Month: January 2024

From Jonathan Nunn for The Guardian: “If you were a young person living in London in the early 1970s and you were looking for a bargain, the word of Nicholas Saunders was something close to holy scripture. Whatever you sought, Saunders had the answer. If you wanted to start an anarchist squat or self-publish a Trotskyist pamphlet, you consulted Nicholas Saunders. If you wanted to know how much a gram of cocaine should cost, or where to get free legal advice if you were arrested, you consulted Nicholas Saunders. If you just wanted to find out which supermarkets were cheaper for which goods, or how to fly all the way to India on a ticket to Frankfurt, you consulted Nicholas Saunders.”

What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back?

From Eric Berger for Ars Technica: “Taylor Wang was deeply despondent. A day earlier, he had quite literally felt on top of the world by becoming the first Chinese-born person to fly into space. But now, all of his hopes and dreams, everything he had worked on for the better part of a decade had come crashing down around him. He asked the NASA flight controllers if he could take some time to try to troubleshoot the problem and maybe fix the experiment. But on any Shuttle mission, time is precious. After being told no, Wang said something that chilled the nerves of those in Houston watching over the safety of the crew and the Shuttle mission. “Hey, if you guys don’t give me a chance to repair my instrument, I’m not going back,” Wang said.”

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 forgotten genius who changed British food forever”

By Kevin Hazzard for The Atavist: “Today the role is clearly defined: A paramedic is certified to practice advanced emergency medical care outside a hospital setting. They’re the people who shock hearts back into beating, insert breathing tubes into tracheas, and deliver pharmaceuticals intravenously whenever and wherever a patient is in need. Until the mid-1960s, however, the field of emergency medical services, or EMS, didn’t formally exist. Training was minimal; there were no regulations to abide by. Emergency care was mostly a transportation industry, focused on getting patients to hospitals, and it was dominated by two groups: funeral homes and police departments. Then came the medics of Freedom House, who formally hit the streets in July 1968, a few months after the riots that erupted in the wake of King’s assassination.”

Tardigrades are basically indestructable and scientists finally figured out why

From Meghan Bartels for Scientific American: “Tiny tardigrades have three claims to fame: their charmingly pudgy appearance, delightful common names (water bear and moss piglet) and stunning resilience in the face of threats ranging from the vacuum of space to temperatures near absolute zero. Now scientists have identified a key mechanism contributing to tardigrades’ resilience—a molecular switch of sorts that triggers a hardy dormant state of being. The researchers hope that the new work, published on January 17 in the journal PLOS ONE, will encourage further exploration of the microscopic creatures’ ability to withstand extreme conditions.”

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 “Black men helped create the first US paramedic corps”

Last July, Meta launched a new social network called Threads as a spinoff from Instagram and a thinly veiled competitor to X, then (just about) still known as Twitter. In the days following the launch, I wrote about my initial impressions of the app (so-so but with some promising signs), and also did a Q&A with my colleague Jon Allsop about what it was like to use the new service and whether I thought it would last. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and CEO, the new app had two million sign-ups in less than two hours, and hit thirty million within a day of launch; it then hit fifty million, then a hundred million, making it one of the fastest-growing new apps ever. (Elon Musk, the owner of X, responded by challenging Zuckerberg to a “literal dick measuring contest.”) Some of that early enthusiasm seemed to ebb, however: while the app is now estimated to have a hundred and sixty million monthly users, Business Insider reported in August that its daily user base had fallen by more than 80 percent, to eight million.

Twitter/X fans searching for an alternative amid that app’s slow-motion implosion are undoubtedly among the millions who signed up for Threads, seeking a new home for their conversations. But Meta promised that its new service wouldn’t just be another real-time chat service; indeed, when Threads launched, Adam Mosseri, the executive in charge of both Instagram and Threads, said that the new app would soon add the ability to integrate with the “fediverse”—a term that refers to a loosely affiliated collection of services, sites, and apps that all use open-source standards, giving users more control over how they use social media (allowing them, for instance, to move their account from one server to another that follows different rules) and how their data is handled. The most well-known Twitter-like app in the fediverse is Mastodon, which I wrote about in 2022. There are also fediverse versions of Instagram (Pixelfed) and YouTube (PeerTube), as well as Twitter alternatives based on the blockchain, such as Nostr, which counts Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder, as a supporter. Dorsey also helped launch BlueSky, a platform that was itself mooted as a possible Twitter replacement and which has its own federation standard known as the AT protocol.

Mosseri said that Meta originally planned to launch Threads with fediverse support built in thanks to a protocol called ActivityPub, which powers many open-source social apps (including Mastodon), but that the team behind Threads couldn’t get the protocol working in time. However, Mosseri assured users that the company was committed to embracing open standards, and that support for ActivityPub would be coming soon. “If you’re wondering why this matters, here’s a reason,” he wrote. “You may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.”

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

Continue reading “Is Meta sincere about joining the social media “fediverse,” and if so, why?”

From NPR: “The strange journey of Einstein’s brain began on the evening of April 17, 1955, when the seventy-six-year-old physicist was admitted to Princeton Hospital complaining of chest pains. He died early the next morning of a burst aortic aneurysm. As in the cases of Carl Gauss and Walt Whitman, the issue of permission to perform an autopsy is clouded by subsequent testimony. Thomas Harvey, the pathologist on call that evening, would later say, “I just knew we had permission to do an autopsy, and I assumed that we were going to study the brain.” As reporters soon discovered, Harvey did not have permission. And not only did Harvey take the brain, he also removed the physicist’s eyeballs and gave them to Henry Abrams, Einstein’s eye doctor.”

A former mobster came out of retirement to steal Dorothy’s ruby red slippers

From Josh Funk for AP News: “An aging reformed mobster admitted stealing a pair of the ruby red slippers that Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz, saying he gave into the temptation of one last score after an old mob associate led him to believe the famous shoes must be adorned with real jewels to justify their $1 million insured value. Terry Jon Martin’s defense attorney finally revealed the 76-year-old’s motive for the 2005 theft from the Judy Garland Museum in the late actor’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, in a new memo filed ahead of his Jan. 29 sentencing in Duluth, Minnesota. The FBI recovered the shoes in 2018 when someone else tried to claim an insurance reward on them, but Martin wasn’t charged with stealing them until last year.”

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 long and strange journey of Einstein’s brain”

From Thomas Lake for CNN: “Johnny Gosch left home for the last time on a warm Sunday in late summer, in the pale morning light before sunrise. Just before 6 a.m., a neighbor heard a wagon rattling through the yard and figured it was Johnny taking his usual shortcut on his way to pick up his newspapers. A boy saw a blue car pull up, and saw Johnny talking to a stranger. What happened in the next few minutes would resonate for the next four decades, far beyond the rolling green hills of Iowa. Johnny would become a tragic abstraction, a face on a milk carton, a story that warned other kids away from paper routes and changed the way police handled missing-children cases.”

This language was long believed extinct but then one man spoke up

From Natalie Alcoba for the NYT: “As a boy, Blas Omar Jaime spent many afternoons learning about his ancestors. His mother, Ederlinda Miguelina Yelón, passed along the knowledge she had stored in Chaná, a throaty language spoken by barely moving the lips or tongue. The Chaná are an Indigenous people in Argentina and Uruguay whose lives were intertwined with the mighty Paraná River, the second longest in South America. Ms. Miguelina Yelón urged her son to protect their stories by keeping them secret. So it was not until decades later that he made a startling discovery: No one else seemed to speak Chaná. Scholars had long considered the language extinct.”

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 “An Iowa paperboy’s disappearance 41 years ago remains a mystery”

From Truly Adventurous: “Tim Todd spent a quiet and, by all appearances, happy weekend with his wife, Patti. First thing Monday he went to meet his boss, private security kingpin Bill Pagano, to solidify his plans to have her killed. Bill, the former police chief of the small town of Festus, Missouri, said he had gone to St. Louis to rendezvous with a pair of hitmen who Tim was convinced would solve all his problems. Bill was Tim’s mentor. And Tim was Bill’s right-hand man. But the chummy brotherhood was a veneer. Bill was recording the conversation with his protégé to bring to his friends in law enforcement. The events already in motion would soon draw the attention of the entire Midwest.”

A whale named Hvaldimir escaped captivity and became a global celebrity

From Ferris Jabr at the NYT: “On April 26, 2019, a beluga whale appeared near Tufjord, a village in northern Norway, immediately alarming fishermen in the area. Belugas in that part of the world typically inhabit the remote Arctic and are rarely spotted as far south as the Norwegian mainland. Although they occasionally travel solo, they tend to live and move in groups. This particular whale was entirely alone and unusually comfortable around humans, trailing boats and opening his mouth as though expecting to be fed. And he seemed to be tangled in rope. When a fisherman named Joar Hesten got a closer look, he realized that the whale was in fact wearing a harness: one strap girdling his neck and another gripping his torso just behind his flippers.”

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 hit man and a doublecross in a small town in Missouri”