James' World 2

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On June 17, 1775, some 1,000 rebel colonial troops faced down the British war machine on a hill on a peninsula north of Boston, allegedly conserving scarce ammunition by waiting to fire until they could see the whites of the redcoats’ eyes.

The Battle of Bunker Hill, as it became famously—albeit misleadingly—known, happened as the revolutionaries were looking to keep British troops contained in the city and had scrambled to fortify its surroundings. Though the British ultimately won the battle, but they suffered heavy losses, leaving George Washington time to eventually roust them from the region the next spring.

Though the battle became part of Revolutionary War lore, being widely known is no guarantee of being fully understood. That’s why archaeologists decided to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary with a new excavation at the battle site using much more detailed radar scans than were available during a previous survey in the 1990s. The dig focused on the “Rebel Redoubt” fortification patriots had constructed on Breed’s Hill—the actual site of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Scientific American spoke to Joe Bagley, Boston’s city archaeologist, about what the team found.

What did you find at the site? Was there anything particularly exciting?

From the actual battle itself, we found seven musket balls and three gunflints. The gunflints could have been from either side, because they used the same gunflints. The musket balls are both provincial (or the American side) and British, based on their size. We have an expert that’s going to be studying them each very carefully and give us a full report of who shot it, what happened, how was it fired, what did it hit—that kind of thing. We’ll have an exact accounting of all of that.

The other thing that was really exciting was that we started to find a lot of tea ware, such as broken teacups and bowls—things that would be in a dining set, a fairly fancy one. We found wig curlers—which would have been a men’s object—and really fancy buttons. So there’s all this really nice stuff. From the June battle through March the following year, there were about a hundred soldiers and six officers stationed at the redoubt, so it looks like we’re finding stuff from them. Were they taken from nearby houses? Were they brought overseas with the troops? That’s some of the research that we still need to do.

There’s a lot more stuff on the site than we were really expecting, and our job is now going to be going through all of it. We have to wash it, we have to sort it, we have to catalog it, and then we have to figure out what it says about the site. That’s going to be a minute to go through.

What big questions about the battle were you hoping the dig could shed light on?

One of the big questions that we have is basically: How structured was the effort going into the battle from the folks that were organizing what they didn’t realize was going to be the first battle of the Revolution?

Farmers marched to the site, having no idea that they were going there to build a fort, and they had absolutely no idea that the next day they were going to be starting a massive battle with the world’s biggest army. What were they being asked to do, and how big of an ask was it? Was it just like, it’s the middle of the night, we’re going to try to fortify this hill? Were they trying to go for a really structured fort, or were they trying to just bang it out?

“When the first gunflint came out, it drove home the horror of the whole thing”—Joe Bagley, Boston’s city archaeologist

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An earlier version of the survey that happened up there concluded that the fort was basically a sloppy oval on the top of the hill, and then every map after that was drawing these crisp little squares and angles, like they were out there with a protractor making the fort. The results that we’re seeing from the radar really do look like they were building this much more structured, designed, angular fort, and I think that just speaks to the ambition of folks in this early phase.

It’s also just trying to have an accurate representation of what actually happened up there. For me, when the first gunflint came out, it drove home the horror of the whole thing. There’s this tendency to romanticize and dramatize things, but the reality is this was hell. These folks were scared—they were brave, but they were terrified. [The British] set fire to [nearby Charlestown], so there was this black column of smoke that went up and over the actual battlefield by hundreds of feet, probably thousands of feet. The sounds of all the muskets going off, the cannons, the screaming. It was a bloody, gory war. And hundreds of people were killed—people were walking and slipping in blood.

We were basically digging on the site of a massacre, and I think that’s an important part of the story that people need to remember. If we’re just talking about the heroism of the whole thing, it downplays the reality of how tough it is.

What was it like to excavate there?

I’m not a big military buff, but I knew that was a place where people died, and that is a huge responsibility. To know I’m going to be trying to tell the story of people who didn’t get to tell their story after that day—that’s a heavy thing. To be there on that day with them when you find the musket ball that went through them or the gunflint that was in their pocket that slipped out as they were running for their lives—it’s like you’re right there. The last time this interacted with another person was the day that the person that put it in their pocket died or fled for their life. It’s a tingling moment.

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The death of Senator Lindsey Graham has triggered a dual-track process in South Carolina to fill his vacant seat in the chamber and his spot as the Republican nominee on the November ballot.

Graham, a prominent foreign policy hawk who served in the Senate since 2003 and became one of President Donald Trump’s closest allies, died Saturday night following what his office described as a “brief and sudden illness.” He was 71.

The fourth-term senator had secured the GOP nomination for a fifth term in the state’s June 9 primary. His death introduces sudden political uncertainty just months ahead of the November midterm elections, where Republicans are fighting to protect a narrow 53-47 Senate majority.

Trump paid tribute to Graham early Sunday, calling him “one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known” and a “true American Patriot.”

Graham, who served as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee at the time of his death, first entered federal politics in 1994 when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Newsweek has contacted the South Carolina governor’s office and South Carolina’s State Election Commission for comment outside of office hours.

Appointing a Temporary Successor

The path forward to replace Graham follows two distinct avenues under South Carolina law: an interim appointment to the active Senate seat and a separate process to name a new nominee for the upcoming general election.

Republican South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster praised Graham as “the fiercest of fighters for South Carolina and America — and a loyal and steadfast friend.”

McMaster will hold the authority to make an immediate, temporary appointment to fill the vacant seat. Under the South Carolina code of laws, the governor can appoint a successor to serve until January 3 following the next general election.

However, that appointment is strictly temporary and does not automatically grant the appointee the Republican nomination to face Democratic challenger Annie Andrews in November.

A Special Primary Timeline

Determining the permanent Republican nominee will require a separate process dictated by South Carolina Code § 7-11-55.

The statute mandates that the death of a nominee selected through a primary election creates a vacancy that must be resolved through a special primary election.

• Filing Period: The filing window for candidates seeking the nomination opens on the second Tuesday following the vacancy, which places the opening date on July 21.
• Filing Close: The filing period remains open for one week, closing on July 28.
• Special Primary: The special primary election will be held on the second Tuesday following the close of filing, scheduling the vote for August 11.
• Run-Off Election: If no candidate secures a majority, a run-off election must be held two weeks later, on August 25.

State law requires the final nomination to be officially certified no less than two weeks before the general election, establishing an October 20 deadline. If certification occurs later than that window, the office must be filled via a separate special election held the month after the general election.

Ballot Management

Because election logistics are already underway, the statute addresses the potential complications of printed ballots. Election officials are not legally required to reprint ballots that have already been finalized, though they are permitted to reprint them or cover the deceased candidate’s name where feasible.

Under South Carolina Code § 7-13-370, votes cast for a deceased candidate whose name remains on a printed ballot will automatically be counted for the newly certified nominee.

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U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, is seen during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on May 12 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

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On an early morning in January, Jake Linsley woke up to a text from Amazon that was lighting up his phone.

“I thought it was saying, ‘Your package is delayed,’” Linsley said in an interview. “I read it again and was like, ‘Holy s—, I got fired.’”

Linsley, who worked as a finance manager at Amazon for nearly six years, was one of roughly 16,000 employees swept up in the company’s mass layoffs in late January. Combined with the more than 14,000 staffers let go three months earlier, it marked the steepest cuts in Amazon’s history.

As an Amazon employee, Linsley was part of an American corporate elite: working for a tech giant with opportunities for growth, promotion, high salaries, and enviable perks. But he and the other laid-off workers suddenly entered the harsh reality of a job market being rapidly reshaped by artificial intelligence — and competing with hordes of others who had been let go by Meta, Salesforce and Cisco. In some cases, the jobs they’d been hired to do simply don’t exist anymore. And the tech giants continue to cut roles in part to fund the hundreds of billions of dollars they’re investing in AI.

The tech sector has laid off roughly 140,000 employees in the U.S. so far this year, more than any other industry, according to consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. In May, layoffs across the industry reached their highest for any month since August 2024, before easing in June.

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Helen of Troy is starting wars again. But this time the legendarily beautiful, semi-divine queen of myth, whose adulterous elopement with the Trojan prince Paris brought on the 10-year-long Trojan War, has launched a thousand tweets.

In the buildup to the release of Christopher Nolan’s $250 million, all-IMAX retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey,” the director revealed that he had chosen the Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o to play Helen. A firestorm of controversy followed, fueled largely by self-appointed guardians of the Homeric epics who consider the casting of a Black woman as Helen to be a grotesque violation — a “woke” gesture designed to “destroy Western civilization and everything that helped create it,” as one voice on X put it.

X’s owner, Elon Musk, used the platform to accuse Mr. Nolan of “pissing on Homer’s grave,” referring to the director as an “anti-White racist,” and suggesting that he chose Ms. Nyong’o in a cynical bid to win over Oscar voters. (“He wants the awards.”) Donald Trump Jr. has also complained about the casting of Mr. Nolan’s movie, wishing that Hollywood would “stop pushing this crap on us.”

“Not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is ‘the most beautiful woman in the world,’” the conservative commentator Matt Walsh declared.

Some of Mr. Nolan’s equally vocal defenders have argued that it’s silly to complain about “authenticity” when speaking of mythological figures; Helen, after all, was hatched from a swan’s egg, so how literal can we really be? A few classicists reason that Mr. Nolan’s colorblindness is in fact authentic, since the Greeks didn’t have a concept of race in the way that we do. (If they had, they surely would object to the choice to cast the open-faced, all-American Matt Damon as the wily Mediterranean Odysseus.)

Still, it seems safe to assume that Mr. Nolan’s choice of Ms. Nyong’o was meant to be pointed. The last major big-screen depiction of Helen was in the 2004 “Troy” (Donald Jr. was a fan), in which she was played by the extremely Aryan-looking German actress Diane Kruger.

So what is Mr. Nolan up to? As it turns out, the auteur is using Helen just as the Greek authors did: to provoke, challenge and discomfit how we think about beauty and identity, about who we are and how we relate to our world.

It’s worth noting that we actually have no idea what Helen looked like. Homer confines his descriptions to generic banalities — “she looked awfully like the immortal gods” — while the two visual adjectives he gives her, “beautiful-haired” and “white-armed,” are conventional and used of other female characters as well. (She is also described as “shudder-inducing”; go try to cast that.) Later authors, such as the playwright Euripides, introduce new adjectives, for instance, “reddish-blonde.” But on the whole, the Greeks didn’t care much what she looked like.

What they did care about was how she talked. Already in Homer’s telling, Helen is an effective and indeed seductive speaker. In the “Iliad,” she eloquently rues her mad infatuation with Paris, delivers some nice jabs in an argument with no less a debate opponent than the goddess Aphrodite and effectively has the last word in the epic, pronouncing a powerful final eulogy for the fallen Trojan hero Hector. In the “Odyssey,” she beguiles a group of dinner guests with tales of her efforts to help the Greek cause from behind enemy lines in Troy. But her cuckolded husband, Menelaus, with whom she has long since been reunited, counters with a very different tale, one in which it’s clear that she was working to betray the Greeks.

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Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times

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“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king, the palace instead becomes a circus. — Turkish proverb,”

 

Hmmmmm…History is repeating itself yet again!

 

Isaiah 59:14

New Living Translation

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