Category: Misc

From NPR: “Beginning in 1940, a man named George Metesky hid 33 pipe bombs in public spaces in New York City. Twenty-two of those bombs exploded, injuring 15 people. Until he was captured in 1957, Metesky was known to the press, the police and an increasingly anxious populace as the “Mad Bomber.” Metesky hid his bombs in phone booths or public restrooms, terrorizing the city in a way that is echoed in today’s terrorism threats. Why did it take so long to catch him? He became very adept at melting into society and kind of cruising under the radar; one of his lawyers referred to him as someone who could pass as your next-door neighbor. In the photos of him, Metesky — under arrest and often surrounded by police officers — grins inexplicably. Those photos graced the cover of newspapers like the Hearst-owned New York Journal-American, whose publisher, Seymour Berkson, played a significant role in the manhunt.”

An English surgeon in the 1700s blinded both Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Handel

From La Brujula Verde: “Despite being a royal surgeon, John Taylor had a huge failure rate, with hundreds of people who not only failed to heal but were blinded forever. A good example of this could be his two most famous patients. Bach suffered from serious health problems, including a progressive blindness that made his work difficult and practically impossible. Current experts believe that this was due to diabetes, although he also had considerable blepharitis. Taylor was hired to try and fix his vision, operating on him in March 1750 in Leipzig. He considered that it was cataracts, so he opened his eyeball and crushed his lens. Bach did not recover his vision for the rest of his life. Händel also suffered from vision problems in one eye. It was thought to be due to an accident he suffered while travelling by carriage in Holland in the summer of 1750. He underwent a cataract operation performed by Taylor and lost his vision completely.”

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 “The hunt for the Mad Bomber captivated New York in the ’40s”

Watched the Dylan movie last night, and was pleasantly surprised. I was afraid that Timothee Chalamet might phone it in by acting with his puppy-dog eyes, looking up from under his eyebrows all the time — and there is some of that — but I came away mostly impressed. He did a respectable job of playing the young Dylan, surly and moody but also brilliant. And his guitar playing and singing was impressive from someone who didn’t play before he started filming the movie. I knew he could do a good job of that part when I saw him on Saturday Night Live, when he chose to do several little-known Dylan songs — and did them extremely well. The actress who plays Joan Baez also does an incredible job, and I have to give some props to Ed Norton too, who played Pete Seeger to a T and even learned how to play the banjo for the part, which is not an easy thing to do.

Liberties were taken with the script, obviously. Elle Fanning’s character, who is supposed to be Suze Rotolo, never went to the Newport Folk Festival with Dylan on his motorcyle (he wasn’t even riding a motorcycle at that point), and Johnny Cash comes off as a bit of a cartoon. Joan Baez comes off a little nicer than I think she was in real life (I think even Joan would agree with me there) and events are squished together in various ways. The concert scene at Newport where Dylan played electric is played up a lot more than I think it was in real life (although I wasn’t there) — from what I’ve read, Pete Seeger was mostly upset that the sound was terrible, not that it was electric, and some of those who were there said that the crowd booed because the set was too short, not because they were folk purists who didn’t like electric music. Dylan’s electric album was already out and very popular by then.

The movie also leaves out a bunch of people who were instrumental (sorry) in Dylan’s career, like Dave Van Ronk and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott — and Dylan’s first wife, whom he had already married by the end of the time period the movie covers. Anyway, long story short I thought it was pretty good. The only thing that makes me wonder how realistic some of it is is that Dylan was a producer, and had script approval, and apparently even inserted a scene that never happened (although the director refuses to say which one). Dylan has always been the least reliable narrator of his own life, going back to when he buried Robert Zimmerman in Hibbing, Minnesota and invented the character he became in New York. But what a character 🙂 At one point in the movie, Chalamet says that “if anyone is going to hold your attention on stage, you have to kind of be a freak,” and I don’t know if Dylan ever said that, but he’s not wrong.

Stalin biographer and world historian Stephen Kotkin’s take on the notion that Trump is “not who we are.”

As a lapsed Catholic, I no longer believe in the religious part of what happens inside Catholic churches, but I still really admire their architecture, so I am a sucker for a renovated church that has been turned into a single-family home, and this one in New Orleans is right up my alley. It’s only $1.25 million, so definitely affordable 🙂 It’s got five bedrooms and five bathrooms, and offers about 5,000 square feet of living space on a 5,800-square-foot lot. It was built in 1917.

Continue reading “Always wanted to live in a church in New Orleans?”

If you are of a certain age (I won’t say how old exactly), you might remember a tabloid newspaper called The Weekly World News — a black-and-white paper featuring huge headlines with multiple exclamation marks about Elvis living on the moon, or a mutant child known only as “Bat-Boy.” It was usually sold in a rack by the cashier in the grocery store, along with its sister paper the National Enquirer, The Sun, and other rags, and before the Internet came along it was the source of an almost infinite number of hilarious and bizarre urban legends and stories, most of which were clearly fake. It also featured a column by a right-wing lunatic known as “Ed Anger,” who hated foreigners, yoga, speed limits and pineapple on pizza and was a big fan of the electric chair and beer.

I loved reading the Weekly World News, and after I started down the path to becoming a journalist, I often joked about ending my career — as some British tabloid veterans apparently did — living in Boca Raton, Florida where the paper was based, and inventing ridiculous stories about aliens, complete with photos and artists renderings. It sounded like a ton of fun. And then, after I had graduated from journalism school and was working at my first job as a reporter for a weekly newsmagazine in Alberta, I wound up helping the editors of the Weekly World News publish a story — and this one was 100-percent real, even though it sounded like something made up.

Continue reading “That time I helped write a story for the infamous Weekly World News tabloid”

According to Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten, who is a practicing psychiatrist, the hot new psychotherapy is something called “Internal Family Systems.” The name sounds pretty innocuous, but it quickly takes a turn for the weird. As Alexander described it in a recent edition of his newsletter, which is mostly a book review of The Others Within Us by Robert Falconer:

What I gather from the manuals: IFS is about working with “parts”. You treat your mind as containing a Self – a sort of perfect angelic intellect without any flaws or mental illnesses – and various Parts – little sub-minds with their own agendas who can sometimes occlude or overwhelm the Self. During therapy, you talk to the Parts, learn their motives, and bargain with them.

You might identify a Part of you that wants to sabotage your relationships. You will visualize and name it – maybe you call her Sabby, and she looks like a snake. You talk to Sabby, and learn that after your first break-up, when you decided you never wanted to feel that level of pain again, you unconsciously created her and ordered her to make sure you never got close enough to anyone else to get hurt. Then you and the therapist come up with some plan to satisfy Sabby – maybe you convince her that you’re older now, and better able to deal with pain.

Continue reading “The hot new psychotherapy involves… demons”