Category: Uncategorized

(via Matt Webb’s blog)

1815 saw the eruption of Mount Tambora in what is now Indonesia. Global temperatures fell. The next year, there were crop failures in Europe, and snow fell in New York in June. Two other things also happened as a result:

• Lord Byron holidayed at Lake Geneva with some friends, but the weather kept them indoors. To pass the time they told ghost stories. From that trip we get both The Vampyre (the first modern vampire novel and precursor to Dracula) and also Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
• Driven to move by the collapse in grain prices, the family of Joseph Smith Jr migrated from Vermont to the religious hotbed of New York where he began to receive visions. Later, he founded a religion, writing his visions as The Book of Mormon.

This guy probably thought he had his mom stumped, but it took her less than a minute to figure the problem out

From Henry David Thoreau’s journal, the entry for March 21, 1953I — via the New York Review of Books newsletter, which has been running excerpts:

“It is a genial and reassuring day; the mere warmth of the west wind amounts almost to balminess. The softness of the air mollifies our own dry and congealed substance. I sit down by a wall to see if I can muse again. We are affected like the earth, and yield to the elemental tenderness; winter breaks up within us; the frost is com­ing out of me, and I am heaved like the road; accumulated masses of ice and snow dissolve, and thoughts like a freshet pour down unwonted channels. Roads lead elsewhither than to Carlisle and Sudbury. Our experience does not wear upon us. It is seen to be fabulous or symbolical, and the future is worth expecting. In all my walking I have not reached the top of the earth yet.”

For two decades, Joseph DeRuvo Jr., 59, has lived an almost entirely barefooted life. He initially decided to forgo shoes because of agonizing bunions, but he has stayed barefoot for reasons that transcend physical comfort. After years spent as a photographer and a photography teacher, he is still self-employed, now as a Pilates instructor, a particularly barefoot-friendly profession. And the couple stays close to home. When they go out, they gravitate toward mom-and-pop stores and restaurants where they can forge personal connections with owners and managers, and he can be seen as more than the guy with the feet. Still, his wife Lini Ecker said, “we get thrown out of a lot of places.”

Children’s author Dr. Seuss cheated on his wife, who committed suicide

Ted Geisel, the cartoonist who became famous for writing under the pseudonym Dr. Seuss, may be known for his winsome children’s books, but he had a darker side. Among other things, he cheated on his wife while she was terminally ill. He was married to Helen Palmer Geisel for 40 years, but she contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome, followed by cancer. Ted started having an affair with a close family friend, Audrey Dimond, and when it became public, this reportedly contributed to his wife’s decision to commit suicide. In a suicide note, she wrote that Geisel could “say I was overworked and overwrought” so that his “reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed.”

Continue reading “He took his shoes off years ago and never looked back”

If you are of a certain age, you might remember a pop band called Rilo Kiley, although I didn’t discover them until much later via Spotify (possibly because I am old). The lead singer was named Jenny Lewis, and I have listened to a lot of her solo music as well since I discovered the band. How did she get into music? Therein lies a tale, as they say. According to a New York Times piece from 2014, Lewis was a child actor whose work in commercials, TV shows (Mr. Belvedere, Golden Girls, etc.), and movies helped pay the rent for her family. Her mother had split from her father after years performing with him in a traveling Sonny and Cher-style music act called (ironically) Love’s Way.

Apparently there was a club called Alphy’s Soda Pop Club that catered exclusively to child actors and other performers, and at a party there when Lewis was 10 years old, she met Corey Haim — the Canadian actor who starred in the movie Lost Boys and other more forgettable tripe, and died after years of struggling with drug abuse. Haim gave her a mixed cassette tape he had made with Run DMC on one side and The Beastie Boys on the other. “There have been a couple of cassette tapes that have changed my life,” Lewis told Rolling Stone, “and that was the first one.” Lewis not only cofounded Rilo Kiley (with Blake Sennett, a fellow child actor known for Boy Meets World), but also went on to create Postal Service with Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie.

David Vincent Kimel, a historian completing his PhD at Yale, found a rare copy of the script for Gone With The Wind that contains a number of deleted scenes, including one in which Rhett Butler considers suicide: “Selznick harbored a shocking secret never revealed until today: a civil war that had roiled the production internally over the issue of slavery, with one group of screenwriters insisting on depicting the brutality of that institution, and another faction trying to wash it away. Selznick’s struggles over the exclusion of the KKK and the n-word from the script and his negotiations with the NAACP and his Black cast are the stuff of legend. But the producer’s decision to entertain scenes showcasing the horrors of slavery before deciding to cut them has never been told.”

First Black man to win hiking’s ‘triple crown’ says trails are for healing

Akuna Robinson is the first Black man to wear the “triple crown” for completing three of the most challenging U.S. trails: the Pacific Crest Trail, the Appalachian Trail and the Continental Divide Trail. He’s also the winner of the 2022 George Mallory Award for outdoor explorers. But his advocacy and kindness loom even larger than his accomplishments: He’s a trail mentor, a nature lover and a survivor of depression and anxiety who advocates for mental health. Robinson, 41, was born in Germany to a military family and grew up in New Orleans. A veteran of the Iraq war, Robinson found himself suffering from PTSD, alcoholism and mental health struggles after being discharged in 2003.

Continue reading “Gone With the Wind: The deleted scenes”

After Russian troops invaded Ukraine on February 24 last year, the country’s military responded with a range of defensive measures, but it also took steps to open a second front in the war—a digital one. As I reported for CJR at the time, the Ukrainian government posted appeals in online hacker forums, asking for volunteers to protect Ukrainian infrastructure and conduct digital missions against Russia. The posts asked hackers to “get involved in the cyber defense of our country,” and according to Foreign Policy, within a couple of months more than 400,000 had joined the informal hacker army.

Cybersecurity experts say Ukraine had one thing going for it when Russia attacked a year ago, at least in terms of computer warfare: it was already well aware of the risk of Russian hacking. In 2015, a digital attack crippled Ukraine’s power plants and left hundreds of thousands without electricity, and many believe hackers affiliated with the Russian government caused the outage. In 2017, a ransomware attack known as NotPetya, which most experts believe was created by Russian entities, caused an estimated $10 billion in damages globally, and much of that damage occurred in Ukraine. One year later, there have been thousands of digital skirmishes between Russia and Ukraine, but it’s unclear who (if anyone) is actually winning, or what impact all this cyber-rattling has had on the larger war.

According to a recent presentation by Gen. Yurii Shchyhol, head of Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection, the country’s Computer Emergency Response Team responded to 2,194 “cyber incidents” last year, one quarter of which targeted the federal government and local authorities, Computer Weekly magazine reported. The rest involved defence and other security sectors, as well as energy, financial services, IT and telecom, and logistics. On the other side of the ledger, Russians in close to a dozen cities were greeted one day last week by radio alerts, text warnings, and sirens letting them know about an air raid or missile strikes that never came. Russian officials said the alerts were the work of hackers.

Continue reading “Hackers on the front lines of the Ukraine war”

Yesterday, I included a link to a blog post from economist Tyler Cowen’s blog, Marginal Revolution, about Sir Francis Bacon and his dislike of the printing press. Among other things, the post quoted Bacon as saying “But these three [inventions], perhaps, have fallen out by a certain fatality or providence of such a kind, that though they have added much to human power, they have not much increased human goodness; nay, rather, the first and last have furnished men with the means of doing more mischief, and the please say more second has made them more vain and arrogant.” This was attributed to a book from 1605, Chapter I, section 5.

The only problem is that Bacon never wrote this — from what I can tell, the only place this appears is Cowen’s blog. A number of commenters on the blog post believe this entire post was written by ChatGPT or some other AI. One giveaway? In the quote above, I believe the “please say more” is actually a command directed at the ChatGPT engine to continue its fabricated writing. Apart from just the quotes, the substance of the post also appears to be incorrect — Bacon was not a critic of the printing press, as far as I can tell from my somewhat limited research.

He said that it was one of the inventions (including the magnet and gunpowder) that “changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world,” which isn’t necessarily an endorsement, but I can’t find any evidence that he thought it was responsible for the evils attributed to it in Cowen’s post. Is the post intended as an elaborate satire on our fears about AI engines, and how similar they are to criticisms of the printing press? Perhaps. Hopefully Cowen will reveal what he was up to in a future post. One possible downside of this sort of thing: Cowen’s post is now showing up as a search result for “criticism of the printing press.”

Continue reading “A note about Francis Bacon, and the ChatGPT engine”

Sometime in the period from the 6th to the 8th century, a woman willingly underwent surgery to scrape a hole into the top of her skull. The procedure must have gone well, at least well enough for her to survive and to try it several more times. A multinational group of researchers from the U.K., Spain, France, Italy and the U.S. discovered the unusual bone modifications while conducting detailed observations on remains excavated from the Longobard cemetery of Castel Trosino in central Italy. Tests showed she was a female, around age 50. Microscopic and CT scan analyses further revealed signs of at least two sets of scraping marks. Both healed and unhealed defects in the bone indicate that the woman received multiple distinct rounds of skull modification.

Why Laura Ingalls Wilder stopped writing

When Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of Little House on the Prairie, didn’t start writing books until she was in her 60s, when she began writing down stories from her past with a pencil. With the help of her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, she ended up publishing nine books between 1932 and 1971. In the years since, there have been more than 60 million copies of her books sold. In a profile of the improbable author written for the Kansas City Star in 1949, she discussed the genesis of her late-to-the-game book series and what stopped her from writing even more. “The more I wrote the bigger my income tax got, so I stopped. Why should I go on at my age? Why, we don’t need it here anyway.”

Continue reading “Volunteering for cranial surgery in medieval Italy”

Ian Fishback once seemed to be the embodiment of martial ideals. Intellectually driven, impressively fit, a West Point graduate and Arabist with one combat tour to Afghanistan and three to Iraq, he was heralded as morally inquisitive and ethically rigorous, qualities that earned him international praise after he went public with accounts that fellow paratroopers had humiliated, beat and tortured Iraqi men in 2003. Two tours in the Special Forces followed, then a promotion to major. After earning a pair of master’s degrees, he transferred to West Point in 2012 to teach courses about war and morality to cadets, before resigning his commission in 2015 for a career as a philosopher. But then Fishback struggled with a mercilessly advancing mental illness, never consistently diagnosed, that scrambled his sense of reality and altered his behavior. By the time the university awarded Fishback a doctorate in April 2021, he was the subject of multiple campus police reports, had no fixed address and was unemployed, twice divorced and broke.

Medieval shame masks were used for gossips, drunks, and narcissists

Extravagance was not well tolerated in medieval Germany. Wealthy citizens and members of nobility could wear sumptuous garments and drape their homes in finery but not those of lower socio-economic status. The size of a man’s collar, the fabric used to make his cloak, even the colors in which he dressed, were regulated by law. Commoners who dared to wear the symbols of the upper class were fined for their chutzpah. Restoring the social order, though, required more than a monetary payoff. The punishment for such a violation was public shaming, and in 17th-century Germany, as well as elsewhere in central Europe, England and Scotland, not much was more humiliating than the schandmaske, or shame mask. Peacocking proletariats were sentenced to wear the rooster, a pounded metal schandmaske with a fleshy comb and elaborately wrought feathers.

Continue reading “The meteoric rise and rapid fall of an American war hero”

Late one February evening in 2005, Kerri Rawson went online and listened to a recording of the BTK killer from 1977. It was a 911 call, a chilling dispatch in which the caller casually reported a homicide he had just committed to the police. “I knew right away it was my dad,” she says. But earlier that day, when an FBI agent had knocked on her door and informed her that her father had been identified as the BTK killer and arrested for murder, Rawson insisted it was all a mistake. She knew her father, Dennis Rader, as normal, law-abiding, kind: a 59-year-old compliance officer in Park City, Kansas. He had even risen to become president of his church council. It was not a mistake. Rader had murdered 10 people in the Wichita area between 1974 and 1991. By the time Rawson was born in 1978, her father had already committed seven murders.

Long-lost letter hints at George Washington’s financial struggles

The Raab Collection, an auction house specializing in historical documents, announced the discovery of the letter in a news release Sunday. The letter was previously “unknown to scholars” and was kept in a small private collection in rural West Virginia, according to the news release. In the 1787 letter, the early politician writes of his need to sell land and raise money. He began corresponding with Israel Shreve, a retired colonel, who wanted to use a form of credit to buy a plot of land in western Pennsylvania. But Washington insisted on selling the land for cash. Washington wrote the letter just months before he would arrive in Philadelphia as chairman of the Constitutional Convention, which resulted in the creation of the American Constitution. He was inaugurated as the nation’s first president two years later in 1789.

Continue reading “Daughter of the BTK killer says “I knew right away it was my dad””

He was 23 years old, the privileged son of New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, seven months into the adventure of a lifetime that had transformed him from clean-cut student to bearded photographer and art collector. One moment his boat was being tossed by the waves, just as ours was, and the next he and his Dutch companion were clinging to an overturned hull. And then Rockefeller had swum for shore and vanished. No trace of him was ever found, despite a two-week search involving ships, airplanes, helicopters and thousands of locals prowling the coasts and jungle swamps. The official cause of Michael’s death was drowning, but there had long been a multitude of rumors.

No coach, no agent, no ego: The Lionel Messi of cliff diving

Gary Hunt is an enigma. He trains with the intensity of a modern athlete, but relaxes like a sportsman of a bygone era. He is fiercely competitive but unbelievably laid-back. How did he become the greatest cliff diver of all time? Since his inaugural season in 2009, when he finished second, Hunt has been on a run of dominance that would be extraordinary in any sport, winning 42 of 82 Red Bull cliff diving events, and nine of 11 world series titles.He is, unquestionably, the greatest cliff diver of all time, “the Michael Jordan, the Muhammad Ali, the Tiger Woods” of the sport, as Steven LoBue, an American diver who had the misfortune of competing against Hunt for many years, put it in 2021.

Continue reading “The mysterious death of Michael Rockefeller”

For decades, wild pigs have been antagonizing flora and fauna in the US: gobbling up crops, spreading disease and even killing deer and elk. Now, as fears over the potential of the pig impact in the US grow, North America is also facing a new swine-related threat, as a Canadian “super pig”, a giant, “incredibly intelligent, highly elusive” beast capable of surviving cold climates by tunneling under snow, is poised to infiltrate the north of the country. The emergence of the so-called super pig, a result of cross-breeding domestic pigs with wild boars, only adds to the problems the US faces from the swine invasion.

The time 20,000 Americans packed Madison Square Garden for a Nazi rally

Six and a half months before Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, New York City’s Madison Square Garden hosted a rally to celebrate the rise of Nazism in Germany. Inside, more than 20,000 attendees raised Nazi salutes toward a 30-foot-tall portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas. Outside, police and some 100,000 protestors gathered. The organization behind the  1939 event was the German American Society, an anti-semitic organization that held Nazi summer camps for youth and their families during the 1930s. Youth members were present that night, as were the Ordnungsdienst, the group’s vigilante police.

Continue reading “US faces new threat from Canadian ‘super pig’”

A poem by Jack Gilbert:

I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody’s dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once that she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on their lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other’s eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy the way it always did.