Category: Newsletters

After almost four years of debating a law that would force ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, to sell the app or be banned in the US, Congress finally passed legislation that does exactly that (I’ve written for CJR a number of times over the years about the back-and-forth in Washington regarding a TikTok ban, including here and here and here.) So what happens now? Before ByteDance either sells TikTok or is banned, there are a number of hurdles, roadblocks, and potential landmines that stand in the way—including the Chinese government, which has made it clear that it will not allow ByteDance to relinquish control of TikTok without a fight.

Just a few weeks ago, a sale-or-ban law looked to be doomed. The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of one version of the law on March 13, but then it seemed to lose momentum in the Senate. Some senators said they supported the ban, but Maria Cantwell—a Democrat who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee—seemed skeptical of the law, saying she wasn’t sure that it could withstand a legal challenge. She also criticized the House bill for only giving ByteDance six months to find a buyer or face a ban, but when the House introduced a new version of the TikTok bill that increased the length of time that ByteDance had to find a buyer to as long as a year, Cantwell and others changed their minds and voted in favor.

Washington sources believe that ByteDance made a “series of miscalculations” in its attempts to forestall the passage of such a law. They told the Wall Street Journal that Shou Zi Chew, TikTok’s CEO, failed to build support on Capitol Hill, and instead relied on negotiations with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. over “a complex restructuring that never panned out.” Chew testified before Congress and ByteDance felt that he did well, and the company got support from the Club for Growth, a group backed by Jeff Yass, a major TikTok shareholder. But despite these successes, the Journal wrote, opinion on Capitol Hill was “already shifting against” the company.

Note: This was originally published as the daily email newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “A new law will ban TikTok unless it is sold. So what happens now?”

From AirMail: “Scott Thorson is now 65. In late 2020, he was granted an early release after serving nearly seven years in a Nevada state prison for credit-card fraud. Last year I began interviewing him for a book project and quickly understood why he’s been referred to as the “Zelig of Awful.” Thorson was a teenage runaway bouncing around West Hollywood when he met Liberace, who at the time was the highest-paid entertainer in the world. Liberace was 57 and Scott had just turned 18. Liberace suggested that he go into business with Eddie Nash—a Palestinian immigrant who was the No. 1 club owner in Los Angeles at the time. He also happened to be the biggest drug lord in all of Los Angeles.”

Why this temple priest is one of India’s most highly-prized voters

From IndiaTV: “Mahant Bharatdas Darshandas is the lone voter in the midst of Gujarat’s Gir forest, home to the Asiatic lion, for whom an entire election team sets up a polling booth every election – and will do so again on April 30. Darshandas, in his early 60s, is the lone occupant of a hamlet called Banej in Gir forest. He has been casting his vote for the past elections, including the 2004 and 2009 parliamentary elections and the 2007 and 2012 state elections. This time too, the Election Commission of India is making all arrangements to ensure that Darshandas, a temple priest, gets to cast his precious single vote. Darshandas lives in Banej Tirthdham and looks after an ancient Shiva temple there.”

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

Continue reading “He was Liberace’s lover and then ran drugs for the Mafia”

From the NYT: “A man was charged with drunken driving after crashing his truck and spilling 11,000 salmon onto a highway. Another was secretly recorded by his wife, who was convinced he was a closet alcoholic. A brewery worker was pulled over and given a breathalyzer test, which said that his blood alcohol level was more than four times the legal limit for drivers. The problem? None of those men had been drinking. Instead, they all were diagnosed with a rare condition known as auto-brewery syndrome, in which a person’s gut ferments carbohydrates into ethanol. This week, the man in Belgium was acquitted of drunk driving — the court found his body was essentially making its own beer.”

In the 1400s people in Europe were convinced that the British had tails

From JSTOR Daily: “Tails, tails!” That was the taunt the people of Paris flung at the English army in 1436 as the soldiers vacated the city that they had occupied for sixteen years. It was common knowledge among Parisians that each English person, under their clothes, concealed a secret tail. French literature was peppered with references to this hidden appendage. In his history of the taunt written the end of the nineteenth century, George Neilson argued that the Scottish boasted in 1332 that they would “make ropes of the tails of the English to tie them with.” An Italian book of the fourteenth century also described England as an island whose inhabitants were born with short tails, like deer.”

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

Continue reading “How people can fail a breath test without having a drink”

From IFLScience: “Like many other scrolls recovered from the historic site, the papyrus in question is in good condition but largely blackened, thus rendering it virtually unreadable. Using an array of techniques including infrared and ultraviolet optical imaging, molecular and elemental imaging, thermal imaging, and digital microscopy, researchers were able to make out over 1,000 words from the burnt parchment, equalling around 30 percent of the complete text. Previously, it was well known that Plato was buried within the grounds of the Academy, but after analyzing the ancient scroll, researchers have now pinpointed the famous philosopher’s final resting place. Other details indicate that Plato was sold into slavery on the island of Aegina.”

Genetically engineered bacteria could end tooth decay if you are willing to take a risk

From Undark: “About seven years ago, Aaron Silverbook and his then-girlfriend, a biologist, were perusing old scientific literature online. “A romantic evening,” joked Silverbook. That night, he came across a study from 2000 that surprised him. Scientists had genetically engineered an oral bacterium that they said could possibly prevent tooth decay. So, Silverbook tracked down the primary author, Jeffrey Hillman, a now-retired oral biologist formerly at the University of Florida. In 2023, Silverbook founded Lantern Bioworks, which made a deal with Hillman’s company and then launched the genetically engineered bacteria as a ‘probiotic,’ which doesn’t require FDA approval.”

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

Continue reading “Ancient papyrus buried by Vesuvius reveals that Plato was a slave”

From VinePair: “In the spring, rumors began circulating that Chartreuse, the much-ballyhooed French herbal liqueur, had suddenly become hard to find. Countless fans took to social media to decry the shortage, question if others had any leads on bottles, posit conspiracies, or flex when they actually found a bottle. Demand had risen in the last two decades, as the liqueur went from the domain of wealthy U.S. Francofiles to little-discussed mystery elixir to college party drink. By last year, global Chartreuse sales were at 1.6 million bottles per year — the highest number since the late-1800s — with Chartreuse sales having doubled in the U.S. ever since the pandemic started in 2020.”

Rosalind Franklin’s overlooked role in the discovery of DNA’s double helix

From History.com: “It’s one of the most famous moments in the history of science: On February 28, 1953, Cambridge University molecular biologists James Watson and Francis Crick determined that the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA was a double helix polymer. Nearly 10 years later, Watson and Crick, along with biophysicist Maurice Wilkins, received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for uncovering what they called the “secret of life.” Yet another person was missing from the award ceremony: Rosalind Franklin was a chemist and X-ray crystallographer who studied DNA, and her unpublished data paved the way for Watson and Crick’s breakthrough.”

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

Continue reading “Carthusian monks can’t make enough Chartreuse”

From Red Bull: “Suddenly she was on top of me with her 3-inch claws digging into my lower back. And that’s when the first bite tore deep into my shoulder and ripped open my deltoid muscle. That was followed by bite after bite on my arms, back and head. And then it was over and the bear was gone. I felt so relieved and lucky to have survived as I started hiking back to my truck. And then without warning, the bear attacked again. I heard and felt the crunch of the bone in my arm and the tendons getting ripped off the muscles. My eyes filled with blood as the bears claws ripped a 5″ gash along the side of my head. I thought I may die right here on the trail in a pool of my own blood.”

Unlocking the secrets of the ancient Voynich manuscript

From The Conversation: “The Voynich manuscript has long puzzled and fascinated historians. Carbon dating provides a 95% probability the skins used to make the manuscript come from animals that died between 1404 and 1438, and the document is covered in illustrations of stars and planets, plants, zodiac symbols, naked women, and blue and green fluids. But the text itself – thought to be the work of five different scribes – is encrypted with an unknown cipher. My coauthor and I propose that sex is one of the subjects detailed in the manuscript – and that the largest diagram represents both sex and conception, both of which were considered at the time to be ‘women’s secrets.'”

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

Continue reading “He was attacked by a grizzly bear twice in one day and survived”

From the SCMP: “Organ transplants save lives – but, a recent study suggests, they may also come with an unexpected side effect: profound personality changes. A paper published in the medical journal Transplantology discusses how a number of transplant recipients have experienced major, long-lasting changes in their thoughts, actions and behaviour. Researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in the United States set out to investigate the question of whether transplants affect personality, and surveyed 23 heart recipients and 24 other organ recipients. Almost 90 percent of transplant recipients reported personality changes following their surgery.”

This sci-fi author had a secret life writing Army manuals on psychological warfare

From Annalee Newitz: “Cordwainer Smith was a mid-twentieth century author who wrote about human-animal hybrids of the distant future who led a revolution against their cyborg masters. It was only later that I discovered that Cordwainer Smith was the pen name of Paul Linebarger, an intelligence operative who wrote the first Army manual devoted to the practice of psychological warfare in 1948. Linebarger’s father was a judge in the Philippines who became a devoted follower of Chinese nationalist Sun Yat-Sen. So Paul published science fiction as Cordwainer Smith and realist fiction under the name Felix C. Forrest, and worked to overthrow the Communists in China – not for the glory of America, but to continue the nationalist project of his mentor Sun Yat-Sen.”

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

Continue reading “Organ transplants can lead to changes in personality”

From Crimereads: “The prisoner hauled before a Brooklyn judge in 1928 did not look the part of one of the most notorious criminals in history. He squinted at the world through round-framed spectacles. When he removed his broad-brimmed hat, the sudden exposure of the baldness beneath added years to his appearance. The man was sixty-eight, born the year before the outbreak of the Civil War. He had been arrested more than a dozen times and had spent years in New York’s infamous Sing Sing prison. In the press, he was crowned the “dean of confidence men” and “the biggest of the big-time” swindlers. His name was John McCarthy. And he was the con man who sold the Brooklyn Bridge.”

This town kept its nuclear bunker a secret for more than three decades

From The Smithsonian: “West Virginia’s Greenbrier resort has been a playground for princes and politicians since its opening in 1778. Nestled in the Allegheny Mountain town of White Sulphur Springs, the Greenbrier has expanded over the centuries, so, when the resort broke ground on a new wing in late 1958, no one was surprised. But locals soon noticed something odd about the project. The hole dug for the foundation was enormous, and vast amounts of concrete arrived every day on trucks, along with puzzling items: 110 urinals, huge steel doors. But locals kept their suspicions private, and nearly 35 years passed before the rest of the country learned the truth: the bunker buried 720 feet underground was equipped to hold every single member of Congress.”

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

Continue reading “The con artist who sold the Brooklyn Bridge”

From the CBC: “A group of parents has filed a lawsuit against a Montreal-area high school art teacher and his school board after students found their classroom artwork available for purchase on the teacher’s personal website last month. The parents of 10 young students at Westwood Junior High School in Saint-Lazare, Que., an off-island suburb west of Montreal, filed the lawsuit for $1.575 million, or $155,000 per plaintiff plus punitive damages, against the teacher, Mario Perron, and the Lester B. Pearson School Board for copyright infringement. According to the lawsuit, the teacher assigned his 96 students a project called “Creepy Portrait” in January, in which students drew a portrait of a classmate or themselves inspired by the style of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The students submitted their projects in February and were shocked to stumble upon their classroom artwork being sold after finding their art teacher’s website.”

The butterfly in the prison yard: Life in an Iranian prison

From The Sunday Longread: “Conservationist Niloufar Bayani was released, along with three of her colleagues, after spending six years in a notorious Iranian prison. Six years passed after Bayani was arrested by the IRGC. Apart from a five-day period when she was released on furlough, she spent the entire time behind bars. The IRGC is a separate entity from Iran’s regular armed forces, operating as one of the most powerful paramilitary organizations in the Middle East and a locus of power that has control over much of Iran’s politics. “I was interrogated blindfolded while standing, spinning, or sit-and-standing,” Bayani wrote in letters published by the BBC. “Threatened with the arrest and torture of my 70-year-old mother and father… threatened with physical torture by being shown images and descriptions of torture devices…[and] heard hours of detailed descriptions of suffering and pain.”

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

Continue reading “Parents sue teacher for selling students’ artwork online”

From CBC News: “We may soon learn more about what happened when dozens of crew members from the movie “Titanic” were fed soup laced with a hallucinogenic drug while filming in Nova Scotia. A new report from the province’s privacy commissioner told Halifax Regional Police to disclose more details about the August 1996 incident, which sent around 80 “Titanic” crew members to hospital in Dartmouth, N.S., including director James Cameron. Initially fearing food poisoning, all had in fact unknowingly eaten lobster chowder spiked with the drug phencyclidine, which is also known as PCP and angel dust. Speaking about the infamous incident, crew members have described a long and strange night of chaos and confusion that even involved a hospital conga line.”

Eugene Fodor’s famous travel guide was written in part by CIA spies

From Why Is This Interesting: “Much is written in the press about the link between the Central Intelligence Agency and Hollywood, but what’s less well-known is the U.S. government’s influence on the travel industry. Eugene Fodor, publisher of one of the most successful guide book series of all time, was an officer for the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor to the CIA) during WWII. He specialized in psychological warfare, interrogated prisoners, and wrote propaganda leaflets that were airdropped into the Neapolitan territories. After the war he founded his eponymous company where he employed not only traditional stringers to write copy but also, at the behest of the CIA,  spies—“travel writer” being a good cover for an agent sent into enemy territory.”

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

Continue reading “The cast and crew of Titanic were drugged with PCP”

From SFist: “OJ Simpson’s father, who came out as gay and was largely absent from the family once Simpson turned four years old, became a local drag queen known as Mama Simpson. A documentary on OJ interviewed one of his childhood friends, Calvin Tennyson, who recalled a visit he and OJ made to Jimmy Lee Simpson’s apartment. “When his dad opened the door, he was in a bathrobe, which is not a crime. But then his dad kind of opened the door more, and there was a guy in the back in a bathrobe too. So it was obvious that his dad was gay.” A book about OJ quoted a source as saying Mama Simpson frequently dressed in drag and “everyone knew he was O.J.’s dad.”

What happened when a journalist went undercover as a high school student

From The Chronicle: “San Francisco Chronicle reporter Shann Nix probably should have been on her honeymoon in September 1992 when she took on an assignment she would still be thinking about decades later. Nix, then 26, changed her home answering machine, instructed her new husband to act like her father if he answered the phone and then went undercover for a month, posing as a student at George Washington High School in San Francisco. The result was the four-part “Undercover Student” project, a front-page exposé that today is both increasingly fascinating and increasingly shocking. It had an impact on a lot of people, including students who are now adults, and the reporter herself. And 32 years later, they still have a lot to say about it.”

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

Continue reading “OJ Simpson’s father was a San Francisco drag queen known as Mama”

From Slate: “The waves were already crashing over the Toyota’s hood when they found it. It was a blustery September Sunday in 2021, and the Hilux pickup sat far down the gray sand in a remote cove on the wild west coast of New Zealand’s North Island. The truck was parked below the high-tide line, facing the sea, and was nearly swamped by the waves. The men couldn’t help but notice empty child seats strapped into the back. The disappearances were just the beginning of an ordeal that has not yet ended—a case that has only grown stranger and more ominous in the two and a half years since, prompting pleas from family, increasing public astonishment, online speculation, a shocking crime, and a community’s closing ranks around one of its own.”

Her Highness Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi is forced to couch-surf

From Town & Country: “As they say in Italian, “Finita la commedia”: The farce has come to an end; the party is over. Or so it seemed in April 2023, when a squadron of carabinieri arrived at the Villa Aurora, a crumbling mansion in the center of the Eternal City with the world’s only known Caravaggio ceiling painting. Their mission that day: escort off the premises its 74-year-old chatelaine, none other than the San Antonio–born Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi, née Carpenter, the former model, actress, and real estate agent who had refused to leave the property amid a bitter inheritance dispute with her three stepsons.”

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

Continue reading “First they vanished into the bush and then it got weird”

From Deseret.com: “Why is there 1.4 billion pounds of cheese stored in a cave in Missouri? It started in the 1970s, during former President Jimmy Carter’s era and his promise of giving farmers a break. He wanted to raise the price of milk, but the government couldn’t just buy milk and store it, so it started to buy as much cheese as people wanted to sell. Then farmers were producing way too much cheese, raising the question: What should the government do with all the cheddar? To tackle this, former President Ronald Reagan started food assistance programs to distribute 30 million pounds of cheese. In the 1990s, the government also started making deals with fast-food restaurants to help sell the surplus.”

A crucial component for microchips is a byproduct of the food additive MSG

From MIT: “In microchips, a material is placed between the chip and the structure beneath it in order to keep the signals from getting crossed; this material, called dielectric film, is produced in sheets that are as thin as white blood cells. For 30 years, a single Japanese company called Ajinomoto has made billions producing this particular film, and has more than 90% of the market. If you recognize the name Ajinomoto, you’re probably surprised to hear it plays such a critical role: the company is better known as the world’s leading supplier of MSG seasoning powder. In the 1990s, it discovered that a by-product of MSG made a great insulator, and it has enjoyed a near monopoly ever since.”

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

Continue reading “Why a cave in Missouri holds more than a billion pounds of cheese”

From Science.org: “Harvard University honesty researcher Francesca Gino, whose work has come under fire for suspected data falsification, may also have plagiarized passages in some of her high-profile publications. A book chapter co-authored by Gino, who was found by a 2023 Harvard Business School (HBS) investigation to have committed research misconduct, contains numerous passages of text with striking similarities to 10 earlier sources. The sources include published papers and student theses, according to an analysis shared with Science by University of Montreal psychologist Erinn Acland. Science has confirmed Acland’s findings and identified at least 15 additional passages of borrowed text in Gino’s two books.”

The Brazilian special-forces unit that is fighting to save the Amazon

From The New Yorker: “The men—fighters with combat gear and assault rifles—belonged to a tiny special-forces unit known as the Specialized Inspection Group, or G.E.F. Their leader and co-founder was Felipe Finger, a wiry man in his forties with a salt-and-pepper beard. Finger trained in forestry engineering, and his unit works under the Brazilian ministry for the environment. But he has spent much of his adult life in armed operations to protect the wilderness, and he talks like a soldier, with frequent references to operations and objectives and neutralizing threats. The current mission was known to national authorities as Operation Freedom. Finger and his men called it Operation Xapirí, from a Yanomami word for nature spirits.”

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

Continue reading “Harvard expert in honesty accused of plagiarism”

You see a news story talking about the need for a national privacy law and how Congress is working on one—or, at least, should be. What year is it? 

Trick question: it could be almost any year in the last two decades. Including, now, 2024. Last week, the Washington Post reported that the leaders of two key congressional committees were “nearing an agreement on a national framework aimed at protecting Americans’ personal data online.” (The news was first reported by Punchbowl News, a political newsletter). As the Post noted, this would mean that Congress is close to passing legislation that has “eluded them for decades.” Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican representative from Washington State who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Maria Cantwell, a Democratic senator from the same state and chairperson of the Senate Commerce Committee, are expected to announce the deal next week.

According to The Hill, the two members of Congress decided that the time is right to push for a national privacy law, in part because of recent fears that social platforms are harming children (a debate that I wrote about last week in this newsletter), but also due to concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence. In a statement, Cantwell said that a federal data privacy law must “make privacy a consumer right, and it must give consumers the ability to enforce that right,” adding that the bill is the protection “Americans deserve in the Information Age.” Under the draft law, companies would face limits as to what data they can collect and use, and individuals would be allowed to sue “bad actors” for violating their privacy. New data security standards would also hold companies accountable if data is hacked or stolen. And the Federal Trade Commission would form a new bureau in order to enforce the law.

Note: this post was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “Lawmakers fight over privacy — on two very different fronts”