India’s Silly Security Threat | S ave the Country in Four Hours Flat

Police officers are sharing videos of themselves dancing and singing, and it's making officials worry about discipline and security.

In July, an entire SWAT team of police in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh was transferred from their posts. Their transgression? The five police officers had filmed slow-motion action shots of themselves strutting purposefully toward the camera, cocking their guns and pretend-firing at invisible bad guys, using the video-sharing app TikTok. Staged against a high-voltage song, the cringe-inducing yet entertaining video went viral. Who could resist watching cocky cops making a spectacle of themselves while trying to look cool? But the top brass wasn’t amused. “We do not sanction unprofessional display of weapons and grotesque caricaturing of police,” the state police said in a statement.

Yet the SWAT team is hardly alone. India’s states and cities are grappling with a spree of police officers and other government employees who’ve shared videos of themselves, in uniform or while they are at work, on TikTok over the past few weeks.

Long before C.J. Walker made her fortune, Annie Malone became a self-made millionaire and revolutionized the Black beauty industry.

Last month, California became the first state to ban discrimination based on hairstyle with the Creating a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural Hair (CROWN) Act, a response to several high profile cases where people of color were denied jobs or sent home from school for wearing locks or braids. Weeks later, New York followed suit. Meanwhile, Netflix has announced that it’ll produce a four-part series about Black cosmetics icon Madam C.J. Walker, starring Octavia Spencer and Tiffany Haddish.

But while we’re all remembering Walker — née Sarah Breedlove, a Black cosmetics entrepreneur who is often referred to as the first self-made female millionaire in America — let’s not forget about her precursors. Specifically her mentor and inspiration, Annie Turnbo Malone, a Black woman and inventor who built a cosmetics empire valued at $14 million half a century before the repeal of Jim Crow and long before Walker.

This performance guru believes his keys to “total human optimization” can power purpose-driven communities.

Aubrey Marcus had a dream. Not the deep sleep kind, nor that of Martin Luther King Jr.— though there was certainly a lesson to be learned.

Marcus spoke to a dragon while on ayahuasca, and now he wants to change the world.

“The key to learning is radical, honest, vulnerable introspection,” says Marcus. “I have a lot of tools to help me with that. One of them is my plant medicine journeys.”