Author: Mathew Ingram

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

Former Twitter employees finally get severance offers after months of waiting, only to find them unsatisfactory. Twitter helps drive political mayhem in Brazil. Elon Musk says that Twitter will soon allow users to post tweets that are four thousand characters in length. It may be a new year, but Musk’s ownership of the platform continues to generate ample controversy.

To back up a bit: Musk’s bid to acquire Twitter for forty-four billion dollars, which he initially filed last April, was controversial in part because of his comments about how Twitter needed to do more to protect free speech. His decision to then delay the acquisition, purportedly over concerns about fake accounts, was also widely criticized, since many believed those arguments were a ruse designed to reduce the price, as I wrote at the time for CJR. But the apprehensiveness around all this was a drop in the ocean compared to what has happened since Musk finalized his acquisition of the company in late October (after the most recent edition of this Thursday newsletter came out), getting rid of almost two thirds of the staff—including swaths of the teams responsible for moderating harassment and disinformation on the network—restoring the accounts of prominent right-wing trolls, and suspending a number of journalists, seemingly because he didn’t like what they were writing about.

Musk also stoked the flames of controversy by leaking internal Twitter documents to a number of journalists and right-wing commentators including Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Berenson, in an attempt to show that the previous management of the company colluded with the FBI and others to ban conservative accounts, and to downplay information about COVID and Hunter Biden, Joe’s son. In The Nation, Ross Barkan wrote that many mainstream journalists ignored the Twitter Files because “Musk has evolved into a puerile reactionary, suspending journalist accounts at will and tossing off idiotic gibes to his 122 million followers” (though Barkan concluded that the story did, nonetheless, matter). Oliver Darcy, of CNN, said that the files amounted to “grossly misleading claims” that were “blindly amplified to millions by Fox News.”

Continue reading “Is Twitter dying, and if so, what does that mean for journalism?”

In a Wired magazine article from 1993, before the consumer web even began, Mitch Kapor wrote about the coming Digital Highway and said: “In the worst case, we could wind up with networks that have the principal effect of fostering addiction to a new generation of electronic narcotics (glitzy, interactive multimedia successors to Nintendo and MTV); their principal themes revolving around instant gratification through sex, violence, or sexual violence; their uses and content determined by mega-corporations pushing mindless consumption of things we don’t need and aren’t good for us.

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.

Vicente Lusitano was an African-Portuguese composer and music theorist who was most likely born between 1520 and 1522, and who died sometime after 1562. Probably the child of an enslaved African woman and a Portuguese noble, Lusitano traversed Europe in a career that saw him depart the Iberian Peninsula for Rome as a Catholic priest in 1550 and, around a decade later, relocate from Italy to Germany as a married Protestant. He wrote sacred and secular vocal music, taught extensively and produced scholarship that includes a unique manuscript treatise on improvised vocal counterpoint. But until recently, Lusitano has been mostly overlooked by music histories. He has been omitted altogether in some instances, and his appearances in centuries of academic literature have consistently minimized his biography.

The Renaissance riddle known as the Sola Busca tarot card deck

Considered the oldest complete seventy-eight card tarot deck in existence, the Sola Busca — named for the family of Milanese nobles who owned it for some five generations — was the first to be produced using copperplate engraving. It is also the earliest known tarot deck that illustrates the Major and Minor Trumps in the way that has become the standard, with characters and objects depicting allegorical scenes. In the Renaissance era this would have been revolutionary, while, today, some of these cards may seem familiar. In 1909, when Arthur Edward Waite commissioned artist Pamela Colman–Smith to illustrate his The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), she drew inspiration — and for nearly a dozen cards, the exact imagery — from the Sola Busca deck.

Continue reading “Hundreds of years later, a Black composer gets his due”

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.

Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe used cave drawings to record detailed information about the lives of animals around them, a new study claims. Markings found on paintings dating back at least 20,000 years have long been suspected as having meaning but had not been decoded until now. The initial discovery that the markings related to animal life-cycles was made by furniture conservator Ben Bacon. He then teamed up with professors from two universities to write their paper. Their findings have now been published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal. Bacon spent countless hours of his free time looking at examples of cave painting and analysing data to decipher the markings.

Gustave Zander and the 19th-Century Gym

Long before Muscle Beach, tubs of whey protein powder, or the distinct grade of shame that emanates from an unused fitness club card, Dr. Gustaf Zander (1835–1920) was helping his pupils tone their pecs in his Stockholm Mechanico-Therapeutic Institute. Having opened his first institute in 1865 with twenty-seven machines, by 1877 “there were fifty-three different Zander machines in five Swedish towns”. And not long after, Zander reinvented himself professionally. Once a lecturer in gymnastics at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, he soon became an international fitness entrepreneur, exporting equipment to Russia, England, Germany, and Argentina.

Continue reading “Amateur archaeologist helps crack Ice Age cave art code”

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.

Nearly 200 miles of tunnels snake beneath Helsinki, providing a weatherproof subterranean playground for the Finnish capital’s residents and visitors. Yet hidden behind the bright lights of the underground attractions—which include a museum, church, go-kart track, hockey rink, and more—are emergency shelters fitted with life-sustaining equipment: an air filtration system, an estimated two-week supply of food and water, and cots and other comforts. The shelters reflect a chilling geopolitical reality for a small country that shares an 833-mile border with Russia, its longtime nemesis. Helsinki began excavating tunnels through bedrock in the 1960s to house power lines and sewers and other utilities, then realized the space could also shelter the city’s population of 630,000 in the event of another invasion from the East.

The hit Italian song that sounds like English but is actually gibberish

In 1972, a popular Italian singer named Adriano Celentano released a single called “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” written by him amd performed with his wife Claudia Mori, a singer/actress turned record producer. Both the title of the song and its lyrics are gibberish. Celentano said later that his intention was to explore communication barriers. “Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did,” Celentano said in an interview with NPR. “So at a certain point, because I like American slang—which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian—I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn’t mean anything.”

Continue reading “Cold War fears led Helsinki to build a world underground”

I think I probably learned more about the leadup to the First World War from a recent edition of Talia Lavin’s “The Sword and the Sandwich” newsletter than I probably ever did in history class. The newsletter is ostensibly about sandwiches, but often veers rather sharply into other topics, and this one was about how history only looks inevitable in hindsight:

“In 1903, more than a decade before a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist student would spark the First World War, a coterie of Serbian Army officers entered the royal bedroom in the old Beaux-Arts palace in Belgrade that was the home of the Obrenović dynasty. Armed with revolvers, they hunted down the 26-year-old king, Alexander I, and his deeply unpopular queen Draginja, flushing them out of their hiding place in a wardrobe and filling them with bullets. The assassins then mutilated the bodies beyond recognition with their sabers, and, in an ecstasy of triumph, hurled the corpses from a second-floor window, onto piles of garden manure. 

The army officers’ leader—known by his nom de guerre “Apis,” for the primordial Egyptian bull-god—was a prominent member of the same Black Hand society that would plot the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand a decade later. The point here is that you never know where in history you are. It may well be that the May Coup organizers—decorated military men full of fanatical zeal—could not have imagined a higher drama than the one they engaged in, throwing a disemboweled king and queen onto the dung-heap that fed the royal roses.

Yet it was the tremblingly nervous teenaged fanatic Gavrilo Princip who stepped onto the footboard of the stalled royal motorcar, and shot Franz Ferdinand and his hapless wife. Princip then tried to kill himself, and failed. Another of the conspirators, eighteen years old, threw a bomb that hit the royal motorcade but caused no injuries, ate a cyanide pill that only made him vomit, and finally jumped into a river. It being summertime, the water was less than a foot deep; he died in prison three years later of tuberculosis.”

In a recent edition of her newsletter “The Sword and the Sandwich,” writer Talia Lavin (who is Jewish) writes about the history behind some Hanukkah traditions such as latkes and “gelt,” the chocolate coins that many children get:

“Take latkes, for example. Delicious, beloved latkes. As ancient as the practice of frying things in oil is, we all know potatoes didn’t arrive in Europe until after the Columbian interchange, and there are a suspicious number of Central and Eastern European analogues to the latke, like Ukrainian deruny or Czech bramboráky. The idea that a bunch of Jews sitting around playing dreidel for a stack of chocolate coins represents an unbroken line of tradition dating back to the Second Temple, when Maccabees slaughtered elephants on the streets of Jerusalem, is a bit of sweet twaddle, the sort of semi-harmless hokum I got served in huge helpings as an Orthodox kid.

It seems particularly apropos that gelt—the ubiquitous gold-foil-wrapped waxy chocolate coins doled out to children and snacked on furtively by adults at this time each year—has a very concrete, quite recent historical origin. Money is among the first things kids get lied to about, even when it isn’t real. Gelt, it turns out, isn’t a beautiful tradition of commemorating the first coins minted by the Hasmonean dynasty, an enduring symbol of their establishment of an independent Jewish kingdom that had shucked off the fetters of imperial rule.

According to scholars and historians , the giving of gelt—which is Yiddish for “money”—dates back no further than perhaps the sixteenth century, when it became traditional to give older yeshiva students, who struggled with penury like all grad students since time began, a little extra to make it through the depths of winter. By the seventeenth century, this evolved into a Chanukah practice of tipping the often-itinerant minor religious figures who helped Jewish communal life function. It took the advent of the nineteenth-century concept of childhood as a precious and vulnerable chapter of life for gelt to become something that one gave to one’s children—and a full-on collision with American consumerism for that money to transmute into chocolate and presents.”

I don’t play a lot of games — especially car-racing games — and I don’t really care that much about NASCAR or Formula One or any of those things. But I was fascinated to read about an incident that happened in a race in November, in which driver Ross Chastain used a technique from a video game, known as “riding the wall” to move ahead by two spots and qualify for the championship (he also set a track record for fastest lap). Here’s a video of it:

In an interview after the race, Chastain was asked how he came up with the maneuver, and he said: “I played a lot of Nascar 2005 on the GameCube with Chad [Chastain, his brother] growing up, and you can get away with it. I never knew if it would actually work … and I just made the choice, and I grabbed fifth gear down the back and full-committed. Once I got against the wall, I basically let go of the wheel and just hoped I didn’t catch the turn four access gate or something crazy.”

Writer Max Read has a great newsletter called Read Max (great name) in which he talks about a variety of things, and in a recent one he asked his friend Dan Nosowitz to write about a tiny phone he became fascinated by recently, called the Unihertz Jelly 2. Dan, he said, has “a compulsion to purchase badly made, strangely designed, possibly quite dangerous gadgets from companies you’ve never heard of.”

“Where has the human-sized smartphone gone? Even normal sized phones are too big now, let alone the specifically large ones. Hands, meanwhile, have remained the same size, at least to the best of my knowledge. My advice to anyone looking for a small phone is to turn away from your conglomerates and your chaebols, and shun the iPhone and the Galaxy. Turn instead to this: The Unihertz Jelly 2.

I need to be clear, up front here, that this is not a traditionally “good” phone, in the sense of “it works consistently to the quality you have come to expect from flagship Samsung and Apple products,” and I am absolutely not a reliable narrator or guide. There is something wrong with my brain which causes me to dislike and distrust competently made and assembled electronics. I see the fact that the iPhone works consistently as a gigantic red flag. There are, in fact, many phones that work well. Too many. “Working well” is boring.”

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.

The Ward, a reading group founded by Tennessee-based author Susan Meachen, largely went dormant after a September 2020 post — supposedly written by her daughter — was shared from her page announcing that she had died by suicide following bullying and harassment from members of the book community. Now, more than two years later, Meachen has decided that she wants her life back and returned to Facebook to reveal that she was never actually dead in the first place. “I debated on how to do this a million times and still not sure if it’s right or not,” Meachen wrote in her back-from-the-dead return to the group on Jan. 2. Those who mourned her are furious.

The truffle industry is a giant scam – not just truffle oil, the whole thing

Matt Babich writes: “Truffle-flavored oil is not made from truffles. What is sold as truffle flavor is 2,4-dithiapentane, an organosulfur compound that is naturally found in truffles. It is practically impossible to extract it from truffles, but it can be extracted from oil. There are several reasons why this is terrible. Synthetic garbage sold as a luxury gourmet item gives customers the idea that truffles have an intense gas-like aroma. It is a scam because it deceives customers; that is, it falsely represents a product that has nothing to do with truffles and puts all restaurateurs in an unfavorable position: if you don’t flavor truffle dishes with added aromas  the guests are used to, they will think you’re being cheap.”

Continue reading “This author’s suicide now appears to be a hoax”

From writer Helena Fitzgerald’s great newsletter Griefbacon (which is the literal translation of a German term meaning “the weight you gain after overeating for emotional reasons”). I’ve only extracted the list here, but you should click through and read all the descriptions as well:

“I hated Twitter because of course I hated Twitter; if you didn’t hate Twitter, you weren’t there. Hating it was the only way to live in it; that was word for love in its language. I hated Twitter, and I still hate Twitter, and an alarming percentage of everything I love or am proud of derives from the time I wasted on that stupid website, complaining about how the website is garbage. Here are some final ways I would describe Twitter.

• A group of drunk girls in the bathroom
• Times Square
• What people who didn’t have friends in middle school think having friends in middle school was like.
• A Denny’s at 2am in a town with a vibrant (derogatory) local theater scene.
• The Titanic but everybody wants to talk about Joan Didion.
• The Titanic but everybody wants to tell you why they don’t count as rich.
• The JFK assassination episode of Mad Men.
• The longest-form Jenny Holzer installation ever.
• Listening to two people have an argument on the street directly underneath your window
• Adderall.
• Sitting at the kids’ table at Thanksgiving when you are supposed to be sitting at the adults’ table.
• Sitting at the adults’ table at Thanksgiving when honestly you should still be sitting at the kids’ table.
• Going into the downstairs bathroom at the home of a relative you actually don’t know very well on Thanksgiving and hiding out there while everybody argues
• The fever dream of a high school freshman who has the flu but has come to school anyway and has fallen asleep in the middle of class.
• The depiction of Hell in noted prestige television series Adventure Time.
• Trying to leave a party where the vibe has soured
• The mythical city of Babel”

In Mumbai, thousands of “dabbawalas” deliver hot lunches to hundreds of thousands of customers throughout the city, and then return the empty dabbas (lunchboxes) the same day. They are a model of efficiency, a decentralized network that functions better than many mechanized or computerized ones, and yet they don’t even use smartphones. Harvard Business Review wrote about the dabbawala system in 2012 (found via the Why Is This Interesting newsletter):

“The 5,000 or so dabbawalas in the city have an astounding service record. Every working day they transport more than 130,000 lunchboxes throughout Mumbai, the world’s fourth-most-populous city. That entails conducting upwards of 260,000 transactions in six hours each day, six days a week, 52 weeks a year (minus holidays), but mistakes are extremely rare.

Amazingly, the dabbawalas—semiliterate workers who largely manage themselves—have achieved that level of performance at very low cost, in an ecofriendly way, without the use of any IT system or even cell phones.

The dabbawala service is legendary for its reliability. Since it was founded, in 1890, it has endured famines, wars, monsoons, Hindu-Muslim riots, and a series of terrorist attacks. It has attracted worldwide attention and visits by Prince Charles, Richard Branson, and employees of Federal Express, a company renowned for its own mastery of logistics.”

Fred Fugen, Vincent “Veush” Cotte, and Aurélien “Bras Noir” Chatard set a new record for terrain-flying in wingsuits. They travelled 7.5 kilometres over Mont Blanc — the highest mountain in the Alps — in just 3 minutes and 5 seconds, after jumping in formation from a helicopter just above the summit.

In 1972, a popular Italian singer named Adriano Celentano released a single called “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” written by him amd performed with his wife Claudia Mori, a singer/actress turned record producer. Both the title of the song and its lyrics are gibberish. Celentano said later that his intention with the song was not to create a humorous novelty song but to explore communication barriers, and to demonstrate how English sounds to people who don’t understand the language proficiently.

“Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did,” Celentano said in an interview with NPR. “So at a certain point, because I like American slang—which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian—I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn’t mean anything.”

Update: Someone let me know that Adriano’s daughter Mina released a remake a few years ago. Adriano even makes an appearance in the video