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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Frank Lloyd Wright founded a bizarre sex commune

From The Independent: “Taliesin was an architectural commune set up in 1932 in Wisconsin by Wright and his wife, the mysterious Olgivanna. Staffed by young, eager, and mostly male architects who wanted to learn from the master, it quickly evolved into a place where Olgivanna, Wright’s third wife, could promote the teaching of Georgi Gurdjieff. This bald, mustached, charismatic Russian guru claimed his eyes could not only penetrate a man’s psyche, but also bring a woman to orgasm from across a room. Taliesin became a place where Wright would not only get free in-house labor, but his wife could have total sway over the mental, physical, and sexual lives of the architect’s devoted followers.”

In Denmark an ancient army met a mysterious end

From Atlas Obscura: “In 1944, at the height of World War II, ditchdiggers working in a field known as Alken Enge, on the Jutland Peninsula in Denmark, made a gruesome discovery: human bones. It was quickly determined that the bones were not evidence of a recent murder—they were actually thousands of years old. About 2,000 years ago, during the Iron Age, the Alken Enge water-meadow had been a lake, but the individuals whose remains were scattered around the site had not died from drowning. Their deaths had been more horrific—and what happened to their bodies after death even more macabre. Many of the bones displayed the marks of raw violence: cuts from edged weapons, skulls crushed by axe blows, piercing wounds.”

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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Social media is a symptom, not a cause

I know that it’s tempting to blame what happened on Tuesday night — the re-election of a former game-show host and inveterate liar with 34 felony counts and two impeachments as president of the United States — on social media in one form or another. Maybe you think that Musk used Twitter to platform white supremacists and swing voters to Trump, or that Facebook promoted Russian troll accounts posting AI-generated deepfakes of Kamala Harris eating cats and dogs, or that TikTok polarized voters using a combination of soft-core porn and Chinese-style indoctrination videos to change minds — and so on.

In the end, that is too simple an explanation, just as blaming the New York Times’ coverage of the race is too simple, or accusing more than half of the American electorate of being too stupid to see Trump for what he really is. They saw it, and they voted for him anyway. That’s the reality.

It’s become accepted wisdom that platforms like Twitter and Facebook and TikTok spread misinformation far and wide, which convinces people that the world is flat or that birds aren’t real or that people are selling babies and shipping them inside pieces of Wayfair furniture. And it’s taken as fact that these tools increase the polarization of society, turning people against each other in a number of ways, including by inflating social-media “filter bubbles.” We all know this. And particularly when there is an event like a federal election, concern about both of these factors tends to increase. That’s why we see articles like this one from Wired, which talks about how social platforms have “given up” on things like fact-checking misinformation on their networks.

But is there any proof that social media either convinces people to believe things that aren’t true, or that it increases the levels of polarization around political or social issues? I don’t want to give away the ending of this newsletter, but the short answer to both of those questions is no. While social media may make it easier to spread misinformation farther and faster, it hasn’t really changed human nature itself all that much. In other words, social media is more of a symptom than it is a cause.

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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Cow and deer herds always face magnetic north

From National Geographic: “For centuries, farmers have known that their livestock not only gather in large herds but also tend to face the same way when grazing. Experience and folk wisdom offer several possible reasons for this mutual alignment. They stand perpendicularly to the sun’s rays in the cool morning to absorb heat through their large flanks, or they stand in the direction of strong winds to avoid being unduly buffeted. But cows and sheep don’t just line up during chilly spells or high wind. Their motivations have been a mystery until now. Sabine Begali spied on aligned herds of cows and deer using satellite images from Google Earth. The images revealed behaviour that had been going unnoticed for millennia, right under the noses of herdsmen – their herds were lining up in a north-south line like a living compass needle.”

This artist creates sculptures that are smaller than the width of a human hair

From New Atlas: “A sculpture so tiny that it cannot be seen by the naked eye is claimed to be the smallest sculpture of the human form ever created. Measuring 20 x 80 x 100 microns, artist Jonty Hurwitz’s tiny human statue is part of a new series of equally diminutive new sculptures that are at a scale so miniscule that each of the figures is equal in size to the amount your fingernails grow in around about 6 hours, and can only be viewed using a scanning electron microscope. Sculpted with an advanced new nano 3D printing technology coupled with a technique called multiphoton lithography, these works of art are created using a laser and a block of light-sensitive polymer.”

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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Berlin before and after the wall

An interactive feature from a German newspaper showing what parts of Berlin looked like with the Berlin wall, and what the same spots look like now. The aerial photos from 1989 come from the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development. The more than 700 individual photos were taken six months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, in April. At that time, photographs were only taken over West Berlin and a few hundred meters across the Wall.

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The “commonplace book” was the blog of the 16th century

Long before the internet and social media, intellectuals kept bits of writing and images and thoughts in “commonplace books,” which they carried with them. John Milton (whose book can been seen here), Sir Isaac Newton, John Locke, Michael Faraday, Mary Wollstonecraft and, later, Virginia Woolf and W.H. Auden all did it. Milton’s commonplace book contains notes on 90 authors in five languages, and, after his wife left him, exhaustive notes on bad marriages. Newton’s books were written in tight, tiny script describing recipes for making coloured pigments. Sir Francis Bacon kept one he called “A Promus of Formularies and Elegancies).

From a Globe and Mail article by Wayne MacPhail: “In 1584, the then-12-year-old English poet John Donne was studying at the University of Oxford along with his younger brother, Henry. This was when the university was just beginning to get its time-burnished reputation. The revered Bodleian Library had not yet opened its doors. But every day, in his tiny Hart Hall room, the young Donne was creating his own private Bodleian in a bit of technology called a commonplace book, or a commonplacer. Donne was the first to use the word, in a sermon in 1631.

So what did people do with these commonplace books? They wrote as they read, widely and deeply. They jotted down scripture, aphorisms, quotes, turns of phrase, gossip, poems, japes and words of wisdom. They let that harvested jumble of disparate brain fodder clang together in a cacophony and chorus of ideas that echoed down the long halls of human thought. The commonplace book was their way to burn the knowledge of the world into their brains, one inkwell dip at a time.”

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Remembering Galley, the anti-Twitter

In 2018, two entrepreneurs — Tom McGeveran and Josh Young — approached Columbia Journalism Review editor and publisher Kyle Pope with a proposition. The two had created a web app called Galley a few years earlier as a kind of anti-Twitter, a place where users could have thoughtful discussions with a group of trusted collaborators. Galley looked more or less like a chat app, but its key feature was the “trust” button, which appeared on everyone’s profile. Once you clicked it, you could then start a discussion and either make it wide open, or restrict it to only those users you had explicitly trusted.

The idea was that conversations could be open to anyone, or they could be restricted. The person who started the conversation was in control, and they could choose specific people to be a part of it, or they could restrict it to only those they chose to trust. Unlike the free-for-all that Twitter discussions often became, no one on Galley had the right to enter your conversation if you didn’t want them to. The idea was to get a free flow of information from as many people as possible, but not at the expense of civility or safety.

Tom and Josh suggested that CJR could use Galley for discussions with readers and journalists, as well as trusted members of the broader community? Josh offered to continue running it and handle all of the back-end software operations if we wanted him to, so Kyle and I discussed it and agreed that it seemed like a worthwhile experiment — and I agreed to work with Josh to get it up and running. Kyle wrote something in November of 2018 introducing Galley as a new forum to talk about journalism:

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