Author: Mathew Ingram

On January 7, 2021, the day after rioters stormed the Capitol, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—which was not then, but is now, known as Meta—suspended Donald Trump’s accounts on those platforms, because, the company said, there was a risk that he would encourage further violence. Meta suspended Trump’s accounts indefinitely, but, as I wrote for CJR at the time, the company’s Oversight Board, an arms-length body of advisors that reviews Meta’s content decisions, said a few months later that this was arbitrary, since Meta did not then have a detailed policy for suspensions of public figures. The board advised Meta to come up with one, and the company subsequently said that it would review Trump’s suspension in two years. Last week, with its time up, Meta announced that it would reinstate Trump’s accounts at some point “in the coming weeks.” They appear to have been restored already, although Trump has yet to post. (He has an exclusivity deal with his own social network, Truth Social, but is reportedly planning a return to Twitter and Facebook). At time of writing, the most recent post on his Facebook page is from January 6, 2021, asking everyone at the Capitol to “remain peaceful.”

Last week, Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs (and a former deputy prime minister of the UK), wrote in a blog post that the company believes that “open debate and the free flow of ideas are important values,” and that the public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying, “the good, the bad and the ugly.” Clegg said that Meta had gone through an elaborate process to “assess whether the serious risk to public safety that existed in January 2021” had receded, including an evaluation of the current environment according to the company’s Crisis Policy Protocol, a process by which it tries to “assess on and off-platform risks of imminent harm and respond with specific policy and product actions”, along with “expert assessments on the current security environment.” The conclusion? That the risk had receded. Not that Meta is giving Trump carte blanche on his return. His accounts will henceforth be subject to what Clegg called “new guardrails,” including restrictions on posts that might contribute to “the sort of risk that materialized on January 6, such as content that delegitimizes an upcoming election.”

Clegg’s post, however, didn’t say anything about what would happen should Trump delegitimize a past election, which is something that he does all the time—and a Meta spokesperson subsequently confirmed to CNN’s Oliver Darcy that the company will allow Trump to post about the 2020 election without consequences. And, since Trump is now a candidate, his account will not be not subject to fact-checking by Meta, a decision the company made even before allowing his return, also according to CNN. Charlie Warzel, of The Atlantic, writes that Trump “has offered zero evidence that he changed during his social-media exile” and will likely use Facebook to whip up partisan resentment upon his return. If anything, Warzel argues, Trump’s posts on Truth Social suggest that he “has become more erratic, angry, and conspiratorial.”

Continue reading “Trump and Facebook: The platform is trying to have it both ways”

Janet Vertesi writes about trying to go to Disneyland with her family while remaining anonymous: “Once upon a time, you could just go to Disneyland. You could get tickets at the gates, stand in line for rides, buy food and tchotchkes, even pick up copies of your favorite Disney movies at a local store. It wasn’t even that long ago. The last time I visited, in 2010, the company didn’t record what I ate for dinner or detect that I went on Pirates of the Caribbean five times. It was none of their business. But sometime in the last few years, tracking and tracing became their business. Like many corporations out there, Walt Disney Studios spent the last decade transforming into a data company.”

$500 million Ponzi scheme preyed on Mormons

The Las Vegas attorney, then 49, had been anticipating this visit for months, he would tell an FBI hostage negotiator. He’d already drafted letters to his wife and four children, explaining what he could and describing how much he loved them. On this Thursday in March, Beasley knew his time was up. He placed the letters upstairs on the desk in his office. Then, alone in the house, he went to the front door. One of the agents — identified only as “J.M.” in a detailedcriminal complaint filed March 4 in the U.S. District Court of Nevada — opened his suit jacket and flashed his badge. Beasley stepped fully into the doorway. He held a loaded pistol against his head.

Continue reading “Going to Disneyland without giving them your data”

Authorities in Western Australia are searching for a radioactive capsule, which they believe fell off a truck while being transported. The capsule is smaller than a penny, while the search zone is a stretch of vast desert highway about as long as California’s coastline. The capsule, a small silver cylinder measuring 0.3 inches by 0.2 inches, came from a Rio Tinto mine and formed a part of a sensor used in mining. It contains a small amount of cesium-137 and is dangerously radioactive, according to the authorities. An hour of exposure at about a meter away is the equivalent of having 10 X-rays, and prolonged contact can cause skin burns, acute radiation sickness and cancer, they said.

The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is coining new words to describe our world

From Clive Thompson: “The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is a project started by two artists and anthropologists, Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante. They founded it in 2014 specifically for the purpose of collecting, translating and creating a new vocabulary for the Anthropocene. In essence, they devote themselves to coining new words to help describe the new dislocations, emotions, and phenomena being caused by global warming and global weirding. They’ve traveled around the world, setting up an official-looking table — at which they sit, often wearing matching uniforms — and talk to members of the public about their climate experiences, working with them to craft new words.”

Continue reading “Australians scour the desert for radioactive capsule”

People often think they know what causes chronic depression. Surveys indicate that more than 80% of the public blames a “chemical imbalance” in the brain. The unbalanced brain chemical in question is serotonin, an important neurotransmitter with fabled “feel-good” effects. But the causes of depression go far beyond serotonin deficiency. Clinical studies have repeatedly concluded that the role of serotonin in depression has been overstated. Indeed, the entire premise of the chemical-imbalance theory may be wrong, despite the relief that Prozac seems to bring.

The Montreal Mafia murders: Blood, gore, cannolis, and hockey bags

On the morning they were arrested for allegedly burning bodies as part of a series of Mafia murders, Marie-Josée Viau and Guy Dion had already finished breakfast and packed their daughter off to elementary school. A Mother’s Day card hung on the fridge next to family photographs. Viau, 44, didn’t have to go to her shift at the roadside poutine restaurant until later that day, so she tried baking something new: blueberry phyllo puffs. The pastries were still on the stove top when police arrived at 9:56 a.m. on October 16, 2019. “We’re normal people,” Viau swore to the arresting officers. “We didn’t kill anyone.” But undercover recordings made by investigators told a different tale.

Continue reading “Popular theories about depression are wrong”

In a recent interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which has an estimated audience of 11 million listeners per episode on Spotify, a guest from Alaska presented an explosive discovery: There are tens of thousands of priceless woolly mammoth tusks lying on the river floor. “I’m going to start a bone rush,” the guest, John Reeves, a fossil collector and gold miner, announced. The podcast episode, which aired Dec. 30, was an instant sensation. Without hesitation, teams of men and women from around the country drove, flew and floated to New York City for a chance at finding a many-thousands-year-old artifact that could be worth at least six figures. “You can’t win the lottery if you don’t play,” said one.

Scientists are training ants to sniff out cancer

Ants live in a world of odor. Some species are completely blind. Others rely so heavily on scent that ones that lose track of a pheromone trail march in a circle, until dying of exhaustion. Ants have such a refined sense of smell, in fact, that researchers are now training them to detect the scent of human cancer cells. A study published this week highlights a keen ant sense and underscores how someday we may use sharp-nosed animals — or, in the case of ants, sharp-antennaed — to detect tumors quickly and cheaply. That’s important because the sooner that cancer is found, the better the chances of recovery. “The results are very promising,” said Baptiste Piqueret, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology who co-wrote the paper.

Continue reading “Are there mammoth tusks in Manhattan’s East River?”

In his book “Along the Road,” published in 1925, Aldous Huxley imagined a future in which everyone would have more leisure time — and he wasn’t optimistic about the idea:

“If, to-morrow or a couple of generations hence, it were made possible for all human beings to lead the life of leisure which is now led only by a few, the results, so far as I can see, would be as follows: There would be an enormous increase in the demand for such time-killers and substitutes for thought as newspapers, films, fiction, cheap means of communication and wireless telephones; to put it in more general terms, there would be an increase in the demand for sport and art. The interest in the fine art of love-making would be widely extended. And enormous numbers of people, hitherto immune from these mental and moral diseases, would be affiicted by boredom, depression and universal dissatisfaction. The fact is that, brought up as they are at present, the majority of human beings can hardly fail to devote their leisure to occupations which, if not positively vicious, are at least stupid, futile and, what is worse, secretly realized to be futile.”

When the doctor in Alabama saw what a hornet sting had done to Eli Schlageter, his advice to Eli’s parents was unequivocal: Get an EpiPen. But they were stunned to learn that a single dose of the lifesaving drug, used to treat severe allergic reactions, cost $800 — even with insurance coverage. So the pharmacist in the small farming town of Geraldine turned to an envelope full of carefully folded hundred-dollar bills from an anonymous donor. Every month for more than a decade, a local farmer made anonymous cash donations to the pharmacy, aiming to help neighbors struggling to pay for prescription medication. They learned of his good deed only after he died at 80 in January.

Women in the age of polar exploration

Opportunities were restricted during the so-called Heroic Age, but women still dreamed of exploration… and sometimes managed to reach the polar regions. Ernest Shackleton, known for his expeditions to Antarctica, received a letter from three women eager to join his crew. “We are three strong healthy girls,” they explained. “Willing to undergo any hardships that you yourself undergo.” They even offered to trade their “feminine garb” for “masculine attire” if their clothes proved to be a hindrance. In 1806, Isobel Gunn disguised herself as a man named John Fubbister so she could join an expedition with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Her secret was only discovered when she got sick and went to her supervisor, Alexander Henry, for help.

Continue reading “This farmer secretly paid for his neighbors prescriptions”

Last weekend, the Indian government ordered YouTube to remove clips from a BBC documentary. It sent a similar order to Twitter, telling that platform to remove any tweets that featured links to those clips and pointing to more than fifty specific posts that had done so. The documentary, called India: The Modi Question, covers, in part, a series of violent riots in the western Indian state of Gujarat in 2002. More than a thousand people died—most of them Muslims. The documentary features quotes from UK government correspondence that described the riots as having had “all the hallmarks of an ethnic cleansing” and held Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist who was then the chief minister of Gujarat, “directly responsible.” Modi is now India’s prime minister.

According to the orders from India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the clips from the documentary and the tweets referring to them were to be removed under information technology laws that the Modi government implemented in 2021. According to one report, senior officials from different branches of the government reviewed the documentary and found it to be “an attempt to cast aspersions on the authority and credibility of the Supreme Court of India, sow divisions among various Indian communities, and make unsubstantiated allegations regarding the actions of foreign governments in India.” (The Supreme Court had previously cleared Modi of blame for the riots.) One official told The Hindu that the documentary undermined “the sovereignty and integrity of India,” and had the potential to “adversely impact public order within the country.”

India has several laws that give officials the authority to order information providers to remove or block access to content, including the Information Technology Act of 2000, which allows the government to block content “in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India, security of the State, and public order.” The additional law that the Modi government passed in 2021 bills itself as a “digital media ethics code” that requires social media platforms to take down content within thirty-six hours of receiving a government order, and to otherwise assist law enforcement agencies with their inquiries. Foreign social-media companies are also required to employ a local staffer who can handle such official requests. Some critics have referred to this as a “hostage-taking law,” on the grounds that these local employees could end up in prison should their employer refuse to play ball.

Continue reading “A BBC documentary highlights growing social-media censorship in India”

Earth’s inner core has recently stopped spinning, and may now be reversing the direction of its rotation, according to a surprising new study that probed the deepest reaches of our planet with seismic waves from earthquakes. The results suggest that Earth’s center pauses and reverses direction on a periodic cycle lasting about 60 to 70 years, a discovery that might solve longstanding mysteries about climate and geological phenomena that occur on a similar timeframe, and that affect life on our planet. But while it sounds like the plot of a disaster movie, most scientists think this periodic spin switch is a normal part of its behavior that does not pose risks for life on our planet.

The Wright Brothers’ flight wasn’t the first

We’reused to thinking that the Wright brothers flew the first powered flight, but Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft – the definitive source for airplane-related facts – says a 1901 flight by Connecticut aviation pioneer Gustave Whitehead was the first successful powered flight in history, beating the Wright brothers’ first flight by more than two years. Jane’s has traditionally backed the Wright Brothers as first in flight, but now they say the evidence for Whitehead’s flight is strong enough for the publication to reverse course and recognize it as the first successful powered flight. Jane’s Editor Paul Jackson describes what happened in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on August 14, 1901.

Continue reading “Earth’s core has stopped and may be reversing direction”

Eleven pairs of shoes were dangling over the New York City skyline. It was September of 1932, as the Great Depression was reaching its height. Unemployment and uncertainty could be felt throughout the city and the entire country. But on West 49th Street, a pillar of hope was under construction: the art deco skyscraper that would come to be known as 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The ironworkers constructing its 70 floors were taking a break, sharing boxed lunches and cigarettes. They appeared to be completely unfazed by the location of this break: a narrow steel beam jutting out into the sky, hundreds of feet above the pavement. But this iconic photo is not really what it appears to be.

What happens when anaesthesia fails

Donna Penner’s panic attacks began after a small medical procedure that she had before her 45th birthday. She was working in the accountancy department of a local trucking company and had just celebrated the wedding of one of her daughters. But she had been having severe bleeding and pain during her period, and her family physician had suggested that they investigate the causes with exploratory surgery. It should have been a routine procedure, but, for reasons that are far from clear, the general anaesthetic failed. Rather than lying in peaceful oblivion, she woke up just before the surgeon made the first cut into her abdomen.

Continue reading “An iconic photo of American workers is not what it seems”

Last September, Swiss cheesemaker Beat Wampfler and a team of researchers from the Bern University of Arts placed nine 22-pound wheels of Emmental cheese in individual wooden crates in Wampfler’s cheese cellar. Then, for the next six months each cheese was exposed to an endless, 24-hour loop of one song using a mini-transducer, which directed the sound waves directly into the cheese wheels. The “classical” cheese mellowed to the sounds of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The “rock” cheese listened to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” An ambient cheese listened to Yello’s “Monolith,” the hip-hop cheese was exposed to A Tribe Called Quest’s “Jazz (We’ve Got).”

What it’s like to be the only person with a unique genetic condition

Beverly Gage writes about finding out she has a unique genetic disorder: “In early 2021, Dr. Michael Ombrello, an investigator at the National Institutes of Health, received a message from doctors at Yale about a patient with a novel genetic mutation—the first of its kind ever seen. A specialist in rare inflammatory and immune disorders, Ombrello was concerned by what first-round genetic tests showed: a disabling mutation in a gene, known as PLCG2, that’s thought to be crucial for proper immune functioning. It was hard to discern how the patient, a forty-eight-year-old woman, had survived for so long without serious infections. That’s how I ended up as a patient in his clinic.”

Continue reading “Playing music to cheese as it ages changes the flavor”

Unlike what history tells us medieval women were like, these “trobairitz” or female troubadors  openly criticized men and even made fun of their romantic advances. They felt no need to submit or be meek simply because society expected it of them. Some of them, such as Comtessa de Dia, openly sang about sexual exploits and infidelity. On at least one occasion, a trobairitz song was written specifically from a woman’s point of view addressing another woman! Trobairitz wrote and performed in the same accepted styles of their male counterparts (the troubadours). Themes were similar of course, as was poem structure. Singing or writing about politics or other “masculine” topics was still off limits to women, so the trobairitz stuck with love and romance.

This subterranean cave city in Turkey could hold 20,000 people

The ancient city of Elengubu, known today as Derinkuyu, burrows more than 85m below the Earth’s surface, encompassing 18 levels of tunnels. The largest excavated underground city in the world, it was in near-constant use for thousands of years, changing hands from the Phrygians to the Persians to the Christians of the Byzantine Era. It was finally abandoned in the 1920s by the Cappadocian Greeks when they faced defeat during the Greco-Turkish war and fled abruptly en masse to Greece. Not only do its cave-like rooms stretch on for hundreds of miles, but it’s thought the more than 200 small, separate underground cities that have also been discovered in the region may be connected to these tunnels, creating a massive subterranean network.

Continue reading “In medieval times, women could be troubadors too”

David Sedaris writes about the last time he saw his sister Tiffany, who suffered from severe mental health issues and took her own life in May of 2013. At the time of her death, they had not spoken for several years. The last time he saw her was at the Symphony Hall in Boston, when he was on the verge of performing at the beginning of a tour.

“The last time I saw my sister Tiffany was at the stage door at Symphony Hall in Boston. I’d just finished a show and was getting ready to sign books when I heard her say, “David. David, it’s me.” We hadn’t spoken in four years at that point, and I was shocked by her appearance. Tiffany always looked like my mother when she was young. Now she looked like my mother when she was old, though at the time she couldn’t have been more than forty-five.

“It’s me, Tiffany.” She held up a paper bag with the Starbucks logo on it. Her shoes looked like she’d found them in a trash can. “I have something for you.” There was a security guard holding the stage door open and I said to him, “Will you close that please?” I had filled the house that night. I was in charge—Mr. Sedaris. “The door,” I repeated. “I’d like for you to close it now.”

And so the man did. He shut the door in my sister’s face and I never saw her or spoke to her again. Not when she was evicted from her apartment. Not when she was raped. Not when she was hospitalized after her first suicide attempt. She was, I told myself, someone else’s problem. I couldn’t deal with her anymore.”

from the Paris Review via A. J. Daulerio’s newsletter The Small Bow