Author: Mathew Ingram

Hi there. My name is Mathew Ingram, and until recently I was the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review in New York. I live in Canada. I post things I've written for work here, but also a daily newsletter called When The Going Gets Weird, which you can find here, and one about technology and culture called The Torment Nexus.
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Why was a banana company involved in the creation of radio?

When General Electric formed the Radio Corporation of America or RCA with Marconi assets in 1919, conflicts over patents prompted a push for cross-licensing agreements with the other large electrical and telephone interests. In addition to RCA, General Electric, AT&T and Westinghouse, a fifth partner in the patents pool was the United Fruit Company, a conglomerate whose primary business was banana production in Latin America.

The United Fruit Company actually started out in the railway business: In 1871, U.S. entrepreneur Henry Meiggs signed a contract with the government of Costa Rica to build a railroad connecting the capital city of San José to the port of Limón. He was assisted by his nephew, Minor C. Keith, who took over Meiggs’s business after his death in 1877. Keith began experimenting with the planting of bananas as a cheap source of food for his workers. When the Costa Rican government defaulted on its payments in 1882, Keith had to borrow money from banks and private investors to keep going. 

In exchange for this, and for helping renegotiate Costa Rica’s own debt, in 1884 the government agreed to give Keith 800,000 acres of tax-free land along the railroad, plus a 99-year lease on the operation of the train route. The railroad was completed in 1890, but the flow of passengers proved insufficient to finance Keith’s debt. However, the sale of bananas grown in his lands and transported first by train to Limón, then by ship to the United States, proved very lucrative. Keith eventually came to dominate the banana trade in Central America and along the Caribbean coast of Colombia.

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The US was built on control of the bird poop supply

From Science News: “In December 1855 and January 1856, a trio of vessels set sail from the United States to Jarvis and Baker islands, coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean. The ships carried representatives from the American Guano Company and a guano expert tasked with examining the quality of the islands’ bird poop. After estimating the quantity of guano available and taking samples, the entourage claimed the islands in the name of the United States. That move marked the country’s first effort to acquire territory overseas. U.S. ownership of those islands became official in July 1856 with passage of the Guano Islands Act. That act gave the country “permission” to claim sovereignty over any allegedly uninhabited or unclaimed territory to secure access to guano, a prized fertilizer for American tobacco, cotton and wheat fields.”

Dante cast her as his guide in the Divine Comedy. But who was Beatrice Portinari?

From JSTOR Daily: “She was the great love of the Early Renaissance Italian poet Dante Alighieri. He adored her so much that he cast her as his divine guide to the celestial spheres of heaven in the last book of the Divine Comedy. But his would always be an unrequited love: she was promised to someone else, and so was he. Her name was Beatrice Portinari. Beatrice Portinari belonged to a family of bankers and politicians; her father was Folco Portinari, a prior of Florence. Her family’s upper-class social status allowed her to marry into another rich Florentine set. She wed another wealthy banker, Simone de Bardi, in an arranged marriage. Dante’s wife was an Italian woman named Gemma Donati, though he never wrote a single poem about her.”

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.

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Is BlueSky the new Twitter, and if so is that a good thing?

After deciding to write about Bluesky and its recent meteoric growth, I wrote down the headline above, and then I went to look at what I had written in the past about Bluesky while I was at the Columbia Journalism Review (where I was the chief digital writer until recently). And what did I find but a piece I wrote in May of last year with the identical headline 🙂 Two things we can learn from this, I think: 1) I lack imagination when it comes to headlines, and 2) the question about Bluesky and whether it has staying power, and what its future might look like, has been around for awhile now. I thought about changing the headline on this piece, but then I decided against it — I still think both are valid questions, and if anything they might be even more critical at this point.

Note: In case you are a first-time reader, or you forgot that you signed up for this newsletter, this is The Torment Nexus. You can find out more about me and this newsletter in this post. This newsletter survives solely on your contributions, so please sign up for a paying subscription or visit my Patreon, which you can find here. I also publish a daily email newsletter of odd or interesting links called When The Going Gets Weird, which is here.

The news hook here is that Bluesky’s user base has been climbing rapidly following the election of a certain inveterate liar with multiple fraud convictions and two impeachments as president of the United States, and the corresponding rise of his lieutenant and chief booster, Elon “Dark MAGA” Musk. Perhaps it was the continued slide into right-wing mania, or the way that Musk used the network as his personal hype machine for Trump — along with the $200 million or so that he sank into Trump’s campaign via a super-PAC. In any case, Bluesky has been adding literally hundreds of thousands of users every day — The Verge reported on November 11 that users had grown by 700,000 and the next day, the New York Times said it had grown by a million (you can see a live user counter here).

I have seen this happen from my own perspective, as someone who has had an account for over a year now. I don’t recall the exact number of followers I had prior to the election, but I know it was below a thousand — likely in the 600 range. It is now over 2,300 and every time I check the app it says dozens more have followed me. Some I’ve been connected with on Twitter for a long time, but many are completely unknown to me. According to Clearsky, I am on about 30 lists, or what Bluesky calls “starter packs,” so that probably explains it (my favourite list is the one that some user named “not porn”). Here’s a graph that shows Bluesky’s user growth since early this year, which I found here — it begins in February, which is when Bluesky opened to the public.

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.

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The US deliberately gave hundreds of people STDs

From The Guardian: “From 1946-48, the US Public Health Service and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau worked with several Guatemalan government agencies on medical research paid for by the US government that involved deliberately exposing people to sexually transmitted diseases. The researchers apparently were trying to see if penicillin, then relatively new, could prevent infections in the 1,300 people exposed to syphilis, gonorrhea or chancroid. Those infected included soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis. The commission revealed on Monday that only about 700 of those infected received some sort of treatment. Eighty-three people died. The research came up with no useful medical information, according to some experts.”

A rockstar researcher spun a web of lies and almost got away with it

From The Walrus: “Laskowski revealed that her ambition had drawn her into the web of prolific spider researcher Jonathan Pruitt, a behavioural ecologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Pruitt was a superstar in his field and, in 2018, was named a Canada 150 Research Chair, becoming one of the younger recipients of the prestigious federal one-time grant with funding of $350,000 per year for seven years. He amassed a huge number of publications, many with surprising and influential results. He turned out to be an equally prolific fraud. When Pruitt’s other colleagues and co-authors became aware of outright falsifications in his body of work, they pushed for their own papers co-authored with him to be retracted one by one. But making an honest man of Pruitt would be an impossible task.”

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.

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A Sabre jock of world renown

This is a photo from June, 1957 of my friend Rob Hyndman’s father, an RCAF pilot, who added this caption: “The day of my first solo flight in 050. I had 9 earlier great flights with my instructor one F/O Ingram, a former F-86 Sabre jock of world renown.”

The Sabre jock of world renown was my father, Donald Lew Ingram. He and Rob’s dad were both stationed at Zweibrücken, West Germany as part of 427 Squadron, which in turn was part of 3 Wing, a small group of Canadian fighter pilots whose job was to patrol the border with East Germany. In 1962, the year I was born, the base was switched over to become a forward operating base with nuclear weapons capacity, and the pilots started flying CF-104 Starfighters.

I was born while my father was in Zweibrücken, although we only lived there for a year or two after that and then moved back to Canada (Weird fact: Hockey Night in Canada host Ron MacLean was also born in Zweibrücken, I found out a little while ago). Many decades later, Rob and I met after he read the bio on my blog and noticed that we both lived in Zweibrücken when we were kids. We had coffee, and started talking about blogs and the social web — what was then called Web 2.0 — and that led to further conversations with friends, and in 2005 we started a conference in Toronto called Mesh.

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Heart transplant patients show changes in personality

From Psychology Today: “Claire Sylvia was an accomplished dancer when, at the age of 45, she was diagnosed with a rare incurable condition known as primary pulmonary hypertension. The only effective treatment for severe PPH is a heart-lung transplant. Claire’s transplant was unique not just because she was the first person in New England to undergo such an operation, but also because of the changes that occurred following her surgery. She developed a new taste for foods she did not like before receiving her new organs. Once she was allowed to drive, she headed to Kentucky Fried Chicken to satisfy her craving for chicken nuggets, which made no sense to her because she never ate fast food before her transplant. She also noticed that she no longer felt lonely, and felt more independent. She was more confident, assertive.”

The New York real estate queen and the secret she couldn’t keep hidden

From the New York Times: “Alice Mason was throwing one of her black-tie dinner parties. For years, she’d been hosting events that New York City’s social pages fawned over, but she didn’t expect that this one would disrupt a secret she’d kept for much of her life.A Manhattan real estate agent to the elite, Alice typically held six dinner parties a year, almost always with 56 attendees — half women, half men. Her guests, as one socialite put it, were “the A-list of A-lists”: Barbara Walters, Bill Clinton, Gloria Vanderbilt, Alan Greenspan, Norman Mailer, Estée Lauder, Mary Tyler Moore, Jimmy Carter. This party, circa 1990, was for her only child, Dominique Richard, who had just become engaged. A guest’s plus-one would cause a permanent rift between them.”

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.

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The untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb

From The Bulletin: “In the early hours of October 30, 1961, a bomber took off from an airstrip in northern Russia and began its flight through cloudy skies over the frigid Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya. Slung below the plane’s belly was a nuclear bomb the size of a small school bus—the largest and most powerful bomb ever created. At 11:32 a.m., the bombardier released the weapon. As the bomb fell, an enormous parachute unfurled to slow its descent, giving the pilot time to retreat to a safe distance. A minute or so later, the bomb detonated. The flash alone lasted more than a minute. The fireball expanded to nearly six miles in diameter—large enough to include the entire urban core of Washington or San Francisco, or all of midtown and downtown Manhattan. Over several minutes it rose and mushroomed into a massive cloud. Within ten minutes, it had reached a height of 42 miles and a diameter of some 60 miles.”

An astronaut who returned from space had to go to the hospital but no one is saying why

From Ars Technica: “On October 25, one of the astronauts was hospitalized due to what NASA called an unspecified ‘medical issue’ after splashdown aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that concluded the 235-day mission. After an overnight stay in a hospital in Florida, NASA said the astronaut was released “in good health” and returned to their home base in Houston to resume normal post-flight activities. The space agency did not identify the astronaut or any details about their condition, citing medical privacy concerns. NASA initially sent all four crew members to the hospital in Pensacola, Florida, for evaluation, but Grebenkin and two of the NASA astronauts were quickly released and cleared to return to Houston. One astronaut remained behind until the next day. “I did not say I was uncomfortable talking about it,” mission pilot and flight surgeon Michael Barratt said. “I said we’re not going to talk about 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.

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The last of a dying breed of mountain-climbing ice men

From the New York Times: “For 60 years, Baltazar Ushca worked a rare but rigorous trade: ice merchant. Once or twice a week, he climbed snow-capped Mount Chimborazo, Ecuador’s highest peak, to hack ice from a glacier with a pickax, wrap the 60-pound blocks in hay and transport them on the backs of his donkeys. He would then sell them to villagers who did not have electricity and needed refrigeration to conserve their food.It started as a family business. But Mr. Ushca, who was 4-foot-11, chipped at the ice decades after modern refrigeration came to his village, by which time his job was nearly obsolete. He became known as the last of his breed, selling his blocks of ice for a few dollars in Ecuador for use in fruit drinks and making ice cream.”

She treated her own breast cancer with viruses that she grew in her lab

From Nature: “A scientist who successfully treated her own breast cancer by injecting the tumour with lab-grown viruses has sparked discussion about the ethics of self-experimentation. Beata Halassy discovered in 2020, aged 49, that she had breast cancer at the site of a previous mastectomy. It was the second recurrence there since her left breast had been removed, and she couldn’t face another bout of chemotherapy. Halassy, a virologist at the University of Zagreb, studied the literature and decided to take matters into her own hands with an unproven treatment. A case report published in Vaccines in August outlines how Halassy self-administered a treatment called oncolytic virotherapy. She has now been cancer-free for four years.”

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.

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