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You Can See Everything, the three-hour Elizabeth Holmes documentary that’s becoming a cinematic phenomenon, argues two truths that shouldn’t be radical, but are: First, there is such a thing as the truth. Second, it can be really, really hard to figure out what the truth actually is. The movie does a cannonball into our current cesspool of lying politicians, fake news, and new technologies that make reality feel ever more unknowable. Our social media algorithms are tailored to deliver us a bespoke version of reality that fits all our preconceived biases, and artificial intelligence-generated content supercharges those biases. The result is to make reality feel unspeakably confusing and tangled. “The truth will set you free,” Jesus told the disciples in John 8, but that promise comes with a condition: “You will know the truth.” The harder the truth is to know, the harder it is to be set free. But Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary posits that the truth is real, it’s there, and the struggle to take hold of it is worth the fight. That’s the crux of Georgia Coley’s review of You Can See Everything, where she argues that “Some truths can still be seen, and some must be, even when they are hard to stomach.” Elsewhere this week: -Moody Vs. Marx: D.L. Moody and Karl Marx were two contemporaries with very different ideas about how to help the poor. Amar Peterman and Yanan Melo try to figure out who was right. -ICE’s Shock Gloves: Immigration and Customes Enforcement agents have added electric shock gloves to their toolkits. This tells us something important about how they think about power, argues Colin Martinez Longmore. -A Civil Rights Landmark: 16th Street Baptist Church became a beating heart of the Civil Rights Movement. Evana Upshaw takes us inside its new plan to educate the next generation. -Voting With Your Faith: As midterms approach, Sojourners president Adam Russell Taylor argues for casting your ballot as an exercise of your spiritual convictions. -The Valley of the Shadow of AI: Data centers have become a surprise political flashpoint. Holly Flynn told us about a big one—right in her backyard. -The Rise of Black Church Bankruptcy: Predatory lending has been a scourge for many Black churches. Now, Pamela Foohey reports that some have found a surprise way to fight back: through Chapter 11.
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