darkest

Nearly five decades after the importation of enslaved people was abolished by US Congress in 1807, the last slaver’s ship came from west Africa to dock in Mobile, Alabama, in defiance of the law. Around 100 of those enslaved people’s descendants still live in Africatown, a neighbourhood north of the city. This compilation sets this community’s songs, stories and memories against industrial sounds that shudder around their 21st-century lives.In charge are Italian-Rwandan filmmaker Marilena Umuhoza Delli and her husband,…

The deep ocean is a whole world of alien mystery.Once you start diving deep, below the range through which sunlight can penetrate, whole ecosystems unfold, glimmering, glittering, and feasting in the darkness.Case in point: In a deep environment where methane seeps from below the seafloor into the surrounding water, a shimmering new worm has been discovered.It's been named Pectinereis strickrotti, and it marks the 48th new species discovered thriving around methane seeps off the coast of Costa Rica – an environment once…

Devolver Digital I’ve played a whole lot of puzzle games in my life, but I can safely say that I’ve never played one as pitch-black as Children of the Sun. Published by Devolver Digital, the newly announced Children of the Sun is an unholy hybrid between a shooter and a spatial reasoning game. It follows a lone wolf with a sniper rifle on a bloody quest for revenge against an evil religious cult. He has to take out swaths of zealots one bullet at a time. It’s as dark as video game premises get, but one that’s steeped…

Psychologists call it the dark triad: an intersection of three of the most malevolent tendencies of human nature – psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism.But the truth goes deeper, and darker. There's also egoism, sadism, spitefulness, and more. And behind this rogues gallery of all our worst inclinations on the surface, a central, common core of human darkness lies, researchers say.In a 2018 study, psychologists from Germany and Denmark mapped this driving force behind all our darkest impulses and gave it a name.…

As associate professor at Columbia Business School Dr. Michael Slepian pointed out in his research, the real problem with keeping a secret is not that you have to hide it, but that you have to live with it, and think about it.In fact, secrecy is associated with lower well-being, worse health, and less satisfying relationships — studies have linked secrecy to increased anxiety, depression, symptoms of poor health, and even the more rapid progression of disease.Luckily, a recent Reddit thread offered people a chance to…

I remember the first time I saw a truly dark sky.My parents had sent 12-year-old me to a summer camp in the mountains of central Virginia. I’d grown up in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, where houses and streetlights illuminated the night sky, so it was rare to see more than a couple of hundred stars at any one time.At that rural camp, though, the situation was very different. One night the camp’s counselors drove us out to a nearby field. We leapt from the truck, and when its headlights went dark, most of us started…

It’s safe to say we will not be getting a Taika Waititi-directed Thor 5, given the filmmaker’s stacked slate and his confession that he only made the past two because he was poor. The God of Thunder’s franchise looks all set to refresh itself yet again, then, especially as Chris Hemsworth has admitted he’s looking to do something less “silly” next time around. If you believe the gossip, Marvel is on the same page too, as word has it the studio’s looking for someone with a “more serious” background than Waititi to helm…

A European space telescope blasted off Saturday on a quest to explore the mysterious and invisible realm known as the dark universe.SpaceX launched the European Space Agency's Euclid telescope toward its ultimate destination 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away, the Webb Space Telescope's neighborhood. It will take a month to get there and another two months before it starts its ambitious six-year survey this fall. Flight controllers in Germany declared success nearly an hour into the flight, applauding and…

Star power is a rare thing in music today, stripped away by social media overexposure and a heritage industry that trades on former glories. But PJ Harvey has an otherworldly air as she walks into a restaurant at the Barbican in London for one of her first interviews about her music in more than a decade. A thunderstorm has broken the June heatwave, and Harvey, 53, had to shelter under a ledge to keep dry on her way here. Still, Harvey looks pristine in a black vest and tiny black leather shorts, her famous dark hair in…

The Deep!: Wild Life at the Ocean’s Darkest Depths Did you know June is National Ocean Month? Consider celebrating with The Deep!: Wild Life at the Ocean’s Darkest Depths by Lindsey Leigh. This clever and informative nonfiction survey uses comics and comedy to impart fascinating facts about the denizens of the most enigmatic areas of the ocean. Through The Deep!, readers of all ages will be introduced to creatures like the blob sculpin and the pigbutt worm, to fascinating concepts like marine snow and chemosynthesis, and…