Month: August 2023

From Elena Kostyuchenko in n+1 magazine: “I spent March 30, the eve of our trip, in a hotel. I was trying to gather my strength. A colleague from Novaya called me. She asked me if I was going to Mariupol. I was puzzled: only two people from the paper knew I was going to Mariupol. She said, “My sources have gotten in touch with me. They know that you’re going to Mariupol. They say that the Kadyrovites have orders to find you.” The Kadyrovites, a Chechen subdivision of Rosgvardia, were actively engaged in the fighting around Mariupol. My colleague said, “They’re not planning to hold you. They are going to kill you. That’s been approved.” Forty minutes later, my source from Ukrainian military reconnaissance called me. He said, “We have information that an assassination of a female journalist from Novaya Gazeta is being organized in Ukraine.”

Could artificial intelligence help us communicate with animals?

From Kathryn Hulick for Science News: “Gašper Beguš is a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. He got the chance, last summer, to observe sperm whales in their wild Caribbean habitat off the coast of the island nation of Dominica. With him were marine biologists and roboticists. There were also cryptographers and experts in other fields. All have been working together to listen to sperm whales and figure out what they might be saying. They call this Project CETI, which is short for Cetacean Translation Initiative. Project CETI has three listening stations. Each one is a cable hanging deep into the water from a buoy at the surface. Along the cable, several dozen underwater microphones record whale sounds. From the air, drones record video and sounds. Soft, fishlike robots do the same underwater. Suction-cup tags on the whales capture even more data.”

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 Russian journalist describes what it’s like to be poisoned”

From Lars Chittka for Scientific American: “Researchers have shown that bees and some other insects are capable of intelligent behavior that no one thought possible when I was a student. Bees, for example, can count, grasp concepts of sameness and difference, learn complex tasks by observing others, and know their own individual body dimensions, a capacity associated with consciousness in humans. They also appear to experience both pleasure and pain. In other words, it now looks like at least some species of insects—and maybe all of them—are sentient. These discoveries raise fascinating questions about the origins of complex cognition. They also have far-reaching ethical implications for how we should treat insects in the laboratory and in the wild.”

The song everyone associates with Top Gun was written for a different movie

From Colin Nagy for Why Is This Interesting: “I re-watched Top Gun on a flight recently with some pretty good headphones. For the first time, I paid close attention to the anthemic theme song that kicks off the credits. It has been embedded into every American brain from the time of first exposure, and reinforced recently with the second film, Maverick, where it was also used. Turns out the track wasn’t originally composed for Top Gun — it was originally composed for a dream sequence in the Chevy Chase movie Fletch. The story goes that while composer Harold Faltermeyer was working on the theme, it was overheard by Billy Idol, who was recording in the studio next door. “That’s great – you should use it for Top Gun,” Idol exclaimed.”

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 “Do insects feel joy and pain? Some scientists believe that they do”

From Maximilian Hess for The Fence: “Jesse Dean Bogdonoff has been many things – proponent of orthopaedic magnetism, star financier, solar installation salesman, spiritual explorer, alleged fraudster, Buddhist devotee and saxophonist. But the peak of his fame came in 1999, when he was appointed to the Tongan royal court – as its jester. Tonga is a distant and unfamiliar place. In December 2021, it was the site of the largest volcanic eruption in the world since at least 1883. When Tonga has made the headlines, it has typically been for the eccentricities of its kings. In 1976, the Guinness Book of World Records named Taufaʻahau Tupou IV the world’s heaviest monarch at a redoubtable 209 kg. His son, Prince Siaosi, made headlines for his aspirations as a film-maker, musicologist, and communications developer.”

Think you’re a good person? That’s up to the Cart Narc and his camera

From Nate Rogers for The Ringer: “Sebastian Davis, a boyish 42-year-old better known as “Agent Sebastian” in his Cart Narcs videos, was dressed like he was going to war. He was wrapped in an actual bulletproof vest (a gift sent by one of his many fans—this one a cop in Louisiana), with a red patch reading “CART NARCS” across his chest, just above a strapped-in GoPro. He carried an orange baton, like one an airport worker would use guiding a plane out of its gate. And he was in Nike Free Runs, ready to bolt at a moment’s notice, light up his voice-siren alert (a deliberately obnoxious variation on the buoy-weep that police will use to pull someone over), and deploy his catchphrase: “That’s not where the cart goes!”

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 “The man who became the court jester for the King of Tonga”

Amanda Knox writes: “In 2007, I was studying abroad in Perugia, Italy. I had been there for five weeks, my eyes wide with the excitement of navigating a foreign culture, my heart aflutter over a nerdy boy I’d met at a classical music recital. It all seemed like a glorious dream, until it became a nightmare. On November 1, a local burglar named Rudy Guede broke into the apartment I shared with three other young women, two Italian law interns and a British exchange student named Meredith Kercher. Meredith was the only one home that night. Rudy Guede raped her, stabbed her to death, and then fled the country to Germany. A week later, I was in jail, charged with Meredith’s murder. Two years later, I was convicted and sentenced to 26 years in prison. I went on to win my appeal and in 2011 I was acquitted, after four years of being incarcerated.”

The British poet Lord Byron once tried to buy a twelve-year-old girl

From Emily Zarevich for JSTOR Daily: “The real lives of the writers of the Romantic era aren’t always as charming as they might seem. Mary Shelley and her husband, Percy, violated her mother’s gravesite, John Keats provoked petty fights at dinner parties, and everyone accepted a depressed, suicidal teenager as their idol. Add to this a bizarre and uncomfortable episode in the life of the poet Lord Byron that often gets glossed over in admiring biographies: the time he tried to buy a twelve-year-old girl. It happened in Greece, far away from his native England. While doing the Grand Tour, Byron attempted to collect more than just material for his epic poem Childe Harold. He was a lodger in the home of Athens landlady Tasia Makri. While living under her roof, he became infatuated with her twelve-year-old daughter, Teresa.”

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 “What Amanda Knox says she learned while she was in prison”

From Akanksha Singh for JSTOR Daily: “Before ice dispensed at the press of a button or the twist of an ice cube tray, ice was a luxury. An iced drink was indicative of wealth, and the ice industry was a multi-million-dollar employer. Norway—a hub for natural ice—exported one million tons of it per year. The US market overshadowed that effort manifold. At its peak in the nineteenth century, an estimated 90,000 people and 25,000 horses were involved in the natural ice trade in the States. In fact, such was the demand for American ice in London at one point, Lake Oppegård in Norway was rechristened “Wenham Lake” (after a lake in a Massachusetts town) to compete with American ice imports in England. By 1856, American ice was shipped to South America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and Australia, the Persian Gulf, and its biggest market–India.”

Why you should stop putting plastic in the microwave

From Celia Ford for Wired: “In a study published in June in Environmental Science & Technology, Kazi Hussain and his colleagues reported that, when microwaved, plastic containers released millions of bits of plastic, called microplastics, and even tinier nanoplastics. Plastics are complex cocktails of long chains of carbon, called polymers, mixed in with chemical additives, small molecules that help mold the polymers into their final shape and imbue them with resistance to oxidation, UV exposure, and other wear and tear. Microwaving delivers a double whammy: heat and hydrolysis, a chemical reaction through which bonds are broken by water molecules. All of these can cause a container to crack and shed tiny bits of itself as microplastics, nanoplastics, and leachates, toxic chemical components of the plastic. The human health effects of plastic exposure are unclear, but scientists have suspected for years that they aren’t good.”

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 “Ice harvesting used to be a multimillion-dollar industry”

In May, agents from the FBI arrived at Tim Burke’s home and seized several computers, hard drives, his cellphone, and other equipment that he uses as a freelance journalist. The reason for the seizure is unknown, because the affidavit that the Department of Justice used to get a search warrant remains sealed, but Mark Rasch — Burke’s lawyer, and a former staffer in DoJ’s fraud unit — believes it has something to do with video clips from a Fox News broadcast that Burke acquired through completely legal means. Burke is a former video director at The Daily Beast, and his specialty is finding and analyzing video streams to find newsworthy content. Rasch has filed a motion to compel the government to return Burke’s computers and all the material seized, and to unseal the affidavit, so that Burke and his defense lawyer can see what the government’s case is based on. Rasch spoke with me on Tuesday about the implications of the case for journalists (our conversation has been edited for clarity and length).

CJR: Hi Mark — I’ve read most of the press coverage of this case in the Tampa Bay Times and the Washington Post and at Techdirt, and I’ve read the various filings you’ve made with the court as well, but I’m still a little unclear on why this happened to Tim, and what the legal rationale and repercussions are. Can you explain that a bit?

Mark Rasch: So there’s a journalism part of this, and then there’s a technology part of this. Part of it is the question of who is a journalist, and what protections does a journalist have? It’s entirely possible that the government did not think of Timothy Burke as a journalist because he operates primarily in the digital environment. And therefore, all of the protections that are afforded to journalists may not have been afforded to Tim. There’s an entire approval process that is required before you can get a search warrant for a journalist, but there isn’t if it’s not a journalist.

CJR: What kind of approval process? I thought the First Amendment protected everyone, regardless of whether they are officially a journalist or not.

MR: The First Amendment does protect everyone, but there are special protections for journalists who gather information for the purpose of disseminating that information to the public. This all arose out of a Supreme Court case called Zercher versus Stanford Daily Press. In that case, the student newspaper at Stanford was covering a protest and they took photographs, and a number of police officers were injured, so they were interested in getting photos so they could prosecute the people who injured the police officers. And they got a search warrant to search the offices of the Stanford Daily Press for photographs. In response to that, Congress passed something called the Privacy Protection Act, which makes it illegal to do those kind of searches on a journalist, unless the government believes that the journalist committed an illegal act of some kind.

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

Continue reading “Q&A: If a journalist downloads a video stream, have they committed a crime?”

From Becky Little for History.com: “After World War II, a critical MI5 spy named Juan Pujol Garcia faked his own death, and kept it secret for almost four decades. And that’s not even the most interesting thing about him. Pujol was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and when Britain went to war with Germany in 1939, he was determined to join the British war effort as a spy against Germany; so determined that he wasn’t deterred when British officers turned him down because he didn’t have any connections or credentials. Posing as a Spanish official who was flying to London, Pujol made contact with Nazi officials in Madrid and told them that he was interested in spying on Britain for the Third Reich. After that, he began sending the Nazis fabricated information that they thought was from London, but which was actually fed from Lisbon and Madrid. Essentially, Pujol became a rogue double-agent whom Britain didn’t even know it had.”

On the trail of the guerrilla programmer who is archiving the Internet

From Jani Patokallio at Gyrovague: “Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can’t afford to pay what can be hundreds of dollars a year in subscriptions? If so, you may have already stumbled on archive.today, which provides easy access to these and much more: just paste in the article link, and you’ll get back a snapshot of the page, full content included. For a long time, I assumed that this was some kind of third-party skin on top of the venerable Internet Archive, whose Wayback Machine provides a very similar service, at the very similar address archive.org. But the Internet Archive is a legitimate non-profit with a budget of $37 million and 169 full-time employees in 2019. Archive.today, by contrast, is an opaque mystery. So who runs this and where did they come from?”

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 “This World War Two spy faked his own death for 36 years”

Do journalists need to change the way we write about Elon Musk? Casey Newton, who writes the Platformer newsletter, is among those who think that we do. Musk’s behavior as the owner and (until recently) CEO of X, the company formerly known as Twitter, may have started out  mesmerizing, like a multi-car pileup on the freeway, but at some point, his penchant for making statements and promises that are not only untrue, but will likely never become true, raises questions about how we should cover him. To take just one recent example cited by Newton, Musk bragged about a proposed martial-arts fight with Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta. Musk promised that the fight would be live-streamed on X, with the proceeds going to charity; he also hinted that the fight might take place at the Colosseum, in Rome. Behind the scenes, however, Musk reportedly ignored attempts to book a time for the fight, then said he needed more time, and might need surgery.

A grudge match between Zuckerberg and Musk is the kind of thing that gets played for laughs, but other examples of the growing gap between Musk’s statements and the truth have been more serious. Despite Musk’s claim that he is a free speech maximalist, earlier this month, X launched a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a research group that investigated hate speech on the platform and found that it has been increasing. X alleges that the researchers violated the platform’s terms of service in a “scare campaign to drive away advertisers.” The suit also claims that the center “engaged in a series of unlawful acts designed to improperly gain access to protected X Corp. data,” as well as breach of contract, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, intentional interference with contractual relations, and inducing breach of contract. (In turn, Imran Ahmed, the center’s CEO, accused Musk of “a brazen attempt to silence honest criticism and independent research.”)

To take another example, Musk said in February that X would start sharing ad revenue with creators on the platform. This promise generated some favorable coverage from business and technology journalists. As Newton notes, however, after sending a small number of creators a single payment last month, X announced that too many creators had applied and that it had thus decided to delay the rollout of the plan indefinitely. Then, over the weekend, after a NASCAR driver was suspended for liking a post that made fun of the police killing of George Floydin 2020, Musk promised to pay the legal bills of anyone whose employer has “unfairly treated” them as a consequence of their activity on X. But many observers are skeptical that this will ever happen. “Given that Musk won’t even pay his own vendors,” Newton wrote, “it strains credulity that he would file unlimited lawsuits” to defend ordinary users from attack. (And Musk, reportedly, has also fired a number of employees for criticizing him.)

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

Continue reading “Covering Elon Musk raises some of the same questions that covering Trump did”

From Daniel Russell at Unanticipated Consequences: “At the start of World War II, all kinds of ideas for novel weapons were being explored as ways to end the war. Perhaps the most unlikely was Project X-Ray, an attempt to arm Mexican free-tailed bats with tiny incendiary charges. The idea came from a dental surgeon, Lytle S. Adams, who had seen the vast clouds of bats flowing out of Carlsbad caverns. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adams thought of combining the bats with small, fiery charges that would go off after the bats were dropped from a plane. If the bats were dropped at dawn over a Japanese city, they would look for a comfortable place to spend the daylight hours, then the timed fuses would go off, setting the building ablaze.” (Thanks for this items, David Weinberger!)

How an amateur diver became a true-crime sensation

From Rachel Monroe for The New Yorker: “In December, 2020, Brandy’s husband showed her a video he’d seen on YouTube. It was made by a group called Adventures with Purpose, volunteer salvage divers who investigated cold cases by searching for cars in lakes and rivers. Brandy spent the evening binge-watching their videos, including one about Nicholas Allen, a North Carolina teen-ager who had disappeared a few months earlier, and whose submerged vehicle and body had been recovered by A.W.P. divers. The video showed Allen’s mother, Judy Riley, standing on the shore of a muddy river, sobbing. “I’ve known he was here. I’ve known and I’ve begged and I’ve asked, and today you guys got me my answers,” she said in the video. That evening, Brandy sent A.W.P. a Facebook message: “I’m hoping to find out how you determine which missing persons cases you work? My mother and her car have been missing without a trace since 1991.”

Continue reading “Bat bombs: A World War II idea that didn’t turn out so well”

From Suzanne Raga for Mental Floss: “For Lyudmila Pavlichenko, killing Nazis wasn’t complicated. “The only feeling I have is the great satisfaction a hunter feels who has killed a beast of prey,” she once said of her job. But Pavlichenko wasn’t just any soldier: She was the most successful female sniper in history, and one of the most successful snipers, period. As a member of the Soviet Army during World War II, she killed 309 Nazis, earning the sobriquet “Lady Death.” She also became a public figure who toured North America and Britain, befriended Eleanor Roosevelt, and spoke candidly about gender equality—especially when she was fed up with American reporters. Pavlichenko killed hundreds of enemy combatants in Odessa, Moldavia, and Sevastopol. “We mowed down the Hitlerites like ripe grain,” she later said.”

Switched at birth, two Canadian men discover their roots at the age of 67

From Norimitsu Onishi at the New York Times: “Richard Beauvais’s identity began unraveling two years ago, after one of his daughters became interested in his ancestry. She urged him to take an at-home DNA test. Mr. Beauvais, then 65, had spent a lifetime describing himself as “half French, half Indian,” or Métis, and he had grown up with his grandparents in a log house in a Métis settlement. So when the test showed a mix of Ukrainian, Ashkenazi Jewish and Polish ancestry, he dismissed it as a mistake. But around the same time, in the province of Manitoba, a young member of Eddy Ambrose’s extended family had shattered his identity with the same test. Mr. Ambrose had grown up attending Mass in Ukrainian, but he wasn’t Ukrainian at all. He was Métis.”

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 “Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the greatest female sniper of all time”