Author: Mathew Ingram

Plenty of countries have built massive defenses in case of invasion (the Great Wall of China comes to mind), but few have taken it quite as far as Switzerland, which built an incredible network of hidden bunkers and artillery placements across the country, many of them disguised as rock formations, hillside chalets, or even regular homes. The enormous fortress chain was built in the 1940s, at an estimated cost of $10 billion in today’s dollars, after Germany started invading countries as part of its global expansion. There are believed to be more than 8,000 of them, known as the Swiss National Redoubt.

The most important parts of the redoubt were the fortifications of Sargans, St. Maurice, and the Gotthard region. Besides cannons and howitzers, the infrastructure in many of these caverns and tunnels consisted of dormitories, kitchens, field hospitals, rooms for the sick, bakeries, and enough space to accommodate 100 to 600 soldiers for up to several months.

Continue reading “Switzerland’s hidden artillery placements and bunkers”

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

Over the past few years, criticism of “Big Tech” has grown from an undercurrent of dissatisfaction into a full-fledged crusade by Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, and other critics to blunt the power of the quasi-monopolies that control consumer technology, and Facebook—which recently changed its name to Meta—has been at or near the top of that short list. When Congress held hearings into the 2016 election, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, was front and center, as he has been in antitrust lawsuits launched by the FTC and a number of states. This isn’t surprising, given Meta’s control over the information consumption habits of more than two-and-a-half billion people around the world. Despite all this negative attention, however, Meta’s market power continued to grow, along with its market value, which climbed as high as a trillion dollars last year, up from three hundred billion in 2017.

The past week has been a very different story, however. On February 2, Meta’s market value was still close to seven hundred and sixty-five billion dollars, not that far from its peak, at least in proportional terms. The following day, its share price fell by more than twenty-five percent, wiping about two hundred billion dollars from the company’s market value—the largest decrease in value in the history of US stock exchanges, according to a report from CNBC. When the dust settled, Meta’s share price was lower than it had been since May of 2020. The stock dropped again the following day, although not by as much, and fell again the day after, although it has since recovered somewhat.

What happened? The most obvious answer is that Meta reported its quarterly financial results, and investors and stock analysts didn’t like what they heard. Although the company’s revenue was a little above expectations, its forecast for the current quarter was well below what analysts were looking for, and its earnings were much lower than consensus forecasts. Most important of all, the number of users who login to the service every day fell for the first time in the company’s eighteen-year history, to below two billion. The drop was not a very large one, but when you have been growing steadily for more than a decade, even a small drop can take on huge importance. As the Washington Post noted, the loss of users “was greatest in Africa, Latin America and India, suggesting that the company’s product is saturated globally.”

Continue reading “Meta is looking a lot less invincible these days”

If you know how vision works, you may know that what you see — and particularly what colours you can see — is controlled by the rods and cones in your retina, at the back of your eye. Rods are sensitive to light, and cones allow you to see colour. Most people have three different types of cones, which allows them to see up to 1 million shades of colour — this is known as trichromacy. But relatively recently, scientists became aware that certain people, in most cases women, have a fourth type of cone, and this allows them to see up to 100 million different shades of colour. They are called “tetrachromats.”

It would be easy to look at the vivid array of colour contained in the paintings of artist Concetta Antico and assume she is using artistic licence. The trunks of her eucalyptus trees are hued with violet and mauve; the yellow crest on her cockatoo has hints of green and blue; the hypercolour of a garden landscape looks almost psychedelic.

“It’s not just an affectation and it’s not artistic licence,” says Antico. “I’m actually painting exactly what I see. If it’s a pink flower and then all of a sudden you see a bit of lilac or blue, I actually saw that.”

Antico is a tetrachromat, which means she has a fourth colour receptor in her retina compared with the standard three which most people have. While those of us with three of these receptors – called cone cells – have the ability to distinguish around one million different colours, tetrachromats see an estimated 100 million.

Continue reading “What it’s like to see 100 million colours”

If you’ve got $380,000 on your hands and you’re looking for an unsual home, Zillow has just the thing — an abandoned Atlas F missile silo in Abilene, Kansas. It’s going to take a little work, since there’s water inside it that looks like it’s been there for quite some time, and there’s a lot of rust. But it’s got about 7,000 square feet of space, according to the listing — although only about 1,200 of that would be any good for things like bedrooms. It currently has zero bedrooms and one bathroom. Here’s what the entrance looks like:

If you want an idea of what your missile silo pad might look like if you fixed it up, look no further than this Wired piece from 2009 about a guy who did exactly that with a different Atlas F silo — which is also in Abilene, but the Abilene that’s in Texas, not the Abilene that’s in Kansas.

Bruce Townsley was up late one night in the mid-’80s when he saw an unusual guest take a seat on Johnny’s set: a nuclear missile base real estate mogul named Ed Peden. Peden lives in an abandoned missile base in Kansas and was invited on the show to tell Johnny all about his underground lifestyle. Townsley was hooked.

Using the pre-Google research librarians at the public library outside of Chicago where he then lived, Townsley tracked Peden down. And though it wasn’t until 1997 that Townsley secured his current property, the idea blossomed in his head over the years. After completing his fair share of conventional home remodels in the Chicago area, Townsley wanted a challenge to keep him busy for the rest of his life. So far, his silo property has perfectly fit the bill.

Other Atlas missile silos have been turned into even more interesting things, including an LSD production facility, a scuba-diving training facility, and a research facility for exploring the colonization of Mars, partially funded by William Shatner. But the ultimate reno of a missile silo has to be this one, which is also in Kansas, just north of Wichita. It’s been turned into a luxury doomsday complex called Survival Condos, where a single-floor unit with everything goes for about $3 million.

The site says that includes “mandatory training” — on the indoor shooting range, no doubt — as well as “a three-year per person food supply, fully furnished and custom designed interior, special equipment for registered members, computer access to condo systems, and much more.” The silo has a swimming pool, climbing wall, full gym facilities, hydronponic gardens, and a built-in food store for residents. There are no windows, but each suite has electronic displays that look like windows, which the site says “simulates Life-Like outdoor views complete with varying light levels that reflect time of day.”

Owner Larry Hall is an ex-government contractor, property developer and doomsday prepper, with a master’s degree in business, who worked for a private defence contractor, designing the weapons database for an air force surveillance plane, and later moved into constructing hardened data centres. He bought the silo in 2008 for $300,000 and spent two years and $20 million transforming the 60 metre-deep building into a 15-storey luxury bunker for the wealthy. Units have reportedly been bought by Tyler Allen, a real estate developer from Florida, and Nik Halik, an Australian entrepreneur who has flown on a civilian mission into outer space and dived to the wreck of the RMS Titanic.

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

Last week, criticism of Spotify for hosting the Joe Rogan podcast—and thereby enabling the distribution of misinformation about COVID, among other things—accelerated after music legend Neil Young chose to remove all of his work from the streaming service. “I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines—potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them,” Young wrote in a letter on his website (which has since been removed). He was followed by a number of other artists, including fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren, and the other former members of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Prince Harry, the Duke of York, and his wife Meghan Markle, also registered their concerns about the service, which they have partnered with for a series of podcasts.

Throughout this process, Spotify’s position has remained steadfast: it said it is sorry for any harm caused by Rogan’s podcast, and it plans to add content warnings and other measures, but it also maintained that it is a platform and not a publisher—in other words, simply a conduit for content produced by artists such as Rogan, and not a publisher that makes choices about which specific kinds of content to include. Daniel Ek, co-founder and CEO of Spotify, wrote in a blog post that the company supports “creator expression,” and that there are plenty of artists and statements carried on the service that he disagrees with. “We know we have a critical role to play in supporting creator expression while balancing it with the safety of our users,” he said. “In that role, it is important to me that we don’t take on the position of being content censor.”

The only problem with Spotify’s platform defense—at least as it pertains to Joe Rogan—is that it isn’t true (even some Spotify employees called it “a dubious assertion” according to the LA Times). Rogan’s podcast isn’t available through any other service such as YouTube Music, Amazon Music, etc. He has an exclusive contract with Spotify, a relationship the company paid $100 million for. In that sense, Spotify is his publisher. As Elizabeth Spiers, former editor of the New York Observer, pointed out, this is a clear editorial choice the company has made, just as the New York Times or the Washington Post choose whom they give a column to. If those columnists decide to say something wrong or dangerous, responsibility for that lies with the paper.

Continue reading “Of platforms, publishers, and responsibility”

Everyone seems to have found their own ways of dealing with COVID quarantine, whether it’s learning a language, practicing an instrument, baking a lot of sourdough bread, or doing Wordle puzzles. One of the things I got obsessed with for a little while — to the point where I was watching at least one or two videos a day, or letting them play on a second monitor while I was working — is what some call “narrow boating.”

That’s when you own (or rent) a canal boat and spend your days or weekends driving around Britain’s massive canal system at slow speed, just watching the countryside go by. They are called “narrow” boats because that’s exactly what they are — in order to pass through all of the locks between canals, a boat can’t be any wider than seven feet, and it can’t be any longer than about sixty feet. So what you get is a long, thin mobile home.

Continue reading “The stress-free charms of boating around Britain’s canal system”

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, the game of the moment is Wordle — an incredibly simple game that Josh Wardle designed for his partner as a harmless amusement. It has since taken off, and I think it’s for much the same reason that everyone started making sourdough bread during the first COVID lockdown — namely, boredom and a desire to escape. If people aren’t doing Wordle, then they are probably knitting or making pottery, or they’re watching all the original Star Trek series episodes in order.

In that vein, I think one of the things that is fascinating to me about Wordle is how different it is from almost everything else around it — and not just games, but media in general. In fact, it’s the opposite of almost everything that falls into that broad category, in almost every way (with one important exception). As I said, it is incredible simple — you get six chances to guess a five-letter word. That’s it. And there’s only one game per day. And it doesn’t cost anything, and there are no ads, and it’s not an app, and you can’t buy new guesses, and it doesn’t spy on your attempts and then try to sell you things.

Continue reading “What we talk about when we talk about Wordle”

In his day job, Parker Higgins is the director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and the former head of copyright activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But on the side, he has a passion for public-domain content, so in 2019 he put together a project called 1923, which became a year-long ‘zine which he distributed — on paper! — to subscribers who funded his Kickstarter campaign. The archives of the ‘zine are available online now, and they are fascinating. Here’s what Parker says in the preamble/about section of the site:

The year 1923 has served as an invisible barrier for decades. For the first two decades of the 21st century‚Äîthe very time period that archives, databases, and collections were really starting to come online — the commons was cut off at that year; works published before 1923 were safely in the public domain, while works published in 1923 or later were risky and required individual research.

On January 1, 2019, the public domain resumed its march forward after a 20-year hiatus. Our cultural commons now includes a handful of very famous works: one of the most iconic images of the silent film era; the first book of poetry by e e cummings; a legendary novelty song that topped the charts for weeks. These well-known works got lots of well-deserved attention in January 2019 as they rose into the public domain, their copyright restrictions falling away after so many years.

Continue reading “A monthly ‘zine of public domain treasures”

I confess I have a thing about photos of abandoned institutions — prisons, hospitals, amusement parks, shopping malls, etc. — and photographer Matthew Christopher has exactly the kind of thing I like: detailed and haunting shots of all kinds of crumbling churches and schools across the US. He posts them on his website, Abandoned America, but also on Instagram and Twitter. One of my favorite newsletter writers, Luke “Welcome to Hell World” O’Neill recently interviewed Christopher. As Luke put it in his intro:

You probably have your own local variations on the theme. Abandoned factories that made god knows what with glass hanging like jagged teeth in the windows after years of tossed stones. Town buildings left in bureaucratic limbo ripe for sneaking into. An old library with empty shelves or a squat little brick shit house of an elementary school whose halls echoed no children’s voices but our own surreptitious whispers. The “old firehouse.” The “old” whatever. Something was always the “old” something. A place where important things happened and now do not. 

Continue reading “Pictures from abandoned America”

Thanks to the popularity of the musical Hamilton, by Lin-Manuel Miranda, plenty of people know the role that the eponymous legislator played in the creation of the United States, before he was killed during a duel. They may even know that he helped create the idea of a central bank, as the nation’s first Treasury Secretary. But what is probably less known is how his rival, Aaron Burr, had almost as long-lasting and important a legacy in banking — one that relied on assistance from Hamilton — but his began with a bit of misdirection. As this short history details, the result was what became Chase Bank:

In the late 1790s, following the new US Constitution’s adoption, New York City was enjoying a period of commercial growth and expanding population. These increases didn‚Äôt come without a price, however, and one of the most vexing problems the city faced was the lack of clean water. Aaron Burr observed the need for a healthy water supply and devised a plan to employ the local demand for water into a vehicle he could use to enrich himself.

He proposed the creation of a private company — the Manhattan Company — that would provide clean water for street cleaning and firefighting as well as the infrastructure for the project by laying pipes. Burr’s Manhattan Company ultimately won approval from the state Legislature. However, Burr’s plan was an artifice and a ruse. What he really wanted to do was start a bank; hence, just before his Manhattan Company was approved, Burr inserted a clause in the bill giving his company sweeping powers to use surplus capital to function as a bank.

After Burr’s Manhattan Company achieved incorporation, it quickly began to engage in the banking business and operated under that name until it merged with Chase Bank in the early 1950s. After a series of subsequent mergers, beginning in the early 1980s and culminating with the union of the JPMorgan and Chase banks, JPMorgan Chase became the largest bank in the United States

John Neuman skateboards down the Alps

I guess if you are famous for singing “It’s better to burn out than to fade away” (from “My my, hey, hey” off the Rust Never Sleeps album from 1978) you have to be pretty careful not to do either one — and Neil Young seems to be doing more than just about any other senior citizen (he’s 76) to avoid either of those fates, with the possible exception of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Willie Nelson (okay, Elton John and Bruce Springsteen are doing okay too).

Neil just told Spotify to remove all of his music, because they let Joe Rogan promote COVID misinformation on his podcast, which Spotify bought in 2020 for $100 million. And he also just released a documentary — filmed by his wife, Darryl Hannah — to go along with his newest album, called Barn. It’s called that because he reunited with the members of Crazy Horse, his legendary band, and they set up shop in an 18th-century barn on a ranch in Colorado.

It’s kind of amazing to watch Neil wail away at his guitar and harmonica, stomping up and down in classic Neil Young style, wearing ripped jeans and an old T-shirt, just like he did 40 years or so ago. And all the guys bang away at their instruments too, although they do so a little more gently than they used to, and they are a bit more hunched over. Maybe they forget the lyrics now and then. Still, kind of inspirational. Pitchfork’s review says: “Neil Young is standing on the porch, smoking weed, waiting for somebody else to show up. That’s the basic premise of “They Might Be Lost,” the strangest, loosest—and thus, the quintessential—song from Barn, his latest album.”

Continue reading “Neil Young, still not burning out or fading away”

Toronto Life magazine has a fantastic retrospective of Toronto in the 1960s and ’70s, courtesy of a photo collection from Joan Latchford — a former nun who left the convent in the UK where she spent seven years, and returned to Toronto and bought a Hasselblad camera:

“Instead of paying bills, of which I had a number, I decided I would get something that I really wanted, which was a good camera,” she once said. She soon switched to a Leica, set up a darkroom in her basement, and started a photography career, knocking on magazine editors’ doors to sell her images. Her clients included the CBC, Chatelaine and the National Film Board’s stills division, which commissioned her to capture images of Toronto’s Caribbean diaspora. After her death in 2017, she left behind around 40,000 negatives, which she’d meticulously filed under categories like, “Men,” “Women,” “Children,” “Celebrities” and “Humour.” She also kept detailed notes: one of her phone books had B.B. King’s number in it.