Month: January 2022

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, the game of the moment is Wordle — an incredibly simple game that Josh Wardle designed for his partner as a harmless amusement. It has since taken off, and I think it’s for much the same reason that everyone started making sourdough bread during the first COVID lockdown — namely, boredom and a desire to escape. If people aren’t doing Wordle, then they are probably knitting or making pottery, or they’re watching all the original Star Trek series episodes in order.

In that vein, I think one of the things that is fascinating to me about Wordle is how different it is from almost everything else around it — and not just games, but media in general. In fact, it’s the opposite of almost everything that falls into that broad category, in almost every way (with one important exception). As I said, it is incredible simple — you get six chances to guess a five-letter word. That’s it. And there’s only one game per day. And it doesn’t cost anything, and there are no ads, and it’s not an app, and you can’t buy new guesses, and it doesn’t spy on your attempts and then try to sell you things.

Continue reading “What we talk about when we talk about Wordle”

In his day job, Parker Higgins is the director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and the former head of copyright activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But on the side, he has a passion for public-domain content, so in 2019 he put together a project called 1923, which became a year-long ‘zine which he distributed — on paper! — to subscribers who funded his Kickstarter campaign. The archives of the ‘zine are available online now, and they are fascinating. Here’s what Parker says in the preamble/about section of the site:

The year 1923 has served as an invisible barrier for decades. For the first two decades of the 21st century‚Äîthe very time period that archives, databases, and collections were really starting to come online — the commons was cut off at that year; works published before 1923 were safely in the public domain, while works published in 1923 or later were risky and required individual research.

On January 1, 2019, the public domain resumed its march forward after a 20-year hiatus. Our cultural commons now includes a handful of very famous works: one of the most iconic images of the silent film era; the first book of poetry by e e cummings; a legendary novelty song that topped the charts for weeks. These well-known works got lots of well-deserved attention in January 2019 as they rose into the public domain, their copyright restrictions falling away after so many years.

Continue reading “A monthly ‘zine of public domain treasures”

I confess I have a thing about photos of abandoned institutions — prisons, hospitals, amusement parks, shopping malls, etc. — and photographer Matthew Christopher has exactly the kind of thing I like: detailed and haunting shots of all kinds of crumbling churches and schools across the US. He posts them on his website, Abandoned America, but also on Instagram and Twitter. One of my favorite newsletter writers, Luke “Welcome to Hell World” O’Neill recently interviewed Christopher. As Luke put it in his intro:

You probably have your own local variations on the theme. Abandoned factories that made god knows what with glass hanging like jagged teeth in the windows after years of tossed stones. Town buildings left in bureaucratic limbo ripe for sneaking into. An old library with empty shelves or a squat little brick shit house of an elementary school whose halls echoed no children’s voices but our own surreptitious whispers. The “old firehouse.” The “old” whatever. Something was always the “old” something. A place where important things happened and now do not. 

Continue reading “Pictures from abandoned America”

Thanks to the popularity of the musical Hamilton, by Lin-Manuel Miranda, plenty of people know the role that the eponymous legislator played in the creation of the United States, before he was killed during a duel. They may even know that he helped create the idea of a central bank, as the nation’s first Treasury Secretary. But what is probably less known is how his rival, Aaron Burr, had almost as long-lasting and important a legacy in banking — one that relied on assistance from Hamilton — but his began with a bit of misdirection. As this short history details, the result was what became Chase Bank:

In the late 1790s, following the new US Constitution’s adoption, New York City was enjoying a period of commercial growth and expanding population. These increases didn‚Äôt come without a price, however, and one of the most vexing problems the city faced was the lack of clean water. Aaron Burr observed the need for a healthy water supply and devised a plan to employ the local demand for water into a vehicle he could use to enrich himself.

He proposed the creation of a private company — the Manhattan Company — that would provide clean water for street cleaning and firefighting as well as the infrastructure for the project by laying pipes. Burr’s Manhattan Company ultimately won approval from the state Legislature. However, Burr’s plan was an artifice and a ruse. What he really wanted to do was start a bank; hence, just before his Manhattan Company was approved, Burr inserted a clause in the bill giving his company sweeping powers to use surplus capital to function as a bank.

After Burr’s Manhattan Company achieved incorporation, it quickly began to engage in the banking business and operated under that name until it merged with Chase Bank in the early 1950s. After a series of subsequent mergers, beginning in the early 1980s and culminating with the union of the JPMorgan and Chase banks, JPMorgan Chase became the largest bank in the United States

John Neuman skateboards down the Alps

I guess if you are famous for singing “It’s better to burn out than to fade away” (from “My my, hey, hey” off the Rust Never Sleeps album from 1978) you have to be pretty careful not to do either one — and Neil Young seems to be doing more than just about any other senior citizen (he’s 76) to avoid either of those fates, with the possible exception of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Willie Nelson (okay, Elton John and Bruce Springsteen are doing okay too).

Neil just told Spotify to remove all of his music, because they let Joe Rogan promote COVID misinformation on his podcast, which Spotify bought in 2020 for $100 million. And he also just released a documentary — filmed by his wife, Darryl Hannah — to go along with his newest album, called Barn. It’s called that because he reunited with the members of Crazy Horse, his legendary band, and they set up shop in an 18th-century barn on a ranch in Colorado.

It’s kind of amazing to watch Neil wail away at his guitar and harmonica, stomping up and down in classic Neil Young style, wearing ripped jeans and an old T-shirt, just like he did 40 years or so ago. And all the guys bang away at their instruments too, although they do so a little more gently than they used to, and they are a bit more hunched over. Maybe they forget the lyrics now and then. Still, kind of inspirational. Pitchfork’s review says: “Neil Young is standing on the porch, smoking weed, waiting for somebody else to show up. That’s the basic premise of “They Might Be Lost,” the strangest, loosest—and thus, the quintessential—song from Barn, his latest album.”

Continue reading “Neil Young, still not burning out or fading away”

Toronto Life magazine has a fantastic retrospective of Toronto in the 1960s and ’70s, courtesy of a photo collection from Joan Latchford — a former nun who left the convent in the UK where she spent seven years, and returned to Toronto and bought a Hasselblad camera:

“Instead of paying bills, of which I had a number, I decided I would get something that I really wanted, which was a good camera,” she once said. She soon switched to a Leica, set up a darkroom in her basement, and started a photography career, knocking on magazine editors’ doors to sell her images. Her clients included the CBC, Chatelaine and the National Film Board’s stills division, which commissioned her to capture images of Toronto’s Caribbean diaspora. After her death in 2017, she left behind around 40,000 negatives, which she’d meticulously filed under categories like, “Men,” “Women,” “Children,” “Celebrities” and “Humour.” She also kept detailed notes: one of her phone books had B.B. King’s number in it.

A fascinating story here from Rosemary Counter, who found out that an uncle was a famous witch hunter in the 1800s.

In the summer of 1829, in a sleepy Ontario sheep-farming settlement called Baldoon, the McDonald family found themselves tormented by their two-storey home. Without warning, beams would drop from the ceiling, and at night, the kitchen filled with the noise of marching feet. Over the years, the disturbances grew more terrifying. Fires spontaneously ignited. Rocks and bullets rained down on the house. Once, a twenty-five-centimetre hunting knife tore through the air.

By 1831, a desperate McDonald family realized they needed professional help, so the patriarch, John, travelled 200 kilometres—three days on horseback, riding dawn to dusk—to consult with a highly recommended healer. According to an 1871 account by John’s son, the diagnosis required gazing into a moonstone, which revealed “a long low log house” where lived a witch and the source of the McDonalds’ suffering. The witch took the form of a black-headed stray goose, and it was decided that, if they shot the goose’s wing with a sterling silver bullet, they’d at once stop her—which they did. The ghost never struck again.

Two centuries later, the Baldoon mystery reigns as one of Canada’s greatest ghost stories—you can find tellings and retellings in just about every collection of Canadian folklore. Less well known, perhaps, is the person who ultimately solved it: John Troyer, a man legendary at the time for his unconventional talents in herbal remedies, fortune telling, white magic, bloodletting, water dowsing, exorcisms, and of course, witch hunting. He was also my distant uncle.

My room at the camp reminded me of my old college dorm room. It came with two single beds with thin mattresses, a hard sponge pillow and a duvet, two small tables with a small television, an electric kettle, a hair dryer, two folding plastic chairs, a fabric closet, a bedside table, an air conditioner and a water heater.I was allowed to open my window to retrieve food and other necessities that were delivered, or just to get some fresh air. Three meals were provided daily in plastic bags (in the morning, afternoon and evening) and were left on a tray outside my window for me to collect.

Through that same window, staff members swabbed my nose and throat as part of the daily Covid-19 testing requirements.The camp has a total capacity of 3,416 units, according to data from Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection (CHP). There were a total of 16 rooms in each building, eight rooms on each floor.As of 9 a.m. local time on January 4, when I was on my third day there, almost 1,300 people were occupying 995 units at the camp, according to the CHP.

Source: The cost of visiting family in the US from Hong Kong: How I ended up at a government quarantine camp

I just finished writing for the Columbia Journalism Review about a report on misinformation that was published recently by the UK’s Royal Society, and in the process of researching the piece, I learned a bit about the society, which is more than just your usual collection of academics and researchers. It turns out that it is one of the oldest scientific organizations in the world — it was founded in 1660 as the “Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge,” when it was given a royal charter by King Charles II.

Prior to that, it was known as the “College for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning,” and before that it was often known as “the Invisible College.” One of the founders was Sir Christopher Wren, who designed St. Paul’s Cathedral but was also an astronomer, physicist and all-around scientist. Robert Hooke, another early founder who was the first to visualize a micro-organism using a microscope, was given the title of “Curator of Experiments,” and performing experiments was one of the main early functions of the Royal Society. Sir Isaac Newton became the president of the society in 1703 and served in that role for almost a quarter of a century. In the 18th century, some of the society’s work became political:

It became customary for His Majesty’s Government to refer highly important scientific questions to the council of the society for advice, something that, despite the non-partisan nature of the society, spilled into politics in 1777 over lightning conductors. The pointed lightning conductor had been invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1749, while Benjamin Wilson invented blunted ones. During the argument that occurred when deciding which to use, opponents of Franklin’s invention accused supporters of being American allies, and the debate eventually led to the resignation of the society’s president, Sir John Pringle. 

Continue reading “The Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge”

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

After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, misinformation—and its more toxic cousin, disinformation—stopped being just an academic concept, and started feeling like a social and political emergency. Concerns about Russian trolls meddling in American elections were soon compounded by hoaxes and conspiracy theories involving COVID-19. Even those who could agree on the definition of misinformation, however, debated what to do about it: should Facebook and Twitter be forced to remove “fake news” and disinformation, especially about something as critical as a pandemic? Should they be forced to “deplatform” repeated disinfo spreaders such as Trump and his ilk, so as not to infect others with their dangerous delusions?

After coming under pressure to do so, both from the general public and from president Biden and members of Congress, Facebook and Twitter—and to a lesser extent, YouTube—started actively removing this kind of content. They began by banning the accounts of people such as Trump and Alex Jones, who runs a disinformation operation known as InfoWars, and later started blocking or “down-ranking” COVID-related misinformation that appeared to be deliberately harmful. But was this the right way of handling the problem? Some argue that it is, and that “deplatforming” people like Trump—or even blocking entire platforms, such as the right-wing Twitter clone Parler—works, in the sense that it removes the problem. But not everyone agrees.

The Royal Society, a scientific organization founded in the UK in 1660, recently released a report on the online information environment, which states that “censoring or removing inaccurate, misleading and false content, whether it’s shared unwittingly or deliberately, is not a silver bullet and may undermine the scientific process and public trust.” Frank Kelly, a professor at the University of Cambridge and the chairman of the report, wrote that the nature of science includes uncertainty, especially when it is trying to deal with an unprecedented medical crisis like the pandemic. “In the early days of the pandemic, science was too often painted as absolute and somehow not to be trusted when it corrects itself,” he wrote, “but that prodding and testing of received wisdom is integral to the advancement of science, and society.”

Continue reading “Is getting rid of misinformation the right approach?”

A historian researching medieval social habits gradually came to the conclusion that sleeping twice during the night — a first sleep, from about 10 pm until midnight or 1 am, followed by a few hours of wakefulness, and then a second sleep until the early morning — was commonplace not just in England or Europe, but also in other countries around the world.

First sleeps are mentioned in one of the most famous works of medieval literature, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (written between 1387 and 1400), which is presented as a storytelling contest between a group of pilgrims. Ekirch found casual references to the system of twice-sleeping in every conceivable form, with hundreds in letters, diaries, medical textbooks, philosophical writings, newspaper articles and plays.

The practice even made it into ballads, such as “Old Robin of Portingale. “…And at the wakening of your first sleepe, You shall have a hot drink made, And at the wakening of your next sleepe, Your sorrows will have a slake…” Biphasic sleep was not unique to England, either – it was widely practised throughout the preindustrial world. In France, the initial sleep was the “premier somme“; in Italy, it was “primo sonno“. In fact, Eckirch found evidence of the habit in locations as distant as Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Australia, South America and the Middle East.

Continue reading “The forgotten medieval habit of “two sleeps””

If you’ve always wanted to own a Civil War fort, then this is your lucky day: Fort Montgomery is for sale for the discounted price of just $1.4 million, which includes about 350 acres of land (although about 85 of those are underwater at the moment) and a huge pile of crumbling limestone, complete with slit windows for firing cannons out of. The limestone came from the same quarry as the stone that built Radio City Music Hall, according to the realtor’s website (which looks like it was designed in 1994 using Windows Notepad). “Rebuild your dream on the rich ruins of history,” it says, along with a Powerpoint presentation of the fort’s charms, which include tunnels covered in graffiti.

There’s no rush in case you actually do want to buy this crumbling pile: the fort, and the man-made island it sits on, have actually been for sale since about 2006. Prior to that date, a businessman named Victor Podd owned the fort, and used it as the headquarters for his company, Powertex. After he died, his heirs tried to sell it, and in 2006 someone offered $5 million for it, but the sale never went through.

Construction of the fort and the island — which overlook Lake Champlain, close to the Canadian border — started in 1844 and continued for more than two decades. The fort was actually the second attempt to build a military outpost on the site; the first was almost completed when the builders realized that it was actually on the Canadian side of the border, so it was torn down, and is now known to history only as “Fort Blunder.” When the international border was redrawn, it turned out the site was on the US side, so a new fort was built.

Continue reading “Civil War fortress for sale — would make a perfect super-villain hideout”

In case you like to play the piano, but also want to grill some shishkebabs at the same time, and want to drive around as well, this creative inventor has just the solution — a piano with 52 individual motors connecting the keys to spits, with an internal firepit and three motorized wheels. Spectacularly useless? Definitely. And why did this man create such a thing? Because he could.

Turns out our artist/inventor is Geng Shuai, also known as “Handy Geng,” a Chinese YouTuber whose fans call him “Useless Einstein” (if that’s what your fans call you, imagine what others call you!). He got the idea for the piano-grill-car — Grillano? — from a reader comment. In case you are in the market, he also makes phone cases that look like meat cleavers, of which he has sold 10. And he made a driveable mech with tractor treads and hydraulic arms:

On a related note, there is a Japanese term, “chindogu,” which loosely translated means “useless tool,” and covers an entire category of inventions that solve prosaic problems in an overly engineered way. Examples include the “noodle cooler”:

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

Facebook’s name change in November, when the company announced that it was rebranding itself as Meta, sparked a lot of credulous media coverage of “the metaverse,” a somewhat nebulous concept that incorporates virtual reality, 3D gaming, and a number of other trends. Microsoft’s announcement on Tuesday that it plans to acquire Activision Blizzard, a leading game developer, for almost $70 billion is likely to accelerate interest in the concept even further, since it was specifically mentioned as one of the justifications for the deal (which still needs to be approved by the Federal Trade Commission). Microsoft said that the acquisition will “provide building blocks for the metaverse,” a claim that was repeated in more than one news story about the deal (although in some cases the statement was not taken at face value).

Activision Blizzard is one of the largest gaming companies in the world, with titles such as Call of Duty, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft, as well as smaller one-person games like Candy Crush. What does any of that have to do with the metaverse? Not a lot, admits the New York Times. Microsoft didn’t go into any detail on how the deal advances the metaverse, although Satya Nadella, the CEO, did say “when we think about our vision for what a metaverse can be, we believe there won’t be a single, centralized metaverse.” Peter Kafka, a media writer for Vox, described this as a statement aimed directly at Lina Khan, head of the Federal Trade Commission—an attempt to encourage her to approve the purchase, because it might mean competition for Facebook/Meta.

The connection between games like World of Warcraft and the metaverse isn’t totally a creation of Microsoft’s marketing department. Experts—including Matthew Ball, who has written a number of essays on the concept, and helps run an investment fund that finances metaverse-related technology— point out that multiplayer “worlds” such as Roblox and Fortnite are the closest thing to the multiverse right now. Although they began as just a pastime, they have consumed the attention of users to the point where non-game events take place in them, including concerts by musicians like L’il Nas X that draw millions. Last year, technology writer Clive Thompson argued that “the metaverse is already here, and it is Minecraft” (which Microsoft bought in 2014).

Continue reading “What’s the metaverse? Whatever companies want it to be”