S tar Wars: Galaxy’s Edge hadn’t even opened yet, and the trash cans were already disgusting. Brown-green streaks ran down the sides of the bins in Disneyland’s newest, most hyped zone, but standard messes like kid spit-up and splattered Mickey bars weren’t to blame. These stains had the look of overflowing effluent, rotted in the sun and impervious to power washing. Galaxy’s Edge is the five-years-in-the-making supposed future of theme parks, and its first impression is not entirely a pristine one.Gunk and junk are, in fact, the best part of this new Star Wars spectacle. Just as Walt Disney’s artisans selected sherbet pink to coat Sleeping Beauty’s Castle when the Anaheim, California, resort opened in 1955, some must have agonized over the shade and shape of the scum for the Galaxy’s Edge trash cans.
The 14-acre park expansion is stunning not because of its sci-fi gimmicks, but because of its shabby-chic detail. The Millennium Falcon’s interior resembles an aborted condo rehab, all drywall patches and exposed wiring. You could spend a morning counting the blaster craters on the spaceport’s stucco-like walls.
In the corner of the central bazaar stands the corpse of an R2-D2 cousin, un-domed and ash-scorched, looking less like space-age tech than like a charcoal grill at a poorly maintained public beach. The manifold crud is a sign that Disney, stewards of George Lucas’s franchise since it for $4.05 billion in 2012, understands the gut appeal of the Star Wars universe. The discourse around the original movies got clogged up with arguing that Luke Skywalker’s journey scratched a primal itch for “chosen one” tales, and while that read isn’t wrong, the plot was not the most relevant factor in A New Hope’s influence. Star Wars’, really, came in look and sound. Lucas’s team brined Flash Gordon sleekness in the future-thinking-but-ubiquitous textures of the 1970s: concrete brutalism, post-Vietnam military surplus, sticky linoleum, S&M rubber.
A guide on how to build the Pride of Core in the Republic at War Mod. Plus Game play of it in action.
Though imbued with the mystical Force and populated by muppets traveling at hyper-speed, the galaxy far, far away came off like one that Earth’s people could—and maybe already do—live in. Four decades later, Star Wars like the ruins of the now.Since 1977, video games, novels, toys, comic books, and one have indulged fans’ desire to step into the screen. Now Disneyland offers those fans a full-body experience: a walk-on movie set where the luminescent cocktails are drinkable and the flight-jacketed extras banter back.
Galaxy’s Edge thus might be the ultimate culmination of Star Wars’ original promise, and it’s no coincidence that it’s been achieved under the auspices of Disney. Mickey Mouse’s animation studio long ago ballooned into a would-be-monopolistic holding company of many of pop culture’s beloved mythologies, and its trophy case is its theme parks. In Disney’s lands, Cinderella and Nemo the fish and Captain America do not merely share the same corporate ownership; rather, they share something intrinsic and ideological.
For $97 a ticket, enchantment—across genres—ceases to be fiction. The park, like Star Wars itself, is constructed to look lived-in. (Spencer Kornhaber / The Atlantic)Star Wars was first brought into the stable in 1987, when Disney inked a licensing deal with Lucas and opened the simulator ride Star Tours. With its travel-agency posters and Pan Am Airways conceit—complete with a in Leia-like hair buns—it was a campy-great product of its era (one that was ruined for me by the recent addition of 3-D glasses and prequel-trilogy tie-ins, or maybe just by me no longer being 10).
By zipping guests to and from various planets and only glancingly referencing the human characters of Lucas’s saga, the ride also recognized that Star Wars appealed as much for setting as for story. Today’s biggest blockbuster entertainments have taken a similar world-building approach. The original “cinematic universe,” the galaxy far, far away, thus now needs more than a ride. It needs a land—one as scuffed as Lucas’s looked on-screen, which is to say, one as scuffed as our own. T he measure of Galaxy’s Edge’s unconventional theme-park ambitions might be seen in what it doesn’t yet provide: excellent thrill rides. Of the two planned attractions, one is still under construction. The other, Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run, is in the great Disneyland tradition of having a quirky queue that is as—or more—fun as the ride itself.
Riders line up through a cavernous interstellar body shop and eventually arrive in the hull of the Falcon, where they can pose for pictures at the iconic holo–chess board. Intermittently, loud noises and steam erupt from pipes in the wall, and line-standers can flip switches to “repair” the sprung gasket. So deeply did I get into the habit of pressing every visible button that a worker had to stop me after I unwittingly buzzed something on the actual ride-control panel. Role-playing has its perils.The ride itself puts visitors in a team of six crew members with assigned roles: pilots, gunners, engineers. With its famous paneled windshield and actual working toggle switches, the Falcon’s cockpit is something out of nerd Valhalla.
But after liftoff, the experience becomes that of a chaotic video game (it even runs on the popular software). Gunners and engineers are frenetically torn between experiencing the visuals and turning to use the controls, which are awkwardly placed to their side. At the end, players get a score based on accuracy, their smuggling haul, and how much damage the ship sustained. The two times I rode, though, I left not with the pride of accomplishment but with a minor case of motion sickness and a major case of bewilderment. The Falcon isn’t that far off from a flight simulator you’d find in a Dave & Buster’s.
But g-force amusement isn’t the point of new theme parks these days; immersion is. You need to really feel as though you’ve stroller-pushed your tykes into another dimension—one where the sights, scents, and small talk all reinforce one another. That’s the idea behind the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios, a J. Rowling–approved model of the bustling Diagon Alley and the wintry Hogsmeade Village, and Disney World’s, the Avatar planet where reportedly the mountains really do look like they’re levitating.
Disneyland was, of course, immersive all along. The kids who pull the in Fantasyland, for example, really do think they’re King Arthur. But Galaxy’s Edge pushes further. Imagine if the strangers around those would-be Arthurs really did treat them as royalty for the rest of the day.Rather than send visitors to known locales such as Tatooine or Naboo, Disney built out the heretofore undepicted planet of Batuu. There, the dusty-looking trading burg of Black Spire Outpost attracts all the essential Star Wars demographics: canvas-clothed good-guy pilots, all-too-Nazi-like bad-guy squads, toddling and guileless droids, and fuzzy-scaly aliens. Some of these are park employees—or, ahem, “cast members”—and some are animatronic fixtures.
In contrast to the stand-and-pose photo ops with Donald Duck common elsewhere in Disneyland, the likes of Chewbacca and Kylo Ren can be seen living their life, whether rolling dice in a cantina in the former’s case or humorlessly interrogating locals in the latter’s. At Galaxy’s Edge, Kylo Ren is just going about his life. (Richard Harbaugh / Disney Parks)You can play a part, too, though the jury’s out on whether it’ll be an interesting one. Disney touts that a downloadable phone app will let visitors complete quests within the park, thereby aligning themselves with the dark or the light.
Cast members might change how they treat you accordingly. The live-action role-playing sounds exactly like what I, a recovering Dungeons & Dragons addict, have dreamt of all my life. But the app—at least in its partially activated form on the media-preview day—was not that engaging, with missions coming in the form of simple puzzles that had only a hazy relationship to the physical landscape. (I know it’s aimed at kids, but kids today are, I imagine, more discerning with phone games than I am.) It was slightly more satisfying to use the app’s camera to translate the alien language on shop signs or on thermal-detonator-shaped Coke bottles. In person, cast interactions were jokey and tentative, as if they were at a murder-mystery dinner party. The reward for me correctly employing a secret passphrase with a Resistance commander who approached me was a collectible card that is likely to end up destroyed next laundry day. Gpx distance calculator. Where interactivity really worked was in the shopping experience; it’s not really a diss to say that Galaxy’s Edge is, at its core, a very cool mall.
There are unusual-looking food courts hawking items such as Endorian Tip-Yip (crisp chicken with a colorful potato mash) and the blue milk whose ingredients fans have wondered about since 1977 (here, it’s a frozen, candy-like concoction that not only looks like slurried Windex but also kind of tastes like it). The souvenir shops are particularly creative.
At the droid depot, you make like an Ugnaught in Cloud City and pick parts off a conveyor belt to assemble into a take-home friend for $99.99 a pop (this is brilliant). There’s also a lightsaber dealership with a fun, interactive concept: It’s hidden, speakeasy-like, so as to avoid scrutiny from the First Order. “What kind of scrap are you looking for?” a merchant at the weapons-dealer-cum-junk-stall asked me with a slight wink-wink. Unconvincingly, I replied, “Um something that swings?”Furtively, she presented laminated sheets showing the various lightsaber classes available. The experience felt very much like a drug deal, which is certainly a novel sensation for Disneyland to be providing. But accessing the actual facility where the sabers get forged required an appointment and an up-front payment of $200. I settled for a $17 alien at the pet shop around the corner.
It was only a squeeze toy, but the employees nevertheless handed it over with a carrier cage and a warning: “You be careful with that.”. I f I wasn’t feeling fully immersed, I was, certainly, very impressed. The land is sensorially glee-making in the way that Star Wars is supposed to be.
In fact, the biggest obstacle to the adoption of Galaxy’s Edge’s official app might be that visitors will be too busy Instagramming gorgeous craggy vistas, Air and Space Museum–quality spacecraft, and the hilariously large Podracer engine being used to roast alien-meat shawarma.The eerie fun of walking around the land, I realized after a while, came as much from the feeling of stepping into Star Wars as from noticing resemblances to our own planet. At a panel presentation, the Lucasfilm vice president and executive creative director Doug Chiang explained that the Star Wars visual language was set in the ’70s by the conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie, whose use of domes, spheres, and spires helped differentiate this saga’s look. But Chiang also talked about the earthly research that went into Galaxy’s Edge. The jagged landscape of Batuu is modeled after Arizona’s petrified forests.
The land’s designers consulted 19th-century paintings of bazaars and even took location-scouting trips to Istanbul and Marrakech. “The trick to designing Star Wars is that 80 or 90 percent of it is real,” Chiang said.
“The other percent is the freshness,” where freshness translates into, for example, an extra eyeball on a creature, or a distorted sense of scale for a landscape. The Millennium Falcon feels real, even if the ride is clunky.
(Joshua Sudock / Disney)Chiang shared one particularly striking image from his location-scouting research trips: a facade of apartment or office windows tangled with extension cords and air-conditioning units. An unbeautiful image of urban chaos and jerry-rigged modernity, it indeed felt like something from Star Wars. It reminded me of the times I’ve come across decaying shipping equipment in an industrial seaport or the concrete slabs of a municipal building and thought, Didn’t Luke Skywalker interact with this? Galaxy’s Edge, lovingly grime-caked and even tangled with power lines of its own, recognizes that Star Wars is about such moments of recognition. It’s another chapter in the postmodern mystery of why people talk about fictional universes in terms of “authenticity” or “realism.”. The general Disneyland aesthetic, of course, is more synonymous with squeaky-clean fantasy than space garbage.
But browsing the park the day I visited Galaxy’s Edge, I was reminded of how much Walt’s vision was like what Chiang said about Star Wars: Amazement is achieved by an 80/20 blend of the real and the fantastical. Disney’s Adventureland is a colonialist pastiche of “exotic”—Polynesian, South American, African—architectures. Frontierland is the Wild West scrubbed of murder; Critter Country is a cartoonish Appalachia populated by talking bears. Pull back and think about the fictional franchises that have defined pop culture lately, and the 80/20 rule clearly applies there, too. Game of Thrones stood out not for its swords and sorcery, but for its application of real history and moral consequence to that setting. Marvel’s world is also our own, plus superpowers.To enter and leave Galaxy’s Edge, I was escorted through Disneyland’s backlot, which is far less manicured than the park itself, but almost equally eye-popping. It’s a thicket of forklifts and wires and hoses and scaffolding, populated by security workers and electricians and cast members—in mouse and princess costumes—emerging from zippy shuttles and blocky trailers.
Star Wars’ spaceports and cantinas make viewers marvel anew at the bustle of places like this, at the living, breathing organism that is civilization. Galaxy’s Edge can’t quite re-create the complexity that Lucas’s works point at, but what could? If you can’t get a ticket to the park, just look outside. The DisappearanceAt 12:42 a.m. On the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet.
The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old. This was a training flight for him, the last one; he would soon be fully certified.
His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who at 53 was one of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. In Malaysian style, he was known by his first name, Zaharie. He was married and had three adult children.
He lived in a gated development. He owned two houses. In his first house he had installed an elaborate Microsoft flight simulator. 'I t’s not truethat no one needs you anymore.”These words came from an elderly woman sitting behind me on a late-night flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.
The plane was dark and quiet. A man I assumed to be her husband murmured almost inaudibly in response, something to the effect of “I wish I was dead.”Again, the woman: “Oh, stop saying that.”To hear more feature stories, orI didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but couldn’t help it. I listened with morbid fascination, forming an image of the man in my head as they talked. I imagined someone who had worked hard all his life in relative obscurity, someone with unfulfilled dreams—perhaps of the degree he never attained, the career he never pursued, the company he never started. Updated at 12:07 p.m. On June 19, 2019Like most other colleges across the country, Newbury College, a small, private liberal-arts school in Brookline, Massachusetts, held classes through the end of this past spring semester and then bid farewell to cap-and-gown-wearing seniors. But unlike almost every other college, those classes, and, were the school’s last: Newbury officially ceased operations at the end of May.One of the first sources to publicly confirm the long-rumored closure was the president’s blog, where the news was shared last December.
“It is with a heavy heart,” the school’s president, Joseph Chillo, “that I announce our intention to commence the closing of Newbury College, this institution we love so dearly.”. About 65 million years ago, shortly after the time of the dinosaurs, popped up on the evolutionary scene. This “,” as researchers described it, was likely small, ate bugs, and had a furry tail. It looked, according to, like an especially aggressive New York City rat. And it had a placenta, an organ that grows deep into the maternal body in order to nourish the fetus during pregnancy.The rodentlike thing would become the common ancestor of the world’s placental mammals, with descendants that include whales, bats, dogs, and humans, among many other species. And today, the placenta might hold the key to one of the most enduring mysteries in human medicine: Why do women suffer much higher rates of autoimmune disease than men do?. Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues.
Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law.In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy.
The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. Five years ago, the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates published “” in The Atlantic, a cover story that would reinvigorate national discussion over debts owed for slavery and discrimination against black Americans.
Today, on, he is testifying at a House hearing on H.R. 40, a bill that would establish a commission to study reparations.
It’s the first such hearing in more than a decade.Below, the full text of his opening statement as delivered:Yesterday, when asked about reparations, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered a familiar reply: America should not be held liable for something that happened 150 years ago, since none of us currently alive are responsible. This rebuttal proffers a strange theory of governance, that American accounts are somehow bound by the lifetime of its generations. But well into this century, the United States was still paying out pensions to the heirs of Civil War soldiers. We honor treaties that date back some 200 years, despite no one being alive who signed those treaties. Many of us would love to be taxed for the things we are solely and individually responsible for. But we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach.
It would seem ridiculous to dispute invocations of the Founders, or the Greatest Generation, on the basis of a lack of membership in either group. We recognize our lineage as a generational trust, as inheritance, and the real dilemma posed by reparations is just that: a dilemma of inheritance. It is impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery. A few short months ago, Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, was giving. Now he finds himself in the midst of a homelessness crisis that could doom his political future.If you were to conjure up the ideal California politician, you could do worse than Garcetti, a Jewish Mexican American Rhodes Scholar with a gift for gab, in English and Spanish, and a winningly unpretentious style.
Pride Of The Core Star Wars 2
As if channeling a young Barack Obama, the mayor is fond of invoking storied moments from the American past—the Great Depression, the Second World War, the civil-rights movement—to suggest that if previous generations were able to turn daunting challenges into historic accomplishments, then we ought to hold ourselves to the same exacting standard, a welcome alternative to the sourness and fatalism of other politicians on the left and right. But when it comes to Los Angeles’s long-running battle with homelessness, the mayor’s rhetoric looks more delusional than inspirational. The first time someone commented on what I was eating at work, I was a teenager at my first job, manning the front desk at the local courthouse’s law library. On the way out one day, a regular visitor interrupted my fistful of cashews to tell me he loved watching me eat—I did it with such relish.
Before I could think of a response, he left.At 18, I was already well aware of the frequency with which grown men say bizarre things to teenage girls, but what stuck with me was the fact that someone who wasn’t a parent or close friend noticed when and what I ate. It was like realizing I had been looking into a two-way mirror all along, and the food police were on the other side. What had people seen me do before I knew I was being watched?. Dogs, more so than almost any other domesticated species, are desperate for human eye contact.
When raised around people, they begin fighting for our attention when they’re as young as four weeks old. It’s hard for most people to resist a petulant flash of puppy-dog eyes—and according to a new study, that pull on the heartstrings might be exactly why dogs can give us those looks at all.A paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that dogs’ faces are in a way that wolves’ aren’t, thanks to a special pair of muscles framing their eyes.
These muscles are responsible for that “adopt me” look that dogs can pull by raising their inner eyebrows. It’s the first biological evidence scientists have found that domesticated dogs might have evolved a specialized ability used expressly to communicate better with humans.