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Nigeria drove thousands of gold miners from a national park. But can it keep them out?

17 October 2026 at 17:18
A military-backed operation shut down a major illegal gold mining site in Gashaka-Gumti National Park, driving more than 4,000 miners from Nigeria’s largest national park, according to the Africa Nature Investors Foundation (ANI). The miners had already fled by the time Nigerian soldiers arrived at the Kila mining area in July, according to Tunde Morakinyo, executive director of ANI, a Nigerian conservation organization working with the government to manage Gashaka-Gumti. He said no shots were fired during the operation, and bulldozers were brought in to fill the mining pits and shafts. As world leaders and conservation practitioners head to Armenia for the U.N. biodiversity summit Oct. 19-30, with the goal of protecting and conserving 30% of land and waters by 2030, the crackdown spotlights the complexity of safeguarding some of the most biodiverse places on the planet. Gashaka-Gumti is a stronghold for one of the rarest primates in the world: the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes ellioti). The park is also home to more than 1,000 plant species and hundreds of bird and butterfly species, with some of the highest rates of endemism on the continent. A ranger patrols Nigeria’s Gashaka-Gumti National Park, where the Africa Nature Investors Foundation says it employs more than 180 rangers to help protect the park. Image courtesy of Africa Nature Investors Foundation. The operation followed years of growing friction over mining in the park. Tensions came to a head in late 2025. Two rangers were killed by miners in October 2025, according to Morakinyo. The…This article was originally published on Mongabay

What’s Up With That Russian Spacecraft Closing in on Finland Radar Satellite?

Russia’s Cosmos-2612 satellite has made a series of maneuvers that have made it almost perfectly co-planar with the radar satellite ICEYE-X36. ICEYE is natively European, founded in Finland. Bart Hendrickx, a longtime observer of the Russian space program, reports that, in the past two days or so, the Russian spacecraft has made a further orbit […]

🔴 Povoleri: dalla sceneggiatura alla guerra

17 October 2026 at 14:15

Un aereo che precipita per migliaia di piedi, un movente che cambia ogni giorno, un premier in campagna elettorale che incontra gli eroi davanti alle telecamere. E un’Europa che chiama pace la prossima tornata di sanzioni. Dopo aver visto come si fabbrica il consenso, entriamo nella sala di montaggio delle notizie di queste settimane: dove la cronaca prende la forma di un film d’azione e lo spettatore riceve il copione prima ancora dei fatti. Quando il cinema ha smesso di ribellarsi? Che ne è stato delle lezioni di Kubrick? Ne parliamo con Federico Povoleri, regista, documentarista e autore della trilogia Sub Limen e di Enigma Kubrick. Intervista a cura di Jeff Hoffman. 🧠 Di cosa parliamo: ✈ Il volo Flydubai FZ1073: lite tra piloti, pista iraniana, radicalizzazione, lupo solitario. Quattro generi narrativi in 48 ore. 🎭 Eroi, cattivi e “11 settembre sventato”: la grammatica hollywoodiana applicata alla cronaca. 🇪🇺 Più armi e più sanzioni per arrivare alla pace: come si costruisce una contraddizione che nessuno nota. 🛡 Qualcuno seguirà l’esempio di Kubrick e dei grandi registi italiani di una volta? George Orwell lo chiamava bipensiero: credere contemporaneamente a due cose opposte senza avvertire il conflitto. Oggi non serve più un Ministero della Verità. Basta un buon montaggio. 📚 LIBRI DELL’OSPITE 📖 Enigma Kubrick. Cosa raccontano davvero i suoi film? 📖 Sub Limen. La tua vita è un inganno (ARPOD / PlaceBook Publishing) 📖 Sub Limen 2. Alla conquista delle menti. Il lato oscuro di Hollywood (ARPOD / PlaceBook Publishing, 2022, prefazione di Massimo Mazzucco) 📖 Sub Limen 3. La Tana del Bianconiglio ▶ LE PRECEDENTI INTERVISTE A FEDERICO POVOLERI 🎥 Come ti fabbricano il consenso    • Come ti fabbricano il consenso   🎥 Federico Povoleri: la fabbrica della guerra    • Federico Povoleri: la fabbrica della guerra   🎥 Il nuovo mondo tra genocidi, trucchi mediatici e simboli esoterici    • Federico Povoleri: il nuovo mondo tra geno…   🎥 Realtà artificiale nella manifattura del consenso    • Realtà artificiale nella manifattura del c…   📡 CASA DEL SOLE TV: informazione libera e indipendente Casa del Sole TV non ha editori forti né finanziamenti pubblici: siamo sostenuti da voi, il nostro pubblico. Se credi nel valore di un’informazione che non tace, aiutaci a continuare. 💳 Bonifico: IBAN IT63P0326822300052392596590 Intestato a: LA CASA DEL SOLE EDIZIONI. Causale: Donazione Casa del Sole TV 🅿 PayPal: paypal.me/casadelsoletv ⏰ Sostegno ricorrente: casadelsole.tv/sostienici ⭐ Membership YouTube 👉    / @casadelsoletvchannel   — Analista Multipolare €5/mese — Inviato della Verità €15/mese — Architetto del Futuro €25/mese 📖 I LIBRI DI MARGHERITA FURLAN BRICS Scacco Matto (in italiano, inglese, russo) Anche un piccolo contributo fa la differenza. Grazie di cuore! ❤ #FedericoPovoleri #Propaganda #Narrazioni #Flydubai #Netanyahu #GuerraCognitiva #ManifatturaDelConsenso #SubLimen #EnigmaKubrick #Deepfake #Disinformazione #Multipolarismo #CasaDelSoleTV #JeffHoffman

L'articolo 🔴 Povoleri: dalla sceneggiatura alla guerra proviene da Casa del Sole TV.

America’s Spiritual Founding Father

17 October 2026 at 05:01
The founding of America. The shaping of Europe. We still live in a world that bears the imprint of Whitefield and the Great Awakening. The question is, for how long? Very few people today know who George Whitefield was. The message he preached is becoming decreasingly familiar. Men have forgotten Whitefield. Now they are forgetting... Continue Reading

How Botched Executions Were Handled in Centuries Past

16 October 2026 at 20:43

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The botched execution of Christa Pike, who survived two injections of what was intended to be a lethal dose of pentobarbital on September 30, is—horrifically—not unique: As my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote, it wasn’t even the first botched execution in Tennessee this year. The fact that officials tried twice to kill her is somewhat more unusual, but not without precedent.

Consider the case of Margaret Dickson, a Scottish woman of the early 1700s. Estranged from her husband, Dickson took up work as a domestic in the town of Kelso, where she conceived a child out of wedlock but hid the pregnancy for fear of being shunned. She testified that she’d disposed of the baby after it was stillborn, but the body was found, and she was arrested. Under Scottish law at the time, concealment of a pregnancy was considered evidence of intent to commit infanticide. Dickson was convicted and sentenced to hang in Edinburgh in 1724.

Following what was then the practice, Dickson’s execution was public. She was hanged; her body was placed in a coffin and carted away for burial (by some accounts following a tussle with body snatchers who hoped to procure the corpse for dissection by medical students). Along the way, the burial party stopped for a beer, at which point noise was heard from inside the coffin. The lid was pried off, and Dickson was found alive, though confused. Dickson’s survival became an object of fascination and Dickson herself a sort of folk hero, the historian Mikki Brock, the author of a forthcoming book about Dickson, told me. Authorities in Edinburgh initially sought to rehang her, but they were never able to marshal enough support to do so. Dickson, who came to be nicknamed “Half-Hangit Maggie” (that is, half-hanged), lived into the 1750s.

Or take Joseph Samuel, a criminal who was sent from England to a penal colony in Australia. Once there, he was implicated in the murder of a police officer investigating a robbery. Samuel was convicted and sentenced to hang in September 1803, also publicly. It didn’t go well. On the first try, the rope around Samuel’s neck snapped. On the second, the noose unraveled. By then, the crowd was growing restive; a hasty third attempt also ended with a broken rope. Observers at the scene concluded that the mishaps were a sign from God that Samuel should not be killed, and the governor apparently concurred, commuting Samuel’s sentence to life imprisonment. (Three years later, Samuel disappeared at sea during an escape attempt with other convicts and was presumed drowned; perhaps God’s view was not as clear as it seemed at the gallows.)

A third celebrated case was that of John “Babbacombe” Lee, who was convicted of the 1884 murder of his employer and sentenced to die. (By that point, executions in Britain had moved out of the public and into prison yards.) Just like Samuel, Lee was spared by malfunctioning equipment: A trapdoor under the gallows, meant to release the condemned and snap his neck, had been tested, yet it failed three times to open. Lee’s sentence was commuted to life by the British home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, who said, “It would shock the feelings of anyone if a man had twice to pay the pangs of imminent death.” Lee was eventually paroled in 1907. Now infamous as “the man they couldn’t hang,” he wrote an autobiography and was the subject of a 1912 silent film, but he then faded from the historical record. He appears to have died in the 1940s, perhaps in Milwaukee.

When I first heard the stories of Half-Hangit Maggie and Babbacombe Lee as a child, I knew they were historical, but they seemed to belong more to the realm of myth or fairy tale. Hangings, mysterious mechanical failures, assertions of divine intervention—all of these seemed like things out of fiction. It was easy to chuckle at quaint details, such as the apocryphal tale that Dickson was required to remarry her husband because she’d been declared dead. And though I’d read about the beheadings of Charles I and Louis XVI, the specter of public execution felt distant enough from modern civilization to be faintly unreal.

Now all of these things seem much less remote. Until President Trump reversed course yesterday, the Defense Department planned to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, who massacred comrades at Fort Hood in 2009. Pike’s fate is up in the air after her twice-failed execution. Pike, who was convicted of a brutal murder in 1995, has returned from a hospital to prison. The state official who oversaw capital punishment has resigned, and the governor has temporarily paused all executions in Tennessee. Her lawyers have requested that her sentence be commuted to life in prison.

The doctor and ethicist Lydia Dugdale writes in The Dispatch that U.S. history offers a grim precedent. In 1946, a 16-year-old boy confessed to killing his employer and was sentenced to die via electrocution. A first attempt failed, and his lawyers sought to block a second. The Supreme Court ruled against them, and he was killed that year. But Dugdale argues that this precedent should not apply here. “From Pike’s markedly swollen and chemically burned arms, to her profound cognitive impairment (the severity of which remains unknown), the state has already inflicted a cruel and unusual punishment on Christa,” she writes. Setting aside the law, “as a matter of sheer ethics, if the state has vowed not to punish prisoners cruelly but has inadvertently done so, the state ought not attempt the same method of execution again.” (In this year’s other botched Tennessee case, Tony Carruthers’s failed execution left him partially paralyzed. He received a one-year reprieve, and advocates have called for his sentence to be commuted.)

The historical cases of the men and women they couldn’t hang feel much closer to the present day than they once did. And although some of the visceral details still sound like the stuff of myth, the pragmatic and humane outcomes of these situations stand out more against the backdrop of the recent news. Support for the death penalty has dropped since the 1990s, barely topping 50 percent today. Views are closely correlated with religion—white Protestants are far more likely to back it than any other group, according to polling from the Public Religion Research Institute. For religious supporters of capital punishment, the idea that a failed execution is a sign from above might not be so far-fetched. Among the nonreligious, many people may flatter themselves to believe that contemporary society possesses greater reason and logic than our forebears. Just as we try to understand our ancestors by how they handled cases such as those of Dickson, Samuel, and Lee, future generations will judge our society by its actions.

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  1. President Trump’s new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, was fired after less than a week in the role, according to three people familiar with the matter. Her dismissal followed criticism of her first press briefing on Tuesday and questions about her legal credentials.
  2. Three children and a teacher were killed in a shooting at an elementary school in Bend, Oregon, yesterday. Police said that a bystander pursued the 16-year-old shooter into the school and fatally shot him; another child and a teacher were critically injured.
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Evening Read

An illustration of a human silhouette with a door opening to their mind, with colored light scattering out.
Illustration by Adam Maida / The Atlantic

Big Tech Oligarchs Have a Terrible Plan for Humanity

By Bernie Sanders

Should human beings remain in control of planet Earth? Or should we be replaced as the dominant species? As absurd as these questions may sound, and as obvious as the answers may seem, the Big Tech oligarchs funding the artificial-intelligence revolution have responded in ways that should alarm all of us.

In Silicon Valley, some of the wealthiest people on Earth believe that they have the power to create a superior species. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, wrote in 2017 that AI would allow humans to become “the first species ever to design our own descendants.” What this means for humans, however, remains unclear. According to Altman, we will either jump-start digital intelligence “and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.” In other words, humans have a choice: face extinction or merge with machines. “I believe the merge has already started,” Altman added, and is “probably our best-case scenario.”

Read the full article.


More From The Atlantic


Culture Break

Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes in wood-paneled room
A24 / Everett Collection

Watch. Nathan Fielder’s documentary about Elizabeth Holmes (out now in theaters) is a captivating study of self-perception, David Sims writes.

Read. Stephanie Bai asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors to share some of the best first lines in modern literature.

Play our daily crossword.


PS

A great folk hero needs a good nickname, which is why Billy the Kid and “Pretty Boy” Floyd endure. Babbacombe Lee—the name comes from the site of the murder—belongs to that tier. I first encountered it on the strange, entrancing cover of an album, a 1971 “folk-rock opera” by the English band Fairport Convention. I wouldn’t rank “Babbacombe” Lee as prime Fairport, but it’s an entertaining listen. As for Half-Hangit Maggie, anyone visiting the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, the site of her execution, can have a pint at her namesake pub, Maggie Dickson’s. Just don’t expect it to produce any miraculous resuscitations.

— David


Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

© Photo by Culture Club / Getty Images

The uplifting story of one of Zimbabwe’s pioneering women rangers

16 October 2026 at 20:03
For Nyaradzo Auxilia Hoto, one of the most memorable moments of becoming a wildlife ranger was a trip to town. She and her fellow recruits walked through the streets in their new uniforms, on their way to open bank accounts. Soon, they would receive their first salaries. For a woman who had struggled to make ends meet in rural Zimbabwe, it was an extraordinary moment. “We were very proud,” she recalled. Hoto, 34, grew up in Huyo, a village in Zimbabwe’s Lower Zambezi Valley, where her family depended largely on growing and selling vegetables. Money was scarce, and although she had done well at school, she could not afford to continue her education beyond secondary school. Marriage, she hoped, might offer a better life. Instead, she says, she endured nearly four years with a violent husband before deciding to leave. She returned to her parents’ home with her young daughter and resumed working in the family garden. Her fortunes changed in 2017, when the International Anti-Poaching Foundation began recruiting local women for Akashinga, a new wildlife protection initiative. Hoto was among 16 women selected from roughly 100 applicants. Many men in her community doubted that women could confront poachers or withstand the demands of ranger work. She went anyway. Within a few years, she had become a ranger sergeant, leading other women on patrol. She later returned to university, graduating in 2023 with a degree in wildlife, ecology and conservation. Today, she works as a biodiversity officer with Akashinga, using…This article was originally published on Mongabay

🔴 IN GUERRA LO DICE L’AVVOCATURA DELLO STATO | LEVANTE LIVE

16 October 2026 at 19:32

🚨Il governo italiano scrive in un tribunale che il Paese è dentro una guerra mondiale. In piazza, chi quella guerra la paga viene chiamato reato e teppismo. ⚖ Oggi il Consiglio di Stato ha dato torto all’Agenzia delle Dogane, che per nove mesi ha negato a una giornalista il dato sulle armi passate dal porto di Ravenna. 📄 Per difendere quel no, gli avvocati del governo, l’Avvocatura dello Stato, avevano scritto nero su bianco: è in corso «una guerra mondiale ibrida e a pezzi che coinvolge anche l’Italia». 🚫 Il giudice ha risposto: pericolo «astratto e ipotetico». I dati vanno consegnati. Ma la frase resta agli atti, e quella guerra il Parlamento non l’ha mai dichiarata. 🚛 Intanto il Sud è fermo da due settimane: Calabria, Sicilia, Puglia, Campania, Basilicata. Un pieno di tir da 1.500 a 2.500 euro. ⛽ In Puglia 150 distributori Eni su 300 a secco. Lo sconto sulle accise è scaduto il 6 ottobre. 🚜 Cinquemila agricoltori con i trattori a Bari chiedono lo stato di crisi. La Regione mette 30 milioni, il governo nazionale non compare. 🎓 Oggi gli studenti in piazza in tutta Italia: «soldi alla scuola, non alla guerra». Il ministro Valditara: «teppismo politico». 🗣 Meloni: «ci stiamo interrogando». Salvini: «studiamo da mesi». Lollobrigida: «bloccare le strade è un reato». 🇫🇷 In Francia 70.000 studenti in piazza e 504 arresti in un giorno a Parigi. 🇦🇱 In Albania 143 giorni di proteste, ministeri assaltati, contro Rama e il resort da 4 miliardi di Jared Kushner. 🔥 L’Europa che si riarma è la stessa che non sa più pagare il gasolio e le scuole, e che risponde alle piazze con la polizia. 🎙 A Levante questa sera, venerdì 16 ottobre 2026, conduce Jeff Hoffman. Ospiti: Moni Ovadia, attore, musicista, scrittore, voce ebraica contro la guerra e contro l’uso politico della memoria; Margherita Furlan, giornalista e analista geopolitica, fondatrice di Casa del Sole TV. 🧭 Affrontiamo insieme: 🔹 Il caso Ravenna: chi ha scritto «guerra mondiale» e chi ha detto no 🔹 L’articolo 78 della Costituzione: la guerra la deliberano le Camere 🔹 Dal «reato» di Lollobrigida al «teppismo» di Valditara: le parole del potere contro chi protesta 🔹 Il Sud fermo e il prezzo del gasolio: la guerra lo alza, il governo non lo attutisce 🔹 Dal ddl antisemitismo alle piazze: la stretta sul dissenso è un disegno? 🔹 Parigi, Tirana, Roma: tre Paesi, una sola scena 📚 LIBRI DEGLI OSPITI 📖 Moni Ovadia, «Un ebreo contro», Edizioni Gruppo Abele 📖 Margherita Furlan, «BRICS Scacco Matto» (disponibile in italiano, inglese, russo) 🎯 SOSTIENI CASA DEL SOLE TV 🆓 Casa del Sole TV è un progetto di giornalismo indipendente, autofinanziato da sei anni, senza editori e senza partiti. 💳 Per donazioni con bonifico: 🏦 IBAN: IT63P0326822300052392596590 👤 Intestato a: La Casa del Sole Edizioni ✍ Causale: Erogazione liberale Casa del Sole TV ⭐ Membership YouTube: 👉 https://www.youtube.com/@CasadelSoleT… 🔸 Analista Multipolare €5/mese 🔸 Inviato della Verità €15/mese 🔸 Architetto del Futuro €25/mese 🌐 SEGUI CASA DEL SOLE TV ▶ YouTube: @CasadelSoleTVChannel 🔗 Sito: casadelsole.tv #Levante #CasadelSoleTV #MargheritaFurlan #MoniOvadia #Geopolitica #Multipolarismo #caroGasolio #accise #Ravenna #NoMeloniDay #AvvocaturadelloStato #ConsigliodiStato #sciopero #Europa

L'articolo 🔴 IN GUERRA LO DICE L’AVVOCATURA DELLO STATO | LEVANTE LIVE proviene da Casa del Sole TV.

🔴GUERRA MONDIALE IBRIDA | 16.10.26

16 October 2026 at 19:00

– Italia, la piazza sfida il riarmo di Margherita Furlan – Avvocatura dello Stato: è guerra mondiale ibrida di Jeff Hoffman – La Francia ferma i suoi figli di Jeff Hoffman – Tirana in fiamme, Rama non cede di Jeff Hoffman – USA e UE sempre più distanti di Gionata Chatillard – Due stretti in fiamme, l’Europa paga di Jeff Hoffman – Taiwan cerca alternative a Hormuz, Trump si inserisce di Ivan Bodyan – Buon giro intorno al Sole A cura di Margherita Furlan Con la collaborazione di Gionata Chatillard, Ivan Bodyan e Jeff Hoffman Editing di Mario Ferdinandi 📡 CASA DEL SOLE TV — Informazione libera e indipendente Il nostro lavoro è possibile solo grazie al vostro sostegno. Casa del Sole TV non ha editori forti né finanziamenti pubblici: siamo sostenuti da voi, il nostro pubblico. Se credi nel valore di un’informazione che non tace, aiutaci a continuare. 💳 Dona tramite bonifico bancario: IBAN: IT63P0326822300052392596590 Intestato a: LA CASA DEL SOLE EDIZIONI Causale: Donazione Casa del Sole TV 🅿 Dona tramite PayPal: paypal.me/casadelsoletv ⏰Sostegno ricorrente: casadelsole.tv/sostienici Anche un piccolo contributo fa la differenza. Grazie di cuore! ❤ CasaDelSoleTV, CasaDelSoleTG, MargheritaFurlan, GiuliettoChiesa,censura, russofobia, Trump, NATO, Crisi, Transizione, Ucraina, Kiev, EuroMaidan, Crimea, Donbass, Donetsk, Syria, Iran, PardonSnowden, Nuova Via Della Seta, Pechino, Putin, Libano, guerra, mondomultipolare, multipolarismo, Mosca, XiJinping, Levante, Medio Oriente, Palestina, Gaza, MiddleEast, BRICS, Hormuz

L'articolo 🔴GUERRA MONDIALE IBRIDA | 16.10.26 proviene da Casa del Sole TV.

Can Elizabeth Holmes Drop the Act?

16 October 2026 at 17:02

When he was in charge of Apple, Steve Jobs was notorious for projecting a “reality distortion field.” That was the jokey way his employees described Jobs’s mix of charisma and bravado and his demanding management style—which would lead people to accept seemingly impossible deadlines, or to promise that they could fix unfixable problems. A malfunctioning version of the same phenomenon once surrounded Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of the failed medical start-up Theranos. She worshipped Jobs, imitating his style and unnerving confidence, even while presiding over an imploding enterprise. Her promises of a device that could affordably perform rapid medical tests with only a drop of blood were, at best, fantastical; once valued at $9 billion, Theranos collapsed into nothing. In 2022, Holmes was sentenced to 11 years in prison for defrauding her investors.

In the new documentary You Can See Everything, the comedian and television auteur Nathan Fielder steps into Holmes’s reality-distortion field. Fielder, accompanied by his co-director, Lance Oppenheim, and a small camera crew, essentially moved into Holmes’s abode for the 34 days before she reported to federal prison. The team received fairly unfettered access to her, her two small children, and her partner, the entrepreneur Billy Evans, who professes obsessional devotion to Holmes. What Fielder was expecting to find while staying at the family’s Del Mar, California, rental is unclear, but he ends up in an odd and unsettling game of cat and mouse: He’s trying to suss out whether Holmes is a master manipulator or someone so deeply convinced of her own genius that she can’t distinguish fiction from fact.

The film capturing that experience is an odyssey of human perception. Fielder knows that no matter how intimate his time with Holmes is, the minute the camera is trained on her, both he and the audience will be consumed by the question of whether she’s giving yet another performance. The movie unfolds and evolves over nearly three hours, spanning both the month ahead of Holmes’s May 2023 incarceration and the years following; throughout, Fielder pores over his interactions with not just Holmes but also the people around her, sifting for kernels of authenticity. What emerges is a transfixing portrait of a phenomenon most viewers will understand—a deep desire to empathize, even as we are horrified by what’s occurring or suspect we’re being lied to.

[Read: Manipulator vs. manipulator]

Holmes would disagree about that last part. Early on, she plainly states to Fielder that she has never told a lie, a statement so bewildering that it cracks his reliably deadpan expression. Watching him work to make sense of what she could mean by that, I thought of Jobs’s strange force of personality. Holmes has saucer-shaped, striking blue eyes, and she repeatedly meets Fielder’s squinty gaze with an unblinking stare and gauzy smile. Holmes may indeed be flatly misleading her interviewer, but she comes off as unnervingly sure that she’s being honest; she’s perhaps deceiving herself alongside the people in her orbit.

Evans is a vital part of her new facade, which has morphed from the elite-businesswoman persona of her CEO days to that of a loving mother and partner. Holmes often has a child draped over her, and she seems profoundly attached to her worshipful partner. Yet at other times, Evans gives off a controlling air. He plucks a bowl from her because she’s not stirring eggs quickly enough. When Fielder’s questions probe too close to an uncomfortable topic, Evans will show up, put his hands on Holmes’s shoulders, and softly try to shut down the conversation. The claustrophobic proximity between Fielder and his subjects comes across visually: Oppenheim shoots them all with zoom lenses, holding on their faces for a discomfitingly long time as they wince, frown, and grin. Like his co-director, he’s searching for the truth by getting as physically close as he can. Given Holmes’s past, however, the task of uncovering anything feels impossible.

Fielder is obviously uninterested in relitigating the details of Holmes’s case; she appears firmly assured that she did nothing wrong, and he knows there’s nothing he can do to tell her otherwise. Instead, he pokes at how she takes in the world, and how Evans is helping to feed her surreal self-image. It also becomes apparent that the pair are working on a new version of Theranos, chatting to investors and patent lawyers on the phone with abandon. When the harsh reality facing her—that she’ll soon have to leave her children behind—peeks through, her devastation seems genuine. But those moments then flit by as Holmes and Evans try to ponder a brighter future.

[Read: The comic who’s his own worst enemy]

The first half of the movie consists of captivating fly-on-the-wall footage. The second half, which Fielder and Oppenheim have begged critics not to spoil (and I do think it’s fun to experience it cold), establishes You Can See Everything as one of the best films of the year. That portion finds Fielder fixating on his brief time with Holmes and the untoward influence Evans had over it: He brings in other perspectives to consult, re-creates scenes to better understand them (something he’s wont to do, especially on his fascinating HBO show, The Rehearsal), and, most important, reckons with his role in telling this chapter of Holmes’s life story.

Fielder is smart enough to know that his celebrity presence further pierces the bubble around how we perceive ourselves and one another. But he quickly developed a sort of emotional intimacy with Holmes, even as he sought to remain objective. You Can See Everything is a bold title, an invitation from Holmes that she is unlikely to follow through on. Can Fielder see everything that’s going on in her head? Beyond that, can he be an effective audience surrogate so viewers can see what he sees? The true question of this documentary isn’t just whether Holmes—who has been a figure of societal fascination for more than a decade—is putting on another performance, but also whether that’s all we, the viewers, crave from Holmes anyway.

© A24 / Everett Collection

Is it Time to Regauge the Size of our Solar System?

There is need to redefine the edge of the solar system. That’s the outcome of new work by two leading space scientists. They present a theory that the Milky Way’s gravity, including its dark matter, redraws the Sun’s frontier. Moreover, it allows the Solar Lagrange points L1 and L2 to form “portals” that funnel interstellar visitors […]
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