Newsletters – mathewingram.com/work

October 2, 2026

Japanese monks mummified themselves while still alive

Hidden in remote mountain temples across Yamagata and Fukushima prefectures, you’ll find Japan’s mysterious Sokushinbutsu — self-mummified monks who underwent an extreme ritual to achieve enlightenment. Sokushinbutsu is the ancient practice of self-mummification followed by Shugen-do Buddhist monks in Japan’s mountainous regions. This extreme ritual involved a strict diet, intense physical training, and ultimately, sealing oneself in a tomb while still alive. Monks pursued Sokushinbutsu for enlightenment, to ease suffering, and as an act of spiritual devotion. They viewed it not as suicide, but as a sacred path to transcendence. The path to Sokushinbutsu began with a strict three years diet of nuts, seeds, and fruit, combined with intense physical activity to eliminate body fat. This was followed by another three years of consuming only bark and roots, further dehydrating the body. (via Voyapon)

He left $13 million to a tiny village he had never visited because they shared the same name

A man has given over €10 million to a village in Normandy although it is not known that he had ever visited or had any connection to it. Roger Thiberville did not have any heirs so he decided to bequeath part of his fortune to his accountant and the rest to Thiberville, a village of just 1,800 residents in the Eure. Guy Paris, the maire of the town, was first notified of the donation back in August when he received a call from a notaire, however the exact sum was only confirmed in the last few days. Not much is known about Roger Thiberville. He was a weather engineer who lived in a small flat in Paris and led a discreet life. He came from a family of winemakers and inherited from both his parents and his sister, who also died without an heir. He died on August 23 this year aged 91. The bulk of the donation came from four Paris flats that he owned. He is not known to have ever set foot in Thiberville. (via The Connexion)

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.

October 1, 2026

Letters written by medieval students mostly ask for money

As one medieval Italian father puts its: “a student’s first song is a demand for money, and there will never be a letter which does not ask for cash.” Here is a typical example from the 1220s: “B. to his venerable master A., greeting This is to inform you that I am studying at Oxford with the greatest diligence, but the matter of money stands greatly in the way of my promotion, as it is now two months since I spent the last of what you sent me. The city is expensive and makes many demands; I have to rent lodgings, buy necessaries, and provide for many other things which I cannot now specify. Wherefore I respectfully beg your paternity that by the promptings of divine pity you may assist me, so that I may be able to complete what I have well begun. For you must know that without Ceres and Bacchus Apollo grows cold.” (via Medievalists.net)

At the World Nomad Games athletes compete in sports like horseback archery

On a rainy day at the beginning of September, I found myself standing under the giant sky at the foot of the mountains in rural Kyrgyzstan, shouting “add oil! (加油) from the sidelines of a horseback archery track. I was back in Central Asia for the World Nomad Games, an Olympics-style celebration where China reluctantly lets some of its minorities compete. The World Nomad Games were first conceived in Kyrgyzstan in 2014 and are held every two years. After being hosted by Türkiye in 2022 and Kazakhstan in 2024, the Games have finally returned home to the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. And these were the largest Games ever, with 200,000+ visitors piling into Kyrchyn Gorge, one of the Games’ six venues, by the third day of the Games to watch 3,000+ athletes from 109 countries (compared to 583 athletes from 19 countries in 2014). (via China Talk)

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.

October 1, 2026

How do we regulate something we can’t even understand?

Every week there seem to be new revelations about “rogue” AI agents (although the anti-anthropomorphism crowd don’t like to call them that). First there was a report that a couple of OpenAI models hacked into Hugging Face to try and rig a test – not great. Then it was revealed these models spawned thousands of agents that operated semi-autonomously, coordinating their work on bypassing the guardrails on their sandbox by posting messages to each other on a message board they repurposed from a separate feature inside OpenAI. This seemed worse, obviously (despite many attempts by skeptics to downplay the whole thing). Then we find out that the OpenAI models had been practicing for this hack for months, and in the process had used multiple external services to keep in touch with one another, including a German wiki.

Then Australia announced that OpenAI had hacked into a government medical database, and only informed the government months later via email. And now we find out that OpenAI and Anthropic models have been involved in tens of thousands of similar activities. In fact, it isn’t just the Australian government that has seen its databases hacked by OpenAI models – agents have also gained access (or attempted to gain access) to systems at the United Nations, as well as a number of US government agencies such as the Education and Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the New York Times, and in some cases attempted to circumvent protections thousands of times. In at least some of these cases they appear to have been engaged in harmless inquiries about various mundane topics, and resorted to hacking as a way of finding out as much as possible, something those in the AI business refer to as “reward hacking.” As a report at Interesting Engineering described it:

OpenAI’s autonomous AI agents repeatedly queried a UN website and used techniques that appeared to circumvent restrictions when trying to retrieve publicly available data, according to an independent research report based on information supplied by AI research firm Transluce. The agents scanned a public data hub operated by UN Trade and Development, the UN’s trade arm, more than 16,000 times between April and the end of June, highlighting a growing problem with AI agents that can independently navigate the web and take actions when they encounter obstacles. Researchers believe the models were initially tasked with finding publicly available information, but their behavior became increasingly aggressive when the website prevented them from accessing some of the requested data.

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.

September 30, 2026

The true story of the actual first shot ever fired in the Civil War

It was the autumn of 1865 — a quiet, bitter autumn after four hollowing years of war — when James Gilmore received a manuscript from a ghost. Well, not a ghost exactly. There’d been rumors, of course, about what had become of William Parker. Some had him lynched in a dark woods. Others had him hacked to pieces in New York City. Still more had him living long enough to slaughter Confederates on Southern battlefields. But it had been nearly a decade and a half now since Parker vanished, and no one could ever truly prove what had become of him. The manuscript in James Gilmore’s hands revealed elements of this story never before shared: the outrageous adventures of Parker’s armed Black mutual defense organization; their alliance with various white neighbors; and finally, the daring narratives of Parker’s escapes, first from slavery and later from the enraged mobs and hastily deputized law enforcement officers. (via LitHub)

During World War I in war-torn Paris some brave women started a library

The Germans began firing on Paris again on the fifth of August 1918. Mary Josephine Booth was familiar with the sound of the air raid sirens by then. If they came at night, she would jump out of her bed at the Hotel Petrograd, dress, take what valuables she had, and if the shelling was especially fierce, retreat to the basement. But if the sirens came during the day, then Booth, clad in her olive-green uniform, would remain at her post in an ornate building across the street from the Palais de L’Élysée. “We had to keep working to get the library ready to open,” she would later write. Booth was one of hundreds of librarians who went to war alongside American troops during the First World War. In the summer of 1918, the 42-year-old woman from Illinois served with fellow recruits to the American Library Association’s Library War Service as they prepared to open a library in the war-scarred French capital. (via JSTOR Daily)

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.

September 29, 2026

He was an art forger but he became a national hero

In July of 1945, Han van Meegeren picked up his badger-hair brush and began to paint his last forgery. Over a decade, the wiry Dutchman had surreptitiously become Europe’s premier conman — a disgruntled artist-turned-forger who’d sold his works for tens of millions of dollars. He had duped leading critics, wealthy collectors, and even a high-ranking Nazi official into believing his works were real. What’s more, he had chosen to do so by emulating the works of Jan Vermeer, a technically-immaculate master of the Dutch Golden Age. Post-World War II, a “Vermeer” painting sold to Hermann Göring was traced back to van Meegeren — a painting of such high quality that experts agreed no one could have possibly fabricated it. Accused of plundering for the Germans, the artist was sentenced to death. In an odd twist, van Meegeren was given one last chance to prove his innocence: If he could produce a brilliant forgery before the eyes of court-appointed witnesses, he’d be spared. What ensued would make the man one of the most popular figures in the Netherlands. (via Priceonomics)

Scientists found an ancient sheep virus hiding in a medieval parchment

In ancient Rome, shepherds feared the appearance of bumpy pustules on their sheep—a telltale sign of deadly sheeppox. Even today, the disease poses a major threat, capable of wiping out entire flocks. Yet the disease’s origins—and historical impact—have remained mysterious. In a study published today in Science Advances, researchers pin the virus’ emergence to about 5000 years ago, roughly the same time people started to intensively shear sheep for wool. The peek into the pathogen’s past came from an unusual source: dozens of medieval books and legal documents written on parchment, which is made from specially treated animal skins. “It turns out parchment is an extremely good preserver of this type of biological data,” says University of Leicester historian Joanna Story, a co-author of the new study. Researchers rubbed pages of the books with erasers, then extracted DNA from the eraser rubbings. That there was DNA to recover at all came as a surprise. Before becoming pages in a book, cow, goat, and sheep skins were soaked for days in pits filled with lime. (via Science.org)

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.

September 28, 2026September 28, 2026

How Lady Gaga’s biggest fan wound up in prison

On Tuesday, Kirill Nguyen shared a rare personal dispatch from the @GagaDaily X account: “Sorry about the lack of updates, I was literally in prison 😭”. The profile, an outgrowth of the eminent Lady Gaga fan site Nguyen, now 32, founded nearly two decades ago, had gone dark for a year beginning in February 2024. His return was met with an overwhelmingly effusive response. Nguyen was deliberately vague about the circumstances of his detainment, but speaking to Pitchfork, he revealed some of the details. In 2020, Nguyen attended a protest in Belarus, where he’d lived most of his life. The former Soviet satellite had recently catapulted Alexander Lukashenko, “Europe’s last dictator,” into a sixth term as president, in an election widely disputed as fraudulent. “I just came out with a flag and walked,” Nguyen says. “It was a regular protest like you guys have in America every day.” Four years later, Nguyen returned to visit his family in Belarus, where he was arrested by state police forces. (via Pitchfork)

Scientists say acupuncture may work via a newly discovered vascular network

The practice of acupuncture made it into the pantheon of accepted medical methodologies in the West through trade, politics, immigration and fascination. But it took thousands of years for scientists to understand the exact physical system that makes it effective.
In China, acupuncture predates the common era. Its most foundational text was written around 1st or 2nd century BCE, mapping energy meridians and points along the body the same way that circulatory or skeletal systems are mapped. As European missionaries and traders ventured to China, the West flirted with Traditional Chinese Medicine several times. It caught hold in France, where a unique form of acupuncture developed in the 19th century: The French school of acupuncture created new methodologies like ear acupuncture, and using electric currents with needles. In 2021, scientists discovered a new system inside of our bodies. They’ve labeled it the “interstitium”. They say that it plays a role in how acupuncture actually works. (via Why Is This Interesting)

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.

September 25, 2026

TV host Bob Barker was a member of the Sioux nation

Robert William Barker was an American media personality, game show host, and animal rights advocate. He hosted CBS’s The Price Is Right, the longest-running game show in North American television history, from 1972 to 2007. Barker also hosted Truth or Consequences from 1956 to 1975. Born in Darrington, Washington, in modest circumstances, Barker spent most of his youth on the Rosebud Indian Reservation and was a citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. The U.S. Indian Census Rolls, 1885–1940, list Barker as a citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, which the tribe publicly confirmed. His mother, Matilda was a schoolteacher; his father, Byron John Barker, was the foreman on the electrical high line through the state of Washington. Barker’s father was one-quarter Sicangu, , thus Barker was one-eighth Sicangu. Barker once said, “I’ve always bragged about being part Indian, because they are a people to be proud of. And the Sioux were the greatest warriors of them all.” (via Wikipedia)

In the nineteenth century before libraries women sold books door-to-door

In the second half of the nineteenth century, before the rise of public libraries, many people in remote parts of the United States got their hands on new books thanks to traveling salespeople. The booksellers visited homes and businesses with sample books, took orders, and then later delivered the books and collected payment. Braun writes that popular volumes included Bibles, farming and health manuals, biographies, and fiction. Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs and the works of Mark Twain were popular choices. Many books published using this “subscription” model sold hundreds of thousands of copies. In an 1868 account of her work selling books across northern Illinois and Indiana, Annie Nelles Dumond described taking up the work out of necessity. She wrote that, seeking to escape a difficult childhood, she married young to a man who turned out to already have a wife and children. A second husband abandoned her. So Dumond sought ways to support herself. When she began selling books, she wore a mourning bonnet. She acknowledged that this was deceptive but wrote that it was “almost necessary to my self-preservation that my past should not be known.” (via JSTOR Daily)

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.

September 24, 2026

AI doomers may be wrong but the skeptics seem even wronger

As regular readers will know, last week I re-published a piece that I originally wrote on September 3rd, entitled “Yes, we should be very worried about the Hugging Face hack.” I couldn’t write a new post for last week because I was backwoods camping in a remote area of southwestern Ontario – Killarney Provincial Park, in case you are interested – and I had virtually no cell signal for most of that time (if you like canoes or kayaks or sunsets or trees, you can check out the post I wrote about the trip). I chose to re-publish the Hugging Face hack piece because it seemed even more appropriate in light of some of the revelations that have been coming out about the hack – including the fact that the hack was neither the first time OpenAI models had accessed another company’s systems without permission, nor the first time the models in question had used a message board to discuss the methods used in their attack. The September 3rd piece was itself an update on an earlier piece I wrote in July, right after the Hugging Face attack was first revealed (a reveal that came weeks after the hack itself took place).

The debate over AI safety and what AI researchers call “alignment” – or, to put it more bluntly, between whether AI is working as advertised or is going to lead to the extermination of life as we know it – has continued to intensify. One of the main triggers was a series of departures and/or warnings from some senior staffers at most of the major AI companies. The one that started the landslide was Jacob Coxon, a researcher who posted on X about quitting OpenAI because of his concerns about AI. “I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic,” he said. “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” The people building AI, Coxon said, “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately.”

Coxon’s post was quoted by Evan Hubinger, the head of alignment science at Anthropic, who said that many of those working at the company “earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.” Ethan Perez, the head of the alignment team at Anthropic, posted that he and his colleagues “100% agree with him that AI poses serious risks to society.” Drake Thomas of Anthropic responded to Coxon’s post by saying: “I promise you we are actually just fucking scared, it’s not galaxy-brained marketing.” Alex Turner wrote about quitting Google’s DeepMind because the company didn’t keep its promises about AI, and Jonathan Richard Schwarz said he quit DeepMind after seven years and refused job offers from both OpenAI and Anthropic. Andreas Kirsch, a Google DeepMind employee, wrote that he was “worried that AI will kill us all, either via near term risks or long term risks or both.”

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.

September 23, 2026

He spent millions he got from a faulty ATM and has no regrets

An Australian man who defrauded a bank by exploiting an ATM loophole said he does not regret his actions after using the money to fund a lavish lifestyle for months. Dan Saunders managed to spend more than AUS$1.6m ($1.1m) in just over four months after he found he could withdraw money from his account without the transactions being registered. Now out of prison, Saunders has told Australian media how he managed to blow the money on “having a good time and just enjoying things really.” These extravagant purchases include eating at high-end restaurants, buying drinks all night for people in bars, gambling, and even hiring a private jet so him and his friends could go on vacation. The story of how Saunders managed to afford his newfound millionaire lifestyle began after he attempted to withdraw some cash at a National Bank Australia machine in Wangaratta, Victoria, in 2011. After seeing his account was empty, Saunders transferred cash from his Mastercard to his savings account. He said the screen then said “transaction cancelled,” but the machine still gave him the $200. (via Newsweek)

After the Battle of Waterloo teeth were taken from the battlefield and made into dentures

Historians estimate that by the morning following the Battle of Waterloo, the 50,000 bodies that lay dead or dying on the battlefield had been stripped of everything of value including their teeth. Local scavengers, surviving soldiers and professional body scavengers were all known to work on the battlefield. Some body snatchers of London were known to get jobs following the British army. Transported back to England, the teeth were sold to the ivory turners and jewellers and those beginning to make a full-time living from the making of artificial teeth. Sorted and shaped, the teeth were riveted into a hippopotamus or walrus ivory base. Examples on display in the exhibition explore the methods and skill in how these human teeth were attached. The many processes involved ensured the denture took at least six weeks to complete. Not surprisingly they were very expensive to buy. In 1782 Martin Van Butchell of London advertised a full set of ivory dentures with human teeth for £100. (via Nature)

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.

September 22, 2026

He hiked the entire 2,193-mile Appalachian Trail at 91

More than 14 million older adults fall every year in the U.S., perhaps none so often as 91-year-old Dale Sanders. By his count, Sanders fell 71 times while reclaiming his record as the oldest hiker to complete the Appalachian Trail. Six were what he calls hard falls, including one that led to a brief hospitalization and another just 200 yards from the finish. But none were enough to permanently divert him from the 2,193-mile (3,530-kilometer) trail that runs between Springer Mountain in Georgia and Mount Katahdin in Maine. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy defines a thru-hike as completing all of the trail’s sections in any order within a year, allowing for pauses. Sanders started Sept. 6 in West Virginia, hopscotched around with some brief breaks and finished Monday atop Maine’s highest peak, where he paused to pray at the sign marking the summit. Sanders, whose trail name is Grey Beard, first set the Appalachian Trail record in 2017 at age 82. Four years later, his 83-year-old friend M.J. Eberhart, aka Nimblewill Nomad, took the title. But within months, Sanders announced his comeback plan. (via PBS)

Moby Dick wasn’t exciting enough so Hollywood invented an evil half-brother for Captain Ahab

The Sea Beast, the first film adaptation of Moby-Dick, begins with a leather-bound edition of the novel opening to page one, but the phrase “Call me Ishmael” is nowhere to be found. That’s because there’s no Ishmael in this movie at all. Instead, theatergoers a hundred years ago were introduced to a new character: Captain Ahab’s evil younger brother, Derek. Yes, Derek. This silent film, released in 1926, offers the story of a dreamy and handsome young harpooner named Ahab Ceeley, cut down in his prime by both fraternal and cetaceous violence. The Hollywood leading man John Barrymore plays Ahab as a valiant lover, wooing the beautiful Esther with his nautical prowess and igniting the envy of his jealous half brother, who hopes to steal Esther’s heart. The dastardly Derek stealthily shoves his sibling into the jaws of a vicious sperm whale, then convinces the now-disabled Ahab that his sweetheart could never accept him in his disfigured condition. Plunged into a steely despair, the captain focuses his hate on the legendary Moby Dick—at least until he discovers the truth. “Your worst enemy ain’t Moby Dick,” a sailor eventually informs him, “it’s your half brother, Derek.” (via The Paris Review)

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.

September 21, 2026

Why did this trainer at a riding academy shoot a student?

Until 2019, when he attempted to kill one of his students, Michael Barisone was a leading rider and trainer in the horse-handling sport of dressage. Today, he still owns a dressage farm in Loxahatchee, Florida, twenty miles inland from Palm Beach. On five acres, he has a stucco house that’s connected to a barn; white-fenced paddocks shaded by palms; and an outdoor riding ring. Along one end of the ring is a common neighborhood fixture: an eighty-foot-long mirror. Barisone, who’s in his early sixties, with a Will Ferrell chin and a muscular build, can hold a conversation about his own good judgment, and the iniquity of his enemies, while riding a horse and monitoring his own reflection. In Barisone’s Loxahatchee kitchen there is a dark-green safe the size of a vending machine. It used to stand in his office on the New Jersey farm. He has never seriously contested the idea that, on August 7, 2019, he took a handgun from the safe and drove a few hundred yards, to a house on his property where Lauren Kanarek, a thirty-eight-year-old student of his, was boarding with her boyfriend. He shot her twice. (via The New Yorker)

He was cleaning out his garage and found a box marked SECRET in a hidden crawlspace

Jason Hurdle was clearing space in his garage for his Halloween decorations when he pulled back an unassuming sheet of plywood from the wall, revealing a crawl space he’d never seen before. Inside was a dusty cardboard box full of weathered files that looked like trash. But as he carried the box out to the flatbed of his truck and reached for a garbage bin, a breeze lifted one of the covers, and a word in red block letters stopped him: “SECRET.” A mechanic for his local school district near Waterloo, New York, Hurdle doesn’t encounter government documents with classified markings. Initially, he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. But as he read the pages, he started to get an idea.The 80-year-old, onionskin pages were mostly handwritten, first-person accounts by American prisoners of war, or POWs, describing their experiences in German captivity during World War II. In July, the National Archives announced the documents had been safely recovered by its Archival Recovery Program. (via the Washington Post)

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.

September 11, 2026

This forgotten pioneer was the Jackie Robinson of golf

How good a golfer was Ted Rhodes? At the 1948 US Open, he finished the first round just three shots behind the leader – and eventual winner – Ben Hogan. But there’s more to the story: Rhodes was the first Black competitor in the tournament in its modern era, during a time of widespread segregation in American sport. In addition to reintegrating the US Open, Rhodes was part of a 1948 lawsuit against the PGA, which had restricted membership to white people. The PGA responded with a settlement and a promise to change, but according to the book, instead it shifted the status of tournaments from open to invitational, allowing the organization to tacitly continue segregation. Before the PGA reversed its stance, some courses welcomed Black players for PGA events, including Phoenix Country Club for the 1952 Phoenix Open, where the Black entrants included Rhodes and a crucial figure in his life: boxing great Joe Louis. It was golf that connected them – when not in the ring, the heavyweight champ liked to go out on the links, with Rhodes as his teacher. During and after his playing career, Rhodes helped spread interest in golf among Black people through his instruction. (via The Guardian)

Some scientists believe we would be better off burying plastic garbage instead of recycling it

Every child is taught that landfill is the worst place our trash can end up. It is the sad consequence of a failure to recycle: a mountain of waste leaking chemicals and smells, blighting the land forever. What if that picture is wrong? What if landfill, properly done, is actually one of the cleanest, cheapest, and most environmentally sensible things we can do with our waste? It turns out that for much of what we throw away, the humble landfill beats the recycling bin. The case against landfill has two parts. The first part is that there are efficient, cheap, or environmentally friendly ways to practically reuse or recycle materials, rather than landfilling, meaning that there is a reasonable alternative. The second is that landfill itself is unsustainable, or environmentally unfriendly, meaning that we need an alternative. Both are false. It’s natural to assume that reusable always means better. But this intuition treats different materials as interchangeable and ignores the cost of making them in the first place. Once we account for energy, labor, and other inputs, reuse pays off only in selective cases. (via Works In Progress)

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.

September 10, 2026

I don’t like it but the Trump DoJ is right on AI and fair use

I’ve written about this topic a number of times before, but in this case I’m tempted to re-use the popular meme “When the worst person in the world makes a good point,” as I did awhile back when I wrote about Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI for (among other things) not actually being open. In this case, the worst person is the Trump government – or, to be more specific, the Department of Justice. Obviously not everyone in the DoJ is tainted by the association with Trump, and many of them may be hard working and smart lawyers who would like nothing better than to be associated with a different administration, and I choose to believe that those are the ones who wrote the brief that the Trump government recently filed in the copyright case between the New York Times and OpenAI. In a nutshell, the brief argues that scanning news stories and other content owned by the New York Times for the purposes of training an AI model should be covered by the fair use exemption in U.S. copyright law – and, of course, implies that all content owned by corporations or other rightsholders is theoretically covered by the same exclusion. As some of you may know by now, this is a conclusion that I agree with.

To recap for those of you who aren’t familiar with the case, the New York Times sued OpenAI in December of 2023, claiming that its ChatGPT model was trained on NYT content, and that the newspaper publisher should be entitled to billions of dollars in compensation as a result. The newspaper’s complaint, filed in Manhattan federal court, accused OpenAI (and its then-partner Microsoft) of trying to “free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism” by using it as a way to give information to users. The lawsuit added that “there is nothing ‘transformative’ about using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it.” This latter statement is a crucial element in the newspaper company’s argument, since one of the four factors that the courts take into account when considering a fair-use case (and the one that courts often deem to be the most important factor) is whether the infringing use could be seen as “transformative.”

It’s worth noting that the point about OpenAI free-riding on the Times in order to create an alternative way of giving users the same information was buttressed in the lawsuit by an exhibit the Times said showed that ChatGPT gave users the entire text of NYT articles for free when asked to do so. However, OpenAI responded that this was not the way the AI model was supposed to be used, and that the Times only managed to generate the entire text of an article by repeatedly prompting the AI with long sections of the article, and even then it took many tries before it succeeded. “Even when using such prompts, our models don’t typically behave the way The New York Times insinuates, which suggests they either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts,” OpenAI said at the time. In any case, OpenAI said that it had changed the way ChatGPT worked so that this was no longer possible. The whole point of the model, the company said, was not to reproduce the entire text of existing articles but merely to use those articles as raw material to train ChatGPT to understand text.

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.

September 9, 2026

She’s 17 years old and her brain won’t let her forget anything

Known as the human calendar to her friends but nicknamed AJ in later research reports, the woman was looking for help. “I want to know why I remember everything,” she said. AJ told the scientists that she couldn’t turn her memory off, even when she was engaged in other activities that demanded her attention, like talking to a friend. The scientists reported on AJ’s condition, and coined the term “hyperthymesia” to describe it. Almost uniformly, those who have the condition find the memories—which tend to be carefully indexed by date—intrusive, uncontrollable, and distressing. Which is why the recently published case study of a 17-year-old girl dubbed TL is commanding attention. Like others with hyperthymesia, TL has an exceptionally intense and vivid memory for the events that have occurred over her short life. She can provide an especially rich amount of perceptual, spatial, and temporal information, and even recall events from multiple points of view. But unlike the others, she is able to organize these memories into a kind of “memory palace,” and can access them whenever she likes. (via Nautilus)

They rented jet-skis for an hour and wound up fighting for their lives in the open ocean

They had become, in an instant, two indiscernible specks stranded in a dark and boundless sea. The jet skis that had carried them past the breakwater had been swept away. The shore of Long Beach, Calif. — where their evening jaunt had begun — was no longer in sight. Now the longtime friends clung to life jackets while choking on fierce waves, their bodies dangling in the Pacific Ocean. It was Aug. 16, and the last rays of sun had faded. It was not clear if help was on the way. Mr. Carbullido was dazed. He had been thrown from his jet ski and landed on his back, the wind knocked out of him. He appeared unable to comprehend the urgency of the situation. At 47, Ms. Dubray was a strong swimmer; it was not unusual for her to go into the ocean every day of the week, even to take her kayak out at night. But as she left Mr. Carbullido and set off for the glimmer in the distance, the water churned with an unfamiliar terror. Every few strokes, she shouted her friend’s name so he could hear her voice. She heard no response. (via the NYT)

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.

September 8, 2026

An ex-cop said he stole millions so he could give it to the poor

It was the largest armed robbery in Austrian history. The heist had been near perfectly executed — perfect, that is, except for one small oversight. The thieves didn’t realize that the ATM had a security camera that automatically took photos of the street. The images were blurry, but they revealed that the perpetrator who climbed into the van was short enough to stand upright without hitting their head. Detectives decided that it was almost certainly a woman. They soon homed in on a former Loomis employee who, when she worked for the company, had scheduled the routes and was only five feet three inches tall. Investigators were stunned when she named her accomplice: Gabriel E., a former officer in the city’s WEGA unit, the Viennese equivalent of SWAT. When detectives asked why he had committed such an audacious crime, he replied that he hadn’t stolen the money for himself. He’d done it for the children of Africa; he planned to build an orphanage there. It sounded absurd—the kind of desperate lie a thief might invent to deflect blame or ameliorate punishment—but it was very much the truth. (via The Atavist)

He survived for five nights in the mountains by eating wildflowers and hiding in a cave

A man who survived a grueling five nights in British Columbia’s Coast Mountains is sharing more about his experience. Stanislav Volo became the subject of a massive search after he failed to return from a hike on Sunday after riding up the Sea-to-Sky Gondola, just south of Squamish. Search and rescue crews found him Friday evening on the Indian Arm Forest Service Road after he’d descended the mountain injured, but under his own power. In an interview with CBC News on Saturday after being discharged from the hospital, the 43-year-old father of two was in good spirits, despite bruises and a black eye. Volo had intended to hike the Mount Habrich Loop. He said his phone died when he got to the top of the mountain, and he was unable to find his way down. Volo said he spent several nights sheltering in a small cave near a waterfall, where he focused on recovering, trying to stay warm. He said he rationed a few packages of gummy bears before he discovered a sweet-tasting wildflower to eat. (via the CBC)

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.