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  • The Times obtained video of violence inside Rikers, including "fight nights" where officers look on without intervening: "Depicting the fight night and an attempted stabbing, the videos, along with court records and interviews, offer vivid glimpses of the lawlessness that has taken hold on Rikers Island, where violence has soared to levels not seen since the jails overflowed during the crack epidemic in the 1990s."
  • The White House said today that it's deploying a "surge" of military medical personnel to back up hospitals across the country that are struggling with the omicron surge.
  • U.S. diplomats in Geneva and Paris have allegedly come down with "Havana Syndrome," the mysterious, vertigo-inducing brain ailment — which has been called a "mass psychogenic illness"—that's been affecting State Department employees at embassies around the world.
  • More and more, political science professors are speaking highly of "lottocracy": the practice of selecting government representatives through a lottery, a la jury duty, rather than having people win elections.
  • A spike in demand for apartments with doormen has pushed median rents in Manhattan up to a record $3,475.
  • The armorer from Rust, the fatal Alec Baldwin movie, is suing the film's prop ammunition supplier for allegedly including live rounds in a box of what was supposed to be dummy rounds.
  • NPR has a thorough and depressing look at what happened to the half-trillion dollars worth of merchandise that Americans bought and then returned last year. (A lot of it ends up in landfills.)
  • It appears that young people who have no affiliation with right-wing militia groups have also started dressing like Delta Force soldiers as part of a fashion trend called "warcore."
  • And finally, we stan an icebreaker swan: