What happened
The FBI said yesterday it's looking into "offensive and racist text messages" sent to Black people in at least a dozen states since Wednesday morning. Authorities in several of the states are also investigating the anonymous messages, which told recipients — as young as middle school students and often addressed by name — to prepare to "pick cotton" on slave plantations.

Who said what
The text messages "used a similar tone but varied in wording," The Associated Press said. A typical text told the recipient to show up "with your belongings" at a spot where "our executive slave owners will come get you in a brown van" for transport to "the nearest planation." Some included references to the president-elect, Donald Trump, who "stoked racism throughout his campaign," The New York Times said. Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told The Washington Post "the campaign has absolutely nothing to do with these text messages," and suggesting otherwise would be an "asinine and defamatory accusation."

Cybersecurity experts said the text messages could be sent from the U.S. or abroad, possibly using lists of names and phone numbers generated for the political campaigns and their PACs and contractors. Either way, "it points to a well-organized and resourced group that has decided to target Americans on our home soil based on the color of our skin," Missouri NAACP chief Nimrod Chapel said.

What next?
Texts threatening Black people with slavery in 2024 is "not normal," NAACP President Derrick Jackson said. "And we refuse to let them be normalized."

What happened
Plaster casts of calcified Pompeii residents have long been used by archaeologists to tell the stories of the last, desperate moments of ancient Romans before they were buried and preserved in pyroclastic ash from Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. But new DNA evidence shows that many of those stories are wrong, researchers reported yesterday in the journal Current Biology.

Who said what
A team of U.S. and European researchers conducted genomic testing on skeletal remains embedded in 14 casts undergoing restoration, including two people embracing and the four-member "Family in the House of the Golden Bracelet." The presumed nuclear family — including a mother wearing the distinctive bracelet, with a child on her lap — turned out to be four unrelated males, the researchers said. At least one of the entwined "Two Maidens," long believed to be sisters or a mother and daughter, was a male, and the pair were not related. Many of the calcified Pompeiians appear to have immigrated, by choice or force, from the eastern Mediterranean or North Africa.

"Sometimes, what you think you see is not what it is," said Harvard geneticist David Reich, one of the leaders of the study. This "new scientific tool" of ancient DNA analysis reminds us "the past is, as the cliché goes, an undiscovered country." Estelle Lazer, an archaeologist who previously used CAT scans and X-rays to analyze the casts, told The Washington Post that scientifically revealing "the actual lives of the victims" is "much more respectful than just using them as props for storytelling."

What next?
The new discoveries will help researchers better understand not just Pompeii but also gender and migration in the Roman Empire.