Month: March 2025

I’ve been trying to resist writing about the political situation in the United States for some time now — all the terrible decisions and the venal motivations and the chaos and misery that have come with the Trump-and-Musk show — in part because I don’t really know what to say that would make anything better, but also because this is a technology-focused newsletter and not a political one. That said, however, the name of this newsletter is The Torment Nexus, which feels like a pretty good description of the current moment to me. And technology is definitely playing a role in it — like the AI that Musk and his DOGE acolytes are reportedly using to detect inappropriate government spending (which seems to consist of doing a simple text search for words like “gay,” regardless of context).

My friend Mike Masnick, who runs an excellent tech commentary and analysis site called Techdirt, wrote recently that it is “now a democracy blog whether we like it or not,” because of the imminent threat that Trump and Musk and others in the current administration represent to some or all of the democratic principles we hold dear (and which used to be self-evident). Here’s how he described it:

While political reporters are still doing their view-from-nowhere “Democrats say this, Republicans say that” dance, tech and legal journalists have been watching an unfortunately recognizable plan unfold — a playbook we’re all too familiar with. We’ve seen how technology can be wielded to consolidate power, how institutional guardrails can be circumvented through technical and legal workarounds, and how smoke and mirrors claims about “innovation” can mask old-fashioned power grabs. It’s a playbook we watched Musk perfect at Twitter, and now we’re seeing it deployed on a national scale. When someone talks about free speech while actively working to control speech, that’s not a contradiction or a mistake — it’s the point.

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Continue reading “Be careful what you post on social media. They are listening”

From Wikipedia: “After Coltrane’s death, a congregation called the Yardbird Temple in San Francisco began worshipping him as God incarnate. The group was named after Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, whom they equated to John the Baptist. The congregation became affiliated with the African Orthodox Church; this involved changing Coltrane’s status from a god to a saint. The resultant St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, San Francisco, is the only African Orthodox church that incorporates Coltrane’s music and his lyrics as prayers in its liturgy. Rev. F. W. King, describing the African Orthodox Church of Saint John Coltrane, said “We are Coltrane-conscious… God dwells in the musical majesty of his sounds.” Coltrane is depicted as one of the 90 saints in the Dancing Saints icon of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco.”

She finally found an affordable place to live but it became a nightmare

From Curbed: “Tabatha Pope’s story begins in late August 2021, when she heard of an apartment available in a three-story house just outside downtown Houston. Pope, then 32, desperately needed a place to live. For the better part of nine months, she’d been staying at the Great Value Inn, a $35-a-night motel on the city’s West Side, with her boyfriend, Will, then 47. It was an acquaintance who told Pope about the available apartment and connected her to a man named Michael Brown, who, over the phone, offered to show her the house. It was on West Clay Street, at the intersection of the Fourth Ward and Montrose neighborhoods, an area that had gradually gentrified over the past 20 years and was considered fairly safe. Merritt brought Pope upstairs to show her the work needed on the second floor. When she started to open the door, however, an intense, rotten stench flooded the hallway. She told Pope not to worry about the smell: A refrigerator had stopped working, spoiling some meat, she explained.” 

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 church worships jazz great John Coltrane as a saint”

From The Guardian: “One autumn morning, I boarded a plane from Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, to Buka, the capital of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. A collection of islands and atolls the size of Puerto Rico, Bougainville is located 600 miles east of Moresby, across the Solomon Sea. Over the previous months I had become transfixed instead by the strange tale of Noah Musingku, a Bougainvillean scam artist who had made a fortune, lost it, then retreated to a remote armed compound in the jungle, where he declared himself the islands’ king. Musingku’s purported con – a vast, millenarian Ponzi scheme called U-Vistract – had, since the late 90s, raked in some $232m, perhaps far more, and near as I could tell, it was still plodding on. In 2006, a militia allegedly aligned with the ABG stormed Musingku’s hideout and almost killed him. Not since 2012, it seemed, had a reporter set foot in the Royal Kingdom of Papaala, Musingku’s name for his compound in the village of Tonu.”

Vatican City had the highest per-capita murder rate in the world in 1998

From Wikipedia: “The Vatican murders occurred on 4 May 1998, when Swiss Guard lance corporal Cédric Tornay shot and killed the commander of the Swiss Guard, Alois Estermann, and his wife before killing himself. The murder happened the same day that Estermann was confirmed in his position as commander, after a period of being acting commander. Estermann had previously disciplined Tornay for infractions; as a result, he rejected Tornay for the Benemerenti medal, which Swiss Guards usually receive. Tornay wrote a suicide note to his family complaining about Estermann and the supposed injustices he had inflicted against him. The case shocked the Vatican and initiated a media frenzy. Due to Vatican City’s low population, this double homicide gave the country the highest annual murder rate in the world, at over 200 per 100,000 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 “He built a fortune with a scam and then declared himself king”

From New York: “Gene Fleming was well known in Hastings. An eccentric inventor, he lived on a sprawling, unusual estate — a Navy ammunition depot he and his wife had renovated just outside . In September 1988, Fleming visited his brother-in-law‘s farm and noticed a new goose — it didn’t have feet and was struggling to get around. Fleming was enamored with the strangely deformed creature. Once home, Fleming strapped Rock ’n’ Roll to a skateboard. The goose toppled off. So he went out and bought a pair of size-zero patent-leather baby sneakers from a local shoe shop, filled them with rubber padding, and fitted them over the goose’s stumps. The transformation was immediate: The goose could walk. On October 10, 1988, the Hastings Tribune published an article, called “Goose Steps in Style,” chronicling Andy’s unlikely journey. Later that week, the Associated Press picked it up. Within weeks, Andy’s presence was requested in malls, schools, and nursing homes across the state.”

How the color blue came to be associated with the Virgin Mary

From The Paris Review: “Blue is a color with long-standing mystical associations. Perhaps this is because blue is the color of the sky, something we can always see but never reach, or perhaps it’s because, as chemist Heinz Berke points out, early humans had no access to blue because blue is not what you call an earth color … You don’t find it in the soil. Blue was elusive, and this made it valuable. The earliest stable blue was made from lapis lazuli, the mining of which began in Afghanistan around six thousand years ago. For millennia, blue has been a sacred and costly hue, more valuable even than gold. And in the Christian world, the most valuable color was reserved for the most elevated of virgins. Enter Marian blue. Marian blue became the official color of Jesus’s mother in the early fifth century. Painters typically depicted Mary in a red gown or wrapped in a pink mantle. But slowly, blue began to replace red as the color of choice.”

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 “Who killed Andy the famous footless goose?”

From The Guardian: “During the second world war, young women broke traditional gender barriers by working in Britain’s forests as part of the Women’s Timber Corps. As many as 15-18,000 young women left home for the first time, aged 17-24, to fell trees with an axe and saw for the war effort. The women could fell 10-tonne trees, carry logs like weight-lifters, work in dangerous sawmills, drive huge timber trucks and calculate timber production figures on which the government depended during wartime. They did exactly the same jobs as the men on less than half the pay. Britain was the largest timber importing nation in the world in 1939, bringing in 96% of its wood. When the war began, home grown timber supplies became vital. Britain needed to produce wood for the coal mines, as well as wood for railway sleepers, telegraph poles, rifle stocks, ship and aircraft construction, and packaging boxes for army supplies.”

A young girl got a life-saving liver transplant and her blood type changed

From The Sydney Morning Herald: “Doctors at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Australia called Demi-Lee Brennan a one-in-6 billion miracle. The 15-year-old liver transplant patient was the first person in the world to take on the immune system and blood type of her donor, negating the need to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of her life. Doctors say they have no idea how this happened. Demi-Lee was nine when she contracted a virus that destroyed her liver. She was given less than 48 hours to live when a donated liver from a 12-year-old boy became available. Demi-Lee had a 10-hour operation and was started on a cocktail of immuno-suppressant drugs. Nine months later, when her condition worsened, doctors were shocked to find that her blood type had changed. The head of hematology, Julie Curtin, said she was stunned when she realised Demi-Lee was now O-positive, rather than O-negative.”

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 Lumberjills were a female tree-cutting corps in the 1940s”

Digg. Reddit. Fark. Stumbleupon. Slashdot. If you were “extremely online” (as the kids say) in the early part of this century — i.e., the early 2000s — these were some of the sites you probably visited a lot, searching for interesting things to read, or just killing time between classes/meetings etc. And around the year 2005 or so, there was arguably no bigger drama in the “social media” space than the battle between Digg and Reddit. Both offered a more modern take on the old bulletin-board forums that ancient internet denizens used to frequent, the Usenet newsgroups like alt.binaries.starwars. While Digg focused on lists of links to news articles and websites, Reddit added a more social element, with “subreddits” devoted to specific topics. Both Digg and Reddit depended on — and to some extent pioneered — a ranking system that awarded points based on how many votes a link got from users. In a way, this was the birth of the kind of algorithmic filtering we now associate with Facebook and Twitter.

For a time, hitting the front page of either Digg — which called itself “the internet’s homepage” — or Reddit more or less guaranteed that your link and/or website would get swamped by literally millions of clicks and hits. In some cases, being one of the top links on either site could cause websites to crash and become completely unavailable, something that at the time was seen as almost a badge of honor.

In case you missed the headlines, these two formerly fierce competitors have now joined forces — or at least two of their founders have. Kevin Rose, who founded Digg in 2004, and Alexis Ohanian, who co-founded Reddit a year later with his friend Steve Huffman, announced on Wednesday that they are partners in a new venture that involves a rebirth of Digg, which they acquired earlier this year. It’s hard to overstate the enmity that these two companies once had for each other when they were both young: Ohanian reportedly sent an email to his cofounder in 2005 with a link to the Reddit site saying “Meet the enemy,” and both sites and founders enjoyed taking shots at each other at every opportunity. As I said in a post on X (yes, I still use it, but not without feeling like I need a shower) to anyone who was a social-web user in the early 2000s, this was like the Hatfields and McCoys holding hands and singing Kumbaya.

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 “Will a reboot of Digg do anything to help the social web?”

From the BBC: “One of the world’s most prolific blood donors – whose plasma saved the lives of more than two million babies – has died. James Harrison died in his sleep at a nursing home in New South Wales, Australia on 17 February, his family said on Monday. He was 88. Known in Australia as the man with the golden arm, Harrison’s blood contained a rare antibody, Anti-D, which is used to make medication given to pregnant mothers whose blood is at risk of attacking their unborn babies. The Australian Red Cross Blood Service paid tribute to Harrison, saying he pledged to become a donor after receiving transfusions while undergoing a major chest surgery when he was 14. He started donating his blood plasma when he was 18 and continued doing so every two weeks until he was 81. In 2005, he had the world record for most blood plasma donated. His daughter and two of his grandchildren are also recipients of anti-D immunisations.”

How a walnut tree played a critical role in convicting a man of mass murder

From the Dublin Review of Books: “Thirty-five years have now passed since civil war erupted in the Balkans. In 1990, the Yugoslav federation began to tear itself apart, with insurrections breaking out in most of its six constituent republics. One story from the Yugoslav civil war connects a small valley in rural England with a mass grave in Croatia. At its heart is a dreadful crime – involving murder, betrayal and deceit – and a struggle between those who sought to reveal the truth, and those who wanted to deny and suppress it. That conflict was resolved by a most unlikely witness: a walnut tree. One spring morning in 1998, Paul Tabbush was at work at the Bedgebury Pinetum in Kent – one of the world’s largest collections of tree specimens – when he received an unexpected phone call. Prof Tabbush was head of silviculture and seed research with the British Forestry Commission. To his astonishment, the phone call he received that morning came from an investigator with the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.”

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 “His blood helped save the lives of more than 2 million babies”

From Scientific American: “In 2011 an anonymous poster on the now infamously controversial image board 4chan posed a mathematical puzzle about the cult classic anime series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. The first season of this anime series consists of 14 episodes that were designed so that you can watch them in any order you like. At some point in a 2011 discussion, someone asked the minimum number of episodes they would have to watch to have seen it in every possible order. This question is related to so-called superpermutations, and to this day, mathematicians are unable to fully answer the problem that the 4chan user posed. But amazingly, in that discussion, one of the anonymous users made an estimate of the minimum amount of all episodes to watch with an approach that was previously unknown to mathematicians.”

An Australian couple were forced to sit next to a dead body for hours on a plane flight

From The Guardian: “An Australian couple have criticised Qatar Airways after a blanket-draped corpse was seated next to them during a long-haul flight. Mitchell Ring said a passenger died part-way through the 14-hour flight from Melbourne to Doha last week. “They tried to wheel her up towards business class, but she was quite a large lady and they couldn’t get her through the aisle,” he told Nine News. “They looked a bit frustrated, then they just looked at me and saw seats were available beside me.” Ring said he was made to wait next to the corpse even after the plane landed. Ring and his wife, Jennifer Colin, were seated next to the corpse while travelling en-route to Venice. Ring said he was seated with the body for around four hours despite other empty seats. Qatar Airways apologised “for any inconvenience or distress this incident may have caused.”

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 “An unknown anime fan solved a long-standing math problem”

From the WSJ: “Eleanor Maguire wasn’t great at navigating the streets of London, and she started to think that the brains of the people who were expert navigators—the city’s famous cabdrivers—might actually be different than hers. She burst into her lab at University College London and told her mentor, Chris Frith, that she’d just seen a movie called “The Knowledge” about a group of would-be London cabdrivers, and that it had given her an idea for a scientific study. Frith told her to go for it. Maguire, who had cancer and died Jan. 4 at age 54, specialized in the hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in memory. In a series of studies, she demonstrated that human memories aren’t movies that we replay in our minds the way we watch movies on TV. Rather, they are imperfect scenes that we construct in our minds. When we’re thinking about where we want to go, our brains construct scenes that show us how to get there.”

The game of Ultimate Frisbee is helping to heal some of the wounds in the Middle East

From Reason: “Starting an Ultimate Frisbee league to repair a war-torn country sounds like the plot of a buddy comedy, yet it’s a reality in Iraqi Kurdistan. After German and American aid workers introduced Frisbees to the country in 2019, the sport quickly caught on. By 2023, the scrappy Duhok Shepherds team was flying to Dubai for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Ultimate Club Championship. It was the first time many team members had left Iraq. By November 2024, the team was competing in Doha, Qatar, their uniforms proudly displaying both the Iraqi national flag and the Kurdish tricolor. Invented by New Jersey high schoolers in the 1960s and popularized by hippies, the sport is now the basis of a European relief effort. Beyond those aid organizations, European players have run grassroots fundraising efforts to get the Iraqi Ultimate league off the ground.”

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 “Her research on the brains of UK cab drivers changed science”