Once upon a time in Guatemala, the CIA hired a cocky American actor and two radio DJs to launch a revolution and oust a president. Their playbook is being used against the U.S. right now.
Guatemala City looked like a ghost town.
The capital’s 450,000 residents hid in panicked self-quarantine, waiting for the first wave to arrive. World War I–style military planes periodically flew overhead, firing warning shots and dropping leaflets telling people to either flee or stay indoors.
A civil war was moving toward them.
All week, Guatemalan radio had been blasting the news of gruesome battles around the country. The newspapers were going crazy. Two Americans in a tourist plane had been shot down by Guatemala’s Communist army. Refugees were fleeing to Mexico while 400 injured Communist troops were retreating to the capital for medical treatment.
Now, on Saturday morning — June 26, 1954 — radio news broadcasts reported that two columns of anti-Communist patriots calling themselves the “Liberation Army” were 60 kilometers from the capital. And marching fast.
All vehicles were now military targets, the radio warned, so citizens should stay out of their cars. Trains had been stopped due to the intense air battle raging in the northeast. And a sabotage unit of the Liberation Army had just received orders to blow up a bridge in “Sector H-21.”
Soldiers from the Communist government’s own military were now defecting in droves, newscasters reported. Five hundred and thirty-eight civilians had joined the Liberation Army just yesterday.
In response, the government had suspended the constitution. The president had ordered all anti-Communists found on the streets to be rounded up.
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Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, Guatemala’s second democratically elected President. (Photo courtesy Wikimedia)
Canyon de Chelly National Monument is a vast park in northeastern Arizona, on Navajo tribal lands. Its prominent features include Spider Rock spire, about 800-feet tall, and towering sandstone cliffs surrounding a verdant canyon.Inhabited by several Native American peoples for millennia, the area is dotted with prehistoric rock art. The White House Ruins and Mummy Cave are remains of ancient Pueblo villages.
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An image from the Canyon De Chelly National Monument
At the start of the week, Liam Porr had only heard of GPT-3. By the end, the college student had used the AI model to produce an entirely fake blog under a fake name.
It was meant as a fun experiment. But then one of his posts reached the number-one spot on Hacker News. Few people noticed that his blog was completely AI-generated. Some even hit “Subscribe.”
While many have speculated about how GPT-3, the most powerful language-generating AI tool to date, could affect content production, this is one of the only known cases to illustrate the potential. What stood out most about the experience, says Porr, who studies computer science at the University of California, Berkeley: “It was super easy, actually, which was the scary part.”
Jeffrey Rease is running out of time. In 2019, he started a project that would take him and his Nikon D850 from Alabama to Utah, Oklahoma to North Carolina, Mississippi to Arizona. It would introduce him to some of the oldest, and in his opinion, most heroic people in the country. And it would give him a chance to preserve pieces of history that would soon be lost.
The idea: find the remaining American veterans of World War II. An estimated 325,000 of these nonagenarians and centenarians are still with us, with stories to tell. Rease, a graphic designer turned portrait photographer from Birmingham, Ala., wanted to hear them.
His uncle had been killed in World War II when his ship was sunk by a German torpedo. But Rease, 59, never learned much about him as a child. And Rease’s father had served as an Army paratrooper in the Korean War.
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Jeffrey Rease photographs World War II veteran Alvin Lopez, 99, who served as a Seaman 1st Class on the USS Portland. (Jeffrey Rease)
Known for its dramatic landscapes, this outdoor region has trails for hikers & horses.
The Red Rock-Secret Mountain Wilderness is a 47,195-acre (19,099 ha) wilderness area located within the Coconino National Forest in the U.S. state of Arizona.
The wilderness is predominantly wind and water sculpted pinnacles, windows, arches, and slot canyons, and the red-rock cliffs of the Mogollon Rim that mark the edge of the Colorado Plateau. Bordered on the east by Sycamore Canyon Wilderness, the high mesas of Secret Mountain and Wilson Mountain jut out into the lower country, and canyons as deep as 1,500 feet (457 m) drain into Oak Creek and the Verde River.
Prehistoric rock art and abandoned cliff dwellings can be found in the wilderness.
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An image from Mormon Canyon in Red Rock-Secret Mountain Wilderness, Arizona
Well, you can’t make a record if you ain’t got nothin’ to say,” Willie Nelson sings on “Shotgun Willie,” the opening track from his LP of the same name, from 1973.Nelson, who turned eighty-seven in April, has released seventy full-length records since his début, in 1962, and doesn’t seem anywhere close to running out of material. In September, he published “Me and Sister Bobbie,” a memoir co-written with his older sister and longtime piano player, Bobbie Nelson. Through alternating chapters, the Nelsons tell the story of how they were brought up by their grandparents in the tiny town of Abbott, Texas, and the decades of triumphs and devastations (romantic, professional, familial) that they helped each other through. Nelson has published memoirs before (his first, “Willie: An Autobiography,” was released in 1988, and his most recent, “It’s a Long Story: My Life,” came out in 2015), but “Me and Sister Bobbie” feels especially tender and intimate. While music became a lifeline for Willie, Bobbie, who is now eighty-nine, suffered deeply for her art. In the nineteen-fifties, she briefly lost custody of her three sons, after her in-laws successfully argued that she spent too much time playing music with her brother. “Women were made to be homemakers. Women weren’t meant to make music,” she writes. “This sharp-tongued lawyer called me the kind of woman whose only means of earning a living was playing piano in honky-tonks. He referred to me as a harlot. I broke down in tears.”
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, Guatemala’s second democratically elected President. (Photo courtesy Wikimedia)
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