From the New York Times: “For 60 years, Baltazar Ushca worked a rare but rigorous trade: ice merchant. Once or twice a week, he climbed snow-capped Mount Chimborazo, Ecuador’s highest peak, to hack ice from a glacier with a pickax, wrap the 60-pound blocks in hay and transport them on the backs of his donkeys. He would then sell them to villagers who did not have electricity and needed refrigeration to conserve their food.It started as a family business. But Mr. Ushca, who was 4-foot-11, chipped at the ice decades after modern refrigeration came to his village, by which time his job was nearly obsolete. He became known as the last of his breed, selling his blocks of ice for a few dollars in Ecuador for use in fruit drinks and making ice cream.”
She treated her own breast cancer with viruses that she grew in her lab
From Nature: “A scientist who successfully treated her own breast cancer by injecting the tumour with lab-grown viruses has sparked discussion about the ethics of self-experimentation. Beata Halassy discovered in 2020, aged 49, that she had breast cancer at the site of a previous mastectomy. It was the second recurrence there since her left breast had been removed, and she couldn’t face another bout of chemotherapy. Halassy, a virologist at the University of Zagreb, studied the literature and decided to take matters into her own hands with an unproven treatment. A case report published in Vaccines in August outlines how Halassy self-administered a treatment called oncolytic virotherapy. She has now been cancer-free for four years.”
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From The Independent: “Taliesin was an architectural commune set up in 1932 in Wisconsin by Wright and his wife, the mysterious Olgivanna. Staffed by young, eager, and mostly male architects who wanted to learn from the master, it quickly evolved into a place where Olgivanna, Wright’s third wife, could promote the teaching of Georgi Gurdjieff. This bald, mustached, charismatic Russian guru claimed his eyes could not only penetrate a man’s psyche, but also bring a woman to orgasm from across a room. Taliesin became a place where Wright would not only get free in-house labor, but his wife could have total sway over the mental, physical, and sexual lives of the architect’s devoted followers.”
In Denmark an ancient army met a mysterious end
From Atlas Obscura: “In 1944, at the height of World War II, ditchdiggers working in a field known as Alken Enge, on the Jutland Peninsula in Denmark, made a gruesome discovery: human bones. It was quickly determined that the bones were not evidence of a recent murder—they were actually thousands of years old. About 2,000 years ago, during the Iron Age, the Alken Enge water-meadow had been a lake, but the individuals whose remains were scattered around the site had not died from drowning. Their deaths had been more horrific—and what happened to their bodies after death even more macabre. Many of the bones displayed the marks of raw violence: cuts from edged weapons, skulls crushed by axe blows, piercing wounds.”
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I know that it’s tempting to blame what happened on Tuesday night — the re-election of a former game-show host and inveterate liar with 34 felony counts and two impeachments as president of the United States — on social media in one form or another. Maybe you think that Musk used Twitter to platform white supremacists and swing voters to Trump, or that Facebook promoted Russian troll accounts posting AI-generated deepfakes of Kamala Harris eating cats and dogs, or that TikTok polarized voters using a combination of soft-core porn and Chinese-style indoctrination videos to change minds — and so on.
In the end, that is too simple an explanation, just as blaming the New York Times’ coverage of the race is too simple, or accusing more than half of the American electorate of being too stupid to see Trump for what he really is. They saw it, and they voted for him anyway. That’s the reality.
It’s become accepted wisdom that platforms like Twitter and Facebook and TikTok spread misinformation far and wide, which convinces people that the world is flat or that birds aren’t real or that people are selling babies and shipping them inside pieces of Wayfair furniture. And it’s taken as fact that these tools increase the polarization of society, turning people against each other in a number of ways, including by inflating social-media “filter bubbles.” We all know this. And particularly when there is an event like a federal election, concern about both of these factors tends to increase. That’s why we see articles like this one from Wired, which talks about how social platforms have “given up” on things like fact-checking misinformation on their networks.
But is there any proof that social media either convinces people to believe things that aren’t true, or that it increases the levels of polarization around political or social issues? I don’t want to give away the ending of this newsletter, but the short answer to both of those questions is no. While social media may make it easier to spread misinformation farther and faster, it hasn’t really changed human nature itself all that much. In other words, social media is more of a symptom than it is a cause.
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From National Geographic: “For centuries, farmers have known that their livestock not only gather in large herds but also tend to face the same way when grazing. Experience and folk wisdom offer several possible reasons for this mutual alignment. They stand perpendicularly to the sun’s rays in the cool morning to absorb heat through their large flanks, or they stand in the direction of strong winds to avoid being unduly buffeted. But cows and sheep don’t just line up during chilly spells or high wind. Their motivations have been a mystery until now. Sabine Begali spied on aligned herds of cows and deer using satellite images from Google Earth. The images revealed behaviour that had been going unnoticed for millennia, right under the noses of herdsmen – their herds were lining up in a north-south line like a living compass needle.”
This artist creates sculptures that are smaller than the width of a human hair
From New Atlas: “A sculpture so tiny that it cannot be seen by the naked eye is claimed to be the smallest sculpture of the human form ever created. Measuring 20 x 80 x 100 microns, artist Jonty Hurwitz’s tiny human statue is part of a new series of equally diminutive new sculptures that are at a scale so miniscule that each of the figures is equal in size to the amount your fingernails grow in around about 6 hours, and can only be viewed using a scanning electron microscope. Sculpted with an advanced new nano 3D printing technology coupled with a technique called multiphoton lithography, these works of art are created using a laser and a block of light-sensitive polymer.”
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From the Wall Street Journal: “The professional gambler Archie Karas arrived in Las Vegas in December 1992 with $50 to his name. He borrowed $10,000 from a friend and, over roughly the next three years—after a freewheeling and volatile saga of ups and downs, but predominantly ups—reportedly turned that money into $40 million.It was a run of good luck so unfathomable that it’s known in poker circles simply as “The Run.” Many details about The Run have gone fuzzy as the story has been retold in the three decades since, but its essential narrative made Karas a folk hero among gamblers. Shooting craps at his private table at Binion’s Horseshoe casino—betting as much as $300,000 a toss—Karas took in so much money at one point that he possessed every one of the casino’s $5,000 chips: about $18 million worth, he later told Poker News. Karas died Sept. 7 in Los Angeles County at age 73 of undisclosed causes.”
She survived a bombing and he escaped a shark attack and then they found each other
From Esquire: “He remembers the moments just before. Water lapped against Colin Cook’s legs as he straddled his surfboard a hundred yards from the shore of Leftovers Beach, on Oahu. He remembers the sun’s warm glow in the east, a little after 10:00 a.m., and that he had been out some two hours already. He remembers being exhausted but happy—the dopamine high that rushes the system after a long workout. He looked the part of a seasoned surfer that October morning in 2015. She remembers a noise loud enough to go unheard and blow out Celeste’s eardrums. She felt as if she’d been flipped in the air. She looked around. Black smoke clouded Boylston Street, blown-out plated glass was scattered across the sidewalk, and blood—blood everywhere. Kevin came into her vision and told her he was going to cinch her legs with a belt. She looked down and saw that her legs dangled by the skin around her knees.”
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From the Harvard Gazette: “The 1990s was the decade of peanut allergy panic. The media covered children who died of a peanut allergy, and doctors began writing more about the issue, speculating on the growing rate of the problem. In 2000 the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a recommendation for children zero to three years old and pregnant and lactating mothers to avoid all peanuts if any child was considered to be at high risk for developing an allergy. Within months, a mass public education crusade was in full swing, and mothers, doing what they thought was best for their children, responded by following the instructions to protect their children. But despite these efforts, things got worse. It seemed that avoiding peanuts at a young age didn’t prevent peanut allergies, it actually created them.”
Crows can hold a grudge that lasts for generations
From the New York Times: “Renowned for their intelligence, crows can mimic human speech, use tools and gather for what seem to be funeral rites when a member of their murder, as groups of crows are known, dies or is killed. They can identify and remember faces, even among large crowds.They also tenaciously hold grudges. When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years. How long do crows hold a grudge? Dr. Marzluff believes he has now answered the question: around 17 years.His estimate is based on an experiment that he began in 2006, when Dr. Marzluff captured seven crows with a net while wearing an ogre mask.”
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I know the headline on this post probably sounds ridiculous to some (perhaps all) of you reading this, but I’m going to do my best to convince you that I’m right by the end of this piece (maybe some of you can drop me a line via one of the platforms that are mentioned at the very bottom of the page and let me know whether I succeeded or not!) It seems ridiculous, of course, because how could the media industry — in Canada in this case — getting $100 million from Google be a bad thing? Isn’t getting a hundred million dollars an unequivocally good thing? How can I, a journalist who has been fired, laid off, let go, and otherwise made redundant from almost every job I’ve ever had in 35 years, argue that it’s a bad idea? Isn’t the media industry a financial train wreck?
Many (perhaps all) of those statements are true. The media industry — not just in Canada or the US but almost everywhere — is in a perilous state. Advertising revenue has been in freefall for years, even some of the major mainstream publications have been doing waves of cutbacks and layoffs, and there is no end in sight. Obviously, in that kind of environment, some money for news publishers is better than nothing. But I would argue that the strings tied to the Google funding, and the broader context within which that funding is happening — including Bill C-18, which is the Canadian version of Australia’s news-payment law — make it not a good thing. In fact, I think it’s possible that the media industry could wind up worse off rather than better.
Note: In case you are a first-time reader, or you forgot that you signed up for this newsletter, this is The Torment Nexus. You can find out more about me and this newsletter in this post.This newsletter survives solely on your contributions, so please sign up for a paying subscription or visit my Patreon, which you can find here. I also publish a daily email newsletter of odd or interesting links called When The Going Gets Weird, which is here.
I know the headline on this post probably sounds ridiculous to some (perhaps all) of you reading this, but I’m going to do my best to convince you that I’m right by the end of this piece (maybe some of you can drop me a line via one of the platforms that are mentioned at the very bottom of the page and let me know whether I succeeded or not!) It seems ridiculous, of course, because how could the media industry — in Canada in this case — getting $100 million from Google be a bad thing? Isn’t getting a hundred million dollars an unequivocally good thing? How can I, a journalist who has been fired, laid off, let go, and otherwise made redundant from almost every job I’ve ever had in 35 years, argue that it’s a bad idea? Isn’t the media industry a financial train wreck?
Many (perhaps all) of those statements are true. The media industry — not just in Canada or the US but almost everywhere — is in a perilous state. Advertising revenue has been in freefall for years, even some of the major mainstream publications have been doing waves of cutbacks and layoffs, and there is no end in sight. Obviously, in that kind of environment, some money for news publishers is better than nothing. But I would argue that the strings tied to the Google funding, and the broader context within which that funding is happening — including Bill C-18, which is the Canadian version of Australia’s news-payment law — make it not a good thing. In fact, I think it’s possible that the media industry could wind up worse off rather than better.
Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
From Scientific American: “Human echolocation has at times allowed people to ride bikes or play basketball despite being completely blind from a very young age. These echolocators typically perceive their environment by clicking sharply with their tongues and listening to differences in the sounds reflected off objects. Brain-imaging studies reveal that expert echolocators display responses to sound in their brain’s primary visual region, and researchers have speculated that long-term input deprivation could lead to visual regions being repurposed. “There’s been this strong tradition to think of the blind brain as different,” said Lore Thaler, a neuroscientist at Durham University in England. Thaler co-led a 2021 study showing that both blind and sighted people could learn echolocation with just 10 weeks of training.”
Tracking a serial killer: The bodies behind the walls at 10 Rillington Place
From the LRB: “On 24 March 1953, 43-year-old Beresford Wallace Brown was trying to put up a shelf on which to perch his radio while redecorating the ground-floor kitchen of 10 Rillington Place, where he was an upstairs tenant. The wall sounded hollow behind Beresford Brown’s hammer. He stripped off a sheet of wallpaper and spotted a hole in the wooden panel behind it: an alcove. He shone a torch in, and saw the white torso of a woman, her head covered. He and a fellow tenant went to a kiosk to call the police. The police found two more bodies stashed away behind the first one. All three women in the alcove, Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina Maclennan, were in their twenties. They had died between January and March.”
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From The Guardian: “When Delimar Vera was six years old, the woman she thought was her mother – Carolyn Correa – turned to her and said, “There’s a bad lady who wants to take you away from us, but you’re not going to let her, right?” Vera promised she wasn’t going anywhere; she’d tell the “bad lady” to get off her. “I was a sassy kid,” she says now, 20 years on. Remembering that strange exchange still gives Vera chills. It was Correa herself that had taken Vera away, kidnapping her as a newborn, crossing over from Philadelphia to New Jersey, changing Delimar’s name to Aaliyah and raising her as her own. Vera, 26, tells me the story of her bizarre and traumatic childhood – part horror story, part fairytale, and still in many ways a mystery.”
These twins created their own secret language
From the BBC: “Twins Matthew and Michael Youlden speak 25 languages each. The 26th is Umeri, which they don’t include in their tally. If you’ve not heard of Umeri, there’s good reason for that. Michael and Matthew are the only two people who speak, read and write it, having created it themselves as children. The brothers insist Umeri isn’t an intentionally secret language. An estimated 30-50% of twins develop a shared language or particular communication pattern that is only comprehensible to them, known as cryptophasia. The term translates directly from Greek as secret speech. Nancy Segal, director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, believes there are now better and more nuanced words for the phenomenon, and prefers to use “private speech”.
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From the New Yorker: “Dwight Burdick, a private physician to the Saudi royal family, was on a rotation at the King’s palace, in Jeddah, when he got an urgent summons. Princess Hala, a daughter of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, had gone wild with a knife. Burdick was asked to enter her quarters and forcibly sedate her. Burdick, a lifelong peacenik with a neat white beard, had moved to Saudi Arabia from Texas in the mid-nineties. He had served for years on the King’s personal medical detail, but had never before encountered Princess Hala. The request to drug her alarmed him—forced sedation was a “violation of my professional ethics,” he said—but he was curious. Though he admired Abdullah, he knew little about the lives of the ruler’s daughters.”
She was an R&B legend but it took her 30 years to get the royalties she deserved
NPR: “Ruth Brown was R&B’s first major star. It was 1949 when Billboard changed the name of its Race Music category to Rhythm and Blues — the same year Brown released her first single. She was required to pay for touring and recording costs out of pocket and when Atlantic ended their professional relationship in the early 1960s, Brown had no savings to fall back on. She moved to Long Island, New York, and spent a decade and a half working a series of low-paying jobs, often as a single mother. But in 1976, her career was revitalized when she performed the role of Mahalia Jackson in a production of the musical Selma. She used her new fame to leverage Atlantic Records into paying her back royalties — and she didn’t stop there. The deal she cut with the label also allowed dozens of other musicians to recoup their earnings as well.”
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From Scientific American: “A bipartisan group of Texas legislators has just done something extraordinary: they have unanimously subpoenaed Robert Roberson, convicted in 2003 of killing his daughter based on the now-discredited theory of shaken baby syndrome, to testify before them five days after he was scheduled to be executed, effectively forcing the state to keep him alive. Roberson is one of many people who have been imprisoned for injuries to a child that prosecutors argue resulted from violent shaking. But research has exposed serious flaws in this idea, and dozens of other defendants who have been wrongly convicted under this theory have been exonerated. Yet Roberson remains on death row, even as politicians, scientists and others—including the lead detective who investigated him—have spoken out on his behalf.”
The story behind this Turkish subdivision of Disney-style castles
From The Guardian: “When drone footage of the complex of 732 castles appeared online a few years ago, they quickly became a viral phenomenon: there are dozens of YouTube videos marvelling at the cluster of Disney-like chateaux. Since then, the mystery of whether they will ever be finished has only deepened. The castles were supposed to bring a welcome injection of Gulf money to this part of Turkey. On paper, it was a tempting pitch for prospective purchasers from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Instead, since construction abruptly stopped in 2016, the project has become a bizarre white elephant. As the scandal has dragged on, it has sparked multiple lawsuits, one attempted suicide, and even a minor diplomatic incident between Turkey and Kuwait.”
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From The Art Newspaper: Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana caused an uproar at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019 and quickly went viral as a symbol of the absurdism of the contemporary art market, though Cattelan himself described Comedian (2019), his first “sculpture” in 15 years, as “a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value”. That value will be put to the test next month, when one of the three editions of Comedian goes up for sale at Sotheby’s New York. Made up of a banana duct taped to the wall, the work includes a certificate of authenticity and instructions for how to display the sculpture. The work, which was priced at $120,000 by a gallery in Miami Beach in 2019, is estimated by Sotheby’s to sell for between $1m and $1.5m. A single banana and one roll of duct tape are included in the sale, the auction house said.”
The rollercoaster king: the man behind the UK’s fastest thrill-ride
From The Guardian: “When rollercoaster fans speak of creativity, they speak of Anton Schwarzkopf, late pioneer of the loop, and Ron Toomer, who became the first engineer to haul people up more than 200ft before sending them into a drop. They speak of Alan Schilke and Jeff Pike, both admired for their structures that marry timber with steel. They speak of Werner Stengel, a living legend at 88, whose idea it was to send passengers hurtling around corners while tilted at 90 degrees. John Burton – a self-effacing aficionado of theme parks and musical theatre from Staffordshire – is an anomaly. He was only a few years on from working as a crab feederat an English aquariumwhen he was invited to create his first rollercoaster. He was given an £18m budget, a patch of damp ground, and told: make it big. He was 27.”
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From Garden & Gun: “It is nearing midnight on an unpaved road bordering the Florida Everglades when Donna Kalil slams on the brakes. Light from her blue F-150 floods the scene along the road, where, within the grass, a sheen of iridescent skin glints, and the sinuous shape and inkblot pattern of a Burmese python leap into focus. Kalil jumps from the truck, long braid swinging, and moves in on her quarry. At sixty-two years old, Kalil is a full-time, year-round professional python hunter, and the original python huntress: She is the first woman to hold this job, not that gender crosses anyone’s mind out here in the living, breathing wilderness of the Everglades. Kalil positions herself between the python and the endless black reach of swamp beyond it. Then she pounces, angling for a strong grip just behind the head. This brief fight represents the 876th time Kalil has pitted herself against a Burmese python and won.”
He cracked a 30-year-old encrypted file that helped end apartheid in South Africa
From Wired: “John Graham-Cumming’s day job is the CTO of the security giant Cloudflare, but he is also a historian of technology. He might be best known for leading a campaign to force the UK government to apologize to the legendary computer scientist Alan Turing for prosecuting him for homosexuality and harassing him to death. The story he shared centers around Tim Jenkin, a former anti-apartheid activist. It was the early 1980s, and the ANC’s efforts were flagging. The problem was communications. Using a Toshiba T1000 PC running an early version of MS-DOS, Jenkin wrote a system using the most secure form of crypto, a one-time pad, which scrambles messages character by character using a shared key. When Jenkin returned to South Africa in 1992, he took his tools with him — but then years later, he had forgotten the password.”
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In case you are a first-time reader, or you forgot that you signed up for this newsletter, this is The Torment Nexus (you can find out more about me and this newsletter — and why I chose to call it that — in this post.)
Before I begin, I would just like to apologize in advance to anyone who is reading this and is in their 20s or 30s (or possibly 40s) and doesn’t remember the launch of the first Netscape web browser in 1994. I realize that for some of you, writing about this and my personal experience of it is probably a little like how I felt when my grandfather mused about life during “The Great War” (it didn’t get called World War I until after World War II, obviously, because no one knew there would be a second one). So if you have as much interest in the early days of the world wide web as you do in the Great Pyramid of Egypt then please move on to TikTok or whatever and I will see you later.
I was all set to write about something else this week for The Torment Nexus — which I will keep to myself, since I may write about it at a later date — and then I saw a link to a blog post from Jamie Zawinski, a programmer who was working at Netscape at the time (he is now the the proprietor of the DNA Lounge, a San Francisco nightclub). Zawinski writes about launching Mosaic Netscape 0.9 on October 13, 1994 (okay, I am a little late for the actual anniversary but it is what it is) and describes it in this way:
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From Weird Universe: “In 1961, the French patent office granted Robert-Oropei Martino a patent for a method of placing advertisements on fish. From his patent: “It is known that the effect of advertising is largely determined by the medium chosen for it. It is recognized that advertising carried out on a mobile medium, in particular rotating, attracts much more attention than the same advertising on a fixed medium. According to the present invention, a particularly effective advertisement is produced by having it carried by fish in an aquarium, pond or other. It is obviously possible to imagine many ways of having advertising carried by fish. According to the invention, a corset is preferably used, made to the dimensions of the subject in a material that is sufficiently flexible not to hinder it, and which is closed on it by any appropriate means.”
The close ties between the modern art movement in the US and the CIA
From JSTOR Daily: “The preeminent Cultural Cold Warrior, Thomas W. Braden, who served as MoMA’s executive secretary from 1948-1949, later joined the CIA in 1950 to supervise its cultural activities. The relationship between Modern Art and American diplomacy began during WWII, when the Museum of Modern Art was mobilized for the war effort. MoMA was founded in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. A decade later, her son Nelson Rockefeller became president of the Museum. In 1940, while he was still President of MoMA, Rockefeller was appointed the Roosevelt Administration’s Coordinator of Inter-American affairs. The Museum followed suit. MoMA fulfilled 38 government contracts for cultural materials during the Second World War, and mounted 19 exhibitions of contemporary American painting for the Coordinator’s office, which were exhibited throughout Latin America.”
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