Category: Newsletters

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”

From RR Auction: “A previously unknown 8mm color film capturing President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade on November 22, 1963, has been sold for $137,500 at auction. The silent color footage, shot by local truck driver Dale Carpenter, Sr., captures the presidential motorcade moving through downtown Dallas, followed by a dramatic sequence of the limousine speeding along North Stemmons Freeway en route to Parkland Memorial Hospital. The film’s most powerful image shows Secret Service Agent Clint Hill on the back of the vehicle, shielding First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy as the car raced toward the hospital at 80 miles per hour. For decades Mr. Carpenter’s 8-millimeter snippets of what transpired in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, have been a family heirloom. When he died in 1991 at 77, the reel, which included footage of his twin boys’ birthday party, passed to his wife, Mabel, then to a daughter, Diana, and finally to a grandson.”

The Hum is a mysterious auditory phenomenon that’s baffled the world for decades

From The Independent: “t was around 2005 that Simon Payne started hearing it. A strange, low, rumbling sound that travels through walls and floors and seems to come from everywhere. At first, he was convinced the noise was from some kind of machinery, but he couldn’t find the source. It didn’t go away; he couldn’t run from it. Even when he travelled 12,000 miles from his Cambridgeshire home to New Zealand, he could still hear it. It wreaked such havoc on his life, he had to quit his job. He became increasingly isolated and stopped seeing friends. But when he started to look around on the internet for more information, he discovered he was not alone. “I found out that it was all over the place,” he says. “There’s no hiding from it.” Payne was hearing “the Hum”, a mysterious global phenomenon that is thought to affect as many as 4 per cent of the world’s population.”

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 “Previously unseen footage of JFK shooting sells for $137,000”

From The Weather Network: “The Nazis managed to install an automatic weather station on the coast of Labrador during WWII and it remained undiscovered by Canadians for more than 30 years. The secret German mission remains one of the only known enemy operations to actually take place on North American soil during the second World War and highlights just how much an impact the weather had on the war. In October 1943, German U-boat U-537 sailed undetected to Martin Bay, off the coast of Labrador in what was then the British Dominion of Newfoundland. There, a crew led by civilian meteorologist Kurt Sommermeyer rushed to set up what was, at the time, an incredibly sophisticated weather station.”

She was a chess prodigy but later walked away from the game

From Slate: “During her brief and polarizing career in a male-dominated sport in a chauvinistic society, a focus on looks over brains was typically how it went for Lisa Lane, who died of cancer on Feb. 28 at age 90. When Bobby Fischer was still a brash wunderkind, Lane was a bona fide grown-up media star. In 1961 alone, she was interviewed on the Today show, was profiled in the New York Times Magazine, and appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. She was touted as a great American hope against the scary Russians. Lane marketed herself and elevated chess’s profile in America. Disgusted by the game’s latent sexism and classism, she criticized its leadership and advocated for equal pay. Then, as quickly as she’d arrived, she all but disappeared from the game.”

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 “There was a secret Nazi weather station in Canada for decades”

From Science News: “In December 1855 and January 1856, a trio of vessels set sail from the United States to Jarvis and Baker islands, coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean. The ships carried representatives from the American Guano Company and a guano expert tasked with examining the quality of the islands’ bird poop. After estimating the quantity of guano available and taking samples, the entourage claimed the islands in the name of the United States. That move marked the country’s first effort to acquire territory overseas. U.S. ownership of those islands became official in July 1856 with passage of the Guano Islands Act. That act gave the country “permission” to claim sovereignty over any allegedly uninhabited or unclaimed territory to secure access to guano, a prized fertilizer for American tobacco, cotton and wheat fields.”

Dante cast her as his guide in the Divine Comedy. But who was Beatrice Portinari?

From JSTOR Daily: “She was the great love of the Early Renaissance Italian poet Dante Alighieri. He adored her so much that he cast her as his divine guide to the celestial spheres of heaven in the last book of the Divine Comedy. But his would always be an unrequited love: she was promised to someone else, and so was he. Her name was Beatrice Portinari. Beatrice Portinari belonged to a family of bankers and politicians; her father was Folco Portinari, a prior of Florence. Her family’s upper-class social status allowed her to marry into another rich Florentine set. She wed another wealthy banker, Simone de Bardi, in an arranged marriage. Dante’s wife was an Italian woman named Gemma Donati, though he never wrote a single poem about her.”

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

Continue reading “The US was built on control of the bird poop supply”

From Psychology Today: “Claire Sylvia was an accomplished dancer when, at the age of 45, she was diagnosed with a rare incurable condition known as primary pulmonary hypertension. The only effective treatment for severe PPH is a heart-lung transplant. Claire’s transplant was unique not just because she was the first person in New England to undergo such an operation, but also because of the changes that occurred following her surgery. She developed a new taste for foods she did not like before receiving her new organs. Once she was allowed to drive, she headed to Kentucky Fried Chicken to satisfy her craving for chicken nuggets, which made no sense to her because she never ate fast food before her transplant. She also noticed that she no longer felt lonely, and felt more independent. She was more confident, assertive.”

The New York real estate queen and the secret she couldn’t keep hidden

From the New York Times: “Alice Mason was throwing one of her black-tie dinner parties. For years, she’d been hosting events that New York City’s social pages fawned over, but she didn’t expect that this one would disrupt a secret she’d kept for much of her life.A Manhattan real estate agent to the elite, Alice typically held six dinner parties a year, almost always with 56 attendees — half women, half men. Her guests, as one socialite put it, were “the A-list of A-lists”: Barbara Walters, Bill Clinton, Gloria Vanderbilt, Alan Greenspan, Norman Mailer, Estée Lauder, Mary Tyler Moore, Jimmy Carter. This party, circa 1990, was for her only child, Dominique Richard, who had just become engaged. A guest’s plus-one would cause a permanent rift between them.”

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 “Heart transplant patients show changes in personality”

From The Bulletin: “In the early hours of October 30, 1961, a bomber took off from an airstrip in northern Russia and began its flight through cloudy skies over the frigid Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya. Slung below the plane’s belly was a nuclear bomb the size of a small school bus—the largest and most powerful bomb ever created. At 11:32 a.m., the bombardier released the weapon. As the bomb fell, an enormous parachute unfurled to slow its descent, giving the pilot time to retreat to a safe distance. A minute or so later, the bomb detonated. The flash alone lasted more than a minute. The fireball expanded to nearly six miles in diameter—large enough to include the entire urban core of Washington or San Francisco, or all of midtown and downtown Manhattan. Over several minutes it rose and mushroomed into a massive cloud. Within ten minutes, it had reached a height of 42 miles and a diameter of some 60 miles.”

An astronaut who returned from space had to go to the hospital but no one is saying why

From Ars Technica: “On October 25, one of the astronauts was hospitalized due to what NASA called an unspecified ‘medical issue’ after splashdown aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that concluded the 235-day mission. After an overnight stay in a hospital in Florida, NASA said the astronaut was released “in good health” and returned to their home base in Houston to resume normal post-flight activities. The space agency did not identify the astronaut or any details about their condition, citing medical privacy concerns. NASA initially sent all four crew members to the hospital in Pensacola, Florida, for evaluation, but Grebenkin and two of the NASA astronauts were quickly released and cleared to return to Houston. One astronaut remained behind until the next day. “I did not say I was uncomfortable talking about it,” mission pilot and flight surgeon Michael Barratt said. “I said we’re not going to talk about it.”

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

Continue reading “The untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb”

From the New York Times: “For 60 years, Baltazar Ushca worked a rare but rigorous trade: ice merchant. Once or twice a week, he climbed snow-capped Mount Chimborazo, Ecuador’s highest peak, to hack ice from a glacier with a pickax, wrap the 60-pound blocks in hay and transport them on the backs of his donkeys. He would then sell them to villagers who did not have electricity and needed refrigeration to conserve their food.It started as a family business. But Mr. Ushca, who was 4-foot-11, chipped at the ice decades after modern refrigeration came to his village, by which time his job was nearly obsolete. He became known as the last of his breed, selling his blocks of ice for a few dollars in Ecuador for use in fruit drinks and making ice cream.”

She treated her own breast cancer with viruses that she grew in her lab

From Nature: “A scientist who successfully treated her own breast cancer by injecting the tumour with lab-grown viruses has sparked discussion about the ethics of self-experimentation. Beata Halassy discovered in 2020, aged 49, that she had breast cancer at the site of a previous mastectomy. It was the second recurrence there since her left breast had been removed, and she couldn’t face another bout of chemotherapy. Halassy, a virologist at the University of Zagreb, studied the literature and decided to take matters into her own hands with an unproven treatment. A case report published in Vaccines in August outlines how Halassy self-administered a treatment called oncolytic virotherapy. She has now been cancer-free for four years.”

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

Continue reading “The last of a dying breed of mountain-climbing ice men”

From The Independent: “Taliesin was an architectural commune set up in 1932 in Wisconsin by Wright and his wife, the mysterious Olgivanna. Staffed by young, eager, and mostly male architects who wanted to learn from the master, it quickly evolved into a place where Olgivanna, Wright’s third wife, could promote the teaching of Georgi Gurdjieff. This bald, mustached, charismatic Russian guru claimed his eyes could not only penetrate a man’s psyche, but also bring a woman to orgasm from across a room. Taliesin became a place where Wright would not only get free in-house labor, but his wife could have total sway over the mental, physical, and sexual lives of the architect’s devoted followers.”

In Denmark an ancient army met a mysterious end

From Atlas Obscura: “In 1944, at the height of World War II, ditchdiggers working in a field known as Alken Enge, on the Jutland Peninsula in Denmark, made a gruesome discovery: human bones. It was quickly determined that the bones were not evidence of a recent murder—they were actually thousands of years old. About 2,000 years ago, during the Iron Age, the Alken Enge water-meadow had been a lake, but the individuals whose remains were scattered around the site had not died from drowning. Their deaths had been more horrific—and what happened to their bodies after death even more macabre. Many of the bones displayed the marks of raw violence: cuts from edged weapons, skulls crushed by axe blows, piercing wounds.”

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 “Frank Lloyd Wright founded a bizarre sex commune”

I know that it’s tempting to blame what happened on Tuesday night — the re-election of a former game-show host and inveterate liar with 34 felony counts and two impeachments as president of the United States — on social media in one form or another. Maybe you think that Musk used Twitter to platform white supremacists and swing voters to Trump, or that Facebook promoted Russian troll accounts posting AI-generated deepfakes of Kamala Harris eating cats and dogs, or that TikTok polarized voters using a combination of soft-core porn and Chinese-style indoctrination videos to change minds — and so on.

In the end, that is too simple an explanation, just as blaming the New York Times’ coverage of the race is too simple, or accusing more than half of the American electorate of being too stupid to see Trump for what he really is. They saw it, and they voted for him anyway. That’s the reality.

It’s become accepted wisdom that platforms like Twitter and Facebook and TikTok spread misinformation far and wide, which convinces people that the world is flat or that birds aren’t real or that people are selling babies and shipping them inside pieces of Wayfair furniture. And it’s taken as fact that these tools increase the polarization of society, turning people against each other in a number of ways, including by inflating social-media “filter bubbles.” We all know this. And particularly when there is an event like a federal election, concern about both of these factors tends to increase. That’s why we see articles like this one from Wired, which talks about how social platforms have “given up” on things like fact-checking misinformation on their networks.

But is there any proof that social media either convinces people to believe things that aren’t true, or that it increases the levels of polarization around political or social issues? I don’t want to give away the ending of this newsletter, but the short answer to both of those questions is no. While social media may make it easier to spread misinformation farther and faster, it hasn’t really changed human nature itself all that much. In other words, social media is more of a symptom than it is a cause.

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 “Social media is a symptom, not a cause”