Author: Mathew Ingram

It seems quaint now, but not that long ago, one of the biggest reasons for concern about the surveillance of our behavior by massive internet platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon — or by companies buying click data and GPS location from our smartphones — was that they might use that information to flog advertising at us in a more personalized and irritating way. This was supplanted quickly by a fear that our data might be used by foreign agents like the Internet Research Agency, a “troll farm” linked to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, or by those who wanted to target voters in order to get Trump elected. Those things are bad, obviously, but compared to what is happening now, they seem almost anodyne — like being concerned that you might get a bug bite while on a picnic in the woods, compared with seeing a massive grizzly bear advancing on your location, its teeth bared and its intentions obvious.

If you’ve been following The Torment Nexus for the last little while, you may recall a recent post titled “Be careful what you say on social media, part 2” — which was a followup to an earlier post. The first was triggered by the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a former student at Columbia who took part in peaceful pro-Palestine protests and was detained by agents of ICE — Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Department of Homeland Security. They told Khalil that his visa was being revoked, and when they were told that he had a green card, the agents said that this was being revoked as well. He was taken to a detention facility, and has been there ever since. The second post in this series was sparked by the similar detention of several other students, including Turkish graduate student Rumeysa Öztürk, Columbia PhD student Ranjani Srinivasan, and Yunseo Chung, who came to the US when she was seven. Öztürk’s main offence seems to be that she wrote an op-ed about Israel in a student paper.

In that post, I described some of the tools that ICE and others are using to identify people they wish to detain and/or rendition to a for-profit prison in El Salvador (something which is unconstitutional in a number of different ways, but continues to occur, despite the Supreme Court’s attempts to get the government to stop). There are a variety of methods that government agencies can use to monitor social media with the aid of AI and then use those posts as evidence of potentially un-American conduct, as part of what Marco Rubio has called a “Catch and Revoke” plan. As 404 Media has reported, an ICE contractor known as ShadowDragon has the ability to monitor more than 200 social media and other sites, including Bluesky, OnlyFans, Instagram, etc. As I wrote:

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 “The Trump administration is building a Panopticon”

From Wikipedia: “Sarah Bishop was born around 1759 on Long Island, New York. She led a life of privilege as a member of an affluent and well-educated family. During the American Revolutionary War, her family’s house was burnt by a raiding party from a British privateer. She was captured by the raiding party and eventually became the wife of the captain. After the captain was killed, she went overboard and swam towards the shore at Stamford, Connecticut. She then travelled to Westchester County, New York, where she took up residence in a rocky cleft or cave. Described as mentally sound and deeply devoted to her faith, her few possessions included an old pewter basin and a gourd shell for cooking. She slept on a solid rock with scattered old rags, and when a reporter visited her in 1804, her cave had no signs of food or an active fire.”

He wrote a cryptic note to the judge and then jumped out the window and escaped

From Now I Know: “In the spring of 1976, Albert Spaggiari robbed the Société Générale bank in Nice. Bank employees returned to work from a long weekend, having just celebrated Bastille Day, but they couldn’t get into the vault. The door had been welded shut. Once inside, the bankers saw the damage: all the lockboxes had been opened and almost all the cash was gone. In total, the thieves got away with the equivalent of as much as $10 million — $55 million in today’s dollars. Spaggiari was ultimately arrested and he confessed to being the mastermind. In a private meeting with the judge, he said he was going to implicate others, including local political figures. The judge couldn’t make sense of Spaggiari’s handwriting, so he got up to explain to the judge what he had written, and then leaped out the window, landed on a parked car, then jumped onto a waiting motorcycle and fled. He was never caught, and lived out his life on the lam, surviving another decade before dying of cancer at the age of 56.”

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 “She was forced to become a pirate and then lived in a cave”

From NPR: “In 2001, after working up to it for years, Tim Friede finally allowed himself to be bitten by a snake. Friede has been fascinated with snakes for as long as he can remember. He used to hunt garter snakes growing up in Wisconsin. As an adult, his obsession turned to venomous snakes — and the harm they cause people globally. He felt the most dramatic way to raise awareness of the issue was to allow himself to be bit, repeatedly. Right out of the gate, he says, “I was put in ICU after two cobra bites and I dropped in a coma for four days.” To date, he estimates he’s willingly been bit some 200 times by all manner of venomous snakes — black mambas, taipans, cobras, kraits and many others. Friede’s motivation evolved to see if he could develop immunity to this swirl of toxins — so that his body might provide a roadmap to making a broad kind of antivenom. Now, researchers say they’ve done just that, thanks in large part to the antibodies that Friede has developed over nearly a quarter century of self-envenomation.”

Victorian ladies who wanted to lose weight infected themselves with tapeworms

From Atlas Obscura: “The Victorian era, roughly the 1830s to 1900, is notorious for its bizarre beauty standards, and the even more bizarre secrets to meeting them. The ideal of the time was modeled after those afflicted by consumption—that is, tuberculosis. Pale skin, dilated eyes, rosy cheeks, crimson lips, and a meagre and fragile figure. From swallowing ammonia to bathing in arsenic—which they knew to be poisonous— to using figure-molding corsets in a quest for the “perfect” 16-inch waist, there was no limit to what fashionable Victorians would do. Most of these practices have, thankfully, gone out of style. There is one gruesome dietary idea, however, that has managed to survive—the tapeworm diet. The idea is simple: you take a pill containing a tapeworm egg. Once hatched, the parasite grows, ingesting part of whatever the host eats. In theory, this enables the dieter to lose weight and eat without worrying about calorie intake.”

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 let snakes bite him 200 times to create a better antivenom”

From the New York Times: “It was May 1996, and David Kaczynski, a counselor for troubled youth in upstate New York, sat down to write a letter to his brother Ted. A month earlier, his brother had been shockingly unmasked as the shadowy Unabomber, responsible for a 17-year campaign of bombings that had killed and maimed people across the country. Ted Kaczynski, a brilliant but mentally troubled mathematician who had retreated years earlier to a remote hovel in Montana, had been arrested based on information from a tipster to the F.B.I.. He was now in custody and facing what would almost certainly be a lifetime behind bars, if not a death sentence. The tipster was David. Sitting in his home in Schenectady, N.Y., David began writing the letter. He used a pencil, knowing he might have to erase before he got it right. “I wanted to tell him in person that we morally felt an obligation to stop the violence,” he said.

Many people believe that the engraving on the Pope’s tomb is a travesty

From Fast Company: “Pope Francis’s tomb is simple by design. Francis—a modest man who opted to live in humble quarters alongside his peers rather than in the Vatican’s official housing for the leader of the church—requested nothing more than his name and a cross to adorn regional marble (“the stone of Liguria, the land of his grandparents”). It really is quietly beautiful. But atop that marble is a tomb inscribed with the name “Franciscus.” Or what—due to terrible spacing between letters, known as kerning—reads something more like “F R   A NCIS VS.” Cheryl Jacobsen, a calligrapher and adjunct assistant professor at the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa, calls the engraving “horrifically bad,” noting that “there is no historical reason for spacing that bad.” Christopher Calderhead, editor and designer of Letter Arts Review, says it is “the most boneheaded rookie mistake you can imagine (pun intended).” Calderhead suspects the work was “farmed out to a run-of-the-mill tombstone company.”

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 Unabomber’s brother turned him in and then tried to win him back”

From Mental Floss: “Louis Knapp saw the girl in the red parka and decided to stop. It was roughly 3 p.m. on Sunday, December 1, 1946, and Knapp was driving along Route 67A in Bennington, Vermont. He asked the girl where she was going. To hike the Long Trail, she said, a reference to a path that climbed five miles up Glastenbury Mountain. She didn’t seem dressed for it, though. Knapp figured she was a student at Bennington College, which was right near where he had stopped. The two said little as Knapp neared his driveway on Route 9. Down the road roughly two miles was the entrance to the Long Trail. A few minutes later, Knapp’s daughter went outside, and there was no sign of the hitchhiker. The girl’s name was Paula Welden, and her fate would lend credence to the belief that the Long Trail seemed to harbor one story after another of people who simply vanished. So many, in fact, that it is called the Bennington Triangle.”

The mystery behind a Banksy painting that went missing from The Met is finally solved

From the Art Newspaper: “Banksy has been making mischief for years, including hitting the US headlines in 2005 when he illicitly hung a work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. John Barelli, the former head of the Met’s security department, said three accomplices helped the street artist to carry out the stunt. Two of them began arguing, distracting the guards, allowing the third, who wore a fake beard and a tweed hat, to covertly affix a painting to the wall. The intruder then placed a placard next to the painting: “Banksy, 1975. ‘Last breath.’ Oil on board. Donated by the artist.” Banksy apparently tried to reclaim his property. “About a month later, I got a call from our legal department, telling me that he wants it back,” Barelli said. “And I said, ‘Well, he can’t have it back. We threw it out.’” So where is the piece now? Barelli admits that when he retired, he took the work himself. “If I need some money, maybe I’ll do something with it.”

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 “People keep disappearing in Vermont’s ‘Bennington Triangle’”

From AP: “One of the greatest mountain guides will attempt to scale the world’s highest peak for the 31st time — and possibly the 32nd time as well — and break his own record. Kami Rita, 55, flew to Mount Everest from Kathmandu to lead a group of climbers who will try to reach the 8,849-meter summit during the spring climbing season. He holds the record for the most successful ascents of Mount Everest at 30 times. In May last year he climbed the peak twice. His closest competitor for the most climbs of Mount Everest is fellow Sherpa guide Pasang Dawa, who has made 27 successful ascents of the mountain. Kami Rita first climbed Everest in 1994 and has been making the trip nearly every year since. He is one of many Sherpa guides whose skills are vital to the safety and success each year of foreign climbers aspiring to stand on top of the mountain. His father was among the first Sherpa mountain guides.”

These techno-utopians want to colonize the sea

From the New York Times: “Forty-six hours before Rüdiger Koch officially seized the Guinness World Record for the longest time spent living in an underwater fixed habitat, I took a 15-minute motorboat ride from Linton Bay Marina, in north-central Panama, to visit him. It was a warm afternoon in January, and Koch was approaching a full 120 days spent working, eating, sleeping, drinking and smoking cigars in a room 36 feet below the surface of the Caribbean. His 304-square-foot habitat was inside the underwater buoyancy chamber that helps stabilize a floating home called SeaPod Alpha Deep. Koch arrived here, in small part, via a San Francisco-based nonprofit called the Seasteading Institute, which promotes “living on environmentally restorative floating islands with some degree of political autonomy.” The Institute’s president, Joe Quirk, once said the vision is “startup societies where people could form whatever kind of community they wanted” — a libertarian-inflected world where you could “vote with your boat.”

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 Sherpa guide has climbed Everest a record 30 times”

From Modern Met: “For most of her life, Tilley Lockey has been championing the limb different community. The 19-year-old singer, influencer, and host lost both her arms to meningitis when she was just 15 months old. But rather than hide it or try to blend in, Lockey has embraced and celebrated her condition. For many years, she has worked with Open Bionics, which have outfitted her with top-of-the-line bionic hands. Now, Lockey has debuted a new pair of wireless bionic arms. The Hero Pro, the latest prosthetic arm by Open Bionics, is 3D-printed and allows users to do things like push a stroller or carry a suitcase, as well as fine motor actions like zipping a jacket, scrolling on a phone, or holding a guitar pick. Lockey explained that the arms have two muscle sensors — squeeze to close, flex to open — and the hands are also completely wireless, so that they can be detached and will still follow the motions the user indicates.”

He climbed Mount Fuji but had to be rescued twice after he went back to get his phone

From the BBC: “A 27-year-old university student who climbed Mount Fuji outside of its official climbing season was rescued twice in four days, after he returned to look for his mobile phone. The Chinese student, who lives in Japan, was first rescued by helicopter on Tuesday while on the Fujinomiya trail, which sits about 3,000m (9,800ft) above sea level. He was unable to descend the trail after he lost his crampons – a spiked device that is attached to the bottom of climbing shoes for better traction. But days later, he returned to the mountain to retrieve belongings that he left behind, including his phone. He was rescued again on Saturday after suffering from altitude sickness but is now out of danger. Due to harsh conditions, people are discouraged from climbing Mount Fuji outside of the official climbing season that starts in early July and ends in early September.

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 “She can control her bionic hands even when they aren’t attached”

From NBC: “A 2-year-old boy spent the night alone in the remote Arizona wilderness and walked 7 miles through mountain lion territory, authorities said. A huge search operation was launched when the boy disappeared from his home in Seligman, Arizona, about 100 miles south of Grand Canyon National Park. The sheriff’s office said that more than 40 rescuers, including Department of Public Safety rangers, joined the search, and a DPS helicopter spotted two mountain lions in the area. But 16 hours after he went missing, rancher Scotty Dunton found him on his land 7 miles away. The boy was safe and well and had apparently been led to his property by the rancher’s dog, Buford. Dunton asked the boy if he had walked all night, and he answered, “No, I laid up under a tree.”

In the Czech Republic it’s an Easter tradition for boys to whip girls with willow branches

From Radio Prague: The Czech Republic has a rather unusual tradition on Easter Monday. Boys get willow branches, braid them together into whips and decorate them with ribbons to whip girls with for luck and fertility. The word for this whip in Czech is pomlázka, which has also become the name of the tradition itself. According to tradition, the boys will also sing a song that says: ‘Hody, hody, doprovody, dejte vejce malovaný, nedáte-li malovaný, dejte aspoň bílý, slepička vám snese jiný ” which means something like “Feast, Feast give me a painted egg if you don’t give me a painted one give me at least white one, the hen will give you another.” Said Noemi: “In the past it was worse because boys came really early in the morning. They hit the girls a lot, they poured water on the girls and then they wanted an egg or something sweet. It’s terrible.”

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 “A two-year-old walked seven miles through the wilderness”

From The Cut: “A friend suggested Katie and Houston try a form of communication known in the autism world as spelling. Spelling involved not just Houston but Houston and Katie as a team. Katie held in the air an 8.5-by-11-inch board or stencil covered with the letters of the alphabet and numerals 0 to 9. Houston’s role was to use a pencil to point to letters on the board to make words he wanted to say. All summer long, in 2018, Katie and Houston spent four, five, six hours every day at their dining table trying to master the technique. Each spelling lesson consisted of a reading on a topic, like constellations, followed by questions that had just been answered by the reading. After each lesson, Katie lifted a black plastic stencil letter board in front of Houston’s chest and he pointed. Three months before Houston’s birthday, he spelled I-M S-P-E-C-I-A-L. And then he spelled I C-A-N H-E-A-R T-H-O-U-G-H-T-S.”

Fans of the game Magic:The Gathering could help solve a prime number puzzle

From Scientific American: “A game of Magic: The Gathering begins well before players lay down their first card. As a collectible card game, Magic requires competitive players to select the optimal deck of cards based on how they think it will function against hypothetical opponents with many different strategies—then the game itself offers proof or disproof of the player’s predictive powers. Because about 30,000 different cards are available today—though they’re likely not all owned by a single individual—there are many degrees of variation. In the fall of 2024 a Reddit user posted a combination of 14 moves that use about two dozen Magic cards and could potentially deal infinite damage. The outcome of the game depends on the answer to a mathematical puzzle that is almost 180 years old: Are there an infinite number of prime number twins?”

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 “A podcast claims non-speaking autistic people can read minds”

From Nautilus: “It’s impossible to know exactly when each of the five mutations happened. When, deep in my marrow, one thing after another went awry, and divided my life. Like all people who have been ill, my life is split into Before and After. Did a mutation occur the summer Before, when my gallbladder inexplicably started to act up, when I got a surprisingly terrible case of hand-foot-mouth virus for an adult? Perhaps one occurred in college, silently changing my future while I took my first organic chemistry lab, being careless with a solvent. Maybe the first mutation occurred when I was 2 years old, wearing footie pajamas soaked in flame retardant. Is it possible, even, that the mutation happened generations before I was even born, perhaps when my grandmother worked in her family’s dry-cleaning shop, the chemicals triggering a change deep in one of her cells that eventually lead to her death, my father’s, and nearly mine?”

Astronomers say they have detected a sign of life on a distant planet

From the New York Times: “A team of researchers is offering what it contends is the strongest indication yet of extraterrestrial life, not in our solar system but on a massive planet, known as K2-18b, that orbits a star 120 light-years from Earth. A repeated analysis of the exoplanet’s atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known source: living organisms such as marine algae. “It is in no one’s interest to claim prematurely that we have detected life,” said Nikku Madhusudhan, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge and an author of the new study. Still, he said, the best explanation for his group’s observations is that K2-18b is covered with a warm ocean, brimming with life. “This is a revolutionary moment,” Dr. Madhusudhan said. “It’s the first time humanity has seen potential biosignatures on a habitable planet.” The study was published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.”

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 “A chemist investigates the potential causes of her leukemia”

From The Guardian: “Nobody can recall who first phoned the police on the morning of 4 September 1990, but everyone remembers the girl. Her body, hanging from a pine tree on a steep slope above the Spanish frontier town of Portbou, was visible to anyone looking up from the beach or across from the opposite hillside. She was barefoot, with grey-blue eyes and thick chestnut-brown hair. She wore blue dungarees over a turquoise green shirt. In these years before the Schengen agreement, guards were stationed on the French border but these officers were experts in immigration and smuggling, not violent deaths. Instead, Enrique Gómez, a 35-year-old investigator from the Guardia Civil police force was called in from the nearby city of Figueres to investigate. Carles Cereijo, an 18-year-old reporter who had just begun working with the local El Punt Avui newspaper, got to the scene before him. Cereijo had been woken by a call from a waiter friend working the breakfast shift at a cafe.

This philosopher didn’t think unluckiness existed until he met his wife

From New York: “Holly Davis didn’t believe in luck until she realized just how unlucky she was. Often, it was the little things. Reservations she made disappeared. Rides she booked never came. Someone else would fill out an annoying but vital online form without a hitch; the site would crash as soon as she tried. Her neighbors’ plants glowed a lustrous green while hers — same soil, same rain — shriveled with disease. Was this just adulthood, she wondered, to be waging an endless war against the everyday? The man who would eventually become her second husband didn’t think so, and he knew a thing or two about luck. He’d written a master’s thesis about it. His name was Lee John Whittington, and he didn’t believe in the salt-throwing, new-engagement-ring-buying sort of luck, either. At least in most cases he didn’t. Though he too laughed about it, hedged about it, he came to see his wife as the exception.”

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 mysterious death in Spain is still unsolved 35 years later”

Writing about the government’s antitrust case against Meta is a little like putting on an old sweater — it’s comfortable and worn, but also has kind of a funky smell (maybe it’s best for everyone if I don’t continue with this metaphor). In any case, I have been writing about this topic off and on for more than half a decade now. I wrote about it for the Columbia Journalism Review (where I was the chief digital writer from 2017 to 2024) when the case was first launched in 2020, at the tail end of the first Trump administration. After a bunch of presentations from the Federal Trade Commission and a variety of opinions from Meta watchers and antitrust experts, the case was thrown out because Judge Boasberg of the US District Court for the District of Columbia said the government failed to provide compelling evidence that Meta had a monopoly on the market for any kind of distinct market for something known as “social networking.”

I wrote about the case again in 2020 when it was revived by the Biden administration, based in part on arguments from antitrust theorist Lina Khan, who took over as the chairman of the FTC. At that point, Boasberg ruled that the government had met his test for showing that Meta had a monopoly on a distinct enough market for him to let the case proceed. At the time, he said that “while there are certainly bones one could pick with the FTC’s market-definition allegations, the Court does not find them fatally devoid of meat.” Meta tried to get the court to dismiss the case in 2022 for a variety of reasons, none of which had much substance, and then both sides basically said they needed more time to get their arguments in order and marshall all of the evidence, and that’s how it took three years before the case actually showed up in court.

During that time, of course, the US switched presidents, and Trump returned for a second term. That’s when all hell broke loose on a host of different fronts: massive tariffs against China and dozens of other nations, threats to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal, threats to make Canada the 51st state, mass deportations of alleged criminals — including some US citizens and green-card holders — to a for-profit prison in El Salvador, without a trial or any evidence being provided (Boasberg is also hearing a case about that, by a strange coincidence). Homeland Security and ICE are using artificial intelligence and surveillance software to track down “undesirables,” including anyone who has said anything even remotely positive about Palestine, or remotely negative about either Trump or his bizarre and likely also illegal policies (I wrote about this for last week’s edition of The Torment Nexus, in case you missed it).

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 “Meta may be bad but the FTC’s antitrust case is still weak”