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How the founder of a hip-hop band became a spy

From Variety: “It was a scene ripped from a John le Carré novel. A man is told to go to the front desk of the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Manhattan and say the phrase “banana peel.” The concierge then hands him an envelope with orders to circle the block twice before receiving further instructions. He returns, is shuffled into a secret elevator — one that isn’t even used for celebrities, only visiting dignitaries deemed assassination risks — and brought to the penthouse suite. After 15 minutes, Sun Lijun enters the room and lights a cigarette. The man recognizes Sun, not merely because he is the third-highest-ranking official in China. here’s the part that le Carré’s editors would have rejected as wildly implausible. The man is Pras Michél, founder of the legendary hip-hop band the Fugees.”

Nigel Richards is the world’s best Scrabble player and it’s not even close

From Wikipedia: “Nigel Richards is a New Zealand and Malaysian Scrabble player who is widely regarded as the greatest tournament-level player of all time. Born and raised in New Zealand, Richards became World Champion in 2007, and repeated the feat in 2011, 2013, 2018, and 2019. Richards is also a five-time U.S. national champion, an eight-time UK Open champion, an 11-time champion of the Singapore Open Scrabble Championship and a 15-time winner of the King’s Cup. In 2015, despite not speaking French, Richards won the French World Scrabble Championships. In 2024, Richards accomplished a similar feat by winning the Spanish-language World Championships.”

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

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A body in a basement and a 50-year-old mystery

From Rolling Stone: “A bone case: That’s what law enforcement calls cases where the remains are skeletal, years interred, evidence eroded or disappeared altogether with the passage of time. The remains of the girl soon nicknamed Midtown Jane Doe certainly qualified. The building where she was found, 301 W. 46th St., had few tenants left in February 2003, stubbornly clinging to apartments that had housed sex workers, drug addicts, and others just trying to get by. On Feb. 10, 2003, construction workers noticed a raised concrete slab behind an aging coal furnace in the basement. Six feet wide, five feet long, and a foot high. It seemed out of place. One of the workers took out a sledgehammer and smashed it. A skull rolled out.”

The world’s oldest wild bird has laid an egg at the ripe old age of 74

From Associated Press: “The oldest known wild bird in the world has laid an egg at the ripe age of about 74, her first in four years, U.S. wildlife officials said. The long-winged seabird named Wisdom, a Laysan albatross, returned to Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge at the northwestern edge of the Hawaiian Archipelago and laid what experts estimate may be her 60th egg, the Pacific Region of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service said in a Facebook post. Wisdom and her mate, Akeakamai, had returned to the atoll in the Pacific Ocean to lay and hatch eggs since 2006. Laysan albatrosses mate for life and lay one egg per year. But Wisdom began interacting with another male when she returned last week, officials said.”

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

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“We make plenty of money already”

I posted this tweet today, and I thought I would expand on the story for anyone who might be interested. The comment from Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster came during an interview at Mesh, the Toronto web conference that I started with a few friends in 2006, which ran until 2016 (I wrote a longer retrospective about Mesh here). Buckmaster was a speaker in 2007 — we tried to get Craigslist founder Craig Newmark to come but we got Jim instead; years later I would get to know Craig through a journalism conference in Perugia.

Jim did a one-on-one interview with my friend and Mesh co-founder Mark Evans (this made for a somewhat amusing image, to me at least, because Jim is six foot eight and Mark is about five foot seven). After the interview, there was time for questions, and someone asked how much Craigslist spent on marketing. “We don’t do any marketing,” Jim said (I am paraphrasing). “We don’t even have a marketing department.” I saw some heads turn and people clearly surprised that a website that was the ninth largest in the world at the time didn’t have a marketing department.

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Taylor Swift Eras Tour: $2 billion in ticket revenue

Taylor Swift

As Trung Phan points out in this post on X, Taylor Swift’s concert tour made over $2 billion in ticket revenue — so not including merchandise, etc. That’s almost twice as much as the previous highest-grossing tour, which was U2 with $1.1 billion, and their tour was only two years ago. Even if you factor in higher ticket prices due to inflation etc. that is a massive increase.

According to People, Taylor has handed out close to $200 million in bonuses to the performers in her tour, and to the truck drivers and other staff.

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Pokémon Go set off a wave of paranoia in US intelligence

From Foreign Policy: “As the game’s popularity exploded, pokémon materialized at NSA headquarters; near America’s top-secret nuclear weapons laboratories in New Mexico; and at covert CIA facilities in northern Virginia, thanks to ardent devotees of the game working there.This set off alarm bells for U.S. counterintelligence officials. Why were pokémon appearing at such sensitive locations? Could this conspicuous placement be evidence of some sort of malicious intent? Could the app be functioning as a targeted spying tool, as part of a “Pokémon Go hack me” scheme? Security experts from the CIA, NSA, and Energy Department (which manages the country’s nuclear arsenal) subsequently sent memos instructing colleagues to stop playing Pokémon Go at their workplaces—and perhaps entirely.

JFK staged his own death in a James Bond–inspired movie just before he died

From Vanity Fair: “A visit to the website of the John F. Kennedy Library reveals a silent motion picture, some 16 minutes long, shot on the weekend of September 21 and 22, 1963. The footage depicts scenes of Kennedy, his family, and a few friends at various locations around Newport, Rhode Island. The first lady had made an unusual request. She explained that she and the president were making a humorous short film—a kind of spy movie. At one point, according to Landis, Jackie asked the agents to hurriedly drive up to the main house and react as if they had just heard shots. Landis says the agents entered the house and found the president lying on the floor in the foyer with ketchup smeared on him. Two months later, he was assassinated.”

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

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An AI-generated cyberpunk dystopia

I found the video below on Facebook when someone shared it, and I was amazed at how good it was — at times it was difficult to tell whether it was generated by AI or whether it was created by a movie-calibre CGI program. It appears to have been generated by feeding images into an AI and having it animate them, since some of the transitions and movement seem odd. But still fantastic work.

I’m not sure what the giant bug machines are all about, or why a building has a giant mouth with teet, or why people are wearing what look like old TV sets on their heads, but it definitely looks cool 🙂 Here are some stills I captured, in case you don’t want to watch the whole thing:

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An IVF clinic mixup led to an unthinkable choice

From the New York Times: “Alexander wanted to share his wife’s happiness, but instead he was preoccupied by a concern that he was reluctant to voice: May did not look to him like a member of their family. She certainly did not resemble him, a man of Italian descent with fair hair and light brown eyes, or Daphna, a redhead with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. Alexander often turns to dark humor to mask a simmering anxiety, and in the days after the birth, he started to joke that their IVF clinic had made a mistake. Later he would explain that the jokes were a kind of superstition, a way of warding off something threatening: If you say the horrible thing out loud, it won’t happen.”

Scientists discovered a top-secret military base hidden under the Arctic ice

From The Debrief: “When it first appeared in their radar images, NASA scientist Chad Greene and his team of engineers weren’t sure what they were seeing. Flying above northern Greenland, Greene and his crew were monitoring radar information collected from the ice sheet below. What they saw was the remains of a remote U.S. military base once used as a top-secret testing site for the deployment of nuclear missiles from the Arctic. Camp Century was constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers within the Greenland Ice Sheet in 1959. Also known as the “city under the ice,” this forgotten Cold War relic consists of a network of tunnels hewn into the near-surface portions of the ice sheet.”

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

Continue reading “An IVF clinic mixup led to an unthinkable choice”