James' World 2

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The Bible has a lot to say about the end times. Nearly every book of the Bible contains prophecy regarding the end times. Taking all of these prophecies and organizing them can be difficult. Following is a very brief summary of what the Bible declares will happen in the end times.

Christ will remove all born-again believers from the earth in an event known as the rapture (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; 1 Corinthians 15:51-54). At the judgment seat of Christ, these believers will be rewarded for good works and faithful service during their time on earth or will lose rewards, but not eternal life, for lack of service and obedience (1 Corinthians 3:11-15; 2 Corinthians 5:10).

The Antichrist (the beast) will come into power and will sign a covenant with Israel for seven years (Daniel 9:27). This seven-year period of time is known as the “tribulation.” During the tribulation, there will be terrible wars, famines, plagues, and natural disasters. God will be pouring out His wrath against sin, evil, and wickedness. The tribulation will include the appearance of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the seven seal, trumpet, and bowl judgments.

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Crypto was sold as a sort of lifeline to Black communities, as a way to build wealth outside of the mainstream financial system that many people, understandably, mistrust. The crypto complex told the story of a potential for riches, a way for people left out of more traditional financial apparatuses to get in, bombarding the Black population with marketing and ads featuring celebrities such as LeBron James and Spike Lee. The industry made it clear: If you didn’t get in, well, you might just be missing out. Many Black investors picked up what marketers were putting down, investing in cryptocurrency at higher rates than their white counterparts — especially Black investors under 40.

Now, cryptocurrencies are trading well below their 2021 highs. Many NFTs have plummeted in value and are essentially worthless. Some high-profile projects and companies in the space have imploded, and it’s not clear what, if anything, customers who put their money into those entities will get back. All is not totally lost. Investors who got into cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and Ethereum in the early days are still ahead (assuming they haven’t lost the coins or had them scammed away). Crypto often goes through boom and bust cycles, and it’s unlikely the ecosystem is dead.

Still, Black investors were not generally among that early group to dive into crypto, as the Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey notes. Instead, many of them got in late, and some appear to have bought high and sold low. According to a recent LendingTree survey, Black crypto investors were likelier than white crypto investors to say that they had borrowed money to make their investment and that they had sold their crypto for less than it was worth. In other words, some Black investors have been left holding the bag.

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The crypto crash might have been particularly painful for Black investors.iStock/Getty Images Plus

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Across the country, there’s a silent frustration brewing about an age-old practice that many say is getting out of hand: tipping.

Some fed-up consumers are posting rants on social media complaining about tip requests at drive-thrus, while others say they’re tired of being asked to leave a gratuity for a muffin or a simple cup of coffee at their neighborhood bakery. What’s next, they wonder — are we going to be tipping our doctors and dentists, too?

As more businesses adopt digital payment methods, customers are automatically being prompted to leave a gratuity — many times as high as 30% — at places they normally wouldn’t. And some say it has become more frustrating as the price of items has skyrocketed due to inflation, which eased to 6.5% in December but still remains painfully high.

“Suddenly, these screens are at every establishment we encounter. They’re popping up online as well for online orders. And I fear that there is no end,” said etiquette expert Thomas Farley, who considers the whole thing somewhat of “an invasion.”

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An age-old practice that many say is getting out of hand: tipping

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After days in the hospital, the doctors had ruled out a long list of infections, as well as scary conditions like leukemia. That left them circling around a rare type of childhood arthritis called systemic onset juvenile idiopathic arthritis, or sJIA, in which the innate immune system, the body’s first line of defense against pathogens, goes haywire. Young children are tormented by daily spiking fevers, a fleeting rash, and arthritis. Some develop a life-threatening immune activation syndrome. Untreated, destructive joint damage can occur. We were in shock.

But the doctors mentioned a drug that they’d probably want to try — anakinra, a biologic drug that blocks a key prong of the immune system and quells inflammation. Like most rare disease drugs, anakinra (also known by the trade name Kineret) was obscure, but I’m a health and science reporter and I’d heard of it. In 2020, I interviewed a pediatric rheumatologist, Randy Cron at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who wanted to test whether anakinra could help people with severe covid-19.

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Muscular dystrophy came for my vision first, although I did not know it at the time. On the second Friday morning of April 2020, I realized quite suddenly I couldn’t read out of my right eye. I could see, but I couldn’t distinguish words. In the bedroom, I asked my wife to place a book I had never seen on the dresser. With my left eye covered, I turned around and: nothing. The cover was blended like the clouds of a Bob Ross painting. Four days later, an ophthalmologist examined me. I hadn’t noticed anything wrong with my left eye (yet), but he certainly did. You have cataracts, he told me, in both eyes, at age 31.

Two months later, I started feeling this immense ache up and down my arms. Then I began losing strength in my hands, which I noticed while changing the oil in my car. With the wrench in my right hand, I went to loosen the plug on the oil pan, and my wrist and fingers felt like Jell-O. When I tried to let go of the wrench, my fingers instead curled toward my palm, contorting my hand like a claw. It was the same if I tried opening a jar or turning a doorknob. 

Soon after, I noticed my jaw and tongue cramped up every so often, making it difficult to speak intelligibly. For a year I saw an orthopedist, and then physical therapists at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore who put me through a month-long regimen of stretching activities to see if that would fix the problem.

When I knew the physical therapy wasn’t working, the orthopedist ordered an electromyography exam. These are tests that measure the electrical activity in your muscles and nerves and are one way to determine if you have pinched nerves—which, for a while, I and the doctors suspected was behind my faulty grip. But when the doctor stuck a tiny needle into the skin between the thumb and wrist of my left palm, the unmistakable noise from the machine next to me was that of a dive-bombing plane. He told me it was a sign of some sort of mistake in the ions that enable muscle movement and told me I would need to see a neurologist.

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Illustration by GQ

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Melissa Schriek for The New York Times

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Last year, a Tennessee-based artist named Kelly McKernan noticed that their name was being used with increasing frequency in A.I.-driven image generation. McKernan makes paintings that often feature nymphlike female figures in an acid-colored style that blends Art Nouveau and science fiction. A list published in August, by a Web site called Metaverse Post, suggested “Kelly McKernan” as a term to feed an A.I. generator in order to create “Lord of the Rings”-style art. Hundreds of other artists were similarly listed according to what their works evoked: anime, modernism, “Star Wars.” On the Discord chat that runs an A.I. generator called Midjourney, McKernan discovered that users had included their name more than twelve thousand times in public prompts. The resulting images—of owls, cyborgs, gothic funeral scenes, and alien motorcycles—were distinctly reminiscent of McKernan’s works. “It just got weird at that point. It was starting to look pretty accurate, a little infringe-y,” they told me. “I can see my hand in this stuff, see how my work was analyzed and mixed up with some others’ to produce these images.”

Last month, McKernan joined a class-action lawsuit with two other artists, Sarah Andersen, and Karla Ortiz, filed by the attorneys Matthew Butterick and Joseph Saveri, against Midjourney and two other A.I. imagery generators, Stable Diffusion, and DreamUp. (Other tools, such as DALL-E, run on the same principles.) All three models make use of LAION-5B, a nonprofit, publicly available database that indexes more than five billion images from across the Internet, including the work of many artists. The alleged wrongdoing comes down to what Butterick summarized to me as “the three ‘C’s”: The artists had not consented to have their copyrighted artwork included in the LAION database; they were not compensated for their involvement, even as companies including Midjourney charged for the use of their tools; and their influence was not credited when A.I. images were produced using their work. When producing an image, these generators “present something to you as if it’s copyright free,” Butterick told me, adding that every image a generative tool produces “is an infringing, derivative work.”

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Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker; ; Source photographs from Getty

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The subject in the striking image above looks like the centerpiece prop in a high-end sci-fi flick, but it is anything but. What you are looking at is the Advanced Inertial Reference Sphere (AIRS) guidance system that was designed to be used as the navigational heart of the highly-accurate LGM-118A Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), also known as the MX (Missile Experimental). Peacekeeper represented the pinnacle of Cold War-era American ICBM technology, but it came at a very high price and with a less-than-favorable developmental timeline. Even though it dwarfed its Minuteman III stablemate, and it was advanced in many ways, AIRS was by far the most exquisite piece of technology associated with the MX/Peacemaker program. In fact, the system’s existence was a major factor in the Peacekeeper’s reason for being. 

The masterful image was taken by photographer and author Martin Miller who had taken up the task of capturing Cold War weaponry in dramatic fashion. The photo seen in its entirety below was featured in Miller’s book Weapons Of Mass Destruction: Specters Of The Nuclear Age. 

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