Category: Newsletters

From Rolling Stone: “A bone case: That’s what law enforcement calls cases where the remains are skeletal, years interred, evidence eroded or disappeared altogether with the passage of time. The remains of the girl soon nicknamed Midtown Jane Doe certainly qualified. The building where she was found, 301 W. 46th St., had few tenants left in February 2003, stubbornly clinging to apartments that had housed sex workers, drug addicts, and others just trying to get by. On Feb. 10, 2003, construction workers noticed a raised concrete slab behind an aging coal furnace in the basement. Six feet wide, five feet long, and a foot high. It seemed out of place. One of the workers took out a sledgehammer and smashed it. A skull rolled out.”

The world’s oldest wild bird has laid an egg at the ripe old age of 74

From Associated Press: “The oldest known wild bird in the world has laid an egg at the ripe age of about 74, her first in four years, U.S. wildlife officials said. The long-winged seabird named Wisdom, a Laysan albatross, returned to Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge at the northwestern edge of the Hawaiian Archipelago and laid what experts estimate may be her 60th egg, the Pacific Region of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service said in a Facebook post. Wisdom and her mate, Akeakamai, had returned to the atoll in the Pacific Ocean to lay and hatch eggs since 2006. Laysan albatrosses mate for life and lay one egg per year. But Wisdom began interacting with another male when she returned last week, officials said.”

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 “A body in a basement and a 50-year-old mystery”

From Foreign Policy: “As the game’s popularity exploded, pokémon materialized at NSA headquarters; near America’s top-secret nuclear weapons laboratories in New Mexico; and at covert CIA facilities in northern Virginia, thanks to ardent devotees of the game working there.This set off alarm bells for U.S. counterintelligence officials. Why were pokémon appearing at such sensitive locations? Could this conspicuous placement be evidence of some sort of malicious intent? Could the app be functioning as a targeted spying tool, as part of a “Pokémon Go hack me” scheme? Security experts from the CIA, NSA, and Energy Department (which manages the country’s nuclear arsenal) subsequently sent memos instructing colleagues to stop playing Pokémon Go at their workplaces—and perhaps entirely.

JFK staged his own death in a James Bond–inspired movie just before he died

From Vanity Fair: “A visit to the website of the John F. Kennedy Library reveals a silent motion picture, some 16 minutes long, shot on the weekend of September 21 and 22, 1963. The footage depicts scenes of Kennedy, his family, and a few friends at various locations around Newport, Rhode Island. The first lady had made an unusual request. She explained that she and the president were making a humorous short film—a kind of spy movie. At one point, according to Landis, Jackie asked the agents to hurriedly drive up to the main house and react as if they had just heard shots. Landis says the agents entered the house and found the president lying on the floor in the foyer with ketchup smeared on him. Two months later, he was assassinated.”

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 “Pokémon Go set off a wave of paranoia in US intelligence”

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

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

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

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “An IVF clinic mixup led to an unthinkable choice”

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

Yard cleanup videos can earn influencers millions of dollars per year

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

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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

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

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

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

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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

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

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

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

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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

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

Why we probably won’t find aliens anytime soon

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

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “How the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959 set off a Thanksgiving panic”

From The Atlantic: “3:00 a.m., parked in a public lot across the street from the town beach. Just woke up, sleep evasive. It’s my first week out here. I pour an iced coffee from my cooler. I’m walking around the front of the Toyota I’m now living in when a car pulls into the lot, comes toward me. I see only headlights illuminating my fatigue and the red plastic party cup in my hand. Must be a cop. Someone gets out and approaches. It is a cop, young. I’m not afraid, exactly, but I’m also not yet used to being homeless. My morning routine is taking gabapentin (an anti-seizure medication that also alleviates psychic and neuropathic pain and brightens my perception), lamotrigine (another anti-seizure medicine, but for me it helps my mental energy and cuts through fog, because gabapentin creates fog), fluoxetine (Prozac, an antidepressant), and Adderall (for focus and energy, because after the manic depression struck in 1997, my brain was a flat tire).”

How long can a chicken live without a head? A surprisingly long time

From the BBC: “On 10 September 1945 Lloyd Olsen and his wife Clara were killing chickens, on their farm in Fruita, Colorado. Olsen would decapitate the birds, his wife would clean them up. But one of the 40 or 50 animals that went under Olsen’s hatchet that day didn’t behave like the rest. “They got down to the end and had one who was still alive, up and walking around,” says the couple’s great-grandson, Troy Waters, himself a farmer in Fruita. The chicken kicked and ran, and didn’t stop. It was placed in an old apple box on the farm’s screened porch for the night, and when Lloyd Olsen woke the following morning, he stepped outside to see what had happened. Word spread around Fruita about the miraculous headless bird. The local paper dispatched a reporter to interview Olsen, and two weeks later a sideshow promoter called Hope Wade travelled nearly 300 miles from Salt Lake City, Utah. He had a simple proposition: take the chicken on to the sideshow circuit – they could make some money.”

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 “A firsthand account of what it’s like to be homeless in America”

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote at The Torment Nexus about whether Bluesky could become the new Twitter, and whether that would be a good thing or not. Since then, the network has just continued to ramp up its growth — it now has more than 23 million members, up from 15 million when I wrote that first piece — and so I wanted to go a little bit deeper and look under the hood at how Bluesky actually works, and how that compares not just to something like Twitter or Threads but also to other social networks such as Mastodon that are often referred to as “federated” or “decentralized.” Before I do, I should note that I am not a programmer or social networking expert, and so it’s entirely possible that I may describe some of this inaccurately or just plain get things wrong and for that I apologize in advance. But I think the differences in how they are perceived versus how they actually work are important.

A network like Twitter or Threads is relatively easy to understand. There’s a company that owns everything (including the actual user accounts, as Elon Musk is arguing in a brief related to The Onion’s acquisition of InfoWars) and it controls who gets to post, what they get to say, where the messages go, and so on. If Meta or Musk want to make the network either unusable or actively hostile, or nuke your account and everything you’ve ever said and all the contacts you’ve made, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. This fits the definition of centralized pretty well. Yes, you can export your tweets etc., but it is difficult (but not impossible) to import them into some other network, and even if you do you lose any related content and connections.

Note: In case you are a first-time reader, or you forgot that you signed up for this newsletter, this is The Torment Nexus. You can find out more about me and this newsletter in this post. This newsletter survives solely on your contributions, so please sign up for a paying subscription or visit my Patreon, which you can find here. I also publish a daily email newsletter of odd or interesting links called When The Going Gets Weird, which is here.

This structure makes it a relative no-brainer to use and understand, and I think that helps explain why Threads has more than 275 million accounts (according to Threads honcho Adam Mosseri, in November alone the network added the same number of accounts as Bluesky had in total). But having an account is one thing, and actually using it is another — you’ll notice that I said Threads has 275 million accounts rather than users, and that’s because, despite its size, the activity level on Threads seems to be significantly lower than on Bluesky. According to estimates from Similarweb, daily use on Bluesky hit 3.5 million recently, while on Threads it was just over 4 million, despite the fact that Threads has an order of magnitude more users than Bluesky does.

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Is Bluesky really decentralized? It’s complicated”

From Vulture: “Airing as the final sketch of the Christopher Walken-hosted April 8, 2000, episode, “More Cowbell” has leaped from Studio 8H’s gold-plated diapers into cultural ubiquity. The phrase has even merited an entry into the dictionary. (Idiom, informal: “An extra quality that will make something or someone better.”) Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser, Blue Öyster Cult’s co-founder and front man who wrote “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” for their 1976 album, Agents of Fortune, has managed to maintain a healthy relationship with the sketch, but he admits the fate could’ve been a lot different if he didn’t find the premise genuinely humorous. “It’s been a 25-year journey with the cowbell and riding that horse,” Buck Dharma explains. “I can’t complain about any of the history and what’s happened. It’s all good.”

Archaeologists discover 4,000-year-old canals used by ancient Mayans

From Associated Press: “Using drones and Google Earth imagery, archaeologists have discovered a 4,000-year-old network of earthen canals in what’s now Belize. The findings were published Friday in Science Advances. “The aerial imagery was crucial to identify this really distinctive pattern of zigzag linear canals” running for several miles through wetlands, said study co-author Eleanor Harrison-Buck of the University of New Hampshire. The team then conducted digs in Belize’s Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary. The ancient fish canals, paired with holding ponds, were used to channel and catch freshwater species such as catfish. Barbed spearpoints found nearby may have been tied to sticks and used to spear fish, said co-author Marieka Brouwer Burg.”

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 “Blue Oyster Cult talks about that infamous SNL sketch”

From Sunday Long Read: “One, two, three deliveries of McDonald’s and Dunkin’ and Hardee’s and whatever else the app tells him to deliver and Ryan Nickerson is driving home having pocketed a whole $2.25 an order for his labor. Gas is $4.30 a gallon. He’s 37 and between jobs. Since he moved from Georgia to Florida, after it happened, work’s been hard to come by. Work’s been hard to keep, too, after it happened. Five years ago next week. He dreads the anniversary. The girl hit the front left bumper. And then she rolled beneath the back left tire. There’s still a scratch where she hit. He looks at it every day. For a long time he couldn’t bear to drive the thing, but what else could he do? He was behind on payments. He couldn’t afford to get rid of it. It has 150,000 miles on it now. It’s paid off. He can sell it but doesn’t want to. It’s as if she is still alive, still with him. Was she afraid? She was 10.”

The “placebo effect” may not be real

From Carcinisation: “The current scientific consensus is that the placebo effect is a real healing effect operating through belief and suggestion. The evidence does not support this. In clinical trials of treatments, outcomes in placebo and no-treatment arms are similar, distinguishable only in tiny differences on self-report measures. Placebo-focused researchers using paradigms designed to exploit demand characteristics (politeness, roleplaying, etc.) produce implausibly large effects. There is no evidence that placebos have effects on objective outcomes like wound healing. Three sources purport to show that the placebo effect is a real, objective phenomenon, but the brain imaging studies do not demonstrate an objective effect, but are rather another way of measuring “response bias,” as subjects are capable of changing these measures voluntarily.

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 “What do you do after you accidentally kill a child?”

From Daily KOS: “On Feb. 20, 1939, German-born Fritz Julius Kuhn. the leader of the pro-Nazi German American Bund and would-be Führer, was the final speaker at what was billed as a “Pro-American Rally” at Madison Square Garden. At one point, an unemployed Jewish plumber from Brooklyn, Isadore Greenbaum, rushed the stage, shouting “Down with Hitler!” He was tackled and beaten by Kuhn’s brown-shirted security detail and fined $25 for disturbing the peace. When he returned home, Greenbaum unexpectedly received a congratulatory telegram from a local judge, Nathan D. Perlman, and a lavish gift basket signed by Meyer Lansky, the nation’s most prominent Jewish mobster. The odd couple of the Jewish judge and organized crime boss who secretly teamed up to blunt the rise of fascism in the U.S. by organizing Jewish gangsters and boxers to intimidate and fight the German American Bund and another fascist group, the Silver Shirts.”

A mother debates whether to give her deaf child a cochlear implant

From Aeon: “Critics argued that Alexander Graham Bell – the founding father of what is still one of the major LSL programmes in the US – was not so much a benevolent supporter of deaf children, but a eugenicist and ‘oralist’ with grotesque views about deafness on a self-appointed mission to eradicate sign languages. There were traumatised adults distancing themselves from their parents entirely for forcing them, despite great difficulty, to listen, speak and lip-read. The wet-eyed social media phenomenon of babies with hearing aids and CIs being filmed hearing sound for the first time was disparagingly called ‘inspiration porn’ or ‘switch-on porn’ – the vulgar showboating of an arrogant hearing class determined to convert their perfectly deaf children into hearing ones.”

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 “Meyer Lansky organized Jewish mobsters to fight the Nazis”

Before I go any further, let me be clear about what I mean by saying Elon Musk makes a good point — or rather, let me clear about what I *don’t* mean. I don’t mean that Elon Musk makes a good point when he says the economy will fail without Donald Trump, or that democracy is at risk unless we give Trump whatever he wants. I don’t mean that he makes a good point when he says that free speech is an absolute virtue (unless someone uses the term “cis” on Twitter of course, which he defines as hate speech). And I don’t mean that he makes a good point when he says that we all need to have at least a dozen babies with as many different people as possible (he hasn’t actually said that, but it’s pretty obvious from his behavior that he thinks this is the optimal thing to do).

In fact, there aren’t a whole lot of areas where I think Musk *has* made a good point. But there is one, in my opinion, and it’s in the lawsuit he filed against OpenAI and co-founder and current CEO Sam Altman. The suit originally named OpenAI and Altman, as well as OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman — who left the company after the board tried to oust Altman, and then later returned after Altman emerged victorious from the board’s maneuvering (more on that below). The Musk lawsuit was withdrawn in July, but an amended version has been filed that adds Shivon Zilis as a plaintiff — she is an employee at Musk-owned brain-implant company Neuralink and also the mother of three of his 12 children, including one named Techno Mechanicus (I am not making this up, although I wish I was). The claim also added Microsoft as a defendant.

Zilis was added because she was formerly on the board of OpenAI and had some interactions with Altman that Musk clearly feels might help buttress his case. The reason for adding Microsoft as a defendant is that Musk claims the close relationship between the two has made it harder for OpenAI to form partnerships with other companies, including Musk’s own xAI. The claim argues that OpenAI is “actively trying to eliminate competitors” like xAI by “extracting promises from investors not to fund them.” In effect, it says, OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft has become a “de facto merger.” None of those things are the point that I’ve grudgingly referred to above as good, but they are definitely related to it. The preamble in the lawsuit describes its premise in this way:

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Elon Musk makes a good point”

From Vanity Fair: “Dante and Beatrice, Scott and Zelda, Véra and Vladimir. All famous cases of literary love and inspiration, sure. But these romances lack the 47-year novelistic drama of the craziest story. They lack the stolen gun, the border crossings, the violation of federal law. They lack the forged birth certificate and clandestine love letters. But above all, they lack the leading lady: the secret muse. Cormac McCarthy did not shirk womenkind in his novels. On the contrary, it turns out that many of his famous leading men were inspired by a single woman, a single secret muse revealed here for the first time: a five-foot-four badass Finnish American cowgirl named Augusta Britt. A cowgirl whose reality, McCarthy confessed in his early love letters to her, he had “trouble coming to grips with.”

When the railway industry changed the way that time worked

From Letters From An American: “Until November 18, 1883, railroads across the United States operated under 53 different time schedules, differentiated on railroad maps by a complicated system of colors. For travelers, time shifts meant constant confusion and, frequently, missed trains. And then, at noon on Sunday, November 18, 1883, railroads across the North American continent shifted their schedules to conform to a new standard time. Under the new system, North America would have just five time zones. In Boston the change meant that the clocks would move forward about 16 minutes; in New York City, clocks were set back about four minutes. For Baltimore the time would move forward six minutes and twenty-eight seconds; in Atlanta it went back 22 minutes.”

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 “Cormac McCarthy’s secret muse breaks her silence”

From the BBC: “Hundreds of truckles of cheddar worth more than £300,000 have been stolen from London cheese specialist Neal’s Yard Dairy. Fraudsters posing as legitimate wholesalers received the 950 clothbound cheeses from the Southwark-based company before it was realised they were a fake firm. More than 22 tonnes of three artisan cheddars, including Hafod Welsh, Westcombe, and Pitchfork were taken, which are all award-winning and have a high monetary value. Neal’s Yard Dairy sells Hafod Welsh for £12.90 for a 300g piece, while Westcombe costs £7.15 for 250g and Pitchfork is priced at £11 for 250g. Patrick Holden, who owns the farm where Hafod cheddar is made, said: “The artisan cheese world is a place where trust is deeply embedded in all transactions. “It’s a world where one’s word is one’s bond. The degree of trust that exists within our small industry as a whole is due in no small part to the ethos of Neal’s Yard Dairy’s founders.”

In this small Dominican community, children start out as girls and then become boys

From the BBC: “Johnny lives in a small town in the Dominican Republic where he, and others like him, are known as Guevedoces, which effectively translates as “penis at twelve”. Johnny was brought up as a girl because he had no visible testes or penis and what appeared to be a vagina. It is only when he approached puberty that his penis grew and testicles descended. Johnny, once known as Felicita, remembers going to school in a little red dress, though he says he was never happy doing girl things. So why does it happen? In 1970, Dr. Julianne Imperato-McGinley made her way to this remote part of the Dominican Republic, drawn by extraordinary reports of girls turning into boys. When she investigated, she discovered the reason they don’t have male genitalia when they are born is because they are deficient in an enzyme called 5-alpha-reductase.”

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 “Someone stole 22 tons of expensive cheddar cheese”