Author: Mathew Ingram

From the Wall Street Journal: “The professional gambler Archie Karas arrived in Las Vegas in December 1992 with $50 to his name. He borrowed $10,000 from a friend and, over roughly the next three years—after a freewheeling and volatile saga of ups and downs, but predominantly ups—reportedly turned that money into $40 million.It was a run of good luck so unfathomable that it’s known in poker circles simply as “The Run.” Many details about The Run have gone fuzzy as the story has been retold in the three decades since, but its essential narrative made Karas a folk hero among gamblers. Shooting craps at his private table at Binion’s Horseshoe casino—betting as much as $300,000 a toss—Karas took in so much money at one point that he possessed every one of the casino’s $5,000 chips: about $18 million worth, he later told Poker News. Karas died Sept. 7 in Los Angeles County at age 73 of undisclosed causes.”

She survived a bombing and he escaped a shark attack and then they found each other

From Esquire: “He remembers the moments just before. Water lapped against Colin Cook’s legs as he straddled his surfboard a hundred yards from the shore of Leftovers Beach, on Oahu. He remembers the sun’s warm glow in the east, a little after 10:00 a.m., and that he had been out some two hours already. He remembers being exhausted but happy—the dopamine high that rushes the system after a long workout. He looked the part of a seasoned surfer that October morning in 2015. She remembers a noise loud enough to go unheard and blow out Celeste’s eardrums. She felt as if she’d been flipped in the air. She looked around. Black smoke clouded Boylston Street, blown-out plated glass was scattered across the sidewalk, and blood—blood everywhere. Kevin came into her vision and told her he was going to cinch her legs with a belt. She looked down and saw that her legs dangled by the skin around her knees.”

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 was a gambling legend who won and then lost a fortune”

From the Harvard Gazette: “The 1990s was the decade of peanut allergy panic. The media covered children who died of a peanut allergy, and doctors began writing more about the issue, speculating on the growing rate of the problem. In 2000 the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a recommendation for children zero to three years old and pregnant and lactating mothers to avoid all peanuts if any child was considered to be at high risk for developing an allergy. Within months, a mass public education crusade was in full swing, and mothers, doing what they thought was best for their children, responded by following the instructions to protect their children. But despite these efforts, things got worse. It seemed that avoiding peanuts at a young age didn’t prevent peanut allergies, it actually created them.”

Crows can hold a grudge that lasts for generations

From the New York Times: “Renowned for their intelligence, crows can mimic human speech, use tools and gather for what seem to be funeral rites when a member of their murder, as groups of crows are known, dies or is killed. They can identify and remember faces, even among large crowds.They also tenaciously hold grudges. When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years. How long do crows hold a grudge? Dr. Marzluff believes he has now answered the question: around 17 years.His estimate is based on an experiment that he began in 2006, when Dr. Marzluff captured seven crows with a net while wearing an ogre mask.”

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 “How trying to avoid peanut allergies made them worse”

I know the headline on this post probably sounds ridiculous to some (perhaps all) of you reading this, but I’m going to do my best to convince you that I’m right by the end of this piece (maybe some of you can drop me a line via one of the platforms that are mentioned at the very bottom of the page and let me know whether I succeeded or not!) It seems ridiculous, of course, because how could the media industry — in Canada in this case — getting $100 million from Google be a bad thing? Isn’t getting a hundred million dollars an unequivocally good thing? How can I, a journalist who has been fired, laid off, let go, and otherwise made redundant from almost every job I’ve ever had in 35 years, argue that it’s a bad idea? Isn’t the media industry a financial train wreck?

Many (perhaps all) of those statements are true. The media industry — not just in Canada or the US but almost everywhere — is in a perilous state. Advertising revenue has been in freefall for years, even some of the major mainstream publications have been doing waves of cutbacks and layoffs, and there is no end in sight. Obviously, in that kind of environment, some money for news publishers is better than nothing. But I would argue that the strings tied to the Google funding, and the broader context within which that funding is happening — including Bill C-18, which is the Canadian version of Australia’s news-payment law — make it not a good thing. In fact, I think it’s possible that the media industry could wind up worse off rather than better.

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 — and why I chose to call it that — in this post.) This newsletter survives on donations from you and other faithful readers, so please take a moment and upgrade to a paid subscription or donate via my Patreon. Thanks!

I know the headline on this post probably sounds ridiculous to some (perhaps all) of you reading this, but I’m going to do my best to convince you that I’m right by the end of this piece (maybe some of you can drop me a line via one of the platforms that are mentioned at the very bottom of the page and let me know whether I succeeded or not!) It seems ridiculous, of course, because how could the media industry — in Canada in this case — getting $100 million from Google be a bad thing? Isn’t getting a hundred million dollars an unequivocally good thing? How can I, a journalist who has been fired, laid off, let go, and otherwise made redundant from almost every job I’ve ever had in 35 years, argue that it’s a bad idea? Isn’t the media industry a financial train wreck?

Many (perhaps all) of those statements are true. The media industry — not just in Canada or the US but almost everywhere — is in a perilous state. Advertising revenue has been in freefall for years, even some of the major mainstream publications have been doing waves of cutbacks and layoffs, and there is no end in sight. Obviously, in that kind of environment, some money for news publishers is better than nothing. But I would argue that the strings tied to the Google funding, and the broader context within which that funding is happening — including Bill C-18, which is the Canadian version of Australia’s news-payment law — make it not a good thing. In fact, I think it’s possible that the media industry could wind up worse off rather than better.

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 “Google giving $100 million to the media isn’t a win”