Month: September 2024

When I read news and opinion pieces about TikTok, the video-sharing app owned by China-based ByteDance, it often reminds me of the old parable about the blind men and the elephant: when they touch the animal, each of the men touches a different part, and therefore he thinks it is something different — the one who touches the trunk thinks it is a snake, the one who touches the leg thinks it is a tree, and so on. In TikTok’s case, younger users who enjoy scrolling through the videos probably see it as a harmless distraction; older users who don’t spend any time on it probably think of it as a massive waste of time; and a number of legislators in Congress appear to see it as a dangerous psy-op designed by the Chinese government as a way of gathering data on American users and/or targeting them with misinformation and propaganda.

When I started writing this newsletter, I realized that I’ve been writing about the supposed dangers of TikTok, and the plans to either force ByteDance to sell or make TikTok illegal, for four years now. I first wrote about it for the Columbia Journalism Review in September of 2020, after then-president Donald Trump issued an executive order banning TikTok. Trump said he did it because the app “threatens the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” but even at the time it was clear that the ban was driven by a desire to do hurt China, which had become an economic powerhouse. The US had blocked mergers involving Chinese companies and imposed sanctions on of Chinese firms like Huawei, a maker of telecom equipment, and China had retaliated by hacking into US federal databases and the credit agency Equifax.

Even then, security experts said that TikTok was no more of a data or privacy risk than Facebook or Google. “I am the first to yell from the rooftops when there is a glaring privacy issue somewhere. But we just have not found anything we could call a smoking gun in TikTok,” security expert Will Strafach told The Associated Press in 2020. Nevertheless, Trump’s order soon sparked a frenzy of attempts by US companies to acquire TikTok, immediately sparked a race to acquire TikTok’s assets before the September deadline, with Microsoft, Oracle, and Walmart all in the running. But those plans hit a roadblock when the Chinese government issued new restrictions on the sale or export of artificial-intelligence software, which would include TikTok’s recommendation algorithms.

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Continue reading “The crusade against TikTok is a ridiculous waste of time”

From The Conversation: “The rings of Saturn are some of the most famous and spectacular objects in the Solar System. Earth may once have had something similar. In a paper published last week in Earth & Planetary Science Letters, my colleagues and I present evidence that Earth may have had a ring. Around 466 million years ago, a lot of meteorites started hitting Earth. We know this because many impact craters formed in a geologically brief period. In the same period we also find deposits of limestone across Europe, Russia and China containing very high levels of debris from a certain type of meteorite. The meteorite debris in these sedimentary rocks show signs that they were exposed to space radiation for much less time than we see in meteorites that fall today. Using models of how Earth’s tectonic plates moved in the past, we mapped out where all these craters were when they first formed. We found all of the craters are on continents that were close to the equator in this period.”

He decided to bring his Army friends some beers — when they were in Vietnam

From Now I Know: “In 1968, troops from the United States, South Vietnam, and Laos met the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese in the Battle of Khe Sanh. There were nearly 100,000 combatants involved in the months-long skirmish, including 6,000 American Marines. Almost all of them were there to fight. But one of them, a Marine named Chickie Donohue, wasn’t. In fact, he wasn’t supposed to be there at all. He was just hoping to meet some friends and have a beer. In late 1967, Donohue was back in New York City, his hometown, drinking at a local bar. Antiwar protests had taken hold across the nation and the bartender — a former soldier named George “Colonel” Lynch (who was not, in fact, a colonel) wanted to do something to support the local boys serving in Vietnam. Half-jokingly, most likely, he suggested that someone should go to Vietnam and bring six of the bar’s regulars some beers. Donohue decided to turn the joke into reality.”

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Continue reading “Scientists say Earth may once have had a ring like Saturn”

From the New York Times: “Marie Cooper led her life according to her Christian faith. She baked pies for her neighbors in northern West Virginia, and said grace before even a bite of food. She watched Jimmy Swaggart, a televangelist preacher — a little too loudly, in her daughter Sherry Uphold’s opinion. And she always said that at the end of her life, she did not want to be resuscitated. Last winter, doctors found cancer cells in her stomach. She’d had “do not resuscitate” and “do not intubate” orders on file for decades and had just filled out new copies, instructing medical staff to withhold measures to restart her heart if it stopped, and to never give her a breathing tube. In February, Ms. Cooper walked into the hospital for a routine stomach scope to determine the severity of the cancer. After the procedure, Ms. Uphold visited her mother in the recovery room and saw her in a panic. Doctors restrained her and inserted a breathing tube down her throat, violating the wishes outlined in her medical chart.”

Sexually frustrated dolphin blamed for attacks that injured dozens of swimmers in Japan

From The Telegraph: “A lonely dolphin acting out of sexual frustration is believed to be the culprit behind a spate of attacks on swimmers in Japan this summer. Since July this year, 18 people have been hurt in dolphin attacks near the seaside town of Mihama, with some requiring dozens of stitches. Posters warning beachgoers of the menace feature an open-mouthed dolphin baring razor-like teeth. It says that the mammals “are known to be dangerous to humans” and to get out of the water if they are seen nearby. Japan’s problematic mammal is believed to be a solitary male bottlenose dolphin, who may also be responsible for injuring swimmers in 2022 and 2023, and trying to press his genitals against them. Putu Mustika, a lecturer and marine researcher at James Cook University in Australia, told The New York Times that dolphins can inadvertently harm humans by dint of their sheer strength when acting out mating behaviours.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Doctors saved her life but she didn’t want them to”

From NBC News: “Long before his bleak final years, when he struggled with mental illness and lived mostly on the streets, Victor Carl Honey joined the Army, serving honorably for nearly a decade. And so, when his heart gave out and he died alone 30 years later, he was entitled to a burial with military honors. Instead, without his consent or his family’s knowledge, the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office gave his body to a state medical school, where it was frozen, cut into pieces and leased out across the country. A Swedish medical device maker paid $341 for access to Honey’s severed right leg to train clinicians to harvest veins using its surgical tool. A medical education company spent $900 to send his torso to Pittsburgh so trainees could practice implanting a spine stimulator. And the U.S. Army paid $210 to use a pair of bones from his skull to educate personnel at a hospital near San Antonio.”

A treasure trove of over 20 million collectible baseball cards is finally revealed

From the New York Times: “In a former antique shop off a four-lane highway in rural Virginia, Tim Banazek knelt before a white banker’s box labeled “Autographed Baseballs” that was stashed at the bottom of a steel bookcase. He pulled the first ball out and examined the signature in the fluorescent light. It was Willie Mays’s. Every day, Mr. Banazek unearths new historic treasures from a collection of sports cards that he purchased in 2021 from a quiet hobbyist. But this is not just any assemblage. It is quite possibly the largest private collection of sports cards in the world — and probably by a wide margin. Mr. Banazek estimates that it includes 20 million cards, although other visitors have pegged the number even higher. For comparison, Paul Jones, a man in Idaho who claimed to have the largest private baseball card collection, told a local newspaper in 2020 that his holdings amounted to 2.8 million cards.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “This university cut up and sold unclaimed bodies”

From The Cut: “A few years later, when I was away at college, I learned that my father had been tapping the phone lines. My mother had been adamant: “I am not cheating. I am not a cheater. When do I have time to cheat?” But my father’s career in car sales had given him a sensitive radar for dishonesty. So starting when I was in high school, in the mid-1990s, he would climb into the attic after she went to bed and situate himself at a makeshift station he had equipped with wires, jacks, and recording devices.Dad’s goal was to gather evidence to use as leverage in the divorce. He also used the recordings to exact revenge. After he found out that Mom bought a slinky yellow dress — a dress he thought she certainly wasn’t planning to wear for him — he cut off her credit cards. I remember my father making copies of the tapes, packaging them neatly in brown paper, and sending them to some of our relatives in Ohio.”

Loos, lewdness, and literature from the 1700s: Tales from the Boghouse

From Public Domain Review: “The literary scholar Roger Lonsdale once suggested that our knowledge of eighteenth-century poetry has depended heavily on what our anthologies have decided to print. For the most part modern anthologies have, in turn, drawn on collections put together at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the next, when the ideal for inclusion was essentially that of “polite taste”. The obscene, the feminine, and the political were by general cultural agreement usually omitted. Among the works that would never have been a source of poems for the canon was the collection of verse published in four parts by J. Roberts beginning in 1731, The Merry-Thought: or, the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany, commonly known simply as The Bog-House Miscellany. Its contemporary reputation may be described as infamous.”

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Continue reading “Her father tapped the phones and revealed a family mystery”

From Texas Monthly: “FBI Special Agent Curt Hunt was working in the yard of his San Antonio home one quiet Saturday morning when the call came in: The Texas Commerce Bank off Loop 410 had been robbed. Motor bank? In his 22 years as an agent, the intense, wiry Hunt had worked a lot of bank robberies—there are about twenty a year in San Antonio—but they almost always involved a robber walking into a bank lobby, pointing a gun at a teller, and demanding all the money in the drawer. How could anyone possibly get past the locked doors and bulletproof glass of a motor bank? It was September 21, 1991. Hunt rushed to the scene to begin investigating what would turn out to be the biggest bank robbery in San Antonio history. Grim bank officials told Hunt that someone had gotten away with almost $250,000—all the more astonishing considering that the average bank robber gets no more than $2,000. The robber had reached the vault—another rarity—and then made his escape so efficiently that a customer waiting several yards away for the bank to open did not even know there had been a robbery.”

Norwegian princess married a shaman who says he once came back from the dead

From the BBC: “Princess Märtha Louise, 52, and Durek Verrett, 49, announced their engagement in 2022. The princess – a former equestrian and the eldest of Norwegian King Harald’s two children – was previously married to the late writer and artist Ari Behn. Mr Verrett says on his site that he is a sixth generation shaman, “servant of god and energy activator” who “demystifies spirituality” through his “no-nonsense teachings”. In an interview with Vanity Fair magazine, he claimed to have risen from the dead and said that when he was a child a relative had predicted he would one day marry the princess of Norway.Märtha Louise has long attracted controversy in Norway for decades for her involvement in alternative treatments. In 2007, she announced she was clairvoyant and ran a school which taught students to “create miracles” and talk to angels.

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 “When a lovestruck cop tried to pull off a massive bank heist”

In case you are a first-time reader, this is The Torment Nexus (you can find out more about me and this newsletter — and why I chose to call it that — in my inaugural post.) Since this is only the second edition of the newsletter, I am still working out some bugs, so if things seem a little out of place, bear with me.

In a way, this is a continuation of the newsletter I’ve been writing for the last few years about the intersection between technology and the media, as chief digital writer at the Columbia Journalism Review (you can find some of those pieces here, and they are also all published on my personal website.) As I mentioned in my inaugural post, I’ve been writing about tech and its impact for about 30 years or so, ever since the first web browser was invented.

For me, this newsletter is a return to the days when I used to write about tech on my personal blog. In the same way, there is no large entity or organization in between me and my readers now — it’s just me and you, figuring things out together. And maybe along the way, getting a sense of how much work my editors put into making me seem coherent. 😄

And with that, on to this week’s newsletter! Thanks for reading – and if you decide to subscribe, or you have already, thank you for that as well! If you enjoy this newsletter, please share it and/or give it a thumbs up or heart emoji or whatever on the network of your choice. None of these newsletters are behind a paywall at this point (I haven’t decided if I will do that in the future) and every issue is available via Ghost, through Substack, and on my website.

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Continue reading “The Second Circuit’s decision in the Internet Archive case is bad”

From Outside: “Ten minutes into his dive, Dave Shaw started to look for the bottom. Utter blackness pressed in on him from all sides, and he directed his high-intensity light downward, hoping for a flash of rock or mud. Shaw, a 50-year-old Aussie, was in an alien world, more than 800 feet below the surface pool that marks the entrance to Bushman’s Hole, a remote sinkhole in the Northern Cape province of South Africa and the third-deepest freshwater cave known to man. Only two divers had ever been to this depth in Bushman’s before. One of them, a South African named Nuno Gomes, had claimed a world record in 1996 when he hit bottom, on open-circuit gear, at 927 feet. Shaw touched down and started swimming. Suddenly, he stopped. About 50 feet to his left, perfectly illuminated in the gin-clear water, was a human body.”

A shocking crime divided a Minnesota town

From The Atavist: “Grand Marais is a quiet outpost on Lake Superior’s North Shore, set among boreal forest in the easternmost corner of Minnesota. The town of roughly 1,300 is home to a mix of artists and outdoor enthusiasts, working-class people and professionals, liberals and diehard Trump supporters. The residents of Grand Marais have had a lot to discuss in recent years. A suspicious fire that destroyed the historic Lutsen Lodge. The suicide of their neighbor Mark Pavelich, a star on the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that defeated the Soviet Union. Plans for the 40 acres owned by convicted sex offender Warren Jeff’s fundamentalist clan. All those events stirred plenty of talk. But nothing has captivated local conversation quite like what happened between Larry Scully and Levi Axtell in March 2023. A shocking act of violence attracted international attention and split the town over questions of truth and justice.”

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 “In a cave 800 feet down, divers found a human body”