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Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in Megalopolis. | Courtesy of Lionsgate One mortgaged winery, $136 million budget, several allegations of non-consensual kissing, and a crossdressing Shia LaBeouf later, Megalopolis is finally here — and it appears to be a “mega-flopolis.”  The film, a perplexing, oversaturated modern riff on the waning days of the Roman Republic — if Rome were New York City by way of Baz Luhrmann and Fellini’s Satyricon — made an astoundingly low $4 million over its opening weekend. Though that might speak primarily to the public appetite for a CGI-laden Shakespearean drama without the benefit of Shakespeare, it’s a number likely assisted by the confusion and division surrounding the film. Even for the notably demanding director Francis Ford Coppola, known for intense sets that lead to masterpieces like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now as well as critically acclaimed flops like The Conversation and his musical One From the Heart, Megalopolis has been accompanied by an unusual degree of chaos and controversy. As Coppola has recounted many times, he’s been trying to make Megalopolis for decades, and ultimately wound up financing it by borrowing against his own fortune — a costly risk that may now never pay off.  Yet after all of that hoopla, even the film’s arrival in theaters may not satisfactorily answer the basic question: What even is Megalopolis, anyway? Here’s an attempt to answer that question — though as with all things related to this film, opinions may vary considerably about Megalopolis, what it’s aiming for, and what, if anything, it achieves. Megalopolis is Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead with a dash of Inception and a huge helping of theatre camp Megalopolis stars Adam Driver as a futuristic architect named Cesar Catilina. Giancarlo Esposito plays his rival, Cicero, the mayor of New Rome. Cicero’s daughter Julia (Game of Thrones’s Nathalie Emmanuel), who falls for Catilina, waffles between the two (even after Catalina tells the socialite to “go back to the cluuuuub“). She may or may not hold the secret to mastering the “megalon,” a golden glowy element that looks like gold foil but is, we’re told, made of space-time itself. Using megalon, Catilina wants to build a version of New Rome that he dubs an immortal school-city. His vision ultimately turns out to be just a slightly more sci-fi version of the High Line, but it’s apparently enough to usher in the utopia of his dreams. (It also helps that he’s motivated by the memory of his late wife, whose death he may have hastened with his obsessiveness, a la Inception, despite an official ruling of death by suicide.) Also like Christopher Nolan’s Inception, architecture seems to be a metaphor for movie-making — Catilina as a tortured, misunderstood artist who decides to name his son Francis.   Though this basic plot feels swiped from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, in execution the story is full of oddities — Driver can stop time, except when he can’t? — and curiosities; at many showings, a live performer interacts with the screen, lip-syncing along with an off-screen figure. Though the all-star cast is huge, many of the characters seem to have very little to do with the plot. They seem to primarily be window-dressing or an excuse for Coppola to cast many members of his own family, ranging from nephew Jason Schwartzman to several young grandchildren. Like Kevin Costner’s Horizon, another $100 million auteur box office failure, Megalopolis features an odd mix of deliberately elevated language and literary allusions: Driver makes his entrance reciting two-thirds of Hamlet’s soliloquy, apparently purely for drama. Julia and her father battle-slash-communicate using Marcus Aurelius quotes.  The story, such as it is, unfolds against a surprisingly lackluster CGI city whose skylines and blurred edges aren’t quite enough to convey the soaring futuristic vision Coppola clearly had in mind. By contrast, the crowded ensemble scenes and orgiastic, wild, decadent party life of the streets (embodied by a woozy Aubrey Plaza sleeping her way to the top) feel so Felliniesque it’s hard to take it as anything but pastiche. Overall, the concept might have worked much better as an anime — it’s less like a fully coherent narrative and more like a fun project for theater kids and their friends who recently got into computer animation.  The making of Megalopolis was as over-the-top as the film itself 2024 brought an onslaught of weird Megalopolis news in the long build-up to the film itself. First, in May, there was a deep-dive Guardian investigation into the production. Timed to coincide with the film’s debut at Cannes, where it was debuting without a distributor, the piece depicted a troubled set.  Numerous anonymous crew members belittled Coppola’s directorial sensibilities and claimed to be baffled by his inability to work well with CGI; at one point, Coppola reportedly told a crew member, “How can you figure out what Megalopolis looks like when I don’t even know what Megalopolis looks like?” This specific CGI-induced crisis is the kind of thing that many filmmakers angst over (Christopher Nolan again comes to mind), so it isn’t as though the Guardian report alone was enough to cast doubt on the film. However, the report also contained allegations that he behaved inappropriately toward many women on set by making the rounds of the topless women in one elaborate scene and reportedly trying to kiss them. These are allegations Coppola has partially denied, admitting that he kissed the women but denying there was anything untoward — as he was directing, he reportedly announced to the set that “if I come up to you and kiss you, just know it’s solely for my pleasure.” It’s unclear how that statement clarified anything for the actors on set; it doesn’t exactly create the image of a trouble-free production helmed by a focused, clear-sighted director. According to the Guardian, the now-85-year-old auteur would also allegedly smoke weed in his trailer before emerging to announce a brand-new scene to shoot.  Shortly after the Guardian story came the film’s polarized reception at Cannes. Though its director received a wild ovation from an enthusiastic audience made up of many people who were directly involved in the movie (another Horizon parallel), this was countered by critics who called the film, generously, “absolute madness” and “a totally bonkers experiment,” or, less generously, “a head-wrecking abomination” consisting of “138 stultifying minutes of ill-conceived themes, half-finished scenes, nails-along-the-blackboard performances, word-salad dialogue and ugly visuals all seemingly in search of a story that isn’t there.” Yikes. Finally, in July, we got the trailer, which immediately drew criticism for using quotes from critics about Coppola’s previous works, not about Megalopolis. While audiences were still debating whether this was some sort of intentional meta-commentary, the trailer was quickly recalled by Lionsgate, which apologized sincerely to Coppola for what was apparently a genuine mistake.  All of this led up to the resounding question of what sort of a ride we were in for. Even after the film’s release, that’s still not entirely clear — but it’s definitely anything but boring. What does it all mean?! Coppola has claimed that Megalopolis is an exploration of and a warning about an America on the brink of fascism, but the film, despite its clunky Roman metaphors and heavy-handed satire of the modern media, obfuscates that message in plenty of ways. For starters, Coppola seems to think — and Megalopolis repeatedly seems to imply, however inadvertently — that the greatest risk of fascism comes from the politically correct, insurgent left, rather than from oppressive systems. The film instead seems to view a wealthy upper class as a potentially benevolent force, and Coppola has stated that he deliberately cast “canceled” actors (like LaBeouf) in order to avoid the appearance of being “woke.” LaBeouf plays an opportunistic figure who takes up populist causes for his own manipulative ends, all while intermittently wearing a dress and a rat-tail and cozying up to power; it’s all equal parts boorish and incoherent.  Then there’s Cesar Catilina himself, the nephew of a powerful billionaire (Jon Voigt), who despite nominally claiming to work for the people, pursues power and his vision for the masses with pure Randian entitlement. Despite, or more likely because, of his being named Cesar, the film ultimately endorses his righteousness without any self-reflection. The film ends with Catilina winning his battle with the mayor to usher in the city he wants to build — but his former enemy stands by his side, grandfather to his only son, and the family portrait is accompanied by an overtly creepy chant of schoolchildren pledging to build an America dedicated to education and opportunity. Politically, the message is fully muddled. Beyond that flimsy moral, it’s unclear where Megalopolis’s primary claim to genius rests. Lots and lots of movies have been made about a lone hero lost in a dystopian New York. (The Michael Keaton subgenre alone!) The idea that what the city really needs is a new, futuristic architectural vision isn’t new, either;  it’s the central theme of Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece Metropolis, as well as the film adaptation of The Fountainhead. The 1927 silent classic East Side, West Side finds the main character, just as in Megalopolis, monologuing to his starstruck girlfriend about erecting immortal skyscrapers.  Unlike East Side, West Side, however, Megalopolis wasn’t filmed on location in New York, but rather in Atlanta, where Coppola was apparently so dissatisfied with the accommodations that he bought and renovated an entire motel to house his family during filming. The film’s opening weekend box office might barely cover the cost of that purchase. This contradiction is one of many that makes Megalopolis feel, for all the money and time and clear passion that went into it, like a rough draft of a film that needed several more revisions to find a coherent thesis. Despite a number of head-turning ideas and moments of sheer theatricality, the film gives way more often than not to bloat and incoherence. Is it an interesting sort of incoherence? Well, yes, if you enjoy seeing movies ironically, as many people do.  Still, amid all the scandal and CGI, there’s a real sense of sadness here. This may well be Coppola’s last film, so watching it for the lulz probably isn’t what most movie buffs had on their 2024 agenda. 

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English tourists dancing after taking laughing gas at a Paris dentist, 1820. The sweet, odorless gas technically called nitrous oxide has many names: laughing gas, galaxy gas, hippy crack, whippets, even “the atmosphere of heaven.” Nitrous itself has just as many common uses as it does names. Doctors use it as a mild anesthetic, sending patients off into brief and largely pain-free dissociative euphorias before having a tooth pulled or dislocated finger yanked straight. Inhaling nitrous gives a loopy, giddy sort of high that can last up to five minutes. As a pressurized gas, nitrous also powers rockets, race cars, and whipped cream dispensers.   The gas is both legal and widely available. It comes in small pressurized canisters intended for kitchen use; large tanks for heavier applications, like medicine or car engines; or even as the gas that shoots out of whipped cream canisters when there’s no cream left (hence: “whippets”).  Thanks to being both accessible and cheap, nitrous has been used as a recreational drug for decades, from Grateful Dead concerts in the ’60s to raves in the ’90s. Lockdowns during the Covid pandemic seem to have set off a new wave of recreational nitrous use. Today, “People on Nitrous Gas” has its own TikTok discovery tab, with videos racking up millions of views. Celebrities are putting the risks of abuse on display, from Kanye West and SZA, to Steve-O of the stunt show Jackass fame. The Mormon mothers and social media influencers of “MomTok,” whose faith shuns any drug use, recently said that part of the draw of all the Botox they’ve gotten is getting the nitrous first. “It’s a party,” one said. Inhaling nitrous is considered relatively safe for people who don’t use it often and don’t take too much. But there are definitely risks, and more so in recreational contexts. As recreational use rises, particularly among teenagers, those risks are gaining more attention.  The primary one is vitamin B12 deficiency. Nitrous inactivates B12 in the body, which coupled with long-term use can lead to nerve damage across the brain and spine. Without intervention, that can develop into paralysis or brain damage. There’s currently no consensus as to whether nitrous should be labeled an addictive substance. While it doesn’t seem to build the same physical dependency as opioids, it does still carry the risk of habit formation in some cases. And while nitrous doesn’t have a known fatal dose, deaths from use have been known to occur, usually from accidents that can happen while high on nitrous or from asphyxiation. Across the UK, where statistics on nitrous are more detailed, there were just 56 deaths attributed to nitrous between 2001 and 2020, including both recreational and medical settings. (To put that in some perspective, there were nearly 10,000 deaths in the UK attributed to alcohol in 2021 alone.) But while the rise in using recreational nitrous for its brief highs is prompting new concerns, the drug is actually one of the oldest stories in the Western history of mind-altering substance use.  Through the centuries of up-and-down nitrous use across the US and UK, you find a rich, at times hilarious, trail left by this so-called atmosphere of heaven. Theaters across the US in the early 1800s filled with members of the public, watching volunteers inhale nitrous on stage and provide a delirious form of entertainment for the crowds. Traveling caravans brought nitrous shows on the road. Poets celebrated a new form of pleasure, while philosophers tried nitrous in Harvard laboratories, frantically scribbling down rushes of insight.  The history of nitrous use is a history of shifting cultural attitudes about the mind. More specifically, about the value — or rejection — of chemically altered states of consciousness. Today, as the gradual return of legal access to psychedelics is sparking renewed conversation around the potential benefits, and harms, of mind-altering drugs, seeing the many different iterations of nitrous use across history can help us think more expansively about what, if anything, the strange experiences of nitrous mean and what the future of recreational nitrous might look like. “A new pleasure for which language has no name” In late 18th-century industrial Britain, the air was foul. Coal smoke and the odor of feces were abundant. Respiratory diseases were rampant, like tuberculosis, which had come to be known as “the robber of youth.”  The deadly air inspired the founding of the Pneumatic Institution in 1799, a medical facility in Bristol intended to study whether gasses could be used as medicines, too. It was there that the first experiments with nitrous began in earnest. The chemist Joseph Priestley discovered nitrous oxide in 1772, but dismissed it as toxic. Humphry Davy, a young lab assistant at the Pneumatic Institution, had a hunch that Priestley’s discovery had been confused with a chemically similar but highly irritating compound: nitric oxide.  In April, Davy repeated Priestley’s experiment, and wrote to a friend afterward that he had “made a discovery which proves how necessary it is to repeat experiments,” prefiguring the role of replication in science today. Nitrous oxide, when purely synthesized, was perfectly breathable. Davy then set out to breathe as much as he possibly could. He sealed himself inside a box that was designed to boost the inhalation of gasses. He sat for over an hour while a steady flow of nitrous oxide filled the chamber. When he stepped out, he grabbed a giant silk air-bag full of more nitrous and huffed that too, just for good measure. Then, his mind peeled away from his body, and he “lost touch with all external things,” entering a strange, revelatory world of flashing insights.  That summer, Davy invited dozens of curious writers, physicians, and philosophers to visit the Pneumatic Institute in the late evenings after normal operations had ceased. They all huffed nitrous, experimenting with entirely new regions of the mind. According to historian Mike Jay, author of Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, nitrous gave Western scientists one of the first chemical means of reliably accessing mystical states of consciousness. Against the banality of our ordinary experience, nitrous delivered a shocking contrast, a state of mind full of unfamiliar pleasures that often carried a sense of insight into the nature of the cosmos. The poet Robert Southey, after his first hit of nitrous, wrote to his brother that “Davy has actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name.” Within a year, however, most who had come to try nitrous lost interest. Its pleasures were new and exciting, but rarely stuck with users once they returned to sobriety after a few minutes. Others who tried the gas just ended up with an upset stomach and the giggles. Davy, who would go on to become president of the Royal Society, stayed with his experiments, eventually producing a hefty book on the chemistry and philosophy of nitrous. He predicted that since nitrous temporarily extinguished pain, it could be useful during surgeries. No form of anesthesia existed yet, so surgeries were very painful, and very dangerous. But the idea failed to gain momentum. Instead, nitrous became something else: entertainment. How nitrous became entertainment, and then medicine Though the early enthusiasm for nitrous fizzled, it was easy enough to produce that, as word got out, chemists learned they could make it in their home laboratories. This turned nitrous into something of a party fixture.    “Maybe it will become the custom for us to inhale laughing gas at the end of a dinner party, instead of drinking champagne,” a young German chemist speculated in 1826, after participating in a garden party where guests enjoyed nitrous under the afternoon sun.  Public nitrous shows began taking place as early as an 1814 lecture series in Philadelphia. First, a doctor gave a discourse on the effects of nitrous to the assembled crowd. Then, a series of young men volunteered to inhale balloons of nitrous onstage, putting on a raucous spectacle. While Davy and his friends had been interested in the mental side of what being on nitrous felt like, these public shows put a spotlight on the uninhibited bodies that the chemical set loose. After inhaling the gas, volunteers would clumsily dance, fight, sing, or even strike up the occasional fencing match. Sometimes, the first row of a theater was kept empty to protect onlookers from the mayhem. “On stage, the subjective experience was incidental,” writes Jay. “The moment of return to waking consciousness was not interrogated for mystical revelation, but held up for confused hilarity.”  Soon, nitrous shows were taken on the road, carried by traveling carnivals to new, hooting crowds each night. Volunteers were charged around 25 cents per huff, bringing in good profit for those who’d invested in the necessary gas tanks, tubes, and breathing bags. One traveling nitrous show, put on by Samuel Colt (who would go on to invent the pioneering Colt firearm), dosed roughly 20,000 volunteers from Canada to Maryland.  It was during a show in 1844 that the American dentist Horace Wells witnessed a teenager on nitrous slam into a wooden bench. The boy, Wells noticed, felt no pain, which led him to wonder whether he could give the gas to clients to numb the pain of having a tooth pulled. Wells first tried on himself, inhaling nitrous and having another dentist pull his own wisdom tooth. It was a great success: Wells felt no pain, and proclaimed “a new era in tooth pulling.” He successfully performed the procedure on a few of his patients, before convincing a surgeon at the prestigious Massachusetts General Hospital to let Wells administer the gas during an operation, doubling as a demonstration for a strictly medical audience. It didn’t go well. Nervous in front of a scrupulous crowd, Wells pulled away the nitrous balloon a little too quickly. During the operation, the patient appeared to groan in pain (though it was later deemed an involuntary and unconscious response). Onlookers nevertheless booed Wells out of the theater, and the embarrassment pushed him into a depression that culminated in suicide. But the demonstration inspired Wells’s former partner to try a similar procedure, only with a different substance: a solvent called ether.  After a few successful experiments using ether as an anesthetic, another demonstration was arranged in the same theater where Wells’s had failed. This time, ether was successfully administered as a pain-vanquishing anesthetic, prompting one of the most significant medical breakthroughs of the century, as well as a revisitation of Wells’s work with nitrous. The hospital theater was renamed “The Ether Dome,” while anesthetic use of both ether and nitrous began to spread across the country. The next 150 years of nitrous The rise of anesthetics like nitrous in medicine was accompanied by a decline in their use as recreational drugs.  Physicians began to think of nitrous-induced revelations as gibberish, closer to delirium than real insight. Too much interest in their short-lived pleasures, doctors began to write, could pose a public health risk. Recreational anesthetics like nitrous would “delight the animal sensations, while they destroy the moral sentiments; they introduce their victims to a fool’s paradise; they mock them with joys which end in sorrows.” Jay describes the mid-1800s arc of nitrous as a “shift away from subjectivity,” prefiguring the same trajectory across a variety of disciplines, including psychology. Through the middle of the 19th century, nitrous settled into dentistry while falling out of philosophy, with at least one major exception that ultimately proved the rule: the eccentric American philosopher Benjamin Blood.  In 1860, during what he expected to be a very normal visit to the dentist, he awoke from a routine dose of nitrous with the vague sense that he’d glimpsed the essence of all philosophy, the “secret or problem of the world,” as he later wrote.  Blood asked dentists and doctors why their gas had given him a spiritual epiphany. He learned two things. First, that “nearly every hospital and dentist office has its reminiscences of patients who, after a brief anesthesia, uttered confused fragments of some inarticulate import which always had to do with the mystery of life.” Across the country, patients returning from anesthesia had been asking their doctors something to the effect of, “What does it all mean, or amount to?”  Second, the doctors and the dentists couldn’t care less. Blood received smiles and shrugs, but no explanations. So he spent 14 years reviving the tradition of nitrous self-experimentation, eventually publishing a pamphlet: The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy. It didn’t get particularly famous, but it did catch the attention of Harvard philosopher William James. Inspired by Blood’s curious writings, James followed Humphry Davy’s old protocol, heating a beaker of ammonium nitrate in the Harvard chemistry laboratory, capturing the escaping gas, and inhaling deeply with pen and paper in hand. His subsequent experience of “intense metaphysical illumination” informed the rest of his life’s work, where he would go on to become known, today, as the father of American psychology.  Meanwhile, innovations in the delivery mechanisms for laughing gas were starting to ramp up its use in dentistry. George Poe, cousin of the poet Edgar Allen Poe, figured out how to manufacture nitrous in liquid form. This allowed for packaging and distributing it in easy-to-use canisters. By 1883, he was supplying 5,000 dentists with canned nitrous oxide across the country.    Once nitrous came in a convenient package, people began finding all sorts of new uses for it. In 1914, American rocketeer Robert Goddard filed a patent suggesting it could work as a rocket propellant, where it’s still used today.  But the innovation that brought nitrous back into style as a contemporary recreational drug was a little more mundane: whipped cream canisters. It turned out that dispensing cream out of a nitrous gas cylinder delivers the perfectly fluffy whipped cream we can so easily buy in grocery stores today. These whipped cream canisters are also where the name “whippets” comes from, and how we’ve landed in the awkward situation of rising nitrous use among teenagers. Nitrous, today and tomorrow In the neighboring arena of psychedelic drugs, many advocates are pushing for wider accessibility to these mind-altering substances. With nitrous, that accessibility is already here, and now, attracting strong criticism. The UK recently reinstated a shade of prohibition, making possession of nitrous oxide for “unlawful use” illegal. You can still use it to dispense whipped cream and other culinary delights, but if you’re just interested in a giggly high, or even seeing whether it might reveal, as Blood thought, the world’s philosophical secret, that’s unlawful. But prohibition inevitably pushes drug use underground, where it’s guaranteed to be riskier and less well-informed than legal, regulated, and educated use. And with a substance like nitrous that has relatively few risks when used responsibly and occasionally, there’s an opportunity to work on promoting more responsible forms of use through public education (such as awareness that the gas impairs the body’s ability to take in oxygen, so doing whippets in a tight, closed space is probably not as safe as in a backyard).  Since nitrous-related substance abuse is such a small problem relative to opioids and alcohol, it hasn’t received all that much study. The past few years of data, however, have prompted a new conversation around whether nitrous should be considered addictive. It doesn’t seem to form a physical dependence, like opioids, and has no physical symptoms of withdrawal. But it does seem capable of forming a more psychological form of dependence (dissociative pleasure basically on tap does obviously pose some habit-forming risk), prompting concerns around how exactly to label it. Either way, ensuring support and harm reduction is available to those who need it may prove to be a challenge. But if we can’t figure out how to handle recreational use with nitrous, it’s difficult to imagine how we’d do it in a world where LSD and psilocybin mushrooms become widely available, too.  More broadly, though, set against the long history of different approaches and interpretations of nitrous, our current situation isn’t all that new. Today’s social media spectacles of nitrous use are just digitized versions of the same nitrous shows from the 1800s. Back then, some people believed that wild behaviors while on nitrous revealed “the volatility of the democratic masses.” What might it say about our own cultural moment that recreational nitrous use is returning as a sort of performative delirium?  As far as the philosophy of nitrous goes, I imagine curious experimenters today are working with different substances, like extended DMT. Maybe someone like Benjamin Blood will come along and make the case that we still have much to learn from nitrous. Maybe dentists will begin to read up on metaphysics and begin engaging with their woozy patients rather than dismissing their experiences.  Or, maybe nothing much will happen with nitrous. The social media hype will die down as new drugs take its place, and it will sink back into relative obscurity, propelling rockets and numbing minor surgeries, inspiring the occasional dorm-room conversation about God and the nature of pleasure. At the very least, as its long history shows, nitrous will always remain capable of giving us a great story.

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WAVY TV 10/YouTubeRetired Navy Captain Hung Cao, the Trump-backed Republican running against Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, went on a bizarre and disturbing rant Wednesday, blaming a drag queen for low military recruitment numbers and saying the U.S. military needs people “who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them and ask for seconds.”During a televised debate, moderator and WRIC anchor Deanna Allbrittin asked Cao to explain a tweet where he claimed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices—which he alleged were a “growing obsession” of the Biden administration—were to blame for eight-decade low military recruitment numbers.“When you’re using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy that’s not the people we want,” replied Cao. “What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them, and ask for seconds. Those are young men and women that are going to win wars.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip. | Oklahoma Department of Corrections In 2004, Richard Glossip was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Since then, the case against him has completely fallen apart. The state of Oklahoma, which is currently holding Glossip on death row, commissioned two investigations looking into Glossip’s 20-year-old conviction. The first, conducted by the law firm Reed Smith on behalf of a committee of state lawmakers, determined that a long series of errors, destroyed evidence, and police failures “fundamentally call into question the fairness of the proceedings and the ultimate reliability of the guilty verdict against Glossip for murder.” A second investigation, commissioned by Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, and led by a former district attorney, determined that “Glossip was deprived of a fair trial in which the State can have confidence in the process and result.” And yet Glossip remains on death row, despite the fact that Drummond has become his unlikely advocate. In a brief filed in the Supreme Court, Drummond argues that “by suppressing important evidence about the State’s indispensable witness and then knowingly eliciting false testimony on the same subject,” prosecutors violated the Constitution when they tried and convicted Glossip. Drummond went to the Supreme Court because Oklahoma’s own institutions resisted his pleas to retry Glossip. The state’s highest criminal court denied the request to toss out Glossip’s conviction, claiming, among other things, that a crucial new piece of evidence “does not create a reasonable probability that the result of the proceeding would have been different” had Glossip’s lawyers been aware of it at his trial. The state’s parole board, meanwhile, split 2-2 on whether to grant relief to Glossip — with one member recused because his wife was the lead prosecutor against Glossip. Without a majority vote from the parole board, the state governor may not pardon Glossip or commute his sentence (although the governor can delay the execution for 60 days). Though the two state investigations into Glossip’s conviction were broad, and uncovered a long list of questionable actions by police and prosecutors, the specific legal issues now before the Supreme Court are narrow. Specifically, both Glossip and Drummond identify two possible constitutional violations arising out of a single document that was recently disclosed to Glossip’s lawyers.  Four words in that document, which the state shared with Glossip’s lawyers in January 2023, suggest that prosecutors kept a key piece of information from Glossip: an essential witness against the former motel manager was treated by a psychiatrist for a serious mental illness. Had Glossip’s legal team known of this information at trial, they could have used it to undermine that witness’s credibility and to undercut the state’s entire murder case against Glossip. No matter how the Supreme Court rules, Glossip most likely will not get off scot free. The state maintains that the new evidence does not prove that Glossip is actually innocent, and it reserves the right to retry him. Indeed, the Supreme Court won’t even consider all of the exculpatory evidence listed in the Reed Smith report — instead focusing on the one newly revealed document which suggests that prosecutors violated the Constitution. And it is far from clear that this document will be enough to persuade this Supreme Court, which has a history of arguing that state convictions should remain final even if they are later revealed to be unreliable, to grant Glossip a new trial. The flimsy case against Glossip, explained In 1997, Justin Sneed, a maintenance worker at a motel owned by Barry Van Treese, killed Van Treese with a baseball bat. At the time of this crime, Glossip was the manager at the same motel. Though Glossip was not present when Van Treese was killed, he was convicted of murder in 2004 on the theory that he hired Sneed to kill Van Treese. Sneed’s testimony against him was the only direct evidence connecting him to the murder. The state now describes Sneed as an “indispensable witness.” It’s worth noting that regardless of whether Glossip hired Sneed to kill their boss, he is not entirely innocent. According to his own attorneys, he “spoke to police voluntarily on the day of the murder and again after he was detained the next day, admitting that he took actions after Van Treese was killed that helped Sneed after the fact.” Initially, the state charged Glossip as an accessory-after-the-fact for helping to cover up the murder and clean up the murder scene. But that charge was later upgraded to murder after police caught up with and interviewed Sneed. There are several reasons to doubt this upgraded charge, however, and even to suspect that Sneed was intentionally railroaded by police into implicating Glossip in the murder itself. The Reed Smith investigation, for example, found that “Sneed implicated Glossip as masterminding Mr. Van Treese’s killing, but only after being led there by [the lead detective’s] inappropriate interrogation tactics.” That investigation found that detectives mentioned Glossip’s name six times during the first 20 minutes of his interrogation of Sneed, and “mentioned nobody else before Sneed confessed and pointed the finger at Glossip.” Sneed implicated Glossip, according to the Reed Smith report, “only after [lead] Detective [Robert] Bemo interjected his views that Sneed did not act alone, that Sneed could help himself, that Glossip was arrested, and that Glossip was blaming Sneed for the murder.” The report also found other significant flaws in the police investigation. Among other things, police collected a surveillance tape from a gas station near the motel, which could have revealed information about Sneed and Glossip’s movements the night of the murder, but the tape appears to have been lost. Police never searched the motel rooms where Sneed and Glossip lived, nor did they search the motel office. They also did not interview potentially important witnesses, including “individuals who Sneed was staying with immediately after the murder.”  And, on top of all of this and other failures listed in the report, the state “destroyed a box of evidence containing 10 items” before Glossip’s 2004 trial even took place, and did so at the request of the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s office. This evidence included “key physical evidence from the crime scene that could have been tested for the first time, such as Mr. Van Treese’s wallet which was never checked for fingerprints.” In any event, these failures by police and prosecutors are not before the Supreme Court. The specific constitutional violation alleged by Glossip and Drummond arises out of a single page of handwritten notes by prosecutor Connie Smothermon, which wasn’t disclosed to Glossip’s lawyers until January 2023. Those notes include two somewhat cryptic references, one indicating that Sneed may have been on the drug lithium, which is used to treat bipolar disorder, and other referencing a “Dr. Trumpet.” The significance of these notes, however, quickly became clear to both Glossip’s lawyers and the state. As the state explains in its brief, at the time that Sneed was incarcerated at the Oklahoma County jail, that “jail had just one working psychiatrist in 1997 when Sneed was held there: Dr. Larry Trombka.” Both Glossip and the state agree that Smothermon’s note about “Dr. Trumpet” must have been a reference to Dr. Trombka, who would have been “the only possible treating psychiatrist and the only medical professional at the jail qualified to prescribe lithium.” Sneed’s medical records, moreover, which the state had previously withheld from Glossip’s lawyers, “confirm a diagnosis of bipolar disorder with a treatment of lithium at the county jail.” The state, in other words, withheld evidence that its key witness had a serious and untreated mental health disorder at the time of the murder. Worse, Dr. Trombka later said that Sneed’s mental illness could have caused him to experience a “manic episode” that may have led him “to be more paranoid or potentially violent,” and that Sneed’s condition was “exacerbated by illicit drug use, such as methamphetamine.” Thus, the undisclosed evidence didn’t simply undercut the credibility of the state’s key witness, it suggested that Sneed may have had another motive for committing the murder. Rather than murdering Van Treese at Glossip’s urging, as the state claimed, Sneed may have done so because he was in the middle of a serious mental health episode. What’s the actual legal issue before the Supreme Court? Both Glossip and the state allege that this failure to reveal Sneed’s connection to Dr. Trombka violates the Supreme Court’s decisions in Brady v. Maryland (1963) and Napue v. Illinois (1959). Brady held that prosecutors must turn over evidence that is “favorable to an accused” if that evidence “is material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution.” So Glossip and Drummond now argue that prosecutors had an obligation to reveal that the killer, a key witness against Glossip, was treated by a psychiatrist for a serious mental illness. Napue, meanwhile, held that “a conviction obtained through use of false evidence, known to be such by representatives of the State, must fall under the Fourteenth Amendment.” This rule applies even “when the State, although not soliciting false evidence, allows it to go uncorrected when it appears.” The reason Napue applies to Glossip’s case is that, during Glossip’s 2004 trial, Sneed testified he was given lithium in the county jail, but he suggested that he was prescribed it by accident and that he “never seen no psychiatrist or anything.” Smothermon’s notes suggest that she knew Sneed was not telling the truth when he testified he’d never seen a psychiatrist, but that she failed to correct this false statement as required by Napue. So is that enough to overturn Glossip’s conviction? Well, it was enough to convince Oklahoma’s top law enforcement officer that Glossip’s conviction cannot be sustained. Certainly, many judges would agree Glossip’s rights under Brady and Napue were violated here. But, to win this case, Glossip must convince at least five members of this Supreme Court to rule in his favor. And this Court has a history of condemning men to die despite significant evidence that they are innocent. Consider, for example, the Barry Jones case. Jones was convicted of murdering his girlfriend’s 4-year-old daughter and sentenced to die in 1995. But Jones received constitutionally inadequate representation, so the jury never heard evidence indicating that Jones is innocent. Among other things, medical experts determined that the injuries that killed his alleged victim could not have been inflicted during the time when Jones and the girl were together. Armed with this evidence, two federal courts determined that Jones must be given a new trial. But all six of the Republican justices reversed that decision, holding that federal courts may not even consider this evidence. They reasoned it is more important to preserve “the State’s significant interest in repose for concluded litigation” — that is, once a trial is complete, it is more important to preserve its outcome than to determine if the outcome is correct. (After the Supreme Court ruled, Jones was freed from death row because Arizona’s attorney general negotiated a deal where Jones pled guilty to second-degree murder and was resentenced to the time he’d already served.) When both parties to a Supreme Court case agree that the court below botched a case, the Court typically appoints a third attorney to defend the lower court’s judgment. That happened in the Glossip case. The court-appointed lawyers tasked with defending Glossip’s conviction essentially argue the additional information revealed by Smothermon’s notes is too trivial to matter. “[T]he notes would have at most altered the jury’s perception of Sneed from a troubled murderer who took lithium,” they write, “to a troubled murderer who took lithium from a psychiatrist.” Of course, the real question in the Glossip case is what evidence Glossip’s lawyers could have presented to his jury if they’d known Sneed was treated by a psychiatrist and obtained Sneed’s medical records. But this case will not turn on whether a reasonable judge would find that prosecutors violated Brady and Napue when they withheld this information.  Instead, it will turn on whether the same six judges responsible for the Barry Jones decision are willing to give Glossip a new trial.

A woman looks at her smart phone in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on October 1, 2024 in Bat Cave, North Carolina. You’ve probably seen a satellite phone in a movie. Usually they’re depicted as black bricks that let you phone home from Mount Everest for $100 a minute. Whether you’re a mountaineer or not, the technology has gotten smaller, better, and much cheaper. In fact, you may have a satphone in your pocket right now and not even know it. An untold number of people in western North Carolina have made this realization in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which left towns and counties without power, water, and cell service. The latest generations of smartphones, however, can connect directly to satellites. That means you can send text messages and make emergency phone calls, even when there’s not a working cell tower for miles. “Due to the lack of cell service, EVERYONE in Asheville NC right now on iOS 18 has been able to get messages out and in with the Satellite messaging feature,” Asheville resident Matt Van Swol said in a tweet. “This is literally saving lives.” The Apple feature indeed lets you send iMessages and SMS messages via satellite, and it’s only been available for a few weeks, thanks to the latest iPhone operating system upgrade. Anyone with an iPhone 14 or newer can install the software and gain access to satellite-based messaging. The service is also currently free for the first two years after you’ve activated or updated your device (Apple hasn’t said how much it will cost thereafter). To send a message via satellite, you must be outside, away from obstacles like buildings and trees. Then, you point your iPhone at the sky — just like they do in the movies when looking for a signal. An onscreen prompt will steer you toward a satellite, and when you connect, you can send a message to anyone. It takes a while: Up to 30 seconds for the entire message to send. You can also receive messages, but only from your emergency contact and members of your Family Sharing account. Apple isn’t the only one getting on the satphone bandwagon. Google rolled out a similar service called Satellite SOS for its Pixel 9 series devices, which hit shelves in August. It’s also free for the first two years, and you have to be using the Google Messages app. These texting services are not necessarily designed to be lifelines. In fact, Apple specifically says, “Messages via satellite shouldn’t be used in emergencies.” That’s what its Emergency SOS via Satellite feature, which has been around since 2022, is designed to do. Google similarly offers a Satellite SOS feature. Apple also offers Roadside Assistance via satellite in case your car breaks down or crashes in a remote area. The big difference between the texting services and those SOS options is that, instead of staying in touch with family and friends, the SOS services connect you directly to emergency services, with whom you can share your location and details of your emergency. The new iMessage and SMS service, for now, amounts to a fun, free way to text your friends when you summit Mount Everest. And it obviously comes in handy if “biblical devastation” strikes your part of the world and you want to let loved ones know you’re okay. Apple and Google did not enable these futuristic new services with a simple software update or even a new generation of phones. Enabling cellphones to connect directly to satellites — also known as direct-to-cell technology — has been years in the making. More access to satellite-based communication has also changed the sky. You can now see constellations of satellites flying above you, designed to solve the very difficult problem of beaming signals from your phone up to space and back down to someone else’s device. To make this possible, a growing list of companies is launching even more satellites into orbit and developing new methods of triangulating signals called beamforming. If you’re familiar with the satellite-based broadband pioneered by companies like Starlink, the way direct-to-cell satellite technology works will sound familiar. The basic idea is to create cell towers in space. That way they could receive signals from devices on Earth’s service and bounce it back down to terrestrial cell towers or even specific devices, much in the same way networks of cell towers keep all our phones connected here on the ground.  To do this, a number of companies have launched large constellations of satellites into low Earth orbit a few hundred miles up, where they speed around the planet at tens of thousands of miles per hour. The challenge then is to find devices on the ground while the satellites are moving so quickly. That’s where larger antennas and beamforming come in. Larger antennas help the satellites pick up more radio waves as they speed by, and beamforming allows the satellites to send signals from multiple sources that converge to create a stronger signal. (If you’d like a more technical explanation of how this works, this is a good guide.) A lot of companies you probably haven’t heard of are making this possible. Apple is working with a satellite partner called Globalstar for its new services. For its new Pixel 9 lineup, Google has teamed up with Skylo, which is also working with Verizon to provide its customers with direct-to-cell capabilities. And then there’s the Elon Musk company you have probably heard of. T-Mobile has a partnership with SpaceX, which sent the first of several sets of Starlink satellites into orbit earlier this year as part of the effort. While the system has been successfully tested, it’s not clear when this network will come online for T-Mobile customers. In the meantime, the Starlink satellites themselves are apparently very bright in the night sky.  As all of these disparate efforts to connect cellphones to stars come to fruition, we can expect a near future where you’re never without a signal. You could be deep in the Amazon rainforest texting your kids details about wildlife or in the middle of the Pacific Ocean getting updates about the playoffs. And that’s not even taking into account how many lives could be saved by offering lifelines to those in trouble.  Expect all of these services to cost money. But in the two or so years you have to test it for free, give the satphone experience a try. You can find details about setting up satellite messaging on an iPhone here and the Emergency SOS feature on Google Pixel 9 devices here.  If your phone is a few years old or not made by Apple or Google, then you don’t have these capabilities. Don’t expect to rely on these features in a disaster. For better or worse, the future of extraterrestrial communication is built on Big Tech’s endless upgrade cycle.

Alzheimer's disease is a neurodegenerative condition that affects an estimated 7 million Americans.