Month: September 2023

From Ben Taub for The New Yorker: “For more than decade, a man named Mustafa quietly served as the deputy chief of Syria investigations for the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, a group that has captured more than a million pages of documents. Using these files, lawyers at the cija have prepared some of the most comprehensive war-crimes cases since the Nuremberg trials, targeting senior Syrian regime officers—including the President, Bashar al-Assad. For as long as Mustafa had been working, the group had kept his identity secret. According to one estimate, Mustafa either directly obtained or helped obtain more than two hundred thousand pages of internal Syrian regime documents, likely making him—by sheer volume of evidence collected—the most prolific war-crimes investigator in history.”

The wild quest to create a fake Indian cricket league was just the beginning

From Sean Williams for Sports Illustrated: “Molipur, a village of 5,200 in India’s northwestern state of Gujarat, is not the kind of place where sporting dreams are made. Yet in May 2022, as temperatures soared above 110°, one Molipuri man toiled around the clock on a hangdog farming plot a five-minute walk outside the village. The man’s name was Shoeb Davda, a 35-year-old beanpole of a bangle merchant and a father of five. He’d recently returned from a two-month trip to Moscow, where he had become entangled with a group of shadowy but well-financed men. They had an idea, inspired by the rise of the Indian Premier League, a quick-fire, eight-week-long cricket tournament every spring watched by some half a billion people globally. Were Davda to establish his own, livestreamed cricket tournament, they suggested, wagers would follow, and he could cleave a slice of the sport’s newfound betting riches for himself.”

Editor’s note: If you like this newsletter, I’d be honoured if you would help me by contributing whatever you can via my Patreon. Thanks!

What it’s like to work on a drug abuse hotline

From Aymann Ismail and Mary Harris for Slate: “I met Jessica Blanchard on the front patio of her home in Albany, Georgia. I was about 15 minutes early, and she was still in her pajamas, poking only her head out from the front door to greet us. “I’m on a call now,” she told us, waving us inside. That call, and others like it, was why we came to this backwoods area of Southwest Georgia, the “trailer hood,” as Blanchard called it, about a three-hour drive from Atlanta. Blanchard, known by her friends as Jessie B., is an operator and education director for Never Use Alone, a safe-use hotline for drug users. It was conceived of four years ago by a “bunch a drug users sick of their friends dying,” as she put it. The hotline serves people who worry using alone makes them vulnerable to dying by overdose. Total overdose deaths have climbed to nearly 110,000 in 2022.”

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Continue reading “The secret life of the world’s best war-crimes investigator”

From Jasna Hodžić for JSTOR Daily: “A little after midnight in the late summer of 1859, campers dozing beneath the night sky in the Colorado Rockies woke to a display of auroral light so bright one could easily read a newspaper. In their account of the event, published in the Rocky Mountain News, the party recalled that some insisted it was daylight and began the preparation of breakfast. Thousands of miles away, crowds gathered in the streets of San Francisco with eyes turned skyward. “The whole sky appeared to undulate something like a field of grain in a high wind,” wrote one journalist in the San Francisco Herald. The two-day celestial event did more than inspire poetic musings and temporarily confuse songbirds who began chirping in the night. Almost immediately, the world’s 100,000 miles of telegraph lines fell silent, victim to a wave of space-borne electric current strong enough to fry the systems.”

The time Eleanor Roosevelt disappeared for 10 days

From Sarah Durn for Atlas Obscura: Soldiers nicknamed it “The Island of Death.” Hot, humid, and buzzing with mosquitoes, Guadalcanal was a tiny speck of land northeast of Australia in the Solomon Islands. American soldiers unlucky enough to be stationed there during World War II faced constant threats, from malnutrition to Japanese bombardment to tropical diseases. But none of that deterred First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt from visiting the island—she wanted, as always, to see things for herself. In August 1943, she disappeared for 10 days, only to turn up in one of the world’s most dangerous war zones halfway around the globe. During her five weeks in the Pacific, she traveled to 11 islands, gave countless speeches, and met 400,000 soldiers. Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, later said: “She alone had accomplished more good than any other person, or any group of civilians, who had passed through my area.”

Editor’s note: If you like this newsletter, I’d be honoured if you would help me by contributing whatever you can via my Patreon. Thanks!

The long and tangled story of what happened to John Lennon’s Patek Philippe watch

From Anthony Traina for Hodinkee: “This photo is watch-collector catnip: John Lennon, one of the most famous people of all time, wearing a Patek Philippe ref. 2499 perpetual calendar chronograph, one of the most important watches ever. Patek made just 349 examples of the 2499 over its 35-year production run. It’s complicated, rare, and collectible. Yoko Ono bought the watch for Lennon’s 40th birthday, just two months before he was murdered in New York City outside his and Ono’s apartment. Just months after this photo, the former Beatle was murdered, and the watch hasn’t been seen since.  Thanks to an ongoing lawsuit in Geneva, new information about the mythical Patek’s history and whereabouts has surfaced. But the lawsuit is only the beginning of a story of extortion, theft, and a stolen Patek that traveled from New York to Turkey to Germany to Geneva and, perhaps, back home, as well as the legacy Lennon left behind.”

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Continue reading “In 1859, a massive solar flare took out the global telegraph network”

In 1998, the US Department of Justice sued Microsoft, alleging that the company had abused its monopoly over personal computing by forcing users of its Windows operating system to adopt Internet Explorer as their browser, among other things. In 2001, the two sides settled the case. The government initially asked for Microsoft to be broken up. That outcome was overturned on appeal, but some experts argued that the glare of the legal spotlight nonetheless slowed Microsoft down in key ways. These, in turn, allowed an upstart named Google—founded a month before the trial was launched—to eventually dominate the internet search market. 

Two decades later, Google is ten times the size that Microsoft was in the nineties, with a market value of almost two trillion dollars and control over more than 90 percent of online search and related advertising. On Tuesday, the first major antitrust case since the Microsoft trial got underway in a DC courtroom—with Google in the role of defendant. The Justice Department intends to prove that Google has misused its search monopoly to harm its competitors and that it has maintained that monopoly through illegal means, such as paying smartphone companies like Apple billions of dollars to make Google the default search engine on their products. (Google’s dominance in advertising is the subject of a separate lawsuit that has yet to reach trial.) Kenneth Dintzer, a Justice Department lawyer, opened by arguing that Google viewed these default search deals as a “powerful strategic weapon” to cut out rivals. The resulting feedback loop, Dintzer argued, is a wheel that has been turning for more than twelve years, always “to Google’s advantage.”

Google’s lawyer hit back, arguing that “users today have more search options and more ways to access information online than ever before.” The crux of the company’s defense was outlined in a pretrial filing arguing that the Justice Department has defined the search market too narrowly, that Google doesn’t have a monopoly (which it defines as “the ability to raise prices beyond a competitive level”), and that its dominance in that market actually helps consumers. According to Google, its status as the default browser on products like Apple’s did not result from massive payments but because Google “successfully competed on the merits—that is, on the basis of product quality and price.” Breaking up the company, or forcing it to divest itself of certain software operations, would make the global technology landscape poorer for everyone, Google says. The trial continues, and could take as long as ten weeks to conclude.

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

Continue reading “Google gets defensive in the biggest US antitrust case in more than two decades”

From Daniel Vaughn for Texas Monthly: “The origins of barbecue are murky. Both the transformation from the word “barbacoa” and the development of the cooking process are widely accepted as having come from the Taíno people Christoper Columbus first encountered in present-day Haiti. After much research, Joseph Haynes explains why we’ve got it all wrong in his new book. He contends that barbecue is a uniquely American invention, and he emphatically dismisses what he calls the Caribbean Origins Theory (COT). “Barbecue was born after enslaved Africans were brought to Virginia in 1619 from West Africa,” he writes. “Eventually, enslaved people of African descent, along with people of European descent, and others of American Indian descent combined their cooking traditions, and created what we today call southern barbecue.”

The showman immortalized by John Lennon was the first Black circus owner

From Mike Dash for Smithsonian magazine: “Anyone who has ever listened to The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band–and that’s a few hundred million people at the last estimate–will know the swirling melody and appealingly nonsensical lyrics of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” one of the most unusual tracks on that most eclectic of albums. The lyrics mention Pablo Fanque’s Fair, which was a real thing. During a break in the filming of Strawberry Fields Forever, Lennon wandered into a nearby antique shop and saw a gaudy Victorian playbill advertising a performance of Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal in February 1843. Fanque was more than an exceptional showman — he was a black man making his way in an almost uniformly white society, and doing it so successfully that he played to mostly capacity houses for the best part of 30 years.”

Editor’s note: If you like this newsletter, I’d be honoured if you would help me by contributing whatever you can via my Patreon. Thanks!

Researchers believe that artificial intelligence may allow us to speak to other species

From Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker: “The world’s largest predators, sperm whales spend most of their lives hunting. To find their prey—generally squid—in the darkness of the depths, they rely on echolocation. By means of a specialized organ in their heads, they generate streams of clicks that bounce off any solid (or semi-solid) object. Sperm whales also produce quick bursts of clicks, known as codas, which they exchange with one another. The exchanges seem to have the structure of conversation. One day, Gruber was sitting in his office at the Radcliffe Institute, listening to a tape of sperm whales chatting, when another fellow at the institute, Shafi Goldwasser, happened by. At the time, she was organizing a seminar on machine learning. Perhaps, Goldwasser mused, machine learning could be used to discover the meaning of the whales’ exchanges.”

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Continue reading “Everything we know about the origins of barbecue is wrong”

From Milton Mermikides for Aeon magazine: “Bach was crafty both in his music and life, and he adored puzzles, games and general inventive mischief. His monogram on his wax seal and his goblet was his own design, and at first glance it looks like an ornate decorative symmetrical crest of interlocking swirls. It is in fact built up from his initials JSB overlaid and mirrored, which is apt, as his music uses mirror-like reversals. Another example of Bach encoding information into decoration might be found in the title page of his 24 preludes and fugues for The Well-tempered Clavier – it was not until 2005, a quarter of a millennium after its composition, that the musicologist Bradley Lehman made an argument that the decorative symbol at the top of the page, which for generations had been dismissed as an ornamental ‘meaningless’ series of loops, contained coded instructions for how to construct the tempo, hidden in plain sight.”

The world’s oldest cat door has been around since the 14th century

From Madeleine Muzdakis for My Modern Met: “In medieval days, cathedrals would have been overrun with mice and rats without a feline prowling the premises. To keep vermin in check, the magnificent Exeter Cathedral—known formally as the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter in Exeter—has employed cats for centuries. In fact, they even added a cat flap to one of the structure’s doors, gouging a cat-sized opening into the wood. This led inside the cathedral, under the magnificent medieval astronomical clock, where the cat would be able to scamper about in pursuit of vermin. In return for its service, the cat was paid handsomely. From 1305 to 1467 its wages appear in cathedral records. Thirteen pence per quarter was given “to the custors and the cat” or “for” the cat, according to some notes. The cat’s wages, coming to one pence a week, were likely used by the custor to supplement its diet of rodents with other food.”

A young scientist tries to find a way to preserve a dying way of life

From Zhengyang Wang for Nautilus magazine: “In eastern Tibet, high in the Himalaya, Tenzin stopped at a cliff edge. He lit another cigarette. In front of us, Mt. Gongga dazzled in spring’s morning light, a dizzying 24,800 feet above sea level. Tenzin is not his real name. His perilous occupation—collecting and selling caterpillar fungus—is fraught with competition and secrecy, and I didn’t want to put him in jeopardy with the local authorities. Tenzin had reluctantly agreed to show me how to find the treasured fungus. But his growing dissatisfaction with my ability to keep up on the trek began to show. It was 2016, and I was a first-year doctoral student in search of a thesis. I, too, grew up in this part of the world. But I was naive enough to think that an elliptical machine was adequate preparation to hunt caterpillar fungus.”

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 “Bach loved puzzles so much he worked them into his music”

From Elizabeth Greenwood at LinkedIn: “The biggest challenge of faking your death is that teensy problem of your body. So fake a drowning, right? Wrong. “Death” by water immediately raises red flags. Investigator Steve Rambam, who consults for insurance companies says, “Ninety-nine percent of faked deaths are water accidents. In most drownings, the body is recovered. So why was this body not recovered?” According to Rambam, hiking is the way to go. “People disappear hiking all the time, legitimately. That’s a great way to disappear.” Patrick McDermott, Australian singer Olivia Newton-John’s longtime boyfriend, who faked his death on a fishing trip in 2005 shortly after the couple had broken up. Having recently filed for bankruptcy, he chartered a boat and allegedly fell overboard at night. A group of private investigators hired by Dateline NBC located McDermott when they noticed a centralized cluster of IP addresses originating near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, all clicking onto a site dedicated to tracing his whereabouts.”

The Barbie movie refers to her creator’s tax evasion but the truth is more complicated

From Blake Oliver: “Did you see the Barbie movie? In the movie, Barbie’s creator Ruth Handler makes an off-hand mention of her IRS problems — but that’s wrong. The real-life Ruth Handler ran into legal issues with the SEC, not the IRS. And it wasn’t tax problems. The Securities and Exchange Commission came after the Barbie creator for financial fraud while she was president of Mattel. ABC News says, “In 1971, Mattel was in talks to purchase Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Mattel executives falsified invoices, bills, even customer signatures to paint a rosier picture of the company’s finances.” Handler pleaded no contest to mail fraud charges and making false statements to the SEC. She had to step down from her role as president at Mattel but continued to publicly maintain her innocence while avoiding jail time.”

Editor’s note: If you like this newsletter, I’d be honoured if you would help me by contributing whatever you can via my Patreon. Thanks!

The US has a long history of testing radiation on the poor and disabled

From Wikipedia: “Numerous human radiation experiments have been performed in the United States, many of which were funded by various U.S. government agencies such as the United States Department of Defense, the United States Atomic Energy Commission, and the United States Public Health Service. Experiments performed have included feeding radioactive material to mentally disabled children, enlisting doctors to administer radioactive iron to impoverished pregnant women; exposing U.S. soldiers and prisoners to high levels of radiation; irradiating the testicles of prisoners, which caused severe birth defects, and exhuming bodies from graveyards to test them for radiation without the consent of the families of the deceased.”

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 “Some helpful tips if you plan to fake your own death”

From Cara Giaimo for Atlas Obscura: “Tony Diamond can’t remember exactly why he first shone a blacklight on a puffin. It was around 2010 or 2011, and the ecology professor was helping a graduate student investigate some questions about beak coloration. “For some reason, a colleague had brought a UV light,” he says now. “We thought, ‘Well, why don’t we see what happens.’” So they pointed the light at the bird in question—a preserved specimen—and switched it on. “We got a big surprise,” Diamond says. Under the blacklight, parts of the bird’s beak glowed brightly, as though it had been striped with fluorescent paint.” Such a glowy nose is certainly impressive. But if you threw a best-dressed contest at an all-bird disco, puffins would have some competition. As it turns out, a lot of avian species—from parrots and penguins to owls and nightjars—glow in ways we can’t see. What’s more, they do so using at least two different methods—and for a whole lot of different reasons, some of which remain mysterious to researchers.”

Empire of dust: what the tiniest specks reveal about the world

From Jay Owens for The Guardian: “Nobody normally thinks about dust, what it might be doing or where it should go: it is so tiny, so totally, absolutely, mundane, that it slips beneath the limits of vision. But if we pay attention, we can see the world within it. What do I mean by dust? I want to say everything: almost everything can become dust, given time. The orange haze in the sky over Europe in the spring, the pale fur that accumulates on my writing desk and the black grime I wipe from my face in the evening after a day traversing the city. Dust gains its identity not from a singular material origin, but instead through its form (tiny solid particles), its mode of transport (airborne) and, perhaps, a certain loss of context, an inherent formlessness. If we knew precisely what it was made of, we might not call it dust, but instead dander or cement or pollen. “Tiny flying particles,” though, might suffice as a practical starting definition.”

Editor’s note: If you like this newsletter, I’d be honoured if you would help me publish it by contributing whatever you can via my Patreon. Thanks!

Hitchcock’s “Psycho” and the end of the continuously showing movie

From Jason Kottke: “Going to the movies used to be a somewhat different experience than it is today: people wandered into a theater at any point in a film and would just watch until it looped back around when they came in. This began to change in the 40s and 50s for a variety of reasons — theater owners and movie studios didn’t like it, movies were getting more complex, the rise of TV, etc. — but the real shift occurred with the premiere of Psycho in 1960. The studio put out a promotional blitz before it’s release stating that no one would be allowed entrance to the theater after the start of the film. In a practice later to be known as “fill and spill,” exhibitors hustled audiences in and out with military efficiency. Uniformed Pinkerton guards were on hand to enforce the policy.”

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Continue reading “Why do some birds glow under fluorescent light? Scientists aren’t sure”

From Katie Hafner and Ashraya Gupta for Scientific American: “Meitner’s realization drew upon recent work that Niels Bohr and other scientists had been doing on the structure of the atom. They proposed a liquid-drop model of the nucleus, where subatomic particles were held together by strong nuclear forces. Meitner realized that the nucleus was not indivisible after all. She seemed open to this insight in a way that other scientists weren’t– even Bohr himself. Together, Meitner and her nephew, Otto Robert Frisch, wrote and submitted a paper to the journal Nature. That paper was the first to use the term fission for the splitting apart of the nucleus. But because of the Nazi regime, her name is stripped off of every publication they ever submitted, ever published.”

Chasing “Black Caesar,” southern Florida’s notorious pirate

From Karuna Eberl for Atlas Obscura: “The first time maritime archaeologist Joshua Marano stood at the mouth of Caesar Creek, something smelled fishy. Overlooking a snaking waterway of tangled emerald mangroves and silver-flanked snapper stood a lone interpretive sign. It featured a drawing of a courageous Black man wearing a tricornered hat and looking wistfully toward the horizon. Marano had heard about the pirate Black Caesar: an African chieftain shanghai’d into pirate life, or perhaps an escaped slave. Either way, the stories claimed that he plied the waters of southeastern Florida’s Biscayne Bay. He would lie in wait by careening his ship on its side, to conceal its mast below the mangroves of Caesar Creek. The rope looped through an iron ring fixed in a limestone boulder now known as Caesar’s Rock. When a vulnerable vessel came into view, he would chop the rope, set sail, and begin pursuit.”

Editor’s note: If you like this newsletter, I’d be honoured if you would help me publish it by contributing whatever you can via my Patreon. Thanks!

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s body is on display at University College in London

From Alex Corey for Londonist: “Jeremy Bentham was a philosopher and political radical, who formulated the theory of utilitarianism. In his will, Bentham requested that his body be preserved and fashioned into what he called an “auto-icon”, a task which was carried out by surgeon Thomas Southwood Smith. His body was given to the university in 1850, 18 years after his death. For decades, Bentham’s body was on display in a corridor of the Wilkins Building at UCL, housed inside a wooden cabinet. The head is made of wax, but the rest of his real skeleton lurks beneath his clothes. While the skeletal remains and wax head of Bentham remain in the Student Centre, his actual head remains out of public view elsewhere at UCL. The head was once stolen in a prank by students from the rival King’s College, and has ever since been kept under lock and key.”

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 “She discovered how to split the atom but was denied a Nobel Prize”

From Molly Rains for Science.org: “What has tusks, bristly hair, and is contaminated with dangerous levels of radiation? Visit Germany’s Bavarian mountain towns and you just may find out. The wild boars (Sus scrofa) that snuffle through the region’s forests are so radioactive that the country has ruled them unsafe to eat—but why these animals are so contaminated has proved a puzzle. The enduring radioactivity of Bavaria’s boars has traditionally been blamed on the 1986 meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power reactor, some 1300 kilometers away, but in a new study published recently in Environmental Science & Technology, scientists report that at least some of the radioactive elements in the bodies of the boars are likely the result of fallout from atomic bombs that detonated in our atmosphere more than 60 years ago.”

George Harrison put his house up as collateral so Monty Python could make Life of Brian

From the Los Angeles Times: “It was the late-1970s, and producer John Goldstone and Monty Python’s Flying Circus founding member Eric Idle trekked across the Atlantic with caps in hand to scramble together the money to make “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” EMI Films had summarily backed out of the project. Some of the Python crew had become friendly with George Harrison over the years, “so Eric said ‘Why don’t we see whether George could help?” Goldstone remembered. “We went to his house in the Hollywood Hills, and he said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it.’ And that was it.” Harrison put his English estate, Friar Park, up as collateral against a bank loan that covered the other half of the film’s $4-million budget.”

Editor’s note: If you like this newsletter, I’d be honoured if you would help me publish it by contributing whatever you can via my Patreon. Thanks! 

What it’s like to live alone on a deserted island

From Emine Saner for The Guardian: “Chris Lewis, 43, didn’t intend to be stranded alone on an island, but when Covid hit during his walk of Britain’s coastline, he was in Shetland. Someone offered him and his dog, Jet, the use of a basic house on Hildasay, an uninhabited island more than a mile off the mainland. It had no running water, gas or electricity. He thought he would be on the island for three weeks or so, but he ended up living there for three months. He collected firewood and built ovens around the island, depending on that day’s wind direction. A boat would come every two or three weeks, weather allowing, to deliver coal and fresh water – he would have to lug it to the other side of the island – but Lewis lived largely off foraged food. On some days, he could catch lobsters in shallow water, but mainly he survived by eating whelks and limpets.”

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 “Scientists try to figure out why Germany’s wild boars are radioactive”