From Dave Burkey for Jax Examiner: “They called him the Black Swallow, and from the beginning of his life, all he wanted to do was get to France.He was born in Georgia, his father a former slave from Haiti, his mother full-blooded Cree. He ran away while still a child, determined to fulfill his destiny. He lived for a time with a group of English Romani, learning the art of horsemanship and working as a jockey. He kept traveling and working until he made his way to Norfolk, where he stowed away on a ship bound for Scotland.He wouldn’t see America again for thirty years. Towards the end of his life, he worked as an elevator operator at Rockefeller Square in New York City.”
The captain of Charles Darwin’s ship invented the idea of a weather forecast
From the BBC: “Admiral Robert FitzRoy is chiefly remembered as Charles Darwin’s taciturn captain on HMS Beagle, during the famous circumnavigation in the 1830s. But in his lifetime FitzRoy found celebrity not from his time at sea but from his pioneering daily weather predictions, which he called by a new name of his own invention – “forecasts”. There was no such thing as a weather forecast in 1854 when FitzRoy established what would later be called the Met Office. Instead the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade was founded as a chart depot, intended to reduce sailing times with better wind charts. But the idea that the weather could be predicted was widely ridiculed.”
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On July 5th, Meta launched the company’s new social networking app, Threads, by giving users of Instagram, its photo and video-sharing service, first crack at the ability to set up a Threads account. The following week, I did a Q&A with my colleague Jon Allsop, in which we talked about whether Threads would be able to compete with X (formerly Twitter), and how useful it might be for journalists. Just four months later, Threads has arguably become a significant competitor for X, and has done so a lot faster than most people probably expected. The app hit thirty million sign-ups within twenty-four hours of its launch, and then fifty million, and in a conference call on October 25th, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s cofounder and CEO, said Threads now has almost 100 million monthly users, making it one of the fastest-growing apps in history.
Meanwhile, Twitter’s user metrics are down across the board, and that includes daily active users. Elon Musk, who controls the company, said earlier this year that the app shas somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred and thirty million monthly users, but that still means that Threads has managed to sign up almost one fifth as many monthly users as X, a social network that has been around since 2007. No doubt the turmoil that has continued at X since Musk acquired Twitter last year has helped push users towards Threads, but that’s not the only reason. Last month, Casey Newton wrote in his Platformer newsletter that the Israel-Hamas conflict also seems to have helped tip the scales in favor of Threads, and caused a minor exodus from X.
For more than a decade, Newton noted, people flocked to Twitter whenever calamity struck, attracted by a blend of first-person accounts, verified journalists sharing reporting, and a broad range of commentary on whatever was happening. That Twitter no longer exists, says Newton. There may still be first-person style accounts of the news, but Musk’s approach to verification makes it impossible to tell what is real and what is not, since the blue check that used to denote an official account can be purchased by anyone. And the desire for factual reporting and commentary about the Israel-Hamas conflict, Newton argues, created the latest instance of what Ezra Klein calls an “exodus shock” from X.
Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
From Vanessa Vaselka for the Smithsonian: “Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felso-Szilvas, an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat born in 1877, was a notorious figure in his day. A wild genius with a flair for the dandyish and the dramatic, he was an explorer, spy, polyglot and master of disguise. He crossed the Albanian Alps on foot, and was nearly crowned King of Albania. Later in his life, he was known for chasing villagers from his estate with a pistol. But the baron was also one of the great scholars and scientific minds of his time. He was one of the first scientists to look at fossilized dinosaur bones and see a living creature. And he was a staunch believer in the relationship between birds and dinosaurs, decades before the idea became widely accepted among paleontologists.”
Why you might find a shoe hidden inside the walls of your house
From Katrina Gulliver for JSTOR Daily: “If you live in an old house, there may be more than you realize behind its walls or under its floors. For centuries, there was a custom in Great Britain (which spread to Britain’s colonies in the Americas) of ritual concealment, placing objects in different parts of the house as totems. The practice seems to have been widespread in Britain from the medieval period into the twentieth century. Often, the concealed object was a shoe. The oldest such hidden shoe was found at Winchester Cathedral and dated to 1308. Cases of hidden shoes also “abound” in New England. John Adams Birthplace, a house built by Joseph Penniman in 1681, contained an incredible forty-four shoes and boots, discovered during restoration.”
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From Alex Mar for The Guardian: “In the spring of 1985, Paula Cooper was 15 and on her lunch break at Lew Wallace high school in Indiana. She and her friends Karen and April decided to skip their afternoon classes and head over to Candyland Arcade around the corner. Karen was Paula’s best friend at school. At 16, Karen was a large girl, often out of breath; everyone called her Pooky, maybe because of her sweet face. She had a child, who was three, and he mostly stayed at home with her godmother. April, too, was pregnant – though she could still hide it. April mentioned an old woman who lived in the house just behind hers, the home of Ruth Pelke. April told them she was a Bible teacher, an elderly white woman, and that, since her husband’s death, she had lived alone.”
The mysterious death of Lord Kitchener
From Jeremy Paxman at the Financial Times: “On a sunny day, Marwick Head is a glorious place to be. At the top of the headland stands a squat, crenellated tower. Almost 50ft high and visible for miles, it has no obvious function – too fat to be a lighthouse, too small to be a castle. A stone panel explains: “This tower was raised by the people of Orkney in memory of Field Marshall Earl Kitchener of Khartoum. He and his staff perished along with the officers and nearly all the men of HMS Hampshire on 5th June, 1916.” Though it is hardly remembered at all today, the wreck of the Hampshire was seen at the time as little short of a national disaster. Hundreds of men perished that night, among them the best-known soldier in the English-speaking world. The conspiracy theories began almost at once. How could such an important figure, in the full protection of the greatest navy in the world, be dead?”
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From Jacob Judah for MIT Tech Review: “Tokelau, a necklace of three isolated atolls strung out across the Pacific, is so remote that it was the last place on Earth to be connected to the telephone—only in 1997. Just three years later, the islands received a fax with an unlikely business proposal that would change everything. It was from an early internet entrepreneur from Amsterdam, named Joost Zuurbier. He wanted to manage Tokelau’s country-code top-level domain, or ccTLD—the short string of characters that is tacked onto the end of a URL. Until recently, its .tk domain had more users than any other country’s: a staggering 25 million. But nearly all the websites and others that have used .tk have been spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals.”
The secret room where Michelangelo drew on the walls while he was in hiding
From Open Culture: “In the year 1530, Michelangelo was sentenced to death by Pope Clement VII. The Florence-born Michelangelo had come to the aid of his hometown by working on its fortifications, and that drew the ire of the Medici. They pardoned him before long, so he could finish his work on the Sistine Chapel, but while he was in hiding he spent several months making dozens of drawings, all of which he drew directly on the walls. Their existence remained unknown until 1975 when Paolo Dal Poggetto, then the director of the Medici Chapels, one of five museums that make up the Bargello Museums, was searching for a suitable space to create a new exit for the museum.”
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From Emily Zarevich for JSTOR Daily: “It was exactly the kind of thing a reckless twenty-something-year-old would do. But why would a rational, academically accomplished, thirty-year-old philosophy teacher do it? For whatever reason, Sartre made the decision to get high on mescaline, used at the time to treat alcoholism and depression, and recruited a doctor friend to inject him with it at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris. If Sartre was looking for some kind of epiphany, it presented itself to him in a very bizarre form. For days he was tormented by illusions of crustaceans. Not the charming, singing, Disney-style ones, but demonic, taunting sea beasts that followed him wherever he went. His clock became an owl, his umbrella metamorphosed into a vulture.”
A QAnon cult set up a compound in a small town but the locals are fighting back
From Mack Lamoureux for Vice: “Hugh Everding, a bald hulking man of about 6’4”, stares out of the kitchen window as police vehicle after police vehicle rolls down the street headed towards a check stop manned by a half-dozen cops. Every entry point into this town has such a check stop, ready to interrogate both locals and miscreants on what their business is. There’s little doubt that at this moment, Richmound, Saskatchewan, population 130, is the most fortified town in all of Canada. You can always spot a storm brewing in the Prairies, and in Hugh’s case, it was just across the street, where the so-called QAnon Queen of Canada and her followers had taken over an abandoned school.”
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From Eamon Javers for CNBC: “As he was cheering on his team in LA in 2019, Jimmy Zhong couldn’t have known that a small group of agents from the IRS Criminal Investigation unit, were painstakingly trying to solve a crime that dated back years. It was a 2012 hack in which someone had stolen 50,000 bitcoins from a site on the dark web called Silk Road. Over the years, the value of the bitcoin stolen by the Silk Road hacker had soared to more than $3 billion. Investigators could track the location of the currency on the blockchain, but they couldn’t see the identity of the owner. Then the hacker made a tiny mistake. He transferred around $800 worth to a crypto exchange that required real names and addresses. The account was registered in Zhong’s name.”
The Paris catacombs don’t just play host to millions of skeletons, there are parties too
From Frank Jacobs for Atlas Obscura: “Most people have heard of the Catacombs of Paris: subterranean charnel houses for the bones of around six million dead Parisians. They are one of the French capital’s most famous tourist attractions—and undoubtedly its grisliest. But they constitute only a small fragment of what the locals themselves call the mines of Paris, a collection of tunnels and galleries up to 300 km long, most of which are off-limits to the public, yet eagerly explored by so-called cataphiles. The Great Southern Network takes up around 200 km beneath the city, all south of the river Seine, and smaller networks run under other parts of Paris. But how did they get there?”
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From Michael Idov for GQ in 2011: “The rumors started seeping out of Ukraine: A young Russian film director had holed up on the outskirts of Kharkov, a town of 1.4 million in the country’s east, making…something. If the gossip was to be believed, this was the most expansive, complicated, all-consuming film project ever attempted. A steady stream of former extras and fired PAs talked of the shoot in terms usually reserved for survivalist camps. The director, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, orced the crew to dress in Stalin-era clothes, fed them Soviet food out of cans and tins, and paid them in Soviet money. Khrzhanovsky had taken over all of Kharkov, they said, shutting down the airport. Others insisted, the entire thing was a prison experiment, filmed by hidden cameras.”
When a giant pink bunny appeared on a hill in the Italian countryside
From Dan Lewis at Now I Know: “The Italian village of Frabosa Sottana is located in the northwestern part of the country, in the foothills of the Alps. It’s a small, nondescript municipality, home to only about 1,500 people. And one day, the residents woke up to find a giant pink rabbit lying on the hill of the local ski resort. This was no child’s toy – it was 200 feet long and about 20 feet high. It turned out that the rabbit was put there by a Vienna-based art collective, which does all sorts of weird things like this; in 2014, they built a giant nose in an open space in Germany. The rabbit was knitted from wool and stuffed with hay, and was designed to make a statement about decay – and it did, since it rotted away and was almost completely gone by about 2016.”
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It’s been a big week for AI regulation—or at least, the idea of it. On Monday, the Biden administration published an executive order on “the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence”; while AI has the potential to help solve a number of urgent challenges, the EO said, the irresponsible use of the same technology could “exacerbate societal harms such as fraud, discrimination, bias, and disinformation,” and create risks to national security. Then, yesterday, the British government opened a two-day summit on AI safety at Bletchley Park, the site where codebreakers famously deciphered German messages during World War II. Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, said that AI will bring changes “as far reaching as the industrial revolution, the coming of electricity, or the birth of the internet,” but that there is also a risk that humanity could “lose control” of the technology. And the European Union has been trying to push forward AI legislation that it has been working on for more than two years.
AI and its potential risks and benefits are at the top of many agendas at the same time. Yesterday, Vice President Kamala Harris, who is attending the Bletchley Park summit, gave a speech in which she rejected “the false choice that suggests we can either protect the public or advance innovation,” adding, “We can—and we must—do both.” Ahead of time, a British official told Politico that the speech would show that the summit was a “real focal point” for global AI regulation (even if, as Politico noted, it “may overshadow Bletchley a bit.”) When it comes down to it, though, the US, the UK, and the EU are taking different approaches to the problem—differences that are, in many cases, the result of political factors specific to each jurisdiction.
In the US, the Biden administration’s order aims to put some bite behind voluntary AI rules that it released earlier this year—but it doesn’t go as far as an actual law because there’s no chance one of those would pass. That’s because Congress—as Anu Bradford, a law professor at Columbia University, told the MIT Technology Review—is “deeply polarized and even dysfunctional to the extent that it is very unlikely to produce any meaningful AI legislation in the near future.” Partly as a result, some observers have accused the White House of resorting to “hand waving” about the problem. The full executive order is over a hundred pages long; some of those are filled with definitions of terms that not every reader will be familiar with (“floating point operation”; “dual-use foundation model”) but there is also some rambling as to the potential of AI, both positive and negative.
Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
From John Reed for Vice: “When I was four or five, sometimes I’d walk into my grandmother’s bedroom to find her weeping. She’d be sitting on the side of the bed, going through boxes of tissues. People were always dying around Grandma—her children, her husbands, her boyfriend—so her lifelong state of grief was understandable. To see her sunken in her high and soft bed, enshrouded in the darkness of the attic, and surrounded by the skin-and-spit smell of old age, was to know that mothers don’t get what they deserve. Today, when I think back on it, I don’t wonder whether Grandma got what she deserved as a mother; I wonder whether she got what she deserved as a murderer.”
Inside the capital of Lithuania there’s a tiny micronation called Uzupis
From Daisy Alioto for Dirt: “The Republic of Užupis—a 7,000-resident micronation inside the country’s capital—is located adjacent to Vilnius’s Old Town, just across the Vilnia river. Since its founding on April 1st, 1997, the 148-acre micronation has captured the imagination of the world. Most of this fascination stems from the republic’s unusual constitution, which includes articles like “11. Everyone has the right to look after the dog until one of them dies.” Užupis was born from tragedy. The micronation was founded by Tomas Čepaitis and Romas Lileikis in an attempt to reclaim the derelict area known primarily for its high crime rate. What was once a thriving Jewish neighborhood had fallen into ruin after the murder of 95% of Lithuania’s Jewish population.”
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From the New York Times: “I know I look like a man. I know I sound like a man and maybe even walk like a man and dress like one, too. But I’m not a man; I’m a woman. Playing sports and having muscles and a deep voice make me less feminine, yes. I’m a different kind of woman, I know, but I’m still a woman. I began running competitively as a teenager in South Africa, and by age 18 I was competing on the international stage. In 2009, as I prepared to run in the Berlin World Championships, athletic authorities sent me for some medical testing. Because of my looks, there had been speculation from my fellow athletes, sports officials, the media and fans that I was not what I said I was.”
Vladimir Nabokov’s fame is thanks in large part to the work of his wife Vera
From Stacy Schiff for The New Yorker: “Vladimir Nabokov was famous at Cornell, where he taught between 1948 and 1959, for a number of reasons. None had anything to do with the literature; few people knew what he had written, and even fewer had read his work. Tearing Dostoyevski to shreds in front of two hundred undergraduates made an impression, as did the pronouncement that good books should not make us think but make us shiver. The fame derived in part, too, from the fact that the professor did not come to class alone. He arrived on campus driven by Mrs. Nabokov, he crossed campus with Mrs. Nabokov, and he occasionally appeared in class on the arm of Mrs. Nabokov, who carried his books. In fact, the man who spoke so often of his own isolation was one of the most accompanied loners of all time.”
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Editor’s Note: Sorry to interrupt your reading, but I thought I would mention something that will hopefully make things easier for some of you. In yesterday’s newsletter there was a story titled “The grift, the Indian prince, and a shocking twist,” from a subscription newsletter called AirMail (founded by Graydon Carter, former editor of Vanity Fair). Since the newsletter has a hard paywall, I included a link that got around the payall, using a service called 12ft.io. But that service seems to have shut down, at least temporarily, and so has another I used to use called archive.today. So I have saved a copy of that story to a shared folder on Instapaper, which you should be able to access here. For the Bloomberg story included here, that method didn’t work, so I have copied the entire story to my website, and included a link to the page.
As a professional journalist, I realize this is somewhat hypocritical of me. Don’t paywalls help support journalism? Perhaps. But then, Graydon Carter is extremely wealthy, and so is Bloomberg, so I don’t feel that bad about getting around their hard paywall for a single story. They could make their paywalls more porous, and give readers who come only once in a while a free story, but they choose not to do that. So I am helping them 🙂 And I am promoting their work as well, by allowing you to read these stories. That’s my rationale, anyway. I’m planning to do this for other similar stories in the future – either putting them in the shared Instapaper folder or posting them to my site (which no one ever goes to). If the links don’t work or you can’t access the shared folder, let me know and I will find another way. And now, back to the links!
Update: 12ft.io was apparently taken down without warning by its hosting service, for alleged terms of service violations.As for archive.today (also at archive.is, archive.ph etc.) it doesn’t work for me on Chrome but it does in Firefox. If you have problems with any of my links please let me know and I will find a way to get the article to you!
From Daniel Villareal at LGBTQ Nation: “Flames shot through the crowded Up Stairs Lounge as bartender Buddy Rasmussen opened the front door to see who had been ringing the downstairs buzzer. Someone had lit the popular bar’s stairwell carpet on fire, and it burned its way up the wooden stairs into the bar, quickly igniting the lounge’s red wallpaper, curtains, and posters of Burt Reynolds naked on a bearskin rug and Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz wearing his seven gold medals, a star-spangled Speedo, and a smile. Some patrons saw the blaze and ran for the nearest exits or down the stairwell, emerging with their clothes on fire as neighbors raced to pour pitchers of water onto them. Many were too shocked by the exploding blaze to move. The June 24, 1973, conflagration, likely set by a sex worker ejected from the New Orleans bar earlier that night, killed 32 people and injured at least 15 others.”
Lululemon founder is racing to cure the rare disease destroying his muscles
From Ari Altstedter for Bloomberg: On the outskirts of Silicon Valley, at a private clinic inside a two-story office building near the highway, Chip Wilson was undergoing an experimental medical procedure to retain the use of his legs. Wilson is 68 and has a net worth of $7.1 billion, thanks largely to his development in the late 1990s of a type of yoga pants he could sell to women for $100 a pair. The company he founded, Lululemon Athletica, more or less invented an apparel category, athleisure, which it continued to dominate even after he stepped away in 2013 following some particularly insensitive comments about how the pants looked on some women’s bodies. Unknown to the public, throughout his long career Wilson was watching his own body slowly waste away.”
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Note: This is a Bloomberg story that I included in my email newsletter When The Going Gets Weird (which you can find here), as a way of allowing readers behind the Bloomberg paywall. I am not monetizing this story in any way, and if asked I will take it down.
On the outskirts of Silicon Valley, at a private clinic inside a two-story office building near the highway, Chip Wilson was undergoing an experimental medical procedure to retain the use of his legs. Wilson is 68 and has a net worth of $7.1 billion, thanks largely to his development in the late 1990s of a type of yoga pants he could sell to women for $100 a pair. The company he founded, Lululemon Athletica, more or less invented an apparel category, athleisure, which it continued to dominate even after he stepped away in 2013 following some particularly insensitive comments about how the pants looked on some women’s bodies.
Unknown to the public, throughout his long career Wilson was watching his own body slowly waste away from muscular dystrophy. Lying supine as Matt Cook, the clinic’s proprietor, ran an ultrasound wand over his legs, Wilson surveyed the damage the disease had done. Where images of healthy muscles are largely black, with only specks and striations of white indicating fat, Wilson’s were heavily marbled.
“His muscles kind of look like Kobe beef,” Cook remarked. It was the result of inflammation, the first stage of the muscle death wrought by the disease. Cook, who started off as an anesthesiologist before getting into regenerative medicine, has been using two experimental techniques to stem or even reverse the process. The one Wilson was undergoing involves injecting plasma distilled from his own blood into the inflamed areas, a treatment long used by professional athletes to overcome injury but unproven against muscular dystrophy. The other involves injections of stem cells, which secrete a protein Cook thinks might work even better. Because stem cell therapies are restricted in the US, Wilson’s twice-yearly sessions require him to fly from Vancouver, where he lives, to Tijuana, Mexico, stopping to pick up Cook on the way.
From Hannah Ghorashi for Air Mail: “My husband received a call from his acquaintance Amar Singh—a women’s-rights activist, art patron, film producer, and Indian prince—and said he had a wild story to tell him. It concerned Amar’s relationship with a young Swedish woman named Liza-Johanna Holgersson, whom he had met online. They had broken up on August 6 when, he claimed, he had discovered she had been living a secret life. She had, he said, been a grifter, a con woman, taking him and multiple other men for a ride. But what I thought would be a cautionary tale of online dating among the 0.1 percent became something else: by the end of my research, I had twice been offered bribes to stop writing Amar’s story. Both times they had been offered to me by Amar.”
How many ghost sightings were due to carbon-monoxide poisoning?
From Jeanette Winterson for The Paris Review: “There’s a theory I like that suggests why the nineteenth century is so rich in ghost stories and hauntings. Carbon monoxide poisoning from gas lamps. Street lighting and indoor lighting burned coal gas, which is sooty and noxious. It gives off methane and carbon monoxide. Outdoors, the flickering flames of the gas lamps pumped carbon monoxide into the air—air that was often trapped low down in the narrow streets and cramped courtyards of industrial cities and towns. Indoors, windows closed against the chilly weather prevented fresh oxygen from reaching those sitting up late by lamplight. Low-level carbon monoxide poisoning produces symptoms of choking, dizziness, paranoia, including feelings of dread, and hallucinations. Where better to hallucinate than in the already dark and shadowy streets of Victorian London? Or in the stifling interiors?”
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From Jon Schuppe for NBC: “Seven months of searching for her lost son brought Bettersten Wade to a dirt road leading into the woods, past an empty horse stable and a scrapyard. The last time she’d seen her middle child, Dexter Wade, 37, was on the night of March 5, as he left home with a friend. She reported him missing, and Jackson police told her they’d been unable to find him, she said. It wasn’t until 172 excruciating days after his disappearance that Bettersten learned the truth: Dexter had been killed less than an hour after he’d left home, struck by a Jackson police car as he crossed a nearby interstate highway. Police had known Dexter’s name, and hers, but failed to contact her, instead letting his body go unclaimed for months in the county morgue.”
Do you think your plastic is being recycled? A huge amount of it is not
From Douglas Main at MIT Technology Review: “To date, humans have created around 11 billion metric tons of plastic. This amount surpasses the biomass of all animals, both terrestrial and marine. About 430 million tons of plastic is produced yearly, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. One-third of this total takes the form of single-use plastics, which humans interact with for seconds or minutes before discarding. A total of 95% of the plastic used in packaging is disposed of after one use, a loss to the economy of up to $120 billion annually. One-third of this packaging is not collected. What doesn’t get reused or recycled does not chemically degrade but rather becomes a fixture of our world; it breaks apart to form microplastics.”
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