Category: Newsletters

From Lars Wegner for VG: “On 3 June 1995, a young woman is found dead on the bed in Room 2805 of the Oslo Plaza, shot through the forehead with a Browning 9 mm pistol. She checked in as Jennifer Fergate, but the name is false. Who is this stylish woman? Why are the labels removed from her clothes? Why is she carrying 34 rounds of ammunition? Why has no one reported her missing? In 2017, in collaboration with the Oslo police, VG makes a final attempt to learn the identity of the Plaza woman. What really happened in Room 2805? Fake name, clothing labels removed, and nothing at all in the room to indicate the young woman’s identity. No passport. No wallet, no money, no credit card. No handbag, driver’s license or keys. Not even toiletries or make-up.”

The Cold War’s most important hot dog stand

From Dan Lewis at Now I Know: “The hot dog stand in the picture was located in Arlington County, Virginia, embedded inside the U.S. Department of Defense’s headquarters, better known as the Pentagon. During the Cold War, planning operations happened inside the building, of course, but the Pentagon’s design has an outdoor section as well — a courtyard in the center of the facility. And toward the center of the courtyard was the hot dog stand in question. On a nice day — and Virginia has pretty good weather — many a Pentagon employee would go to the hot dog stand (and it served more than just hot dogs) for lunch. Which is what prompted the reported confusion. Reportedly, by using satellite imagery, the Soviets could see groups of U.S. military officers entering and exiting the hot dog stand at about the same time every day. They concluded that the stand was the entrance to an underground bunker.”

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 mysterious death at the Oslo Plaza Hotel baffles investigators”

Rachel Nuwer writes for the BBC: “In February 2020, Harriet de Wit, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago, was running an experiment on whether the drug MDMA increased the pleasantness of social touch when Mike Bremmer, de Wit’s research assistant, appeared at her office door. The latest participant in the double-blind trial, a man named Brendan, had filled out a questionnaire and written: “This experience has helped me sort out a debilitating personal issue. Google my name. I now know what I need to do.” They googled Brendan’s name, and up popped a disturbing revelation: until just a few months before, Brendan had been the leader of the US Midwest faction of Identity Evropa, a notorious white nationalist group also known as the American Identity Movement.”

This fighter pilot turned MIT computer science professor believed the universe is a computer

Alex Williams writes for the New York Times: “Edward Fredkin, who despite never having graduated from college became an influential professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a pioneer in artificial intelligence and a maverick theorist who championed the idea that the entire universe might function like one big computer, died on June 13 in Brookline, Mass. He was 88. After serving as a fighter pilot in the Air Force in the early 1950s, Professor Fredkin became a renowned, if unconventional, scientific thinker. He was a close friend and intellectual sparring partner of the celebrated physicist Richard Feynman and the computer scientist Marvin Minsky, a trailblazer in artificial intelligence. An autodidact who left college after a year, he nonetheless became a full professor of computer science at M.I.T. at 34.” (Bonus link: Here’s an interview with Fredkin from The Atlantic in 1988).

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 dose of MDMA transformed a notorious white supremacist”

From Kevin Dickinson at Big Think: “Ancient Akkadian is an early Semitic language that was the mother tongue of the Akkadian Empire, which arose around 2300 B.C. through the conquests of its founder, Sargon the Great. Hundreds of thousands — by some accounts more than a million — Akkadian texts have been discovered and today lie in museums and universities. Many have even been digitized online. Each one has the potential to teach us about the life, politics, and beliefs of the first civilizations, yet this knowledge remains locked behind the time and manpower necessary to translate them. To help change that, a multidisciplinary team of archaeologists and computer scientists has developed an artificial intelligence that can translate Akkadian almost instantly and unlock the historic record preserved in these 5,000-year-old tablets.”

The most accomplished man in Europe in the 18th century was a Black man

From Bri Michele at Medium: “Chevalier, based on a true story, traces the life of Joseph Bologne, an 18th century French nobleman. Joseph was the son of a wealthy plantation owner in the French Caribbean and an enslaved Senegalese woman. After some time, Joseph’s father came back to France, and brought Joseph and his mother back with him. The movie follows Joseph’s life from the time he arrives in France. It shows the racial challenges he faced in the private music academy his father enrolled him in — and how he persevered and overcame every single one of them. He became the most accomplished violinist and composer in all of France, rivaling Mozart himself. His accomplishments were so impressive that Queen Marie Antoinette bestowed on him the title of the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, making him part of her court.”

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 “New AI translates 5,000-year-old cuneiform tablets instantly”

Last Friday, Twitter suddenly started blocking anyone not logged into a Twitter account from seeing public tweets, reversing a feature that the platform had allowed since it launched in 2007. As The Verge reported, Twitter didn’t announce any policy change, and so it was initially unclear whether the block was intentional or just the latest in a series of technical glitches to have bedeviled the platform since Musk acquired it last year. Musk eventually tweeted that the change was a “temporary emergency measure” necessitated by what he described as the rampant “scraping,” or copying, of tweets by third parties in an act that he called “data pillaging.” At time of writing, the restriction appeared to have been lifted, according to Search Engine Roundtable. The group chats breathed a sigh of relief.

This wasn’t the end of the Twitter drama, however. On Saturday, Musk announced that logged-in users would also face restrictions when viewing tweets, in the form of a “rate limit” that would be determined based on their account status. Musk said that unverified users—in other words, anyone who hasn’t paid eight dollars a month for a subscription to the Twitter Blue service, or been awarded verified status by virtue of being an advertiser or celebrity—would be able to see a maximum of six hundred posts per day; verified accounts would be capped at six thousand. Musk later added that, in the near future, the rate limits would increase to eight hundred and eight thousand tweets per day for unverified and verified users, respectively, with new unverified accounts capped at four hundred. 

As The Verge noted, Musk blamed the scraping of Twitter, in part, on companies that are trying to harvest data to train artificial-intelligence engines, but he didn’t mention that the incident might have been driven, at least in part, by his own decisions. Twitter recently imposed fees for access to its software API, which allows third-party services to pull tweets to display in their apps. And, since taking over the company, Musk has laid off more than three quarters of its staff, many of whom were involved in maintaining its technical infrastructure. Last November, an unnamed Twitter engineer told the MIT Technology Review that after watching the layoffs at the company, he was convinced that, in the future, “things will be broken more often [and] things will be broken for longer periods of time.” In March, a change by a single engineer led to an outage; two months later, the much-hyped live launch of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign via the Twitter Spaces feature was crippled by glitches. There have been other such examples.

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

Continue reading “Twitter throttles tweets as Meta launches a competitor”

Drik Schulze-Makuch writes for Big Think: “In the mid-1970s, NASA sent two Viking landers to the surface of Mars equipped with instruments that conducted the only life detection experiments ever conducted on another planet. At the time of those landings, scientists had very little understanding of the Martian environment. Since Earth is a water planet, it seemed reasonable that adding water might coax life to show itself in the extremely dry Martian environment. In hindsight, it is possible that approach was too much of a good thing. For microbes that live within salt rocks, pouring water over them might overwhelm them. In technical terms, we would say that we were hyperhydrating them, but in simple terms, it would be more like drowning them.”

What we think of as exercise now used to literally be torture

From Dan Lewis at Now I Know: “The word ‘treadmill’ first entered the English language in 1822, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. Most exercise equipment (think ‘bike’ or ‘weights’ or ‘jump rope’) describes either how to use the equipment or what makes the item useful for a workout. The word ‘treadmill’ has the ‘tread’ part, signaling that it’s used for walking, but it also has the ‘mill’ part, which suggests that it’s used for grinding something down. And while exercise can definitely be a grind, that saying wasn’t one back in the early 1800s. The early treadmills were a lot like sawmills or windmills or millstones, and the first treadmills weren’t found at your local gym — they were found in prisons. The people on them were inmates, and this was part of their sentence.”

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 “We may have accidentally killed whatever life there was on Mars”

From Bryan Burrough at Texas Monthly magazine: “They found her naked body 36 years ago now, her head sunk into a bathtub full of black water, hands tied behind her with a tank top. She had been a quiet, shy woman, five foot seven, with lustrous brown hair cascading past her shoulders and an easy smile that friends didn’t see as much as they once had. Susan was thirty years old and living alone that summer, left by a biker-ish husband who had fled the state, waiting for her divorce to go through. She was a local girl, a little lonely, a little sad, trying hard to put her life back in order. When she missed her shift at the sandpaper factory two days running, a supervisor called her father, Joe Atkins.”

Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert were bitter rivals, and then they both got cancer

From Sally Jenkins at the New York Times: “They have known each other for 50 years now, outlasting most marriages. Aside from blood kin, Navratilova points out, “I’ve known Chris longer than anybody else in my life, and so it is for her.” Lately, they have never been closer — a fact they refuse to cheapen with sentimentality. “It’s been up and down, the friendship,” Evert says. At the ages of 68 and 66, respectively, Evert and Navratilova have found themselves more intertwined than ever, by an unwelcome factor. You want to meet an opponent who draws you nearer in mutual understanding? Try having cancer at the same time. “It was like, are you kidding me?” Evert says.”

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 “Everyone in town thought they knew who killed Susan Woods”

From Tara Isabella Burton for the Smithsonian magazine: “In the autumn of 1878, Thomas Alva Edison had a problem. He hadn’t invented the light bulb—yet. Or, to put it more precisely, he had invented a light bulb, but he couldn’t keep it lit for more than a few minutes at a time. He still hadn’t figured out how to regulate the temperature of the light bulb’s internal filament, meaning the incandescent bulb would immediately overheat, and the filament would promptly melt down. Unfortunately, Edison was running out of time. All over North America and Europe, inventors like him were working on—and patenting—their own electric projects. Sooner or later, somebody would wind up harnessing electricity. Two Canadians, Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans, had already patented an inefficient design four years before.”

The Sicilian mafia got its start controlling the market for oranges and lemons

From research by Arcangelo Dimico, Alessia Isopi and Ola Olsson: “Since its first appearance in the late 1800s, the reasons behind the rise of the Sicilian mafia have remained a puzzle. We argue that the mafia arose as a response to an exogenous shock in the demand for oranges and lemons, following Lind’s discovery in the late eighteenth century that citrus fruits cured scurvy. More specifically, we claim that mafia appeared in locations where producers made high profits from citrus production for export. Operating in an environment with a weak rule of law, the mafia protected citrus production from predation and acted as intermediaries between producers and exporters. Using original data from a parliamentary inquiry in 1881–1886 on Sicilian towns, the Damiani Inquiry.”

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 Edison pretended that he had invented the light bulb”

From Gillian Brockell for the Washington Post: “The mystery of what happened to Emanuela Orlandi has been a national obsession in Italy for 40 years, as of this month, but it went international last year with the release of the Netflix documentary “Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi.” In the four-part series, Orlandi’s family members, their attorney, police investigators and several Italian journalists go through the case, all of them concluding that the Vatican knows more than it has said. The Orlandi family had lived and worked in the city for more than 100 years, serving seven popes as ushers and messengers. In the 1980s, usher Ercole Orlandi lived in an apartment there with his wife, son and four daughters. Emanuela was the second youngest.”

The biggest fraud in modern physics

From Deep Space on Medium: “At the beginning of the 21st century, experimental physics saw a startling breakthrough thanks to the work ofJan Hendrik Schön. This German physicist who worked at Bell Labs was a real prodigy. He set up daring and breakthrough experiments that pushed physics far ahead of the curve. At one period of his career, Schön published one article every eight days, in the most prestigious scientific journals, such as Nature and Science. Schön’s biggest success was that he was supposedly able to create a transistor working at the molecular level from organic materials. But other scientists could not replicate Schön’s results — it seemed that everything Schön wrote about worked only when he was in charge of the experiment.”

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 girl vanished in Vatican City and her fate remains a mystery”

Alex Goldman writes: “For years, there has been a popular conspiracy theory that goes like this: in 2016 the folks in charge at Disney, much like large swaths of the country, believed Hillary Clinton would win, and even before she was elected were hard at work on a Hillary animatronic for the Walt Disney World Hall of Presidents attraction. When they were surprised by a Donald Trump victory, they were forced to hastily repurpose the Hillary animatronic as a Donald Trump one, to comedically grotesque effect. When I tweeted about it, I ended my tweet with an ask that any imagineers with information on the veracity of this theory to reach out. Imagine my delight when one did.”

Editor’s note: My apologies for missing yesterday’s newsletter – my granddaughter, who just turned one, was visiting us and so I got distracted and forgot to send the newsletter 🙂

In the early 2000’s, the Earth shifted on its axis, and scientists finally figured out why

Raymond Zhong writes for the New York Times: “Around the turn of the millennium, Earth’s spin started going off-kilter, and nobody could quite say why. For decades, scientists had been watching the average position of our planet’s rotational axis, the imaginary rod around which it turns, gently wander south, away from the geographic North Pole and toward Canada. Suddenly, though, it made a sharp turn and started heading east. In time, researchers realized melting of the polar ice sheets had changed the way mass was distributed around the planet. And now they’ve identified another factor: colossal quantities of water pumped out of the ground for crops and households.”

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 “Disney turned a Clinton robot into an animatronic Trump”

From Allison Meier at JSTOR Daily: “In the fall of 1886, New Yorkers were transported to the Battle of Gettysburg. That is to say, they flocked to a circular structure in downtown Brooklyn. The inside walls of the curious room were covered with a 360-degree painting, on which soldiers charged and cannons fired. As Scientific American described at the time, the floorboards were covered with sod and “real trees, evergreens and others, with shrubbery, portions of fences, and the like are set about, and tufts of grass, wheat, and similar things, lend their aid to fill up the scene.” Skylights illuminated the canvas and props while leaving the spectator area dark, and mannequins were posed alongside the painted scene. So convincing were these dummies that the police got called one evening to stop a robbery and apprehended two fake soldiers.”

What medieval manuscripts reveal about the hidden history of whales

From Nina Goldman for the Smithsonian magazine: “The creature was enormous. Sailors said it “looked more like an island than a fish.” When feeding, according to a 13th-century Old Norse manuscript, the beast, known as the hafgufa, would rest with its mouth open wide, luring in unsuspecting fish, then snap its jaws shut to capture them. Hair-raising accounts of a similar sea monster were recorded by Alexandrian scribes as early as the second century A.D.; these accounts spread through Europe and Asia in Arabic, Coptic, Latin and Old English translations. Now researchers argue the mighty hafgufa, and similar sea monsters described by the ancients, were not mythical creatures but rather whales engaged in a behavior that was only recently documented: “trap feeding.”

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 “Cycloramas were the virtual reality of the 19th century”

Noh Hyun-soo writes for The Guardian: “I’d been to Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art years ago, but last Aprilwas my first visit to see the artwork Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan, which is a banana duct-taped to a wall. It’s a work of conceptual art and comes with a certificate of authenticity giving precise diagrams and instructions for its correct display. It was famously sold for $120,000 at Art Basel Miami in 2019. The banana is changed every few days. There were a lot of visitors, and about 10 people were standing around Comedian. The atmosphere inside the museum was calm. Interestingly, when I got close to another artwork to see it more clearly an alarm sounded and the guards stopped me. But when I approached Comedian, there was no alarm. So there was nothing stopping me when I pulled off the tape to remove the banana from the wall and peeled it.”

How I helped create the “Dark Side of the Rainbow” Internet meme

From Charlie Savage for the New York Times: “The phenomenon of watching ‘The Wizard of Oz’ while listening to Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ is sometimes called ‘The Dark Side of the Rainbow’: If you start the album at just the right time, the music and lyrics uncannily align with the movie’s visuals. Some coincidences are lyrical, as when Dorothy runs away from home at the line ‘No one told you when to run.’ Some are tonal, as when the tornado sequence seems practically choreographed to Clare Torry’s wordless vocals in ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ — rising to a frenzy as the twister rolls in and then shifting to dreaminess just as Dorothy is knocked unconscious.”

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 “What it’s like to steal and eat a $120,000 banana”

From Rick Reilly for the Washington Post: “His name is Tom Stuker, and he’s the biggest mistake United Airlines ever made. In 1990,United offered a lifetime pass for $290,000. Stuker jumped on it and has pretty much lived in seat 1B — his favorite — ever since. He once went 12 straight days without sleeping in a bed. Just kept jetting from Newark to San Francisco to Bangkok to Dubai and back again, the equivalent of four trips around the world, leaving the sky only for the airport lounge. Why? Duh. For the miles. Once you get them, you can sell them, trade them, win auctions with them. Stuker has lived like a sultan on United miles ever since — lavish hotel suites all over the world, weeks-long Crystal cruises, gourmet meals from Perth to Paris.”

A little-known local surfer beat out the world’s biggest surfing superstars

From Gabriella Paiella for GQ Sports: “How did a North Shore local named Luke Shepardson win the most prestigious big-wave competition on the planet, beating some of surfing’s brightest stars? Even on an ordinary day, surfing is imbued with the mystical, every wave hinging on chance and elemental collision—a storm in Japan will create a swell thousands of miles away in Hawaii. But the waves produced during the Eddie are perhaps the most sacred on earth. To be invited to ride them means being one of the 40 most-esteemed surfers in the world, as chosen by a committee of your peers. On the beach and along the cliffs that line Waimea Bay, some 50,000 spectators would soon squeeze together for a chance to see greatness, to witness ineffable bravery, and to take part in the grand human tradition of watching some guys (and a few women) do truly crazy shit.”

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 a former car dealer has flown 23 million miles for free”

Dan Barry writes for the New York Times: “The Picasso fell off the proverbial truck. It vanished from a loading dock at Logan International Airport in Boston and wound up where it didn’t belong, in the modest home of one Merrill Rummel, also known as Bill. In fairness, this forklift operator had no idea that the crate he tossed into his car trunk contained a Picasso until he opened its casing. In fairness, he didn’t care much for it; he preferred realism. But now things had turned all too real. F.B.I. agents were hot on the trail of a hot Picasso unavailable for public viewing, as it was hidden in Rummel’s hallway closet. He and his fiancée, Sam, began to panic. “How do we get rid of it?” she recalled thinking. “We couldn’t just give it back. It was a pain in our butt.” Fortunately, Rummel knew a guy.”

TikToker arrives at his own funeral in helicopter after faking his death

From Mary Walrath-Holdridge for USA Today: “TikToker David Baertan, 45, pulled what he called a prank on his friends and family members earlier this month, faking his own death with the help of his wife and kids. Baertan and his family arranged a funeral near Liege, Belgium after his daughter created a post on Facebook mourning her father’s apparent loss, telling him to rest in peace and notifying people of his death. Videos of the funeral show a small crowd gathering as a helicopter hovers for a landing over a grassy field. Confused bystanders look on as the helicopter lands, rushing out onto the grass as they realize that Baertan is the one stepping out of 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 “Hey Dad, can you help me return the Picasso I stole?”

If you use the internet, you may think of Reddit—if you think of it at all—as a largely harmless repository of discussion forums about nerdy topics like Star Wars. Last week, however, even those who don’t follow news about the platform may have seen a blizzard of articles about a “moderator revolt” that caused thousands of its most popular forums, or “subreddits,” to go offline by changing their status to private, a process the moderators referred to as “going dark.” The unlikely-sounding catalyst for this uprising was a change to the company’s application programming interface, or API, a set of software instructions that allow third-party apps to access Reddit’s data. Reddit had announced plans to start charging for access to its AP, which used to be freeI. On June 8, Christian Selig, the creator of Apollo, a popular app used for browsing Reddit, said that the new rates would cost him at least twenty million dollars a year. He had no choice, he said, but to shut down his app.

In interviews with The Verge and CNBC, Steve Huffman, the co-founder and CEO of Reddit, suggested that the company decided to implement the API changes because it didn’t want to continue subsidizing third-party apps like Apollo, which essentially compete with Reddit’s official app. But some of the volunteers who moderate the site’s most popular forums seemed to see things differently: they have argued that they rely on third-party apps like Apollo to do the work of moderating posts, because such apps are faster and have more features than the official one. Some critics have also speculated that the API changes—which reportedly involve fees that are hundreds of times higher than those charged by other social-media services—have been driven not by a desire to improve the site, but by to boost revenue so that Reddit can go ahead with an initial public offering, a step that it has been eyeing since 2021.

Reddit was founded in 2005 by Huffman and his college roommate, Alexis Ohanian. In 2006, it was acquired by the magazine publisher Condé Nast, which is owned by the Newhouse family, through their holding company, Advance Publications (the site was spun off as an independent unit in 2011, but Advance is still the majority shareholder). Huffman left Reddit for a time to start a travel company called Hipmunk, but he returned as CEO in 2015. Some still see Reddit as little more than an overgrown discussion forum or a politer version of extremism-riddled communities like 4chan. But according to one estimate, the site has more than five hundred million visitors per month, which would make it the sixth most popular website in the US, behind Google and Facebook but ahead of Amazon and Yahoo. Some observers argue that Reddit now going dark not only affects regular users of the site, but could also mean lower-quality results for some Google searches, which draw on user-generated content from such communities.

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

Continue reading “Reddit goes to war with its volunteer moderators”

Last week YouTube announced that it will no longer remove videos that say the presidential election in 2020 was fraudulent, stolen, or otherwise illegitimate. The Google-owned video platform wrote in a blog post that it keeps two goals in mind when it develops policies around content, one of which is to protect users, and the other to provide “a home for open discussion and debate.” Finding a balance between the two is difficult when political speech is involved, YouTube added, and in the end, the company decided that “the ability to openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions, is core to a functioning democratic society.” While removing election-denying content might curb some misinformation, the company said, it could also “curtail political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of real-world harm.”

YouTube didn’t say in its blog post, or in any of its other public comments about the change, why it chose to make such a policy decision now, especially when the US is heading into another presidential election in which Donald Trump, the man who almost single-handedly made such policies necessary, is a candidate. All the company would say is that it “carefully deliberated” about the change. It’s not the only platform to decide that the misinformation guardrails it erected after the Capitol riots in 2021 are no longer required. Twitter and Meta, Facebook’s parent company, dismantled most of their restrictions related to election denial some time ago.

Twitter announced in January of 2022 that it would no longer take action against false claims about the legitimacy of the election. At the time, a spokesperson told CNN that Twitter had not been enforcing its “civic integrity misleading information” policy, under which users could be suspended or even banned for such claims, since March of 2021. The spokesperson said the policy was no longer being applied to election denial because it was intended to be used during an election or campaign, and Joe Biden had already been president for over a year at that point. Twitter added that it was still enforcing its rules related to misleading information about “when, where, or how to participate in a civic process.”

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

Continue reading “The tech platforms have surrendered in the fight over election-related misinformation”