Category: Newsletters

From Lucy Davies for the BBC: “In the 1930s, Jasper Maskelyne was a superstar magician, performing to sell-out crowds at variety theatres all over Britain. A 1931 poster for his stint at the London Palladium billed him “England’s Greatest Illusionist”. Maskelyne’s greatest hoax was executed in a theatre of a very different kind – the desert near Cairo during World War Two, where he claimed to have led a team that mass-produced, as he described it in his tell-all 1949 memoir, “tricks and swindles and devices intended to bewilder and mislead the crop-headed Axis commanders”. The smoke-and-mirrors methods that Maskelyne and co employed for “Operation Bertram” are still studied by the military today, and a film telling Maskelyne’s story and starring Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role is set for production.”

There’s a small island in Puget Sound where the only residents are sex offenders

From Emily Gillespie for The Guardian: “A small island in the state of Washington houses a group of unlikely residents: they are all men the state considers its most dangerous sex offenders. McNeil Island, nestled in Puget Sound, is unpopulated except for the 214 people who live at the special commitment center, a facility for former prison inmates. All men have served their sentence and yet, due to a controversial legal mandate, they remain confined indefinitely. The only way on and off the small island is a passenger-only ferry, which makes the 15-minute trip every two hours. The ferry docks at a defunct prison on the island and a bus takes employees and visitors to the facility a few miles inland.”

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 “Did a magician help defeat the Nazis in World War II?”

From Anita Singh for The Telegraph: “The Princes in the Tower were not murdered by Richard III but spirited to Europe and later tried to retake the crown, according to new research. Philippa Langley, the amateur historian credited with finding Richard’s remains under a Leicester car park, has presented a series of “extraordinary discoveries” to back-up her theory. She believes that a duo dismissed by history as pretenders to the throne – Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, who each launched failed bids to depose Henry VII in the late 15th century – were the real princes. The two boys, sons of Edward IV and nephews to Richard, disappeared from the record in 1483 after being taken to the Tower of London. A common theory is that they were murdered by their uncle.”

Who was behind the Great Cajun Alligator Snapping Turtle Heist?

From Sonia Smith for Texas Monthly: “Bayou legend has it that there are seven kinds of meat on an alligator snapping turtle, including turkey, fish, pork, and veal. The way to cook one depends largely on what part of Louisiana you find yourself in. In New Orleans’s Creole cuisine, turtle is most often served in a hearty soup. Cajuns are fond of serving it in a “sauce picante,” a spicy, long-simmering, tomato-based stew. “The fastest way to get someone to a supper around here is to say ‘turtle,’ ” Jimmy Mistretta, a Lake Charles developer and restaurateur who bought Caesar and Brutus from Viola, told me on the back porch of his Lake Charles bar, Loggerheads. “If it’s a turtle supper, everybody’s coming. You just can’t imagine the effect it has on people.”

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 “Historian claims Richard III didn’t kill the princes after all”

From Valentine Faure for The Atlantic: “At the small elementary school in France, Gisèle Marc knew the rumor about her: that her parents were not her real parents. It was the late 1940s, a time when whispered stories like this one passed from parents to children. Women who were said to have slept with occupying soldiers had their heads shaved and were publicly shamed by angry crowds. At the age of 10, she gathered her courage and confronted her mother, who told her she was adopted when she was 4. Later, she found her adoption file, but it contained little information. As an adult, she wrote wrote to the Arolsen Archives, the international center on Nazi persecution, in Germany, to ask if there was any mention of her in the records. They told her she was born in Belgium, in a Nazi maternity home that had been set up by the SS, through which the regime sought to encourage the birth of babies of “good blood.”

When Shakespeare’s First Folio disappeared from the Bodleian Library

From the London Review of Books: “The chance meetings, narrow escapes and spooky coincidences that fill Shakespeare’s romances are also a feature of the histories and provenances of the 235 surviving copies of the First Folio of his work. One such tale concerns the copy of the First Folio that was sent to the Bodleian Library in 1624, shortly after it was published, and later disappeared. In 1905, an undergraduate named G.M.R. Turbutt brought his battered family Folio to Oxford to be dated by the experts; his great-great-great-grandfather had bought it c.1750. The librarians soon realised that what they held in their hands was the lost copy, still in its original bindings. A case of Jacobean theft was the initial assumption, but it was later discovered that the library felt the Third Folio from 1663 offered even better value, so it sold the copy of the First Folio.”

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 children born as part of Nazi genetic research projects”

From Andy Greenberg: “Early in the morning on October 21, 2016, Scott Shapiro got out of bed, opened his Dell laptop to read the day’s news, and found that the internet was broken. Users cataloged an alarming number of other digital services that were victims of the outage: Amazon, Spotify, Reddit, PayPal, and Netflix were crippled for most of the East Coast of the United States and other patches of the country. Meanwhile, a little less than 500 miles west of Shapiro’s Connecticut home, 19-year-old Josiah White sat staring at the three flatscreen monitors he’d set up on a workbench in a messy basement storage area connected to the bedroom he shared with his brother in their parents’ house.”

Johannes Kepler’s vision of the solar system got his mother tried for witchcraft

From Maria Popova at The Marginalian: “In The Dream, a young traveler lands on the Moon to find that lunar beings believe Earth revolves around them — an allegory to society’s certitude in Kepler’s time about the solar system revolving around the Earth. The narrator is a young astronomer who describes himself as having apprenticed with the famous astronomer Tycho Brahe, just as Kepler himself did. Some immediately took the story to be not fiction but autobiography – and the narrator’s mother was an herb doctor who conjures up spirits to assist her son in his lunar voyage. Kepler’s own mother was also an herb doctor, and a local barber seized upon the chance to cast Katharina Kepler as a witch.” 

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 three teenaged hackers broke the internet”

From Marco Hernandez at the New York Times: “Hamas militants have built a maze of hidden tunnels some believe extend across most if not all of Gaza, the territory they control. And they are not mere tunnels. Snaking beneath dense residential areas, the passageways allow fighters to move around free from the eye of the enemy. There are also bunkers for stockpiling weapons, food and water, and even command centers and tunnels wide enough for vehicles, researchers believe. Ordinary-looking doors and hatches serve as disguised access points, letting Hamas fighters dart out on missions and then slip back out of sight. No outsider has an exact map of the network, and few Israelis have seen it firsthand. But photos and video and reports from people who have been in the tunnels suggest the basic outlines of the system and how it is used.”

How a ‘refund fraud’ ring stole almost a million dollars from Amazon

From Joseph Cox for 404 Media: “The U.S. government has indicted alleged members of a criminal group that uses insiders at Walmart and other techniques to commit ‘refund fraud’ on a massive scale, according to recently unsealed court records. In short, the scam involves someone ordering an item from, say, Amazon—which in this case says it lost $700,000—receiving the item, and then using one of various tricks to get their money back from the retailer. The person is then free to sell the item online, and the criminal group takes a fee. The indictment reveals a professionalized ecosystem of sellers and people providing various services as part of the wide-reaching scam. As well as malicious insiders, refund scammers take advantage of customer service representatives and online retailers’ lax refund policies to get expensive items for free. “

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 “Inside the vast network of tunnels underneath Gaza”

From Scott Sayare at New York magazine: “The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 mandated that “all Government records related to the assassination” be provided to the National Archives and made available to the public. Among the first visitors to the JFK Assassination Records Collection was Jefferson Morley, then a 34-year-old editor from the Washington Post. Morley had made a name for himself in magazines in the 1980s. He helped break the Iran-Contra scandal for The New Republic.  “If you use what we’ve learned since the ’90s to evaluate the government’s case,” he told me, “the case disintegrates.” Morley, the author of three books on the CIA, has made a name for himself among assassination researchers by attempting to approach Kennedy’s murder as if it were any other subject.”

It’s time to recognize Sally Hemings as the First Lady of the United States

From Evelia Jones for the LA Times: “It is now widely understood that my ancestor Sally Hemings, an enslaved black woman, was the intimate companion of Thomas Jefferson for nearly four decades. Monticello, the Virginia plantation operated as a museum by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, acknowledged as much with a new exhibit of Hemings’ living quarters. The exhibit presents as fact that Hemings gave birth to at least six of Jefferson’s children. Mainstream historians and the White House have long designated Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson as our country’s third first lady. But Martha died in 1782, nearly two decades before Jefferson became president. Hemings was with Jefferson from the late 1780s until his death in 1826.”

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 “Proof the CIA lied about Lee Harvey Oswald and Cuba”

In the past two years, both Australia and Canada have passed laws aimed at forcing Google and Meta to pay news publishers for excerpts of their content that appear on the tech giants’ platforms. (Similar legislation has been proposed, but not enacted, in the US). The outcomes of the Canadian and Australian laws have, so far, been dramatically different: Google and Meta responded to the Australian legislation by signing content deals worth an estimated hundred and fifty million dollars with news outlets, but in Canada, they have pulled news content from their platforms completely (or promised to). If a user in Canada tries to post a link to a news story on Facebook, an error message pops up telling them that their post can’t be published. (Meta briefly blocked news from its platforms in Australia, before relenting.)

At the heart of such laws lies a question: what is the value of news content to the major platforms? And what they might owe the makers of that content as a result? Is it worth the hundreds of millions of dollars that Google and Meta have reportedly paid Australian publishers under that country’s law forcing them to cough up? Is it worth the three hundred million dollars that Google says it spent through its Google News Initiative, a program that has funded journalism startups and grants? What about the six hundred million dollars that Meta says it has spent doing the same since 2018? A study released two weeks ago by researchers at Columbia University argues that these sums are just a fraction of what Google and Meta should actually be paying for news. The researchers—led by Anya Schiffrin, director of the Technology, Media, and Communications specialization at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs—put the figure around ten billion dollars per year for Google, and two billion for Meta. So twelve billion dollars, in total.

Putting a dollar amount on the value that news content brings to Google is tricky. The company doesn’t run ads on Google News pages, and therefore generates no direct ad revenue from them. Media companies say that this ignores the broader value for Google of being able to link out to news content, which, they argue, draws users to and keeps them on Google’s platform, where they can conduct non-news searches and interact with the company’s in-house products. Different studies have tried different ways of putting a number on this value. In 2019, the News Media Alliance, a lobby group for publishers, released a study claiming that Google makes nearly five billion dollars from news—though at the time, a number of critics noted that this number seemed to have been based on an offhand comment that Marissa Mayer, a former executive at Google, made more than a decade earlier.

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

Continue reading “How much do Google and Meta owe news publishers? A new study says $12 billion”

From Max Marshall for Vanity Fair: “At a press conference held during the 2016 College of Charleston summer break, the police chief announced one of the largest drug busts in the city’s history, a collaboration between local police, state law enforcement, the DEA, the FBI, and the US Postal Service. The chief pointed to a row of tables to show what they’d seized: five pounds of marijuana, a pound and a half of cocaine, seven firearms, a Tac-D grenade launcher, $214,000 in cash, and forty-three thousand pills worth $150,000. He then switched the TV display from piles of money to rows of mug shots. Up on the screen, the suspects looked like guys who put in time at the gym, and maybe at the beach, and definitely at the putting green. Two of them belonged to Sigma Alpha Epsilon.”

Drinking radioactive water was once a popular health remedy

From Donald Papp at Hackaday: “Radithor was a quack medicine that was exactly what it said on the label: distilled water containing around 2 micrograms of radium in each bottle (yes, that’s a lot.) This product eventually helped lead to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. It took the horrifying death of Eben Byers, a wealthy and famous golfer, for radium’s dangers to take center stage. Byers had been drinking Radithor for years before he ultimately died of radium poisoning. At the time of his death, he was estimated to have consumed some 1,400 bottles. One record of his death states that the very air he exhaled was found to be radioactive. His jaw was literally falling apart.”

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 “Inside the frat-boy crime ring that swept the South”

From Dave Burkey for Jax Examiner: “They called him the Black Swallow, and from the beginning of his life, all he wanted to do was get to France.He was born in Georgia, his father a former slave from Haiti, his mother full-blooded Cree. He ran away while still a child, determined to fulfill his destiny. He lived for a time with a group of English Romani, learning the art of horsemanship and working as a jockey. He kept traveling and working until he made his way to Norfolk, where he stowed away on a ship bound for Scotland.He wouldn’t see America again for thirty years. Towards the end of his life, he worked as an elevator operator at Rockefeller Square in New York City.”

The captain of Charles Darwin’s ship invented the idea of a weather forecast

From the BBC: “Admiral Robert FitzRoy is chiefly remembered as Charles Darwin’s taciturn captain on HMS Beagle, during the famous circumnavigation in the 1830s. But in his lifetime FitzRoy found celebrity not from his time at sea but from his pioneering daily weather predictions, which he called by a new name of his own invention – “forecasts”. There was no such thing as a weather forecast in 1854 when FitzRoy established what would later be called the Met Office. Instead the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade was founded as a chart depot, intended to reduce sailing times with better wind charts. But the idea that the weather could be predicted was widely ridiculed.”

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 incredible life of Eugene Bullard, the “Black Swallow””

On July 5th, Meta launched the company’s new social networking app, Threads, by giving users of Instagram, its photo and video-sharing service, first crack at the ability to set up a Threads account. The following week, I did a Q&A with my colleague Jon Allsop, in which we talked about whether Threads would be able to compete with X (formerly Twitter), and how useful it might be for journalists. Just four months later, Threads has arguably become a significant competitor for X, and has done so a lot faster than most people probably expected. The app hit thirty million sign-ups within twenty-four hours of its launch, and then fifty million, and in a conference call on October 25th, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s cofounder and CEO, said Threads now has almost 100 million monthly users, making it one of the fastest-growing apps in history.

Meanwhile, Twitter’s user metrics are down across the board, and that includes daily active users. Elon Musk, who controls the company, said earlier this year that the app shas somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred and thirty million monthly users, but that still means that Threads has managed to sign up almost one fifth as many monthly users as X, a social network that has been around since 2007. No doubt the turmoil that has continued at X since Musk acquired Twitter last year has helped push users towards Threads, but that’s not the only reason. Last month, Casey Newton wrote in his Platformer newsletter that the Israel-Hamas conflict also seems to have helped tip the scales in favor of Threads, and caused a minor exodus from X.

For more than a decade, Newton noted, people flocked to Twitter whenever calamity struck, attracted by a blend of first-person accounts, verified journalists sharing reporting, and a broad range of commentary on whatever was happening. That Twitter no longer exists, says Newton. There may still be first-person style accounts of the news, but Musk’s approach to verification makes it impossible to tell what is real and what is not, since the blue check that used to denote an official account can be purchased by anyone. And the desire for factual reporting and commentary about the Israel-Hamas conflict, Newton argues, created the latest instance of what Ezra Klein calls an “exodus shock” from X.

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

Continue reading “Is Threads winning the war with X, and if so is that a good thing?”

From Vanessa Vaselka for the Smithsonian: “Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felso-Szilvas, an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat born in 1877, was a notorious figure in his day. A wild genius with a flair for the dandyish and the dramatic, he was an explorer, spy, polyglot and master of disguise. He crossed the Albanian Alps on foot, and was nearly crowned King of Albania. Later in his life, he was known for chasing villagers from his estate with a pistol. But the baron was also one of the great scholars and scientific minds of his time. He was one of the first scientists to look at fossilized dinosaur bones and see a living creature. And he was a staunch believer in the relationship between birds and dinosaurs, decades before the idea became widely accepted among paleontologists.”

Why you might find a shoe hidden inside the walls of your house

From Katrina Gulliver for JSTOR Daily: “If you live in an old house, there may be more than you realize behind its walls or under its floors. For centuries, there was a custom in Great Britain (which spread to Britain’s colonies in the Americas) of ritual concealment, placing objects in different parts of the house as totems. The practice seems to have been widespread in Britain from the medieval period into the twentieth century. Often, the concealed object was a shoe. The oldest such hidden shoe was found at Winchester Cathedral and dated to 1308. Cases of hidden shoes also “abound” in New England. John Adams Birthplace, a house built by Joseph Penniman in 1681, contained an incredible forty-four shoes and boots, discovered during restoration.”

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 discovered dinosaurs but died penniless”

From Alex Mar for The Guardian: “In the spring of 1985, Paula Cooper was 15 and on her lunch break at Lew Wallace high school in Indiana. She and her friends Karen and April decided to skip their afternoon classes and head over to Candyland Arcade around the corner. Karen was Paula’s best friend at school. At 16, Karen was a large girl, often out of breath; everyone called her Pooky, maybe because of her sweet face. She had a child, who was three, and he mostly stayed at home with her godmother. April, too, was pregnant – though she could still hide it. April mentioned an old woman who lived in the house just behind hers, the home of Ruth Pelke. April told them she was a Bible teacher, an elderly white woman, and that, since her husband’s death, she had lived alone.”

The mysterious death of Lord Kitchener

From Jeremy Paxman at the Financial Times: “On a sunny day, Marwick Head is a glorious place to be. At the top of the headland stands a squat, crenellated tower. Almost 50ft high and visible for miles, it has no obvious function – too fat to be a lighthouse, too small to be a castle. A stone panel explains: “This tower was raised by the people of Orkney in memory of Field Marshall Earl Kitchener of Khartoum. He and his staff perished along with the officers and nearly all the men of HMS Hampshire on 5th June, 1916.” Though it is hardly remembered at all today, the wreck of the Hampshire was seen at the time as little short of a national disaster. Hundreds of men perished that night, among them the best-known soldier in the English-speaking world. The conspiracy theories began almost at once. How could such an important figure, in the full protection of the greatest navy in the world, be dead?”

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 violent murder in Indiana and a child left on death row”

From Jacob Judah for MIT Tech Review: “Tokelau, a necklace of three isolated atolls strung out across the Pacific, is so remote that it was the last place on Earth to be connected to the telephone—only in 1997. Just three years later, the islands received a fax with an unlikely business proposal that would change everything. It was from an early internet entrepreneur from Amsterdam, named Joost Zuurbier. He wanted to manage Tokelau’s country-code top-level domain, or ccTLD—the short string of characters that is tacked onto the end of a URL. Until recently, its .tk domain had more users than any other country’s: a staggering 25 million. But nearly all the websites and others that have used .tk  have been spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals.”

The secret room where Michelangelo drew on the walls while he was in hiding

From Open Culture: “In the year 1530, Michelangelo was sentenced to death by Pope Clement VII. The Florence-born Michelangelo had come to the aid of his hometown by working on its fortifications, and that drew the ire of the Medici. They pardoned him before long, so he could finish his work on the Sistine Chapel, but while he was in hiding he spent several months making dozens of drawings, all of which he drew directly on the walls. Their existence remained unknown until 1975 when Paolo Dal Poggetto, then the director of the Medici Chapels, one of five museums that make up the Bargello Museums, was searching for a suitable space to create a new exit for the museum.”

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 tiny Pacific Island became a hotspot for cybercrime”

From Emily Zarevich for JSTOR Daily: “It was exactly the kind of thing a reckless twenty-something-year-old would do. But why would a rational, academically accomplished, thirty-year-old philosophy teacher do it? For whatever reason, Sartre made the decision to get high on mescaline, used at the time to treat alcoholism and depression, and recruited a doctor friend to inject him with it at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris. If Sartre was looking for some kind of epiphany, it presented itself to him in a very bizarre form. For days he was tormented by illusions of crustaceans. Not the charming, singing, Disney-style ones, but demonic, taunting sea beasts that followed him wherever he went. His clock became an owl, his umbrella metamorphosed into a vulture.”

A QAnon cult set up a compound in a small town but the locals are fighting back

From Mack Lamoureux for Vice: “Hugh Everding, a bald hulking man of about 6’4”, stares out of the kitchen window as police vehicle after police vehicle rolls down the street headed towards a check stop manned by a half-dozen cops. Every entry point into this town has such a check stop, ready to interrogate both locals and miscreants on what their business is. There’s little doubt that at this moment, Richmound, Saskatchewan, population 130, is the most fortified town in all of Canada. You can always spot a storm brewing in the Prairies, and in Hugh’s case, it was just across the street, where the so-called QAnon Queen of Canada and her followers had taken over an abandoned school.”

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 “That time Jean-Paul Sartre got high on mescaline”

From Eamon Javers for CNBC: “As he was cheering on his team in LA in 2019, Jimmy Zhong couldn’t have known that a small group of agents from the IRS Criminal Investigation unit, were painstakingly trying to solve a crime that dated back years. It was a 2012 hack in which someone had stolen 50,000 bitcoins from a site on the dark web called Silk Road. Over the years, the value of the bitcoin stolen by the Silk Road hacker had soared to more than $3 billion. Investigators could track the location of the currency on the blockchain, but they couldn’t see the identity of the owner. Then the hacker made a tiny mistake. He transferred around $800 worth to a crypto exchange that required real names and addresses. The account was registered in Zhong’s name.”

The Paris catacombs don’t just play host to millions of skeletons, there are parties too

From Frank Jacobs for Atlas Obscura: “Most people have heard of the Catacombs of Paris: subterranean charnel houses for the bones of around six million dead Parisians. They are one of the French capital’s most famous tourist attractions—and undoubtedly its grisliest. But they constitute only a small fragment of what the locals themselves call the mines of Paris, a collection of tunnels and galleries up to 300 km long, most of which are off-limits to the public, yet eagerly explored by so-called cataphiles. The Great Southern Network takes up around 200 km beneath the city, all south of the river Seine, and smaller networks run under other parts of Paris. But how did they get there?”

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 Bitcoin thief who stole and then lost $3 billion”