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In case you are a first-time reader, this is The Torment Nexus (you can find out more about me and this newsletter — and why I chose to call it that — in my inaugural post.) Since this is only the second edition of the newsletter, I am still working out some bugs, so if things seem a little out of place, bear with me.

In a way, this is a continuation of the newsletter I’ve been writing for the last few years about the intersection between technology and the media, as chief digital writer at the Columbia Journalism Review (you can find some of those pieces here, and they are also all published on my personal website.) As I mentioned in my inaugural post, I’ve been writing about tech and its impact for about 30 years or so, ever since the first web browser was invented.

For me, this newsletter is a return to the days when I used to write about tech on my personal blog. In the same way, there is no large entity or organization in between me and my readers now — it’s just me and you, figuring things out together. And maybe along the way, getting a sense of how much work my editors put into making me seem coherent. 😄

And with that, on to this week’s newsletter! Thanks for reading – and if you decide to subscribe, or you have already, thank you for that as well! If you enjoy this newsletter, please share it and/or give it a thumbs up or heart emoji or whatever on the network of your choice. None of these newsletters are behind a paywall at this point (I haven’t decided if I will do that in the future) and every issue is available via Ghost, through Substack, and on my website.

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Continue reading “The Second Circuit’s decision in the Internet Archive case is bad”

From Outside: “Ten minutes into his dive, Dave Shaw started to look for the bottom. Utter blackness pressed in on him from all sides, and he directed his high-intensity light downward, hoping for a flash of rock or mud. Shaw, a 50-year-old Aussie, was in an alien world, more than 800 feet below the surface pool that marks the entrance to Bushman’s Hole, a remote sinkhole in the Northern Cape province of South Africa and the third-deepest freshwater cave known to man. Only two divers had ever been to this depth in Bushman’s before. One of them, a South African named Nuno Gomes, had claimed a world record in 1996 when he hit bottom, on open-circuit gear, at 927 feet. Shaw touched down and started swimming. Suddenly, he stopped. About 50 feet to his left, perfectly illuminated in the gin-clear water, was a human body.”

A shocking crime divided a Minnesota town

From The Atavist: “Grand Marais is a quiet outpost on Lake Superior’s North Shore, set among boreal forest in the easternmost corner of Minnesota. The town of roughly 1,300 is home to a mix of artists and outdoor enthusiasts, working-class people and professionals, liberals and diehard Trump supporters. The residents of Grand Marais have had a lot to discuss in recent years. A suspicious fire that destroyed the historic Lutsen Lodge. The suicide of their neighbor Mark Pavelich, a star on the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that defeated the Soviet Union. Plans for the 40 acres owned by convicted sex offender Warren Jeff’s fundamentalist clan. All those events stirred plenty of talk. But nothing has captivated local conversation quite like what happened between Larry Scully and Levi Axtell in March 2023. A shocking act of violence attracted international attention and split the town over questions of truth and justice.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “In a cave 800 feet down, divers found a human body”

From the New York Times: “The trip had been a long shot. Bob Garrison reminded himself of that as he stood on a pier a thousand miles from home. Behind him lay the tile-roofed beach town of San Clemente, Calif., his last stop. Before him stretched the Pacific Ocean, immense and unbound. Gulls cried. Surf broke. It was Monday, his last day. Mr. Garrison could afford only so much time off. And yet what if he was close? He had spent the last two days following up on leads, scouring parks, passing out fliers. “MISSING,” they said, in block letters over photos of a 45-year-old man from Seattle, 6 feet, 6 inches tall with a beard to his chest, an ice-ax tattoo and a silver cross necklace. On this June day, Mr. Garrison, an engineer from rural Ellensburg, Wash., was not thinking about California’s humanitarian crisis. He was just a 70-year-old man trying to rescue his son.”

How Mark Twain and Helen Keller formed a lifelong friendship

From Open Culture: “While many people grow more conservative with age, Twain and Keller both grew more radical, which accounts for another little-known fact about these two nineteenth-century American celebrities: they formed a very close and lasting friendship that in Keller’s case may have been one of the most important relationships in either figure’s lives. Twain’s importance to Keller, and hers to him, begins in 1895, when the two met at a lunch held for Keller in New York. According to the Mark Twain Library, Keller “seemed to feel more at ease with Twain than with any of the other guests.” She would write, “He treated me not as a freak, but as a handicapped woman seeking a way to circumvent extraordinary difficulties.” After the meeting, he wrote to his benefactor Henry H. Rogers, asking Rogers to fund Keller’s education. Rogers made it possible for her to continue her education and to achieve the enduring fame Twain had foreseen.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “A father’s desperate search for a son who didn’t want to be found”

From The Economist: “One winter morning in 2022 I found myself being pushed, blindfolded, into a Taliban interrogation room in Kabul. A guard I couldn’t see shoved me into a chair. I heard the door close, then nothing. I had no idea why the Taliban had taken me. One possibility was that they might be trying to use me as a bargaining chip in their dealings with the West. My speculation was interrupted by a voice to my right telling me, in English, to remove my blindfold. When I did so I saw a powerfully built man sitting at a desk. He wore a black skullcap, and a bulky camouflage jacket which made him look even larger. For the next hour the man grilled me, trying to get me to admit I was a spy. Had I been to Iran? Which was my favourite Bond film? He wrote down my responses. Suddenly he looked up from his notes and said: “You’re going to be hanged.”

Scientists made the skin of mice transparent using a common food dye

From Scientific American: “In mere minutes, smearing mice with a common food dye can make a desired portion of their skin almost as transparent as glass. In a study published in Science, researchers spread a solution of the dye tartrazine, a common coloring for foods, drugs and cosmetics, onto living mice to turn their tissues clear—creating a temporary window that revealed organs, muscles and blood vessels in their body. The procedure—a new form of a technique known as “optical tissue clearing”—has not yet been tested in humans, but it may someday offer a way to view and monitor injuries or diseases without the need of specialized imaging equipment or invasive surgery. The fats and proteins in skin typically have higher refractive indexes than the water, which creates a contrast that you can’t see through. In the study, Ou and his colleagues looked for light-absorbing molecules that could make the various refractive indexes within the layers of skin more similar—reducing the amount of light scattered throughout.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “How a journalist became the Taliban’s portrait artist”

Hi everyone! Just wanted you to know that I’ve launched a newsletter about technology and society called “The Torment Nexus,” where I will be writing analysis and commentary about technology and culture. I was recently laid off from my job as the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I have been writing since 2017 about the intersection of technology, media, and culture, so I decided to run this up the old flagpole and see if anyone salutes 😄

I’m publishing The Torment Nexus via Ghost, an open-source publishing system, as I do my other newsletter, a collection of interesting, odd, and/or unusual links called When The Going Gets Weird. If you’re more comfortable with Substack, I’m also publishing it through that software as well, and if you prefer to read it the old-fashioned way, I will also be posting some or all of the posts here on my website, as I do with almost everything I write. Feel free to share this and other posts with anyone you think might have an interest in these kinds of topics!

In case the name Torment Nexus doesn’t ring a bell, it comes from a hilarious meme that Alex Blechman—a writer for The Onion—came up with awhile back, and I think it sums up so much about where we are right now in terms of our relationship with technology. Here Alex’s original tweet:

Continue reading “Welcome to The Torment Nexus”

From Esquire: “Heidi Guilford rode shotgun in her boyfriend’s white Dodge Charger. Her stepsister and a couple friends sat in the back, with the windows rolled down for the smokers. It was a cool night in June—sweatshirt weather—an unremarkable Sunday on an island off the coast of Maine. Roger seemed upset, bordering on frantic, going on about Dorian and Briannah Ames, a married couple who lived down on Roberts Cemetery Road, about a half mile out of town. He said the Ameses had been harassing him, that he was sick of it, and that nothing was being done about it.It all happened so fast. Less than twenty minutes after leaving the parking lot, Roger was bleeding to death in the back seat of Isles’s car. The group of friends, stunned, believed they had just witnessed a homicide—one lobsterman killing another with an ax in a bloody brawl. But did they? A man died—was killed, in what the state itself said was a homicide—and yet to this day, no one has been charged with a single crime related to his death.”

Lincoln shared a bed with a man for four years and fell into a deep depression when he died

From People: “Abraham Lincoln was, by most accounts, the greatest president the United States has ever had. He led the country through the Civil War and played a pivotal role in the emancipation of enslaved Black Americans. But through his professional and political triumphs, he is said to have suffered from crippling, lifelong depression. It’s a side of the great American president that history books don’t typically dwell on, and the new documentary Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln takes a look at another aspect of Lincoln’s life that often has gone overlooked: his sexuality. The documentary covers Lincoln’s relationships with several men over the years, most notably Joshua Speed, the co-owner of a general store with whom the future U.S. president shared a bed — for four years. The film features interviews with more than a dozen scholars and historians and offers letters and never-before-seen photos, while laying out the thesis that Lincoln was probably gay or at least bisexual.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “They saw a man killed with an ax but no one was ever charged”

From Curbed: “Sometimes Wu remembers how his family balked when he told them he was going to start ratting out lawbreakers in New York City. But for a chance at making nearly $90 for a minute of his time, he found he could push their skepticism to the bottom of his consciousness.The source of the money was the city itself, thanks to the Citizens Air Complaint Program, which allows members of the public to claim a reward by sending in videos of buses and trucks that idle illegally. The statutory limit for leaving your engine running is three minutes. But on a block with a school, that drops to 60 seconds, which is what has now drawn Wu several times to this particular block in Manhattan that’s being poisoned by the pooling diesel exhaust of nearly a dozen yellow school buses. Wearing a mask to filter out the acrid tang of sulfates and carbon soot, Wu uses his phone’s camera to capture the license plates and company markings on the buses.”

Was Rudolph Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, murdered?

From History.com: “On September 29, 1913, Rudolf Diesel, inventor of the engine that bears his name, disappears from the steamship Dresden while traveling from Antwerp, Belgium to Harwich, England. On October 10, a Belgian sailor aboard a North Sea steamer spotted a body floating in the water; upon further investigation, it turned out that the body was Diesel’s. There was, and remains, a great deal of mystery surrounding his death: It was officially judged a suicide, but many people believed (and still believe) that Diesel was murdered. Diesel patented a design for his engine on February 28, 1892 and at the time of his death, he was on his way to England to attend the groundbreaking of a new diesel-engine plant—and to meet with the British navy about installing his engine on their submarines. Conspiracy theories began to fly almost immediately: “Inventor Thrown Into the Sea to Stop Sale of Patents to British Government,” read one headline.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “You can make six figures in New York by reporting idling trucks”