Author: Mathew Ingram

From the New York Times: “Alexander wanted to share his wife’s happiness, but instead he was preoccupied by a concern that he was reluctant to voice: May did not look to him like a member of their family. She certainly did not resemble him, a man of Italian descent with fair hair and light brown eyes, or Daphna, a redhead with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. Alexander often turns to dark humor to mask a simmering anxiety, and in the days after the birth, he started to joke that their IVF clinic had made a mistake. Later he would explain that the jokes were a kind of superstition, a way of warding off something threatening: If you say the horrible thing out loud, it won’t happen.”

Scientists discovered a top-secret military base hidden under the Arctic ice

From The Debrief: “When it first appeared in their radar images, NASA scientist Chad Greene and his team of engineers weren’t sure what they were seeing. Flying above northern Greenland, Greene and his crew were monitoring radar information collected from the ice sheet below. What they saw was the remains of a remote U.S. military base once used as a top-secret testing site for the deployment of nuclear missiles from the Arctic. Camp Century was constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers within the Greenland Ice Sheet in 1959. Also known as the “city under the ice,” this forgotten Cold War relic consists of a network of tunnels hewn into the near-surface portions of the ice sheet.”

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 “An IVF clinic mixup led to an unthinkable choice”

From the Wall Street Journal: “Vladimir Putin has an illegitimate daughter living under a pseudonym in Paris, where she works as a DJ, Ukrainian media has reported. The 21-year-old, who goes by the name of either Luiza Rozova or Elizaveta Olegovna Rudnova, was tracked down by a Ukrainian TV channel using leaked airline manifests. She is said to be a love child from a brief affair between Putin and Svetlana Krivonogikh, a former cleaner who is now one of Russia’s richest women. Ms Krivonogikh has previously been referred to in the media as “Putin’s acquaintance”. Reporters said that they had tracked down the birth certificate of Ms Rozova, who was born on March 3 2003.”

Yard cleanup videos can earn influencers millions of dollars per year

From Why Is This Interesting: “There appears to be a cottage industry of people with lawn and yard care companies making videos of labor intensive, pro-bono work on properties that have been neglected. The recipe is simple: Find a property that has fallen into disrepair. Spend a ton of time sprucing it up with a time lapse video. Then, apparently, profit. A few of these videos are doing numbers, to the tune of 23m videos. This particular channel, SB Mowing, started out as an organically growing business that had some early savvy in Facebook and social media marketing. He’s now clocking 40 million total followers, and around 3 billion annual views, which, even with conservative estimates, is looking like upwards of millions of dollars of revenue.”

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 “Putin’s daughter said to be working as a DJ in Paris”

Last week, the Australian government passed a law aimed at banning children under the age of 16 from using social-media platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and the network formerly known as Twitter (but not, somewhat surprisingly, from YouTube). A press release quoted the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, as saying that “we know social media is doing social harm,” that the government wants Australian children to “have a childhood,” and wants parents to know that the government is “in their corner.”

Laudable statements, perhaps, but saying that “we know social media is doing social harm” to teens is stretching the case more than a little, as I wrote in a recent issue of The Torment Nexus. And some child psychologists and other experts in the use of the internet by teenagers say Australia’s law — and other similar laws either in place or being considered in the US and around the world — could not only fail to have the effect their proponents expect but could backfire badly.

As Casey Newton notes in his Platformers newsletter, a number of states — including Utah, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Ohio, Tennessee — have recently passed laws requiring teens to get parental consent to use social-media platforms, while Florida has banned accounts for children under 14 (some or all of these laws are currently on hold due to legal challenges, which I will get to later). In addition to those laws, France now requires parental consent for children under 15 and social platforms are required to verify the ages of their users (according to the French National Commission for Technology and Freedoms, more than half of children aged 10-14 use social media sites like Snapchat and Instagram).

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 “Australia’s attempt to ban teens from using social media is a mistake”

From The Guardian: “I began to feel that myself plus the bicycle equaled myself plus the world,” said American women’s suffragist Frances Willard in the 1800s, epitomising how bicycles were caught up with women’s rights and social reform in the US. Back then the image of a woman on a set of wheels symbolised a swelling tide of transportation independence and freedom from restrictive Victorian fashion for women. Fast forward a century later, halfway across the world in the Indian state of Bihar, and a similar revolution is afoot. Bicycles gifted by the state government are teaching families that their girls can move around fearlessly, attend school like their brother and act on their ambitions, untethered to cultural expectations of their role in society.”

The weight-loss drug Ozempic was derived from the venom of the Gila monster lizard

From The University of Queensland: “In the 1980s John Pisano, a biochemist with a penchant for venoms, and a young gastroenterologist Jean-Pierre Raufman were working with poisonous lizard venom from the Gila monster, a slow-moving reptile native to the south of the United States and north of Mexico. By the 1990s, Pisano, Raufman and colleague John Eng identified a hormone-like molecule they called exendin-4. This stimulated insulin secretion via action at the same receptor as GLP-1. Excitingly, exendin-4 was not quickly metabolised by the body, and so might be useful as a diabetic therapeutic. Eng was convinced this would work, but pharmaceutical companies didn’t want to give people a hormone that would mimic a drug from a venomous lizard. Even the medical centre where Eng was working said that it wouldn’t help fill the patent.”

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 “Bicycles are changing what it’s like to be a girl in India”

From History.com: “On November 9, 1959—just two-and-a-half weeks before Thanksgiving—the U.S. secretary of Health, Education and Welfare made a startling announcement: some cranberries grown in the Pacific Northwest may have been contaminated by a weed killer that could lead to cancer in rats. This meant that cranberry sauce, a popular staple of Thanksgiving dinners, might not be on the menu anymore. Thus began the cranberry scare of 1959, a crisis that temporarily crashed the cranberry market and sent Americans scrambling for alternative fruit-based dishes for Thanksgiving (Life magazine provided a few interesting suggestions, including pickled watermelon rind).”

Why we probably won’t find aliens anytime soon

From Scientific American: “Are we alone in the universe? The answer is almost certainly no. Given the vastness of the cosmos and the fact that its physical laws allowed life to emerge at least one place—on Earth—the existence of life elsewhere is effectively guaranteed. But so far, despite generations of looking, we haven’t found it. In that time, however, we’ve arguably learned enough to declare that, while we may not be alone, the interstellar gulf between us and our nearest neighbors effectively puts us in an isolation ward. This doesn’t mean we should stop looking—only that we should manage our expectations and prepare for a long and lonely voyage through space and time before meeting them, either virtually or physically.”

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 the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959 set off a Thanksgiving panic”