Month: December 2023

From the Washington Post: “At some point, Erik McIntyre inhaled the fungal spores. He couldn’t see them, or feel them, and it was weeks before he began to lose energy, to drop weight, to cough up blood at a karaoke bar in Arizona. Now he’s paralyzed from Valley fever, in a nursing home at age 53. The antifungal injections are less frequent now, and the lesions where the fungus grew on his face and arms have faded. But he knows he will never walk again. Valley fever has long haunted the American Southwest: Soldiers, construction workers, and prisoners have all encountered the fungus. But the threat is growing. Cases have roughly quadrupled over the past two decades.”

Why are there murals of angels holding guns in this Bolivian town?

From Amy Crawford for Atlas Obscura: “About an hour and a half south of La Paz, Bolivia, the town of Calamarca is in many ways a typical colonial settlement, a grid of houses and shops centered around a circa 1600 Baroque church that overlooks a small plaza. Inside this church, however, a remarkable gathering of angels has made the town a destination. Dressed in lace, feathers, and gold brocade—finery that resembled that of the Indigenous elites who administered Spanish colonial rule—these celestial beings are androgynous, posing like dancers with their wings discretely held behind them. What startles the viewer is that they are also bristling with weaponry: Each is armed with a musket—specifically, an arquebus, a common infantry gun of the 16th century.”

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From Amitha Kalaichandran for Undark: “In May, I was invited to take part in a survey by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to better delineate how long Covid is described and diagnosed as part of The National Research Action Plan on Long Covid. The survey had several questions around definitions and criteria to include, such as “brain fog” often experienced by those with long Covid. My intuition piqued, and I began to wonder about the similarities between these neurological symptoms and those experienced by people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. As a medical journalist with clinical and epidemiological experience, I found the possible connection and its implications impossible to ignore.”

A Russian whaling fleet hunted humpback whales almost to extinction

From Charles Homans for the Pacific Standard: “In five years of intensive whaling by first one, then two, three, and finally four fleets, the populations of humpback whales off the coasts of Australia and New Zealand were so reduced in abundance that they were completely destroyed. It was one of the fastest decimations of an animal population in world history, and it had happened almost entirely in secret. By the time a ban on commercial whaling went into effect, in 1986, the Soviets had reported killing a total of 2,710 humpback whales in the Southern Hemisphere. In fact, they had killed nearly 18 times that many, along with thousands of unreported whales of other species.”

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From Sarah Viren for the New York Times: “Liz Flatt drove to Austin mostly out of desperation. She had tried talking with the police. She had tried working with a former F.B.I. profiler who ran a nonprofit dedicated to solving unsolved murders. She had been interviewed by journalists and at least one podcaster. She had been featured on a Netflix documentary series about a man who falsely confessed to hundreds of killings. She didn’t know it at the time, but Flatt was at a crossroads in what she had taken to calling her journey, a path embarked on after a prayer-born decision five years earlier to try and find who killed her sister, Deborah Sue Williamson, or Debbie, in 1975.”

Human beings give birth because we were infected by an ancient virus

From Carrie Arnold for Nova: “The rise of the mammals may be feel like a familiar tale, but there’s a twist you likely don’t know about: If it wasn’t for a virus, it might not have happened at all. One of the few survivors of the asteroid impact 65 million years ago was a small, furry, shrew-like creature that lived in underground burrows and only ventured out at night, when predators weren’t active. The critter—already the product of some 100 million years of evolution—looked like a modern mammal, with body hair and mammary glands, except for one tiny detail: according to a recent genetic study, it didn’t have a placenta. And its kind might never have evolved one if not for a chance encounter with a retrovirus.”

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.

From Joshua Rothman for The New Yorker: “People say it’s just glorified autocomplete,” Geoffrey Hinton told me. “Now, let’s analyze that. Suppose you want to be really good at predicting the next word. If you want to be really good, you have to understand what’s being said. That’s the only way. So by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand. Yes, it’s ‘autocomplete’—but you didn’t think through what it means to have a really good autocomplete.” Hinton thinks that “large language models,” such as GPT, which powers OpenAI’s chatbots, can comprehend the meanings of words and ideas. And that they are either close to or are already able to reason in the same kind of way that human brains do. And that could be dangerous.”

The rise and fall of the bank robbery capital of the world

From Peter Houlahan: “Less than an hour later, the man the FBI called The Yankee walked out of Imperial Bank in Westwood, practically in the shadow of the Federal Building that houses the FBI’s L.A. Bank Robbery Squad, with $4,190. Diving into rush hour traffic on the 405 Freeway, The Yankee headed over the hills to the San Fernando Valley and pulled a final job just before closing time at the First Interstate in Encino for a take of $2,413.  Four hours, six heists, $13,197. As impressive as The Yankee’s performance had been, a record for bank licks by one person in a single day, It did not entirely shock the FBI agents in bank robbery squad. This was L.A. after all, and by 1983, L.A. had long established itself as the undisputed “Bank Robbery Capital of the World.”

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.

In February, The Crimson, the student newspaper at Harvard University, broke the story that the school had decided to shut down the Technology and Social Change project, a research effort founded by Joan Donovan, a prominent disinformation researcher. This took many researchers in the field by surprise; Donovan was highly regarded in the field, and had reportedly been wooed by a number of prestigious institutions before agreeing to join Harvard and lead the project. Donovan was also one of the first researchers to get her hands on the documents leaked by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook staffer who collected evidence of alleged wrongdoing by the platform. Getting access to these documents seemed like a coup for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, which Donovan and the Technology and Social Change project were affiliated with.

Why would Harvard decide to shut down such a prominent and well-regarded effort? The Crimson reported in February that according to unnamed sources within Harvard, Donovan was being forced out by Douglas Elmendorf, dean of the Kennedy School of Government, because she and her work were getting too much attention. The Crimson‘s sources said that Elmendorf had forbidden Donovan to spend any more money on the Technology and Social Change project or hire any more staff. However, according to James Smith, a Harvard spokesman who sent The Crimson a statement at the time, Donovan’s project was being shut down because university policy required that every research effort be led by a faculty member, and Donovan was a contract staffer.

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

From Chris Lewicki: “Some mistakes feel worse than death. A February evening in 2003 started out routine at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA. I gowned up in cleanroom garb and passed into the High Bay 1 airlock in Building 179 where nearly all of NASA’s historic interplanetary spacecraft have been built since the Moon-bound Ranger series in the 1960s. After years of work by thousands of engineers, technicians, and scientists, there were only two weeks remaining before the Spirit Mars Rover would be transported to Cape Canaveral in Florida for launch ahead of its sibling, Opportunity.”

Literary fight club: What started the great poets brawl of 1968

From Nick Ripatrizone for Literary Hub: “One Saturday evening in 1968, the poets battled on Long Island. Drinks spilled into the grass. Punches were flung; some landed. Chilean and French poets stood on a porch and laughed while the Americans brawled. A glass table shattered. Bloody-nosed poets staggered into the coming darkness. Allen Ginsberg fell to his knees and prayed. The World Poetry Conference at Stony Brook University was almost over. At the center of it all was Jim Harrison, a self-described “nasty item,” a prominent, if obnoxious, student in comparative literature. He had no business graduating.”

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.

From Eren Orbey for the New Yorker: “One night in August of 1999, on a summer trip back to Ankara, our dad was murdered. G was twelve and I was three. We were both there when it happened, along with our mom, but I was too young to remember. My dad’s murder was as fundamental and as unknowable as my own birth. My grief had the clumsy fit of a hand-me-down. As far as I can recall, no one in the family explained his death to me. My mom considered my obliviousness a blessing. “He’s a normal boy,” she’d tell people. From a young age, I tried to assemble the story bit by bit, scrounging for information and writing it down. But G always seemed protective of her recollections from that night and skeptical of my self-appointed role as family scribe.”

For decades, a Florida woman had no sense of smell. Can she get it back?

From Lana DeGregory at the Tampa Bay Times: “The first smell was lemon. At least she thought it was lemon. Barbara Walker hadn’t smelled a thing in 34 years. She walked out of the lanai, through the yard. The closer she got to her actual lemon tree, the stronger the aroma seemed. She inhaled its branches, leaves, flowers, immersing herself in the fresh, biting fragrance, overcome. At dinner, she couldn’t contain herself. “I think I’m starting to smell again!” Her teenage daughters were skeptical. After all these years? Her husband laughed. “You’re hallucinating.” No, she insisted that evening in 2021. “I smelled the blooms.” Barb lost her sense of smell at age 21, after a car accident.”

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.