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            <h1 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Houston Flooding Pushed the Earth's Crust Down 2 Centimeters</h1>
            
            <p class="dek" itemprop="description">The 275 trillion pounds of water from Hurricane Harvey deformed the ground in Texas.</p>
            
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                        <span class="caption">The weight of Harvey's water pushed Houston down.</span>
                    
                    
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        <section id="article-section-1"><p>The weight of water can deform the Earth’s crust, if there’s enough of it. And we can measure that change with the ultraprecise global-positioning satellites humans have launched into orbit.</p><p>On Monday, Chris Milliner of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory <a href="https://twitter.com/Geo_GIF/status/904808613339848704" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'0',r'538866'">tweeted a simple map</a> visualizing data from the <a href="http://geodesy.unr.edu/about.php" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'1',r'538866'">Nevada Geodetic Laboratory</a>. It showed that the GPS data from special stations around Houston detected that the whole area had been pushed down roughly two centimeters by the weight of the water that fell during Hurricane Harvey.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">GPS data show <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Harveyflood?src=hash" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'2',r'538866'">#Harveyflood</a> was so large it flexed Earth's crust, pushing <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Houston?src=hash" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'3',r'538866'">#Houston</a> down by ~2 cm! <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/EarthScience?src=hash" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'4',r'538866'">#EarthScience</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/HurricaneHarvey?src=hash" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'5',r'538866'">#HurricaneHarvey</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/txflood?src=hash" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'6',r'538866'">#txflood</a> <a href="https://t.co/88lNScJBq9" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'7',r'538866'">pic.twitter.com/88lNScJBq9</a></p>
— Chris Milliner (@Geo_GIF) <a href="https://twitter.com/Geo_GIF/status/904808613339848704" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'8',r'538866'">September 4, 2017</a></blockquote><p>Why this would happen is simpler than you might think. A gallon of water weighs about 8.34 pounds. And by one estimate, Harvey dropped <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/08/30/harvey-has-unloaded-24-5-trillion-gallons-of-water-on-texas-and-louisiana/?utm_term=.267846a0a7cf" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'9',r'538866'">33 trillion gallons of water</a> across the area it hit. So that’s roughly 275 trillion pounds.</p></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector1" targeting-pos="boxinjector1" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2" data-object-pk="1" data-object-name="boxinjector"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3], [320, 520], [320, 430], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-2"><p>And it turns out that scientists have measured the effects of loading a bunch of water onto land many times. For example, <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011JB008925/full" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'10',r'538866'">a 2012 study of the Himalayas</a> detected a seasonal flux in the height of the mountains as water fell, and then ran off those mountains into Asia’s rivers.</p><figure style="max-width: 700.0px;"><picture style="display: block; position:relative; width:100%; height:0; overflow:hidden; padding-bottom:69.2857142857%;"><img alt="" data-srcset="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/09/Screenshot_2017_09_05_10.26.17/6e9c4e473.png" class="lazyload" style="position:absolute; width:100%; height:100%; top:0; left:0; border:0;"></picture><figcaption class="caption">The rise and fall of different GPS stations in Nepal and Tibet (Fu and Freymueller)</figcaption></figure><p><a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6343/1161.full" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'11',r'538866'">A 2017 study in <em>Science</em></a> found that the Sierra Nevada exhibits “vertical surface displacement [with] peak-to-peak amplitudes” of 0.5 to one centimeter. More water is more mass. Less water is less mass. And the crust underneath that water responds to the changes.</p><p>One could see Harvey’s deposition of water as a fast-action version of what happens in the Earth’s mountain ranges each year.</p><p>There are some caveats, Milliner later explained. Some of the change could come from the soil underneath the GPS stations becoming compacted by the water’s weight. But because some stations located on bedrock also experienced the depression, he believed that the key mechanism was crust deformation. It’s also possible, he elaborated, that some areas outside Houston were pushed <em>up</em> by the way the water squished the Houston crust.</p><p>Perhaps a hurricane seems a match for the crust of the Earth, in mental scale. But humans can also have this sort of effect (even without calculating how much of Harvey’s water was due to climate change). Huge dams can impound water on a scale of Hurricane Harvey’s rains. The Hoover Dam and Three Gorges Dam both created reservoirs with a capacity of roughly <a href="http://ceeserver.cee.cornell.edu/lwl3/cee3510/Short%20topics/3%20Gorges%20dam%20(2012).pdf" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'12',r'538866'">10 trillion gallons of water</a>.</p><p>The effect of the filling of the Three Gorges Dam has <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095927317303845" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'13',r'538866'">experienced substantial attention from Chinese researchers</a>, in part because there was a marked increase in small earthquakes in the region as the reservoir was filled. That’s not a concern in Houston, which is not a seismically active region.</p><p>It also remains to be seen how quickly the Earth rebounds in Houston, given that the water is rushing back to the sea, rather than sitting on mountaintops as glaciers or in reservoirs as hydrologic storage. And one assumes there’s an interesting paper in that for a geodetic researcher.</p><p>And there are (at least) two more ways humans are changing the crust of the Earth. Because the climate is warming, there’s less ice—and therefore less mass—attached to the world’s mountaintops. “The Earth, behaving like an elastic body, uplifts in a response to the load loss,” the Himalayan researchers write.</p><p>Meanwhile, in Houston, the ground had already been sinking—scientists call it subsidence—because humans have <a href="http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/For-years-the-Houston-area-has-been-losing-ground-7951625.php" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'14',r'538866'">pumped the groundwater out of the aquifers</a> under the city.</p><p>With each passing year, the combined and uncoordinated efforts of humanity force the mountains a little higher and the flats a bit lower.</p></section>
    
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        <p class="dek">Lawmakers scoffed at the president’s calls to slash funding across the government a year ago. With a new spending deal now in place, they’re likely to do so again.</p>
        
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            <p>Within the thousands of pages the White House transmitted to Congress on Monday morning as part of President Trump’s second annual budget request, there is a line that pretty much sums up the whole ritual.</p>

<p>“Many of the eliminations and reductions in this volume reflect a continuation of policies proposed in the 2018 President’s Budget that have not yet been enacted<br>
by the Congress,” the sentence reads. It’s included in the introduction of a 222-page document titled “Major Savings and Reforms.”</p>

<p>Those are all the cuts the Trump administration is proposing, and they’re going nowhere.</p>

<p>Trump again wants to take a meat cleaver to the Environmental Protection Agency, chopping its budget by one-third. He’s asking Congress to scrap entirely community-development block grants and heating assistance for low-income housing. And he wants to eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the national endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/here-are-the-independent-agencies-trump-wants-to-stop-funding/519786/">a slew of other independent agencies</a>.</p>


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        <p class="dek">In the mid-1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project interviewed thousands of former slaves, some of whom claimed the president came to their plantations disguised as a beggar or a peddler, telling them they’d soon be free.</p>
        
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        <p class="dek">“An explosion was audible inside each toad.”</p>
        
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            <p>In the 1997 movie <em>Anaconda</em>, there are, to put it mildly, a few scientific inaccuracies. Chief among them: Anacondas do not regurgitate their still-living prey to experience the thrill of a second kill, as the movie’s snake <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdgB9_hjrMc">does with Jon Voight</a>. They will sometimes puke up a meal, but since they constrict their victims before swallowing, the expelled individual would be very much dead.</p>

<p>But some animals <em>can </em>travel down a predator’s gullet and return to tell the tale. Consider the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_beetle">bombardier beetles</a>. There are 500 species of them, named for their ability to spray scalding, caustic liquid from their backsides. They do so by mixing chemicals housed in two separate glands. Separately, these substances are inert. Together, they react with explosive results. The beetles can create around <a href="http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/30/how-this-beetle-creates-500-explosions-per-second-in-its-bum/">500 of these explosions</a> every second, creating chemical streams that reach over 100 degrees Celsius and travel at up to 22 miles per hour.</p>


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        <p class="dek"><span><span>Its faith-based 12-step program dominates treatment in the United States. But researchers have debunked central tenets of AA doctrine and found dozens of other treatments more effective.</span></span></p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p><span class="smallcaps">J.G. is a lawyer</span> in his early 30s. He’s a fast talker and has the lean, sinewy build of a distance runner. His choice of profession seems preordained, as he speaks in fully formed paragraphs, his thoughts organized by topic sentences. He’s also a worrier—a big one—who for years used alcohol to soothe his anxiety.</p>

<p>J.G. started drinking at 15, when he and a friend experimented in his parents’ liquor cabinet. He favored gin and whiskey but drank whatever he thought his parents would miss the least. He discovered beer, too, and loved the earthy, bitter taste on his tongue when he took his first cold sip.</p>

<p>His drinking increased through college and into law school. He could, and occasionally did, pull back, going cold turkey for weeks at a time. But nothing quieted his anxious mind like booze, and when he didn’t drink, he didn’t sleep. After four or six weeks dry, he’d be back at the liquor store.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Fetishization of Kim Yo Jong</h3>
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        <p class="dek">A dictator’s sister gets positive reviews at the Olympics.</p>
        
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            <p>Call it the diplomacy of low expectations: After Kim Jong Un’s regime spent much of the past year threatening its neighbors and the U.S. with its nuclear weapons, his sister got a surprisingly warm reception at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. And North Korea—having sent athletes and cheerleaders to the Games as well—got the kind of publicity that should have been reserved for South Korea, which organized, paid for, and is hosting event.</p>

<p>Here are some of the recent headlines:</p>

<p><a href="https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-olympics-2018-northkorea-diplomacy-an/north-korea-heads-for-diplomacy-gold-medal-at-olympics-analysts-idUKKBN1FV0JV">North Korea heads for diplomacy gold medal at Olympics: analysts</a> (Reuters)</p>

<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/11/world/asia/kim-yo-jong-mike-pence-olympics.html">Kim Jong-un’s Sister Turns On the Charm, Taking Pence’s Spotlight</a> (<em>The New York Times</em>)</p>

<p><a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/winter-olympics-2018/2018/02/11/north-korea-cheerleaders-bring-feeling-home-winter-olympics-e/327122002/">North Korea cheerleaders making quite an impression at Winter Olympics</a> (<em>USA Today</em>)</p>


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                <figcaption class="credit">lillisphotography / Getty / Emily Jan / The Atlantic</figcaption>
                
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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Stop Saying 'Smart Cities'</h3>
    </a>
    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/bruce-sterling-1/" itemprop="url" title="Bruce Sterling" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Bruce Sterling</span></a></span></li>
        

    </ul>
    <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-02-12T15:39:12" />
    <meta itemprop="dateModified" content="2018-02-13T01:49:03" />

    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">Digital stardust won’t magically make future cities more affordable or resilient.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>The term “smart city” is interesting yet not important, because nobody defines it. “Smart” is a snazzy political label used by a modern alliance of leftist urbanites and tech industrialists. To deem yourself “smart” is to make the <span class="smallcaps">NIMBY</span>ites and market-force people look stupid.</p>

<p>Smart-city devotees all over this world will agree that London is particularly smart. Why? London is a huge, ungainly beast whose cartwheeling urban life is in cranky, irrational disarray. London is a god-awful urban mess, but London does have some of the best international smart-city conferences.</p>

<p>London also has a large urban-management bureaucracy who emit the proper smart-city buzzwords and have even invented some themselves.  The language of Smart City is always Global Business English, no matter what town you're in.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Could Netflix Be Giving Up on Prestige Films?</h3>
    </a>
    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/david-sims/" itemprop="url" title="David Sims" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">David Sims</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">The surprise release of<em> The Cloverfield Paradox</em>, along with acquisitions of other schlocky genre movies, suggests the company is leaning in to its “direct-to-video” approach.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>Just a year ago, at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, Netflix was a big player. The streaming company was a little more than a year into releasing its own original movies for its subscribers, and it was looking for prestige hits to gain a foothold as a distributor Hollywood could take seriously. It acquired one of the best-reviewed films of the festival, <em>Mudbound</em>, <a href="http://www.indiewire.com/2017/01/netflix-mudbound-sundance-film-acquisition-1201773462/">for $12.5 million</a>, and the Grand Jury Prize winner <em>I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore,</em> among others. In terms of prestige, Netflix was lagging behind its competitor Amazon, which had nabbed a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/01/how-amazon-got-a-best-picture-oscar-nomination/514325/">Best Picture nomination</a> for its major Sundance acquisition of 2016, <em>Manchester by the Sea</em>. Maybe Netflix’s new slate of indie favorites would turn things around.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The White House's Problem Is Dishonesty, Not Chaos </h3>
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    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/david-a-graham/" itemprop="url" title="David A. Graham" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">David A. Graham</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">The fumbling of domestic-violence accusations against Rob Porter is a story about the administration’s inability to tell the truth, not its disorganization.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>The White House’s response to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/new-kids-on-the-block/552911/">allegations of domestic violence against former Staff Secretary Rob Porter </a>has so stunned reporters that the whole episode has become an exemplar of the total disorganization of the Trump administration.</p>

<p>“Abuse Case Exposes Fissures in a White House in Turmoil,” <em>The New York Times </em><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/11/us/politics/rob-porter-john-kelly.html?nl=todaysheadlines&amp;emc=edit_th_180212">intones</a>. <em>Axios</em>’s Jonathan Swan <a href="https://www.axios.com/the-white-house-cant-get-its-story-straight-1518385713-0eb5ad28-ec48-4f50-9320-dad0a35b23d8.html">writes</a>, “This is crazy. Even in a White House that’s famous for chaos, I’ve never seen anything like this.” <em>Politico</em>’s Playbook simply <a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2018/02/10/chaos-at-1600-pennsylvania-second-wh-official-steps-down-due-to-domestic-abuse-allegations-hope-hicks-in-the-spotlight-israeli-jet-downed-near-syrian-border-246005">announced</a>, “CHAOS at 1600 Pennsylvania.”</p>

<p>This is peculiar, not only because it is difficult to imagine what would rise to the level of notable chaos relative to the standards of this White House. It’s strange because the focus on disorder has overshadowed the more salient feature of the moment: Insofar as the administration is engulfed in chaos, it is a result of its inability to tell the truth. The Trump team doesn’t have a chaos problem so much as it has a dishonesty problem. Of course this is not new, either—in fact, the serial dissembling of the White House has become so banal that it goes almost unremarked in this case—yet it is on particularly dramatic display here.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Photos of Carnival 2018 Around the World</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/alan-taylor/" itemprop="url" title="Alan Taylor" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Alan Taylor</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">Images of Carnival season 2018, already underway, with celebrations in Brazil, Portugal, Hungary, Bolivia, Haiti, Spain, Italy, and more.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>Carnival season 2018 is underway across Europe and the Americas. These pre-Lent festivals, often a blend of local pagan and Catholic traditions, usher out winter and welcome in spring. The largest and most famous—the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—took place over the past few days.  Gathered here are images of Carnivals around the world, including images from Brazil, Portugal, Hungary, Bolivia, Haiti, Spain, Italy, and more. Depending on available photos, there may be a follow-up post later this week with more from Mardi Gras and other celebrations.</p>

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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Selective Empathy of #MeToo Backlash</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/megan-garber/" itemprop="url" title="Megan Garber" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Megan Garber</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">From Donald Trump to recent op-eds, the male perspective remains—stubbornly, perniciously—the default point of view.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>The tweet, as so often happens, was at once shocking and deeply predictable.</p>

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused—life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?</p>
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/962348831789797381?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 10, 2018</a></blockquote>

<p></p>

<p>That was President Trump, on Saturday, ostensibly reacting to the fact that, this week, allegations of domestic abuse <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/new-kids-on-the-block/552911/">led to the resignations of two high-level staffers at the White House</a>. He was also, obliquely, weighing in on #MeToo. The president’s 48-word assessment of the reckoning so many Americans are painfully but productively engaged in made for rich (but thoroughly unsurprising) irony: Trump, of course, has been <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/what-about-the-19-women-who-accused-trump/547724/">accused of sexual impropriety by 19 women</a>—and has also been <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/the-trump-tapes/503417/">caught on tape</a> bragging about sexual assault, and has also boasted, <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-1994-putting-wife-work-dangerous-thing/story?id=39537935">on national television</a>, about advising friends to “<a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/6/2/11833912/donald-trump-1994-women-buildings-misogyny">be rougher</a>” toward their wives, and has also been elected president of the United States. His tweet is revealing both in spite and because of those facts: “<i>Peoples</i>[sic],” in the plural; <i>allegation</i>, in the singular. The <i>peoples </i>meaning the “men’s”; the <em>allegation</em>—though in its context, the diminishing adjective is redundant—being a “mere” one.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">'Don't Sneak': A Father's Command to His Gay Son in the 1950s</h3>
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        <p class="dek">In a StoryCorps animation, Patrick Haggerty remembers the remarkable advice he got from his dairy farmer dad.</p>
        
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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Gravity-Defying Globe of Death</h3>
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        <p class="dek">Lucius Zafalon is a daredevil motorcycle rider who risks his body in the pursuit of the perfect Globe of Death act.</p>
        
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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">An Urban Legend Is Born</h3>
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        <p class="dek">It’s an incredible story. But did it actually happen?</p>
        
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