Month: January 2025

Posted on

He’s a security guard at the Met, now his work is showing there

From the New York Times: “It seemed like the most ordinary interaction in the world.The man was trying to find “Flight Into Egypt,” a century-old oil painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner depicting a biblical scene. Mr. Khalil walked the visitor over to the painting, and they got to chatting about Egypt. As it turned out, the visitor was not really a visitor at all. He was a Met curator, planning a big new exhibit with ancient Egypt as part of the theme. And Mr. Khalil is not just any security guard. He is also a sculptor, inspired greatly by the ancient works of his homeland.Their chance encounter was brief — five minutes, maybe less — but it set in motion events that changed Mr. Khalil’s life in a way he never could have imagined.To understand how Mr. Khalil, 45, ended up in just the right place at just the right time, it helps to rewind a bit — to understand how he landed a job at the Met, how he arrived in New York in the first place, how a young man from a poor family in a small village in Egypt even got to go art school.”

The hidden network of Hedgehog Highways is growing in the United Kingdom

From Reasons To Be Cheerful: “These days more and more British hedgehogs need rescuing. They may be covered in sharp spines, but that’s no defense against the habitat loss and fragmentation. In urban areas, hedgehogs love to travel between gardens, where there are usually plenty of insects to feed on and nooks to hide in. But with most gardens surrounded by fences and walls, hedgehogs can’t gain access to those critical refuges. So a major prong of the hedgehog conservation strategy is to cut tiny holes in garden fences, which allows hedgehogs to come and go as they please. Connecting urban gardens this way creates what are known as hedgehog “highways” — and they’ve been spreading across British towns and cities. A 2021 study estimated that more than 120,000 such highways connected about 240,000 gardens across the UK, which amounts to about one percent of all residential gardens in the country.” 

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 “He’s a security guard at the Met, now his work is showing there”
Posted on

Mark Zuckerberg can finally stop pretending that he cares

Unless you’ve been living on the moon or under a rock, you probably know that on Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major change in the company’s policy around free speech and fact-checking. Wearing his new uniform of curly hair and a gold neck chain (and a $900,000 watch) to address his subjects… er, users, Zuck described the changes as a restoration of “free expression” on the company’s platforms and a return to Facebook’s free-speech roots, but what it boils down to is the removal of almost all the guardrails that Meta has erected over the past few years around hate speech and misinformation, ever since the company came under fire during the 2016 election (Kevin Roose also noted in the NYT that when it comes to roots, Facebook “was inspired by a hot-or-not website for Harvard students, not a Cato Institute white paper”).

As Wired pointed out in the wake of the news, if you want to go on Facebook or Instagram and say that someone who is trans or gay is mentally ill, you are totally free to do so now. Could you say “f u, retard,” as Elon Musk did to someone on his platform this week? I haven’t checked, but I assume that you could. Now that’s what I call freedom! Of course the Digital Forensic Research Lab, which specializes in disinformation, says that the changes could embolden authoritarian regimes and put Meta’s own users at risk, but hey — the price of freedom, right? (Casey Newton has a good breakdown of this here).

Zuckerberg and Meta’s newly appointed head of global affairs, Joel Kaplan—a former chief of staff under George W. Bush — said they are shutting down the company’s fact-checking program, which was launched in 2016 and at its peak involved dozens of media partners. Instead, Zuckerberg said Facebook and Instagram would implement a community approach similar to X’s “Community Notes” program, which crowdsources corrections from users (and has been criticized for moving too slowly and having little impact). The company also said that its content-moderation teams will be moving to Texas from California, in order to remove any concerns that “biased employees are overly censoring content.” (But aren’t there biased people in Texas who might also do this? Pipe down in the back now — the adults are talking.)

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

Continue reading “Mark Zuckerberg can finally stop pretending that he cares”
Posted on

Neil Armstrong’s closet was full of pilfered space artifacts

From My Modern Met: “There are many stories of historical treasures hiding for decades in attics and cupboards around the world, but few match what was found in a closet in Ohio in 2012. A few months after the death of Neil Armstrong, his widow, Carol, came across a white bag in a closet. Upon closer inspection, she found tiny parts that looked like they could have belonged to a spaceship. In the end, it wasn’t just any spaceship but a collection of items from the Lunar Module Eagle of the Apollo 11 mission. The white bag, which made the trip to the Moon, contained the waist tether he used to support his feet during the only rest period he got on the Moon, utility lights and their brackets, equipment netting, a mirror made of metal, an emergency wrench, the optical sight that was mounted above Armstrong’s window and, most importantly, the 16mm data acquisition camera (DAC) that recorded the footage of the lander’s final approach.”

How could a man rob two banks at the same time? Because they were identical twins

From The Atavist: “Te light was giving way to darkness as detective Patrick Brear arrived at the CBC Bank in Heathcote, an old gold-mining town in southern Australia. The quaint two-story redbrick building had been the scene of a crime. The bandit was the state’s most wanted man, suspected in two dozen armed robberies. Brear and his partner, detective John Beever, had been hunting him for over a year. They knew his MO well. He liked to hit rural targets just before they closed for the day, then escape into the bush under cover of darkness. The timing of many of his crimes was the inspiration for his nickname. Though it pained Beever and Brear to admit it, there was something different about this criminal, almost superhuman. He was known to pull off two robberies within a half-hour of each other, in towns that were more than a dozen miles apart.”

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 “Neil Armstrong’s closet was full of pilfered space artifacts”
Posted on

Time Inc. colluded with the CIA says one researcher

From Oxford University Press: “This article provides evidence for the first time of a systematic policy of direct collusion between the Time Inc. media empire and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. For the first two decades of the Cold War, both Time and Life magazines established policies that provided the CIA with access to their foreign correspondents, their dispatches and research files, and their vast photographic archive that the magazines had accumulated to accompany their stories. These were significant resources for a fledgling intelligence agency. Photographs of foreign dignitaries, rebel groups, protestors, and topography were vital pieces of intelligence, helping the Agency to map and visualize its targets. Depending upon the story, direct access to dispatches returned by foreign correspondents might provide the Agency with important clues to local political, social, and economic conditions, as well as insights into the intentions and capabilities of ruling elites in countries of concern.”

Sigmund Freud started using a couch because he didn’t want to look at his patients

From The Atlantic: “A person who is “on the couch” is known to be in therapy, but most therapists these days don’t ask their clients to lie down. The first time mine did, I resisted. I didn’t want to be on display or unable to see her reactions. Plus, the idea seemed antiquated. Sigmund Freud was inspired to use the couch more than a century ago after observing dramatic hypnotherapy demonstrations by his teacher Jean-Martin Charcot. In psychoanalysis, Freud thought a therapist being out of view would help people access emotions or memories that might be repressed. (He also said that he could not “put up with being stared at by other people for eight hours a day.”) Many of Freud’s ideas about the unconscious haven’t held up, but he may have been onto something with the couch, as I discovered when I eventually followed my therapist’s suggestion. The couch might not be for everyone, but it could be worth a try.”

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 “Time Inc. colluded with the CIA says one researcher”
Posted on

The secret reason that the US beat Russia to the moon

From Big Think: “Back in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviet Union was far ahead of the USA in the space race, launching the first satellite, the first human into space, and many other spaceflight firsts. This dominance continued for several years, and by the mid-1960s, they were planning a 1967 Moon landing: years ahead of even the most ambitious schedule for the United States. After the disastrous Apollo 1 fire, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that the Soviets would be the first to walk on the Moon. Yet they never even came close. The unexpected illness and death of one supremely competent but unsung Soviet figure, Sergei Korolev, changed everything. Without Korolev as the chief designer, everything went downhill quickly for the Soviets.”

A mysterious nerve disease in a mountain town might be a result of poisonous mushrooms

From Knowable: “Well known to skiers, the French mountain town of Montchavin has grabbed the attention of medical researchers as the site of a highly unusual cluster of a devastating neurological disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. ALS is both rare and rather evenly distributed across the globe: It afflicts two to three new people out of 100,000 per year. Montchavin’s year-round resident population is only a couple hundred, and neighboring villages aren’t much bigger, so the odds are strongly against finding more than just a few ALS patients in the immediate area. Yet physicians have reported 14. he notion that something in food might cause ALS does not come out of the blue. It comes from Guam, where US medical researchers, near the end of World War II, documented an epidemic of neurological disease among the island’s native Chamorro people.”

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 “The secret reason that the US beat Russia to the moon”