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.
Note: This has been kind of debunked — or at least 25 percent debunked 🙂 As a number of people pointed out on Mastodon, it seems there is no real place (in terms of being listed on a map) that is called Torpenhow Hill, as noted here, so that might be an embellishemnt just to make the whole story even more absurd sounding. Tom Scott also notes that in his video debunking on YouTube — however, he does mention that there is clearly a small rise near Torpenhow (which he walks up) and this could be considered a hill. So there.
From the New York Times: “It was the kind of tragic accident that reverberates through a community: a first-year college student, out late in New York City on New Year’s Eve, falls onto the subway tracks and is killed by an oncoming train. Word of the 19-year-old’s death spread quickly among the people who knew the young man, Matthew Sachman, who went by Matteo. But when they typed his name and what little they knew into the search bar, they found a blizzard of poorly written news articles, shady-looking YouTube videos and inaccurate obituaries. Some said that Sachman had not fallen onto the tracks at all, but had been stabbed to death in a Bronx subway station.
Top Harvard cancer researchers accused of scientific fraud in 37 studies
From Beth Mole for Ars Technica: “The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is seeking to retract six scientific studies and correct 31 others that were published by the institute’s top researchers, including its CEO. The researchers are accused of manipulating data images with simple methods, primarily with copy-and-paste in image editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop. The accusations come from data sleuth Sholto David and colleagues on PubPeer, an online forum for researchers to discuss publications that has frequently served to spot dubious research and potential fraud.”
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
From Jonathan Nunn for The Guardian: “If you were a young person living in London in the early 1970s and you were looking for a bargain, the word of Nicholas Saunders was something close to holy scripture. Whatever you sought, Saunders had the answer. If you wanted to start an anarchist squat or self-publish a Trotskyist pamphlet, you consulted Nicholas Saunders. If you wanted to know how much a gram of cocaine should cost, or where to get free legal advice if you were arrested, you consulted Nicholas Saunders. If you just wanted to find out which supermarkets were cheaper for which goods, or how to fly all the way to India on a ticket to Frankfurt, you consulted Nicholas Saunders.”
What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back?
From Eric Berger for Ars Technica: “Taylor Wang was deeply despondent. A day earlier, he had quite literally felt on top of the world by becoming the first Chinese-born person to fly into space. But now, all of his hopes and dreams, everything he had worked on for the better part of a decade had come crashing down around him. He asked the NASA flight controllers if he could take some time to try to troubleshoot the problem and maybe fix the experiment. But on any Shuttle mission, time is precious. After being told no, Wang said something that chilled the nerves of those in Houston watching over the safety of the crew and the Shuttle mission. “Hey, if you guys don’t give me a chance to repair my instrument, I’m not going back,” Wang said.”
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
On January 24th in 1985, a little company called Apple launched a revolution in personal computing with the first Macintosh computer — a chunky-looking desktop with an equally clunky-looking mouse and a washed-out screen, which cost $2,495 US (the equivalent of about $7,000 today). It’s difficult to see this as revolutionary now, but in the mid-1980s it absolutely was. The only computers most people — including me — were familiar with were room-sized corporate servers with tape drives. The Mac made computers human-sized, and its graphical user interface with the trash can icon and file folders, and the mouse to navigate among them (both of which Steve Jobs borrowed from the Xerox PARC research lab) were unlike anything else on the market. No more typing DOS commands in green text on a black background!
I didn’t get one when they first came out — instead, I asked a friend who knew about such things what I should buy, and knowing of my interest in both drawing and music, he suggested the Atari 1040ST, because it had a better colour screen and a MIDI interface (which I never used). But I admired the Mac, and every Apple computer that came after it — especially the candy-coloured iMacs and the all-in-one desktops that succeeded them. I could never afford to actually buy one; I almost always wound up with some PC knockoff, which I liked in part because they were easier to take apart so you could upgrade the RAM, graphics card, etc. Also, PCs were better for playing games like Doom. But there’s no question Jobs and Apple were masters of marketing, especially the original Mac “1984” ad, which was created by Ridley Scott.
By Kevin Hazzard for The Atavist: “Today the role is clearly defined: A paramedic is certified to practice advanced emergency medical care outside a hospital setting. They’re the people who shock hearts back into beating, insert breathing tubes into tracheas, and deliver pharmaceuticals intravenously whenever and wherever a patient is in need. Until the mid-1960s, however, the field of emergency medical services, or EMS, didn’t formally exist. Training was minimal; there were no regulations to abide by. Emergency care was mostly a transportation industry, focused on getting patients to hospitals, and it was dominated by two groups: funeral homes and police departments. Then came the medics of Freedom House, who formally hit the streets in July 1968, a few months after the riots that erupted in the wake of King’s assassination.”
Tardigrades are basically indestructable and scientists finally figured out why
From Meghan Bartels for Scientific American: “Tiny tardigrades have three claims to fame: their charmingly pudgy appearance, delightful common names (water bear and moss piglet) and stunning resilience in the face of threats ranging from the vacuum of space to temperatures near absolute zero. Now scientists have identified a key mechanism contributing to tardigrades’ resilience—a molecular switch of sorts that triggers a hardy dormant state of being. The researchers hope that the new work, published on January 17 in the journal PLOS ONE, will encourage further exploration of the microscopic creatures’ ability to withstand extreme conditions.”
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Last July, Meta launched a new social network called Threads as a spinoff from Instagram and a thinly veiled competitor to X, then (just about) still known as Twitter. In the days following the launch, I wrote about my initial impressions of the app (so-so but with some promising signs), and also did a Q&A with my colleague Jon Allsop about what it was like to use the new service and whether I thought it would last. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and CEO, the new app had two million sign-ups in less than two hours, and hit thirty million within a day of launch; it then hit fifty million, then a hundred million, making it one of the fastest-growing new apps ever. (Elon Musk, the owner of X, responded by challenging Zuckerberg to a “literal dick measuring contest.”) Some of that early enthusiasm seemed to ebb, however: while the app is now estimated to have a hundred and sixty million monthly users, Business Insider reported in August that its daily user base had fallen by more than 80 percent, to eight million.
Twitter/X fans searching for an alternative amid that app’s slow-motion implosion are undoubtedly among the millions who signed up for Threads, seeking a new home for their conversations. But Meta promised that its new service wouldn’t just be another real-time chat service; indeed, when Threads launched, Adam Mosseri, the executive in charge of both Instagram and Threads, said that the new app would soon add the ability to integrate with the “fediverse”—a term that refers to a loosely affiliated collection of services, sites, and apps that all use open-source standards, giving users more control over how they use social media (allowing them, for instance, to move their account from one server to another that follows different rules) and how their data is handled. The most well-known Twitter-like app in the fediverse is Mastodon, which I wrote about in 2022. There are also fediverse versions of Instagram (Pixelfed) and YouTube (PeerTube), as well as Twitter alternatives based on the blockchain, such as Nostr, which counts Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder, as a supporter. Dorsey also helped launch BlueSky, a platform that was itself mooted as a possible Twitter replacement and which has its own federation standard known as the AT protocol.
Mosseri said that Meta originally planned to launch Threads with fediverse support built in thanks to a protocol called ActivityPub, which powers many open-source social apps (including Mastodon), but that the team behind Threads couldn’t get the protocol working in time. However, Mosseri assured users that the company was committed to embracing open standards, and that support for ActivityPub would be coming soon. “If you’re wondering why this matters, here’s a reason,” he wrote. “You may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.”
Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
From NPR: “The strange journey of Einstein’s brain began on the evening of April 17, 1955, when the seventy-six-year-old physicist was admitted to Princeton Hospital complaining of chest pains. He died early the next morning of a burst aortic aneurysm. As in the cases of Carl Gauss and Walt Whitman, the issue of permission to perform an autopsy is clouded by subsequent testimony. Thomas Harvey, the pathologist on call that evening, would later say, “I just knew we had permission to do an autopsy, and I assumed that we were going to study the brain.” As reporters soon discovered, Harvey did not have permission. And not only did Harvey take the brain, he also removed the physicist’s eyeballs and gave them to Henry Abrams, Einstein’s eye doctor.”
A former mobster came out of retirement to steal Dorothy’s ruby red slippers
From Josh Funk for AP News: “An aging reformed mobster admitted stealing a pair of the ruby red slippers that Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz, saying he gave into the temptation of one last score after an old mob associate led him to believe the famous shoes must be adorned with real jewels to justify their $1 million insured value. Terry Jon Martin’s defense attorney finally revealed the 76-year-old’s motive for the 2005 theft from the Judy Garland Museum in the late actor’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, in a new memo filed ahead of his Jan. 29 sentencing in Duluth, Minnesota. The FBI recovered the shoes in 2018 when someone else tried to claim an insurance reward on them, but Martin wasn’t charged with stealing them until last year.”
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
“As blockbuster storylines go, The Empire Strikes Back is a bit of an outlier. Our big hero Luke fails physically, spiritually, and psychologically in his training with Yoda. All of his friends get captured by the Empire. His dad chops off his hand. The “happy ending” is just that he and his rebel buddies live to fight another day. This is not exactly a recipe for shifting action figures, lunch boxes, and pajamas. So how did such a dark and psychologically rich sequel to one of the most profitable, kid-friendly movies of all time get made? Why would a Hollywood studio green light this?
The answer is that they wouldn’t. No studio agreed to make The Empire Strikes Back as George Lucas had envisioned it, so Lucas bet on himself, kept the merchandising rights, and financed the entire thing on his own. The result? The Empire Strikes Back was the highest grossing film of 1980, earning over $400 million worldwide. It won Oscars and Grammys, and is now considered the prime example of a sequel that surpassed its predecessor. Not only has it come to be regarded as the best film in the entire Star Wars series, it’s often included in round-ups of the greatest films ever made.”
