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.

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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. 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. 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. For those of you who didn’t get to see President Donald Trump’s news conference early Saturday, let’s recap what he said: Former Secretary of State John Kerry broke the law in talking to Iran about its nuclear program. Jimmy Carter was a terrible president. Russian President Vladimir Putin says he didn’t interfere in the 2016 elections, and, come on, how many times are you going to push the guy on that point?

Vast numbers of illegal immigrants may soon be deported from the United States. And, circling back to Putin, the Russian president kind of makes sense when he says that Western-style liberalism is dead, at least when you consider the sorry state of a couple of Democratic-run cities in California. President Donald Trump doesn’t understand a basic principle that I learned from my mother in elementary school: If you treat people with respect, they’ll likely respect you in return.Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday to blast Megan Rapinoe, a co-captain of the U.S. Women’s national soccer team, after the soccer magazine Eight by Eight posted a video of her saying that if the women win the World Cup, she’s not “going to the fucking White House.” Rapinoe also said she doubted the team—which meets France in the World Cup quarterfinal today—would even be invited.Trump, “I am a big fan of the American Team, and Women’s Soccer, but Megan should WIN first before she TALKS! Finish the job!” In a second tweet, “I am now inviting the TEAM, win or lose.

Megan should never disrespect our Country, the White House, or our Flag, especially since so much has been done for her & the team. Be proud of the Flag that you wear. The USA is doing GREAT!”.

'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 11:54 a.m. ET on June 29, 2019.The United States may no longer be its old hegemonic self in the realm of geopolitics. But in this World Cup, the women’s national soccer team has seemed like a juggernaut from the time of Pax Americana—a team with supreme self-confidence and an almost evangelical sense of mission. There have been moments, these past few weeks, when their swagger has veered toward arrogance. In their second match, the team started seven fresh players, resting its brand names. And in the aftermath of the replacements’ commanding victory, the defender Ali Krieger quipped, “We have the best team and the second-best team in the world.”But an arrogant team would be unable to appreciate its own weakness, and tonight the team made self-aware tactical adjustments to compensate for its inferior component parts.

Put differently, this team is brimming with idealism—it is, after all, a squad in pursuit of equality, as well as a title—but to beat France, the host nation and its near equal, it reverted to an uncharacteristic pragmatism. TALLINN, Estonia—Deniss Metsavas was visiting his relatives in Russia in the summer of 2007 when the incident occurred.While out with his cousin at a nightclub in Smolensk, Metsavas struck up a conversation with an attractive woman he hadn’t met before. They hit it off and spent the night flirting and dancing before retiring to a sauna in the early hours of the morning.

Though saunas in much of Russia are bathhouses where men drink vodka and are flagellated with oak leaves, this one was a sex motel. He and the woman slept together there, but feeling awkward about what was inevitably going to be a one-night stand, Metsavas went out to buy her flowers. “I cannot leave her money,” he recounted to me. “She’s not a prostitute.” Metsavas laid the bouquet by the bed, then returned to his relatives’ home to steal a few hours of sleep. O ne day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up.

We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends.

“No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going.

I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other.

Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone.

That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”. In the faint predawn light, the ship doesn’t look unusual. It is one more silhouette looming pier-side at Naval Base San Diego, a home port of the U.S.

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Pacific Fleet. And the scene playing out in its forward compartment, as the crew members ready themselves for departure, is as old as the Navy itself. Red vs blue wiki. Three sailors in blue coveralls heave on a massive rope.

“Avast!” a fourth shouts. A percussive thwack announces the pull of a tugboat—and 3,000 tons of warship are under way.To hear more feature stories, orBut now the sun is up, and the differences start to show.Most obvious is the ship’s lower contour. Built in 2014 from 30 million cans’ worth of Alcoa aluminum, Littoral Combat Ship 10, the USS Gabrielle Giffords, rides high in the water on three separate hulls and is powered like a jet ski—that is, by water-breathing jets instead of propellers.

This lets it move swiftly in the coastal shallows (or “littorals,” in seagoing parlance), where it’s meant to dominate. Unlike the older ships now gliding past—guided-missile cruisers, destroyers, amphibious transports—the littoral combat ship was built on the concept of “modularity.” There’s a voluminous hollow in the ship’s belly, and its insides can be swapped out in port, allowing it to set sail as a submarine hunter, minesweeper, or surface combatant, depending on the mission. Democrats who watched the second debate on Thursday probably thought their party had a good night. It did not, and they should worry.Their first worry is the weakness of former Vice President Joe Biden.

He has led the Democratic pack—and he polls well with the larger public—on the strength of his offer of a return to normality after the maelstrom of the Trump presidency. The big doubt about Biden: Can he cope with the ferocious malignancy that is Donald Trump? When Trump roars and raves, abuses and insults, can Biden meet and master the obscenity of it all?Last night, Biden showed that the answer is probably: no. The evening’s most dramatic moment was Senator Kamala Harris’s attack on Biden’s racial record, prefaced with a condescending, “I don’t think you’re a racist.” The attack was delivered with all the unpredictable spontaneity of a speech by one of the animatronic characters in Disney’s Hall of Presidents. Biden knew it was coming. He had answers ready.

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And yet, they were inadequate: bureaucratic, incomprehensible, faintly aggrieved. This was the moment for Biden’s “man in the arena” speech. I’ve fought the good fight, lost some, won more—it’s harder than just talking, you know. My name is on a hundred pieces of legislation that have made life better for Americans of every race, every background, men and women. The words vent and complain are often used interchangeably, but really, they refer to two different forms of expression, each with its own aims. Venting is about seeking validation and sympathy, whereas complaining comes with a concrete end goal—in many cases, getting someone else to do something differently.Generally speaking, the psychologist Guy Winch says, people do a lot of venting, but “we are afraid to voice complaints, and for good reason: It often doesn’t go well.” Because of how people typically present complaints, Winch says, they put their loved ones, friends, and co-workers on the defensive—and as a result they often don’t get what they want. Winch has a better way—one that he laid out in his book, and to a crowd earlier this week at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic.

100.00% liked this video 10 0Series Playlist:This video is sponsored by Bobby Fender. Thanks!It has been a while since I've played any Civ - and as it's a year since Civ 6 released, I decided to jump back in and play some more. This time as Nubia, the latest DLC Civ.