Month: December 2021

Since it’s Christmas-time, this is your annual reminder that in Catalonia, a traditional part of the nativity scene for the past couple of hundred years or so is the “caganer,” a small figurine of someone taking a crap. It’s become such a prominent tradition that dignitaries such as former US president Barack Obama have been given figurines of themselves as “caganer.”

Why? Interestingly enough, no one is really sure. The following is from Vox:

“Though excrement is gross, for peasants and farmers it’s actually important since it serves as fertilizer. Some think the caganer was originally a portent of good harvest and fortune to come, a type of fertility symbol. “There was the legend that if a countryside man did not put a caganer in the nativity scene, he would have a very bad year collecting vegetables,” Joan Liiteras, a caganer connoisseur, told the BBC. In the words of an old Spanish proverb, “Dung is no saint, but where it falls it works miracles.”

There might also be theological reasons for the nativity addition. According to Maureen Tilley, professor of Christianity at Fordham University, the caganer is significant because it’s a reminder of the early Christian belief in the Incarnation: that in order to redeem humanity, God had to be fully embodied (incarnated) in human flesh. And what’s a more unifying human trait than “Everybody Poops”?

“One object recovered from the site, a lump the size of a large dictionary, initially escaped notice amid more exciting finds. Months later, however, at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the lump broke apart, revealing bronze precision gearwheels the size of coins. According to historical knowledge at the time, gears like these should not have appeared in ancient Greece, or anywhere else in the world, until many centuries after the shipwreck. The find generated huge controversy.

The lump is known as the Antikythera mechanism, an extraordinary object that has befuddled historians and scientists for more than 120 years. Over the decades the original mass split into 82 fragments, leaving a fiendishly difficult jigsaw puzzle for researchers to put back together. The device appears to be a geared astronomical calculation machine of immense complexity. Today we have a reasonable grasp of some of its workings, but there are still unsolved mysteries.”

Source: An Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculation Machine Reveals New Secrets – Scientific American

December 2021: The Omicron variant, first identified in South Africa, is in the process of sweeping the globe — on December 15, the UK reported the highest number of COVID cases since the pandemic began: more than 78,000 in the past 24 hours. Because the Omicron variant is much more infectious than the Delta variant, the number of cases in most countries is expected to expand rapidly. “If you have 100,000 cases today, it’s 200,000 cases [in] two days, 400,000 two days later, and then it’s 800,000 two days later,” a WHO official said. “So in a week, the actual number of cases can increase eight or tenfold.”

Medical authorities say even if the Omicron variant proves to be milder than Delta — which some early studies and anecdotal evidence from South Africa seem to suggest it might be — because of the higher reproductive or “R nought” rate, this could still overwhelm intensive-care units and hospitals, many of which are already stretched due to the previous waves of the virus, and patients who should have gone to the hospital but didn’t, and are therefore in worse shape. Some early studies appear to show that Omicron is much more prevalent in the nose and throat, and much less prevalent in the lungs, which could explain both the less serious symptoms and the higher rate of infection.

Continue reading “New updates: Life in a time of COVID-19”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

On Tuesday, Vox Media and Group Nine announced that they have agreed to merge their operations, in what Jim Bankhoff—Vox’s co-founder and CEO—told Axios will create “the fastest-growing company of scale in media.” Vox controls a suite of websites, including the eponymous Vox, as well as The Verge, Eater, and SB Nation, while Group Nine owns a number of niche interest sites such as NowThis, The Dodo, PopSugar, and Thrillist. The merger comes on the heels of a number of media-related deals, including BuzzFeed’s merger with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC), which gave the company a public listing and a theoretical value of $1.5 billion, and Axel Springer’s acquisition of Politico, in a deal valued at $1 billion. Donald Trump has also hitched a ride on the SPAC train by merging his media venture with an entity in a deal valued at $2 billion.

The idea of achieving something called “scale” is often referred to when deals like the Vox-Group Nine merger are announced, but the definition of that term is surprisingly hard to pin down. For example, Group Nine acquired PopSugar less than two years ago for $300 million, and yet, according to some sources who spoke with the New York Post, the Vox merger deal values all of Group Nine at less than $300 million—a little over half what the entire company was valued at in 2016, when it got a $100 million investment from Discovery. The current deal reportedly values Vox at $672 million, substantially less than the $1 billion it was theoretically valued at in 2015, during its last funding round, despite the growth the company has reported in the years since that investment.

In a similar vein, BuzzFeed’s SPAC deal originally valued the company at about one and a half billion—less than what it was theoretically worth in 2016, when it got a two hundred million dollar investment from NBCUniversal. Since BuzzFeed merged with the SPAC—and subsequently acquired Complex Networks, a global content network targeting millennials, which itself had a theoretical market value of three hundred million dollars—the new entity’s market capitalization has plummeted by close to forty percent, to the point where it is worth less than eight hundred million dollaes, or less than half what it was supposedly worth when it got the NBCUniversal funding. BuzzFeed had seventy-two million unique visitors in May of this year, according to Comscore; even after the merger with Complex Networks, it will only be slightly larger than Vox (by that measure, at least).

Continue reading “Chasing the ever-changing goal of media scale”

This office photo might look like something out of a bizarre retro science-fiction movie like Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.” but this is a real office — located at the Central Social Institution in Prague, in a picture taken in the late 1930s. The desks that slide up and down the wall are essentially tiny, open individual elevators with a desk and chair built into them, and were designed to make it easy for staff to access the files held in the massive card catalogue that the CSI maintained at the time — 3,000 drawers, 10 feet high, reaching from floor to ceiling and covering approximately 4,000 square feet, which at the time (and probably even now) was the largest filing cabinet in the world.

This profile of a New York mayoral candidate who goes by the name Paperboy Love Prince is fascinating — not just because of the personal quirks like the name, or the fact that they (Prince uses “they/them” pronouns, and also goes by “god/goddess”) wear four wristwatches and a variety of outlandish costumes, but because when you get past all of that, Prince seems like a remarkably level-headed person with some pretty good ideas:

This past Wednesday morning, Paperboy Love Prince, a twenty-eight-year-old activist, performer, content producer, and prankster whom a small but pollable number of people would like to see take office as the next mayor of New York City, sat at a computer behind the front desk of the PaperboyPrince.com Love Gallery, a pink storefront on Myrtle Avenue, in Brooklyn, which operates as a vintage store, community space, and campaign headquarters. Every week, Prince’s campaign gives away food donated by churches and other community groups to anyone who shows up.

Prince, who uses the personal pronouns “they” and “them,” as well as “god” and “goddess,” wore a gold turban, four wristwatches, a red-and-yellow short-sleeved shirt open at the front, blue-and-black flowing pants, and sparkly gold high-tops with Teddy-bear tongues. At one point in the day, Prince described themself to me as “the Steve Jobs of mutual aid.” Prince is an artist, rapper and entrepreneur whose Utopia Plan includes a universal basic income of $2,000 and health care and housing for all. Prince’s Utopia Plan proposes to turn the police into a “Love Team” and NYCHA developments into mansions. Prince studied journalism at the University of Maryland before moving to New York City to work as a performer, party planner, web developer and brand consultant.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Three years ago, a United Nations’ fact-finding mission looking into what it called a genocide committed against the Rohingya community in Myanmar—which saw hundreds of thousands of people displaced, and more than ten thousand tortured, and killed—released a report looking into the causes of the violence. One of the contributing factors, the UN mission found, was hate speech and propaganda spread via Facebook pages and accounts, including some that were maintained by Myanmar’s military police, known as the Tatmadaw. Although Facebook eventually took action to ban some of the most egregious examples, UN observers said these accounts and pages were able to foment violence and hatred against the Rohingya for months, if not years.

Facebook admitted that its own report on the violence in Myanmar—prepared by an independent non-profit called Business for Social Responsibility, and released at the same time as the UN report—found “we weren’t doing enough to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence.” The company apologized for not doing more to prevent violence being fueled by its platform, and promised to expand its policies and add moderation in Myanmar. Some believe it needs to do a lot more, however: this week, in a multi-country effort, lawyers representing thousands of members of the Rohingya refugee community filed legal claims against Facebook demanding $150 billion in compensation for the harms their people suffered.

In the UK, the BBC reported that a British law firm representing some of the refugees has written a letter to Facebook, saying it plans to file a suit in Britain’s High Court because Facebook’s algorithms “amplified hate speech against the Rohingya people,”and that the company failed to hire moderators familiar with the political and cultural situation in Myanmar. The letter also claims that Facebook failed to “take appropriate and timely action” to remove posts or ban accounts that incited violence against the Rohingya. In the US, a law firm representing some Rohingya refugees filed a class action complaint in California, alleging that Facebook was “willing to trade the lives of the Rohingya people for better market penetration” in Myanmar.

Continue reading “Myanmar refugees sue Facebook for $150 billion”

Most people think the Berlin Wall came down because President Ronald Reagan told Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!” But a historian explains that it was actually the product of a mistake, by a bureaucrat who hadn’t paid attention at a meeting about loosening entry and exit restrictions between the two halves of Germany, and who mis-spoke. He was supposed to say that residents of East Germany could apply for travel visas, but instead, he told them they were free to cross the border immediately. And the rest is history:

“When the wall started to fall on November 9th, it was a mistake. In the face of mass protests against the regime in 1989 and thousands of East Germans seeking refuge at West German embassies in Eastern Europe, East German leaders waived the old visa rules stating that citizens needed a pressing reason for travel, such as a funeral or wedding of a family member. The Communist Party official who announced these changes, Guenter Schabowski, missed most of the key meeting about the travel procedures and went unprepared to a news conference. In response to reporters’ questions about when the new law would take effect, he said, “Immediately, without delay.”

Schabowski left the impression that people could immediately cross the border, though he meant to say they could apply for visas in an orderly manner. Over the next several hours, thousands of East Berliners gathered at the checkpoints along the wall. Since the country’s leaders hadn’t intended to completely open the border, the supervisors at the crossing points had received no new orders. The chief officer on duty at the Bornholmer Street checkpoint, Harald Jaeger, kept calling his superiors for guidance on how to handle the growing mass of increasingly angry East Berliners expecting to be let through. Jaeger finally gave up around 11:30 p.m. and allowed people to pass through en masse. The East German regime never fully regained control.”

via “Five Myths About the Berlin Wall“

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Over the past several years, Congress has held a seemingly never-ending series of hearings into “Big Tech,” the handful of companies that control much of our online behavior: Facebook, Twitter, and Google. They’ve looked into whether the platforms allowed foreign agents to influence the 2016 election, whether their algorithms suppress certain kinds of speech, and whether they harm young women, and in many cases these hearings have been a forum for grandstanding. This week saw another in the series, a hearing by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, called “Holding Big Tech Accountable: Targeted Reforms to Tech’s Legal Immunity.” The subject of the hearing was a piece of legislation that has been an ace in the hole for the platforms in all of their other congressional appearances: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

This clause protects electronic service providers from liability for the content posted by their users — even if that content is harmful, hateful, or misleading — and for the past few years, pressure has been building within Washington to somehow find a way around it. That pressure came to a head when former president Donald Trump signed an executive order in 2020 asking the Federal Trade Commission to do something about Section 230 (even though the agency has no legal right to do so). Before he became president, Joe Biden said that he believed Section 230 “needs to be revoked, immediately,” and since he took office a number of legislative proposals have been put forward in an attempt to do that, including a recent one from Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, which would carve out an exception for medical misinformation during a health crisis, making the platforms liable for distributing anything the government defines as untrue.

Republican members of Congress have introduced their own similar proposals for a host of other Section 230 carve-outs, aimed at forcing platforms to keep certain kinds of content (conservative speech), while forcing them to remove others (cyber-bullying, etc.). This week’s hearing was held to consider a number of other pieces of similar legislation aimed at weakening or even dismantling Section 230. They include one supported by four of the top Democratic members of the Energy and Commerce Committee, called “The Protecting Americans From Dangerous Algorithms Act,” which would expose the platforms to lawsuits for making personalized recommendations to users that cause them harm. At least some of the hearing was taken up — as many previous ones have been — with statements from Republican members about how platforms like Facebook and Twitter allegedly censor conservative content (which studies have shown is not true).

Continue reading “Making platforms liable for algorithms is easier said than done”

For decades, Parker Brothers, the game company, liked to claim that the game Monopoly was invented by “a plucky entrepreneur named Charles Darrow in the middle of the Depression,” author Steven Berlin Johnson explains. But in fact, Monopoly began more than thirty years earlier, with a game patented in 1903 by a brilliant and multitalented political radical named Lizzie Magie. It was called The Landlord’s Game.

Born in Illinois in 1866, Magie had an eclectic and ambitious career. She worked at various points as a stenographer, poet, and journalist. She invented a device that made typewriters more efficient, and worked part-time as an actress on the stage. For a long time, her greatest claim to fame came through an act of political performance art, placing a mock advertisement in a local paper that put herself on the market as a “young woman American slave” — protesting the oppressive wage gap between male and female salaries.

Magie was also a devotee of the then-influential economist Henry George, who had argued in his bestselling 1879 book Progress and Poverty for an annual “land-value tax” on all land held as private property — high enough to obviate the need for other taxes on income or production. Many progressive thinkers and activists of the period integrated “Georgist” proposals for single-tax plans into their political platforms and stump speeches. But only Lizzie Magie appears to have decided that radical tax reform might make compelling subject matter for a board game.

As Johnson explains, Darrow would eventually be immortalized as the sole inventor of Monopoly, but was actually one of the great charlatans in gaming history. “Without altering the rules in any meaningful way, Darrow redesigned the board with the help of an illustrator named Franklin Alexander, and struck deals to sell it through the Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia and through FAO Schwarz. Before long, Darrow had sold the game to Parker Brothers in a deal that would make him a multimillionaire.”

In unrelated Monopoly news, a World War II intelligence officer named Christopher Clayton Hutton used Monopoly to smuggle escape plans and tools to prisoners in German POW camps.

Games like Monopoly were often allowed in the prison camps, as Germans believed it was a diversion for soldiers who might otherwise use their free time to plot escapes. Unbeknownst to them, some prisoners were actually receiving contraband within the game sets like silk maps—which could help them navigate to safety once outside of the prisons, and were quieter than paper maps. Along with the maps, the Monopoly boards could contain a small compass, a saw, and a file. Real money could even be concealed with the play money of the game.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

On Tuesday, Twitter said it is expanding its privacy policy to include what the company calls “private media.” The existing policy prevents users of the service from sharing other people’s private information — phone numbers, addresses, and other personal information that might make someone identifiable against their will. Users who share this kind of data have found their accounts blocked or restricted in a variety of ways. The new addition to the policy forbids “the misuse of media and information that is not available elswhere online as a tool to harass, intimidate, and reveal the identities of individuals.” Twitter said it is concerned because personal imagery can violate privacy and lead to emotional or physical harm, and this can “have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents and members of minority communities.”

Twitter’s blog post goes on to say that the ban applies to any imagery — photo or video — regardless of whether it includes actual abusive content. The important criteria, the company says, is that the content was posted “without the consent of the person depicted.” The only exception is if the person in question is “a public figure,” or if the relevant imagery is shared “in the public interest, or adds value to public discourse.” How the company will determine if the content is in the public interest is unknown, and how it defines the term “public figure” is also unclear. The new policy seems likely to re-ignite the kinds of debates that Twitter’s “newsworthiness” standard sparked when it was used to justify keeping abusive tweets posted by former president Donald Trump.

Even if the person is a public figure, Twitter says it may still remove images or videos if it believes that the purpose of the sharing the content was to “harass, intimidate, or use fear to silence them.” How Twitter intends to determine whether the images were posted in order to harass, intimidate, or silence an individual is unclear. The company says it will “try to assess the context in which the content is shared,” including whether the image is publicly available and/or is being covered by mainstream/traditional media, and whether it adds value to the public discourse or is “relevant to the community.” The policy adds that media shared about private individuals is acceptable provided it “contains eyewitness accounts or on the ground reports from developing events.”

Continue reading “Twitter’s new privacy policy could clash with journalism”