Author: Mathew Ingram

From Dan Lewis at Now I Know: “Pop-up stores like Spirit Halloween or Halloween City start dotting suburban and urban landscapes starting in late August, making it rather easy for a parent who can’t sew (or who lacks the time and patience) to fork over $25 or so on a Batman, hot dog, Barbie, or inflatable alien abduction costume. But there’s one costume you won’t find for sale in any of those places, and that’s Smokey Bear. In 1944, forest fires became an increasing threat in the United States, for two reasons: first, many firefighters and would-be firefighters were called into military service, and second, Japan had launched a handful of incendiary balloon attacks against the U.S. mainland in an effort to start fires. In the 1950s, Congress passed the Smokey Bear Act, giving full authority to manage Smokey’s likeness to the Forest Service. The Forest Service strictly controls the official Smokey Bear costumes — you can sometimes rent one via the Service’s website, but it comes with many restrictions.”

How horror films became Hollywood’s best financial investment

From Daniel Parris at Stats Significant:”The Exorcist premiered in the winter of 1973 to overwhelming public interest, captivating audiences with its harrowing story of demonic possession. The film smashed box office records, becoming one of the highest-grossing movies of all time and a critical darling nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. To date, The Exorcist has grossed over $441M worldwide on an initial budget of $12M. The film’s immense box office success showcased the genre’s artistic and economic promise, demonstrating its potential for high returns and, more importantly, its relatively inexpensive production costs. Unlike big-budget action franchises, horror films are produced on meager budgets in hopes of achieving modest returns. When examining average ROI by genre, horror films stand out as a significant outlier, averaging a 173% return (i.e. profit) on production costs. The best investment in Hollywood history was The Blair Witch Project, which had a 124,220% return.”

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Continue reading “There’s one Halloween costume you can’t buy because it’s illegal”

From Cara Ocobock for Scientific American: “The theory of man as the hunter has dominated the study of human evolution for nearly half a century. It is represented in museum dioramas and textbook figures, Saturday morning cartoons and feature films. But mounting evidence from exercise science indicates that women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons. This advantage bears on questions about hunting because a prominent hypothesis contends that early humans are thought to have pursued prey on foot over long distances. Furthermore, the fossil and archaeological records, as well as ethnographic studies of modern-day hunter-gatherers, indicate that women have a long history of hunting game.”

An easy way to get away with a crime: be an identical twin

From Dan Lewis at Now I Know: “After Harrod’s of London, Berlin’s Kaufhaus des Westen is the continent’s largest department store. On January 25, 2009, before the store opened its doors, three masked men climbed onto an awning overlooking the store’s second floor, pried open a window, lowered a rope ladder, and made their descent onto the store’s floor. They made their way through the jewelry department and helped themselves to a haul worth the equivalent of $6.8 million. They exited undetected, leaving behind only the rope ladder and a single latex glove. Inside that glove was a little bit of sweat, enough to run a DNA test. German investigators ran that DNA against a government database, but they didn’t get a match. They got two.”

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Continue reading “Men weren’t the only ones who did the hunting”

From Sugandha Srivastav at The Conversation: “One argument put forward in defence of fossil fuels is that they were a historical necessity, because there was no other viable substitute for much of the 20th century. But what if I told you there was a viable alternative, and that it may have been sabotaged by fossil fuel interests from its very inception? While researching the economics of clean energy innovation, I came across a little-known story: that of Canadian inventor George Cove, one of the world’s first renewable energy entrepreneurs. Cove invented household solar panels that looked uncannily similar to the ones being installed in homes today – they even had a rudimentary battery to keep power running when the Sun wasn’t shining. Except this wasn’t in the 1970s. Or even the 1950s. This was in 1905.”

An American museum reconsiders how it handles human remains

From Zachary Small at the New York Times: “The American Museum of Natural History is planning to overhaul its stewardship of some 12,000 human remains, the painful legacy of collecting practices that saw the museum acquire the skeletons of Indigenous and enslaved people taken from their graves and the bodies of New Yorkers who died as recently as the 1940s. The new policy will include the removal of all human bones now on public display and improvements to its storage facilities. Anthropologists will also spend more time studying the collection to determine the origins and identities of remains, as the museum faces questions about the legality and the ethics of its acquisitions.”

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Continue reading “He invented solar power in 1905 then he was kidnapped”

On Tuesday, a blast hit the Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza, apparently killing hundreds of people including patients and other civilians who had been using the building as a shelter from Israeli missile attacks. Within minutes of the first news report on the story, accusations were flying on social media: some said that Israel was to blame, and in some cases said that they had video evidence to prove it; Israel said that the blast was the result of a failed missile launch by Islamic Jihad, a group allied with Hamas. Amid a firehose of outrage and takes, journalists worked to try and verify—in some cases publicly and in real time—what had actually happened, wading through testimony and images from sources of varying reliability that said wildly different things at different times. 

An official Israeli account on X tweeted a video purporting to bolster its claims that Islamic Jihad was responsible, but took it down after users pointed out that its timestamp didn’t match the apparent time of the hospital bombing. Later, Israel said that its intelligence services had intercepted a conversation between two Hamas operatives referring to a failed Islamic Jihad strike, and released what it claimed was audio of the discussion. Yesterday morning, Shashank Joshi, defense editor at The Economist, said that the evidence he had seen so far was more consistent with the failed missile launch hypothesis than an Israeli strike, but cautioned that this was “NOT conclusive by any means.” (A user accused Joshi of relying on evidence provided by the Israel Defense Forces; Joshi replied that “the relevant image being analyzed, published this morning” was actually posted by an account “thought to be associated with Hamas.”) Other analysts reached a similar conclusion, as did the US government, the White House said. But other observers remained skeptical, pointing out, for example, that the IDF has wrongly blamed Islamic Jihad in the past. At time of writing, the online debate raged on. 

Continue reading “Disinformation on social media adds to the fog of war surrounding Israel and Palestine”

From Emma Madden at Narratively: “March 5, 2012. The staff of the San Diego nonprofit Invisible Children had been working around the clock for the past several months. At midday Pacific time, Kony 2012 went live. A beat. A sigh. The view count hardly budged. Everyone returned to their seats. Jason Russell, the video’s protagonist and Invisible Children’s then-33-year-old co-founder, was in Los Angeles. Jason awoke in the middle of the night to a flurry of texts, all saying “Jason, Oprah has tweeted the video.” Jason began receiving messages from late-night TV hosts requesting to interview him, and from celebrities like Justin Timberlake who wanted to show their support. To this day, many of those messages remain unopened.”

Robert Peary’s partner Matthew Henson was the first Black man at the North Pole

From Imogen Lepere for JSTOR Daily: “On April 6, 1909, six men and forty dogs stood on a sheet of sea ice floating 413 nautical miles off the coast of Greenland. Their faces were raw after driving at break-neck speed for five days to reach their objective before supplies dried up. They’d made it to the North Pole. For the two American men, Robert Peary and Matthew Henson, the planting of the expedition flag was the realization of a dream they had risked their lives for many times over during six previous (unsuccessful) Arctic missions. Despite this victory, the atmosphere became increasingly strained after the marking of the pole. The next morning, Peary left and later claimed the discovery of the Pole for himself without even mentioning Hansen.”

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Continue reading “His Kony2012 video broke the internet, and broke him”

From Sanchia Berg for the BBC: “In the summer of 1944, in a village in German-occupied western France, a slim young woman with dark hair and grey-green eyes sat in a building with a wireless set, tapping out messages in Morse code. She was an agent in the Special Operations Executive, known as Churchill’s Secret Army. Her codename was Genevieve and she was sending urgent messages back to London. The messages being sent by Genevieve were vital intelligence, as they included precise locations for the RAF to bomb, as well as where to drop equipment. Working behind German lines, as the fighting grew closer, was incredibly dangerous, but she never lost her nerve. Genevieve’s real name was Phyllis Latour. After she married, she became known as Pippa Doyle, and rarely spoke about her wartime career.”

Unraveling 40 years of sexual misconduct at a single California high school

From Matt Drange for Insider: “Clara didn’t think much of it when the social science teacher gave her his phone number. She’d met Alex Rai in her fifth-period journalism class. He was friends with the journalism teacher, Eric Burgess, and often stopped by Room 16 during his prep period to kill time. Burgess introduced Rai to Clara, telling her that Rai had been his student a decade before. Burgess thought they’d get along. In the weeks that followed, Rai would perch on Clara’s desk, leaning over as he asked about her day and who she hung out with after school. He’s only a few years older than my sister, Clara thought when Rai texted her one day after volleyball practice.”

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Continue reading “Phyllis Latour: The secret life of a WW2 heroine revealed”

From Ian Sample for The Guardian: “When the blast from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius reached Herculaneum in AD79, it burned hundreds of ancient scrolls to a crisp in the library of a luxury villa and buried the Roman town in ash and pumice. The disaster appeared to have destroyed the scrolls for good, but nearly 2,000 years later researchers have extracted the first word from one of the texts, using artificial intelligence to peer deep inside the delicate, charred remains. The discovery was announced on Thursday by Prof Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, and others who launched the Vesuvius challenge in March to accelerate the reading of the texts. Seales and his team released thousands of 3D X-ray images of two rolled-up scrolls and three papyrus fragments, along with a program they had trained to read letters in the scrolls based on subtle changes in the structure of the papyrus.”

Flipped coins found not to be as fair as thought

From Bob Yirka at Phys.org: “A large team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions across Europe, has found evidence backing up work by Persi Diaconis in 2007 in which he suggested tossed coins are more likely to land on the same side they started on, rather than on the reverse. The team conducted experiments designed to test the randomness of coin flipping and posted their results on the arXiv preprint server. For many years, the coin toss (or flip) has represented a fair way to choose between two options—which side of a team goes first, for example, who wins a tied election, or gets to eat the last brownie. Over the years, many people have tested the randomness of coin tossing and most have found it to be as fair as expected—provided a fair coin is used.”

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Continue reading “Researchers use AI to read a scroll burned by Vesuvius”

From Adam Mastroianni at Experimental History: “There’s something very weird about the timeline of scientific discoveries. For the first few thousand years, it’s mostly math. The Greeks had the beginnings of trigonometry by ~120 BCE. Chinese mathematicians figured out the fourth digit of pi by the year 250. In India, Brahmagupta devised a way to “interpolate new values of the sine function” in 665. Meanwhile, we didn’t discover things that seem way more obvious until literally a thousand years later. It’s not until the 1620s, for instance, that English physician William Harvey figured out how blood circulates through animal bodies by, among other things, spitting on his finger and poking it into the heart of a dead pigeon. We didn’t really understand heredity until Gregor Mendel started gardening in the mid-1800s, and we didn’t really grasp the basics of learning until Ivan Pavlov started feeding his dogs in the early 1900s.”

The MacArthur Genius who discovered that COVID transmission was airborne

From Gabriel Spitzer for NPR: “To understand why the MacArthur Foundation singled out Linsey Marr for one of this year’s fellowships – the so-called “genius grants” –  you have to go back to the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The early guidance from health experts emphasized washing hands and keeping six feet from others with no recommendation to wear masks or avoid gathering indoors. Linsey Marr, an aerosols expert and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, became convinced that advice was based on a flawed idea of how respiratory viruses spread. Her groundbreaking research and tireless advocacy showed that the virus is airborne as opposed to traveling in large droplets that fall with gravity. That work helped lead to a course correction in the public health guidelines and likely saved lives.”

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Continue reading “Why did some discoveries take so much longer than others?”

Three years ago, a House of Representatives subcommittee on antitrust released a four-hundred-plus page report that detailed the allegedly anti-competitive practices of the four major digital platforms—Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta (then known as Facebook)—and called on the Department of Justice to take action. A few weeks later, the government did exactly that, filing a landmark antitrust lawsuit against Google in which it alleged that the company engaged in various anti-competitive practices, including a multibillion-dollar deal that made Google the default search engine on Apple phones. As I wrote for CJR at the time, some observers saw the suit as an attempt by William Barr, then the attorney general, to make the Trump administration look tough on tech; others saw it as correcting what many believed to be the antitrust failures of the past two decades. But many analysts also foresaw  a legal quagmire, arguing that the case was likely to be substantially weaker than the federal government’s landmark antitrust action that put the brakes on Microsoft in 1998.

The Justice Department continued to build its case against Google under the Biden administration, and last month, the case arrived in court. According to the suit, Google—which has a market value of almost two trillion dollars—controls more than 90 percent of the online search market. (Its dominance of the search advertising market is the subject of a separate lawsuit that has yet to reach trial.) The Justice Department intends to prove that Google has abused this search monopoly in order to harm its competitors, and that the company has maintained the monopoly through illegal means. (For more details of the arguments, read my newsletter previewing the case just as it was getting underway.)

Observers have compared the Google lawsuit and the 1998 case against Microsoft on various substantive grounds. But legal experts have pointed to one striking difference between the two: whereas the Microsoft trial—including video testimony and other documents—was open to the public, the Google trial has been shrouded in a high level of secrecy. As Caitlin Vogus described it for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group, Amit Mehta, the judge hearing the Google case, has already imposed measures limiting transparency—including the sealing of documents and testimony, asking the Justice Department to remove exhibits that were presented in court from the public internet, and the refusal to provide the kind of audio broadcast used in the Microsoft trial.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “Google trial shrouded in secrecy as Amazon gets its own antitrust case”