Category: Newsletters

From Sky News: “Dr Cara Love, an evolutionary biologist and ecotoxicologist at Princeton University, has been studying how the Chernobyl wolves survive despite generations of exposure to radioactive particles. Dr Love and a team of researchers visited the CEZ in 2014 and put radio collars on the wolves so that their movements could be monitored. They also took blood samples to understand how the wolves’ bodies respond to cancer-causing radiation. The researchers discovered that Chernobyl wolves are exposed to upwards of 11.28 millirem of radiation every day for their entire lives – which is more than six times the legal safety limit for a human.”

A Liverpool man who inherited $125,000 let 12 strangers decide what to do with it

From The Guardian: “A man who has been sitting on a £100,000 inheritance from his mother for more than 10 years has given the large sum to four charities in Liverpool, and that decision was down to 12 strangers. David Clarke, 34, said he wanted to tackle inequality as he felt he had enough money to live on. He wanted to give power to his neighbours and residents to decide what to do with his lump sum of money. So he sent letters randomly to 600 addresses in the L8 postcode, and then picked 12 to take part in the project. “During the first session, everyone thought it was a scam,” Clarke said, “but when the facilitator and I explained the cause and backstory, it was fine.” The only condition he gave to the group was not to spend the money on themselves.”

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 “Chernobyl wolves appear to be immune to radiation”

Last July, Meta launched Threads, a new social network it hoped would compete with X (formerly Twitter), and within twenty-four hours the new app had hit thirty million sign-ups; a few months later it would have almost a hundred million monthly users, according to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO. Not long after it launched, however, Adam Mosseri—the man in charge of both Threads and Instagram—sparked some controversy by describing how Threads would handle news, including political topics. In a nutshell, he said that while users were free to post and discuss news and politics, Threads was “not going to do anything to encourage” that kind of content. In other words, news and politics would not be recommended by the Threads content algorithm.

The controversy Mosseri triggered with these remarks resurfaced this week, when he posted an update on Threads’ approach to political news and user accounts. If a user followed political accounts on either Threads or Instagram, he said, Meta would do its best to “avoid getting between you and their content”—but at the same time, Mosseri said, the company remained focused on how to avoid recommending such content in various places across the app. The result, he added, is that political news topics and accounts will not show up as recommendations in any of the app’s features, including Explore, Reels, and Suggested Users. (Mosseri noted that if users wanted to see political recommendations, there would be a way to opt in.)

Mosseri and other Meta spokespeople described these moves as consistent with the company’s existing approach to political content, as described in a Meta blog post. “People have told us they want to see less political content,” the post states, and so the company has spent “the last few years” reducing the amount of such content that users see in their feeds or in recommendations. Meta does this, it said, because its policy is not to recommend certain types of content “to those who don’t wish to see it.” The company told Axios that anyone who discovers that their account is blocked from being recommended can request a review of this decision or “stop posting this kind of content for a period of time” in order to be eligible to be recommended again.

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

Continue reading “Threads: You can have political content but you will have to work for it”

From Atlas Obscura: “She’s been called the greatest female explorer of all time, and the best-traveled woman of the Middle Ages. Just after the year 1000 AD, she gave birth to the first European baby in North America. And she concluded her global odyssey with a pilgrimage on foot to Rome. Yet few today can name this extraordinary Viking lady, even if they have heard of Erik the Red and Leif Erikson, her father- and brother-in-law. Her full name, in modern Icelandic, is Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir—Gudrid the Far-Traveled, daughter of Thorbjorn. She was born around 985 AD on the Snæfellsnes peninsula in western Iceland and died around 1050 AD at Glaumbær in northern Iceland.”

This unassuming suburban couple had a $160 million painting in their bedroom

From the Smithsonian: “She was a retired speech pathologist, and he was a retired music teacher. For all intents and purposes, Rita and Jerry Alter were a totally normal couple living in the New Mexico suburbs—except for one thing. They had a stolen Willem de Kooning painting worth $160 million hanging behind their bedroom door. The couple has never been officially linked to the artwork’s theft from the University of Arizona. According to the university, a man and a woman entered the museum around 9 a.m. on November 29, 1985. While the woman spoke with a security guard, the man went up to the second floor, where he cut the painting from its frame, rolled it up and hid it under a garment.”

Continue reading “She was the greatest female explorer of all time”

From the Financial Times: “Last year, Norway’s $1.5tn sovereign wealth fund revealed that it had lost NKr980mn, roughly $92mn, on an error relating to how it calculated its mandated benchmark, which led to a marginal overweight in US fixed income relative to global fixed income. In a recent report, the fund revealed the source of the mistake: a staffer named Simon entered the date December 1st instead of November 1st when calculating the fund’s benchmark, which threw off the calculations. The mistake wasn’t found until months later by the Norwegian Ministry of Finance, which audits the fund’s performance. Could this be the most consequential Excel spreadsheet error ever?”

The long and surprising legacy of the Hopkinsville Goblins

From Atlas Obscura: “In August 22, 1955, a Kentucky newspaper reported strange goings-on north of Hopkinsville. Two cars arrived at the local police station, filled with at least five adults and several children, all of whom were highly agitated. They unfurled a strange story: a circular-shaped object came to rest in a nearby gully, and a strange, goblin-like thing with glowing eyes appeared and moved toward him. Steven Spielberg was told about the case by J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer turned UFO researcher whose work gave Close Encounters of the Third Kind its title, and the story not only helped inspire what became the movie E.T., but also the movie Gremlins, and the film Poltergeist.”

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 entered the wrong date in an Excel spreadsheet and lost $92 million”

From the MIT Press: “One of the most unusual chapters in psychiatry behind the Iron Curtain concerns the use of LSD psychotherapy in 1960s Czechoslovakia. Until recently, this period was known mainly through the work of Stanislav Grof, who practiced at Prague’s Psychiatric Research Institute, moved to the U.S. in 1967, and is today celebrated as one of the founders of transpersonal psychology. But dozens of other Czech psychiatrists also used LSD in psychotherapy, and the most dedicated and outspoken of them was Hausner, who supervised more than 3,000 LSD sessions, published research in more than 100 articles and books, and yet remains largely unknown, even in his homeland.”

Archeologists have found a vast network of cities hidden under the Amazon jungle

From the BBC: “Using airborne laser-scanning technology, Rostain and his colleagues discovered a long-lost network of cities extending across 300 sq km in the Amazon, complete with plazas, ceremonial sites, drainage canals and roads that were built 2,500 years ago and remained hidden for thousands of years. They also identified more than 6,000 rectangular earthen platforms believed to be homes and communal buildings in 15 urban centres surrounded by agricultural fields. Most of what we think we know about the Amazon is wrong, says Rostain. “This forces us to rethink the entire human past of the Amazon.” 

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 history of LSD therapy behind the Iron Curtain”

From The Atlantic: “Plenty of everyday objects, from ceramics and glass to metals and bananas, are radioactive, to varying degrees. Should the particles from their decay hit the detectors of particle-physics experiments, they could give scientists false positives and dig potholes on the road to scientific discovery. Even the experiments themselves, built from all kinds of metals, have lightly radioactive components. Just a few inches of lead can shield detectors from all kinds of rogue radiation, and one of the best ways to block sneaky, unwanted particles is to surround them with lead that itself is barely radioactive. The best source of such lead just so happens to be sunken ships, some of which have been corpses near coastal waters for as long as two millennia.”

She’s 116 years old and her entire town has become her family

From the New York Times: “When Edith Ceccarelli was born in February 1908, Theodore Roosevelt was president, Oklahoma had just become the nation’s 46th state and women did not yet have the right to vote. At 116, Ms. Ceccarelli is the oldest known person in the United States and the second oldest on Earth. She has lived through two World Wars, the advent of the Ford Model T — and the two deadliest pandemics in American history. For most of that time, she has lived in one place: Willits, a village tucked in California’s redwood forests that was once known for logging but now may be better known for Ms. Ceccarelli. At Willits City Hall, where 100-foot redwoods tower overhead, a gold-framed photograph of Ms. Ceccarelli sits in a display case.”

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 search for dark matter depends on shipwrecks”

From Mary Spicuzza for the Milwaukee Journal: “Florence Grady and Augie Palmisano reached the elevator doors at the same time. Both were tenants at Juneau Village Garden Apartments in downtown Milwaukee. And shortly before 9 a.m. that Friday — June 30, 1978 — both were heading to the basement of the apartment complex. They chatted about the weather and Summerfest. When they reached the basement, he walked to his car, a 1977 Mercury Marquis. Less than a minute later, there was a massive explosion. The blast shook the city. Paintings fell from walls and books tumbled off shelves. Tenants ran from the building as firefighters and police rushed to the scene. Augie Palmisano was my cousin. His murder has never been solved.”

The Black female engineer who played a pivotal role in developing GPS

From Tanasia Kenney for the Atlanta Black Star: “From cell phones to cars and even social media, most folks in this day and age are familiar with the Geographical Positioning System, or GPS. Little known is the fact that an African–American woman mathematician was a part of the original team of engineers tasked with developing the highly useful system. West, 87, enjoyed a 42-year career as a mathematician at the Naval Support Facility in Virginia where she, and fellow engineers saw the early beginnings of the popular tracking system. She was just one of four Black Americans employed at the base when she first started in 1956, her calculations eventually leading to GPS satellites.”

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 “Her cousin’s murder has never been solved”

Last week, executives from some of the world’s largest social platforms—Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, as well as TikTok, Snap, Discord, and X, formerly known as Twitter—testified at a Senate hearing about children’s safety online. The session featured the sort of grandstanding by senators that often occurs in such hearings, including a bizarre detour into whether Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok (which is based in China), is a member of the Chinese Communist Party (even though he is from Singapore). One particularly striking moment came after Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, asked Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, to apologize to some of the families present at the hearing, including Maurine Molak, whose son David died by suicide at sixteen after he was cyberbullied, and Todd and Mia Minor, whose son Matthew died at twelve after he took part in an online “blackout challenge.” Zuckerberg complied. “No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered,” he said.

Parents in the viewers’ gallery, including Molak and the Minors, weren’t just there for an apology from Zuckerberg or the other executives, but to pressure legislators to pass the Kids Online Safety Act, a law that, according to its supporters, could help prevent the kinds of dangers that their children were exposed to. Molak told NBC News that she and other parents are up against a “billion-dollar lobby campaign” funded by the tech platforms and aimed at blocking the legislation. She added that she and the other parents in attendance are “sick and tired of [tech platforms] deploying all of these people to crush the work that we’re doing.”

KOSA was first proposed in 2022 by Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, and Marsha Blackburn, the Republican senator from Tennessee. Blumenthal has said that he was inspired to craft the legislation after Frances Haugen—a former Facebook staffer turned whistleblower, whose disclosures from inside the company were widely covered by numerous major news outlets in 2021—appeared before Congress that year. As part of her testimony, Haugen submitted internal documents that appeared to show that bosses at Meta knew that Facebook and Instagram were harming teenagers, by encouraging emotionally or physically harmful behavior, but had taken little or no action to prevent by way of mitigation. Blumenthal said that KOSA was necessary because Haugen had showed that Facebook knowingly “exploited teens using powerful algorithms that amplified their insecurities.”

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

Continue reading “Legislators continue to push Kids Online Safety Act despite ongoing criticism”

From Alec Marsh for Outside magazine: “On September 5 of 1936, a pair of fisherman came across a woman floundering her way through a bog on the eastern shores of Nova Scotia. In the background was her single-engined Percival Vega Gull aircraft, its nose buried deep in the moss. Blood streamed down the woman’s face and black peat went up to the waist of her formerly white overalls: ‘I’m Mrs Markham,’ she told them. ‘I’ve just flown from England.’ Taken to a local farmhouse, the aviator asked for a cup of tea and for a phone. She was directed to ‘a little cubicle that housed an ancient telephone’ built on the rocks, ‘put there in case of shipwrecks,’ she recalled. Over the line she told the operator: ‘Could you ask someone to send a taxi for me?’ Beryl Markham, 33, had just become the first person to fly non-stop, solo, from Europe to North America.”

The Donner party might have survived if they hadn’t rejected help from indigenous tribes

From Julie Schablitsky for Archeology Archive: “Until now the Native American perspective has been left out of the telling of the Donner tragedy, not because the wel mel ti did not remember the pioneers, but because they were never asked, or perhaps were not ready to share. Their oral tradition recalls the starving strangers who camped in an area that was unsuitable for that time of year. Taking pity on the pioneers, the northern Washoe attempted to feed them, leaving rabbit meat and wild potatoes near the camps. Another account states that they tried to bring the Donner Party a deer carcass, but were shot at as they approached. Later, some wel mel ti observed the migrants eating human remains. Fearing for their lives, the area’s native inhabitants continued to watch the strangers but avoided further contact. The migrants at Alder Creek were not surviving in the mountains alone—the northern Washoe were there, and they had tried to help.”

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 “She made history with a hair-raising flight across the Atlantic”

From Mark Thiessen for AP: “A woman with a lengthy criminal history including theft, assault and prostitution got into a truck with a man who had picked her up for a “date” near downtown Anchorage. When he left her alone in the vehicle, she stole a digital memory card from the center console. Now, more than four years later, what she found on that card is key to a double murder trial set to begin this week: gruesome photos and videos of a woman being beaten and strangled at a Marriott hotel, her attacker speaking in a strong accent as he urged her to die, her blanket-covered body being snuck outside on a luggage cart. Smith has pleaded not guilty to 14 charges in the deaths of Kathleen Henry, 30, and Veronica Abouchuk, who was 52 when her family reported her missing in February 2019.”

An African-American man named Osbourn Dorsey invented the doorknob in the 1800s

From Same Passage: “Osbourn Dorsey invented the doorknob and doorstop in December of 1878. He successfully obtained a patent for his work in the same year. Because of the time in which he lived and the fact that he was African-American, very little is known about his life. Historians still wonder if the man was born free or if he was a freed slave, and they don’t really know where Dorsey lived or what other inventions he created if any, or even what he did for a living. Most of the information about him and his inventions comes from his patent application. Before Dorsey’s invention people closed and secured doors in a variety of ways. Many people used some type of latch to keep doors closed, whereas others used leather straps as handles. Even after the doorknob was invented it took years for people to embrace them fully and begin installing them.”

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 “She stole a man’s memory card and discovered a serial killer”

From Jack Dolan at the LA Times: “Dangling from a thin rope thousands of feet above Yosemite Valley last October, Zuko Carrasco could feel his arms tremble. A paraplegic who had lost the use of his legs eight years earlier in a bizarre accident — a trust fall gone awry — he had spent a week ascending El Capitan, the world’s most famous big wall rock climb, one tiny pull-up at a time. A “good pull” moved him up about 4 inches. He would need to perform something like 9,000 of them to reach the summit. Along the way, he suffered dehydration, searing blisters and, at times, soul-crushing doubt. He shivered in the early morning and baked in the midday sun. That was the worst because the injury that paralyzed him from the waist down also prevented him from sweating properly, adding heatstroke to the long list of mortal dangers he had to contend with.”

Unravelling the mystery behind a tiny village at the center of a giant crater on Madagascar

From Vox, via Kottke: “Right in the center of the island nation of Madagascar there’s a strange, almost perfectly circular geological structure. It covers a bigger area than the city of Paris — and at first glance, it looks completely empty. But right in the center of that structure, there’s a single, isolated village: a few dozen houses, some fields of crops, and dirt roads stretching out in every direction. When we first saw this village on Google Earth, its extreme remoteness fascinated us. Was the village full of people? How did they wind up there? And what did life look like in such a strange geography? To find out, we teamed up with a local team in Madagascar and fell down a rabbit hole of geology and mapping along the way. It’s a story of how continental shifts and volcanic geology came together to form a place for a group of people to call home.”

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 “A paralyzed man made it up El Capitan using only his arms”

From Emmie Goldberg for the NYT: “There is an adage that says there are no atheists in foxholes — even skeptics will pray when facing death. But Hancock, in the time leading up to his execution, only became more insistent about his nonbelief. He and his chaplain were both confident that there was no God who might grant last-minute salvation, if only they produced a desperate prayer. They had only one another. The two spoke at least once a week, and sometimes multiple times a day. Mostly, they talked over the phone, and provided recordings of these conversations to The Times. Sometimes it was in person, in the prison’s fluorescently lit visitor room, over bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.”

She set a new record by spending five hundred days alone in a cave

From D.T. Max for The New Yorker: “In 2021, just after lockdowns in Spain ended, Flamini thought about coming down from the mountains. But her real desire was to go somewhere more remote: the Gobi Desert, in Mongolia. Only one European had ever crossed it alone on foot, she’d learned. She moved to northern Spain and began training for the Gobi expedition by hiking steep mountain trails while carrying a backpack weighed down by bottles filled with water. She soon decided that she was prepared physically but not mentally. Flamini thought about test runs that might prepare her for the solitude of the Mongolian desert. Spending time in a cave, she decided, could provide useful lessons.” 

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 “An atheist chaplain and a death row inmate”

Last week, fake pornographic images of singer Taylor Swift started spreading across X (formerly known as Twitter). Swift fans quickly swarmed the platform, calling out the images as fakes generated by AI software, and demanding that X remove them and block the accounts sharing them. According to a number of reports, the platform removed some of the images and the accounts that posted them, but not before certain photos had been viewed millions of times, and images continued to circulate across the service even after the bans were implemented. X then blocked the term “Taylor Swift” from its search engine, so that trying to search for the singer produced an error telling users that “something went wrong.” Despite this attempt to block people from seeing the content, reporters for The Verge found that it was relatively easy to get around the search block and find the fake images anyway.

Some observers noted that X’s inability to stop the proliferation of Swift porn was likely caused in part by Elon Musk’s dismantling of the company’s trust and safety team, most of whom were fired after he acquired Twitter in 2022. In the wake of the Taylor Swift controversy, Joe Benarroch, head of business operations at X, told Bloomberg that the company is planning a new “trust and safety center of excellence” in Texas to help enforce its content moderation rules, and that X intends to hire a hundred full-time moderators. Bloomberg also noted that the announcement came just days before executives from X and the other major social platforms and services are set to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a hearing on child safety online.

On Monday, X restored the ability to search for Taylor Swift, but said in a statement that it would “continue to be vigilant” in removing similar AI-generated nonconsensual images. (According to a report from The Verge, some of the original Swift images were seen forty-five million times before they were removed.) The White House even weighed in on the controversy: Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told ABC News that the Biden administration was “alarmed by the reports,” and that while social media companies are entitled to make their own content decisions, the White House believes it has a role in preventing “the spread of misinformation, and non-consensual, intimate imagery of real people.”

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

Continue reading “Taylor Swift deepfakes could be just the tip of an AI-generated iceberg”

From Daniel Rennie for Bold Entrance: “The biggest villain in Gotham isn’t the Joker, but Batman’s creator himself, Bob Kane. In the years following Batman’s first appearance in May 1939, Kane became almost as famous as the Caped Crusader himself. But Kane wasn’t responsible for what makes the crime-fighter so memorable: his costume, his arsenal of cool gadgets, or his secret identity. He didn’t even create Gotham City. All these creations belong to Bill Finger, whose identity remained as secret as Bruce Wayne. Finger made Batman what he is, and had a hand in the creation of Robin, and villains like The Joker, Penguin, and Two-Face. Nonetheless, Kane got all the credit – and the money.” 

The inventor of the Pringle’s can was so proud of it he was buried in one

From Scott Horsely at NPR: “If it weren’t for Frederic Baur, Pringle might still be just a street name in suburban Cincinnati. Back in the 1960s, Cincinnati-based Procter and Gamble, where Baur worked, developed a potato chip made from dehydrated flour and shaped like a saddle. They didn’t look like any other potato chip, and Baur’s can was just as novel. Baur won a patent on the tubular container in 1970, and packaging experts say the distinctive can was a big reason for the national and international success of the chips. Baur died in 2008 at 89, and at his request, some of his ashes were buried in a Pringle’s can.”

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 Bob Kane stole all the credit for inventing Batman”

From Maxine Bernstein for Oregon Live: “Husband-and-wife chauffeurs are accused of stealing $34 million from wealthy publisher Win McCormack over seven years. Sergey Lebedenko and his wife, Galina provided rides to McCormack through their limousine service and then made unauthorized charges of up to $34 million to his American Express card.The couple used the money to buy lavish vacation homes and a $1.5 million executive jet. While executing search warrants at the couple’s homes, federal agents seized more than $100,000 in cash and 150 ounces of gold bullion worth about $300,000. It is the largest alleged heist against a single person in the history of Oregon.”

The US government created a battle plan in case of a zombie invasion

From Thaddeus Morgan for History: “The United States may have one of the largest armies on earth, but even the Pentagon has taken no chances at being caught off-guard by an unusual foe. In fact, in 2011, the U.S. Department of Defense released a strategy to combat a potential zombie apocalypse. While the potential opponents might be fictional, the military took it seriously. In fact, the first line of the Counter-Zombie Dominance Plan, or “CONPLAN 8888-11,” states, “This plan was not actually designed as a joke.” The origins of the plan can be traced to training exercises held in 2009 and 2010, during which young officers realized the potential upsides to planning for a hypothetical zombie attack.”

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 “His staff stole $34 million from him and he didn’t notice”