Category: Uncategorized

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When he made his 1973 classic horror film, The Exorcist, director William Friedkin had never actually seen one performed. For decades he wondered how close he had come to reality. So in May of 2016, Friedkin watched as Father Gabriele Amorth, known as “the Dean of Exorcists,” tried to expel the spirit of Satan from an Italian woman, and wrote about the experience for Vanity Fair magazine. “It was Father Amorth’s belief that her affliction stemmed from a curse brought against her by her brother’s girlfriend, said to be a witch. The brother and his girlfriend were members of a powerful demonic cult, Father Amorth believed.”

A philosophical discusion: Should a wise man indulge in alcohol?

It’s a subject which attracted the attention of no less formidable a moralist than the philosopher Plato, and which thereafter plainly exercised members of the various Hellenistic schools to an appreciable but largely unobservable extent, although it is plainly a question of some importance. Should the wise man indulge in wine-drinking? The discussion involves the study of two texts, one from Plato’s Laws, and the other from a work of Philo of Alexandria. One school of thought argues that indulging in drink could be suitable, since the wise man’s moral excellence would be capable of holding its own.

Continue reading “When the director of The Exorcist watched one”

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.

Bumble bees play, according to new research led by Queen Mary University of London published in Animal Behaviour. It is the first time that object play behavior has been shown in an insect, adding to mounting evidence that bees may experience positive “feelings.” The team of researchers set up numerous experiments to test their hypothesis, which showed that bumble bees went out of their way to roll wooden balls repeatedly despite there being no apparent incentive for doing so. The study also found that younger bees rolled more balls than older bees, mirroring human behavior of young children and other juvenile mammals and birds being the most playful, and that male bees rolled them for longer than their female counterparts.

They thought their teenaged son was psychotic, but the truth was much stranger

Judy Campbell drove her son Michael home from high school. It was the day before Halloween, and the houses in their Midwestern suburb were festooned with ghosts, and jack-o-lanterns. As they pulled into the driveway, Judy noticed that Michael was unusually quiet. She glanced over at her adorable fourteen-year-old. He was tall and gangly, with a mop of brown hair that flopped over one eye. Their eyes met.“I need to talk to you and Dad,” he said. “It’s serious.” When they got home, she called her husband, Scott, into the living room. Michael took a deep breath and began: “I think I’m the evil, damned son of the devil.” Michael went on to tell them that a demonic voice was instructing him to murder his friends. “I feel like I need to kill myself before this happens.”

Continue reading “New research shows that bumblebees like to play”

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.

A painting by abstract Dutch artist Piet Mondrian has been hanging upside down in various museums since it was first put on display 75 years ago, an art historian has found. The 1941 picture, a complex interlacing lattice of red, yellow, black and blue adhesive tapes titled New York City I, has hung in Düsseldorf since 1980. The way the picture is currently hung shows the multicoloured lines thickening at the bottom. However, when a curator started researching the museum’s new show on the Dutch avant garde artist earlier this year, she realised the picture should be the other way around. Despite the discovery, the work will continue to be displayed the wrong way up to avoid damaging it.

Even during war with Russia, bat rescue operation continues

As Russian forces advanced this summer on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, the façade of an eight-story apartment building in the Saltivka district suffered heavy damages from shelling. By August, only a few families remained. Some noticed dozens of bats trapped in the lower windows. The animals had flown through broken panes of glass, then got stuck, unable to find an exit. But in a lucky turn of events, one of the families called the Ukrainian Bat Rehabilitation Center, an organization of biologists who rescue injured bats. When a director and volunteer arrived, they carefully removed the remaining animals.

Continue reading “Mondrian painting has been hanging upside down for 75 years”

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.

A painting by abstract Dutch artist Piet Mondrian has been hanging upside down in various museums since it was first put on display 75 years ago, an art historian has found. The 1941 picture, a complex interlacing lattice of red, yellow, black and blue adhesive tapes titled New York City I, has hung in Düsseldorf since 1980. The way the picture is currently hung shows the multicoloured lines thickening at the bottom. However, when a curator started researching the museum’s new show on the Dutch avant garde artist earlier this year, she realised the picture should be the other way around. Despite the discovery, the work will continue to be displayed the wrong way up to avoid damaging it.

Even during war with Russia, bat rescue operation continues

As Russian forces advanced this summer on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, the façade of an eight-story apartment building in the Saltivka district suffered heavy damages from shelling. By August, only a few families remained. Some noticed dozens of bats trapped in the lower windows. The animals had flown through broken panes of glass, then got stuck, unable to find an exit. But in a lucky turn of events, one of the families called the Ukrainian Bat Rehabilitation Center, an organization of biologists who rescue injured bats. When a director and volunteer arrived, they carefully removed the remaining animals.

Continue reading “
Mondrian painting has been hanging upside down for 75 years”

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.

Previously known as South West Africa, Namibia gained independence from South Africa after many years of guerilla warfare in the Border War. About the time Namibia was founded, Berrie Holtzhausen began a remarkable journey from irreverent preacher to caregiver for people with dementia and finally to his latest role: locating people who have been accused of witchcraft in Namibia’s tribal populations. His pioneering discovery of a connection between persons with dementia and an elevated risk of being named a witch spurred a personal mission to seek justice. “Witches need us to understand them,” he says.

Martin Luther King Jr. paid the hospital bill when actress Julia Roberts was born

When the was born 55 years ago in Smyrna, Ga., a couple swooped in and paid her parents’ hospital bill, because her parents didn’t have the money to do so. It was Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King. And how did this happen? Walter and Betty Roberts owned a theater school in Atlanta, called the Actors and Writers Workshop, which the King children attended. “One day Coretta Scott King called my mother and asked if her kids could be part of the school,” Julia Roberts recalled. “My mom was like, ‘Sure, come on over.’ And so they just all became friends and they helped us out of a jam.”

Continue reading “They were labeled witches, but they just had dementia”

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.

Myalgic encephalomyelitis (also known as chronic fatigue syndrome), a condition that’s often postviral and similar to what some long Covid sufferers appear to have, can be so debilitating that it leaves those who have it with a sense of desperation. That wasn’t apparent during a recent demonstration, says New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci, as sufferers picketed and chanted, some in wheelchairs or using canes, wearing red shirts with slogans like “Still sick, still fighting.” They gave their best shot at civil disobedience, but instead of being arrested, they were largely ignored.

King Tut died long ago, but the debate about his tomb rages on

More than three millennia after Tutankhamun was buried in southern Egypt, and a century after his tomb was discovered, Egyptologists are still squabbling over whom the chamber was built for and what, if anything, lies beyond its walls. At the center of the rumpus is Nicholas Reeves, a former curator at the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who believes there are rooms hidden behind the northern and western walls in the treasure-packed burial vault. He says the tomb belonging to King Tut is merely an antechamber to a grander sepulcher for Tutankhamun’s stepmother and predecessor, Nefertiti.

Continue reading “Protesters so sick that they couldn’t get arrested”

From Scott Alexander’s website Astral Codex Ten: “Did you know you can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum? You can go into a bookstore and say “I would like the legendary manual of witch-hunters everywhere, the one that’s a plot device in dozens of tired fantasy novels”. They will sell it to you and you can read it. I recommend the Montague Summers translation. Not because it’s good (it isn’t), but because it’s by an slightly crazy 1920s Catholic priest every bit as paranoid as his subject matter.”

“The Malleus is traditionally attributed to 15th century theologians/witch-hunters Henry Kramer and James Sprenger, but most modern scholars think Kramer wrote it alone, then added the more famous Sprenger as a co-author for a sales boost. The book has three parts. Part 1 is basically Summa Theologica, except all the questions are about witches. Part 2 is basically the DSM 5, except every condition is witchcraft. Part 3 is a manual for judges presiding over witch trials.”

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.

One in two American adults buys a lottery ticket at least once a year, one in four buys one at least once a month, and the most avid players buy them at rates that might shock you. Some customers snap up entire rolls, three hundred dollars’ worth of tickets, and others show up in the morning, play until they win something, then come back in the evening and do it again. All of this, repeated every day at grocery stores and liquor stores and mini-marts across the country, renders the lottery a ninety-one-billion-dollar business. “Americans spend more on lottery tickets every year than on cigarettes, coffee, or smartphones,” Cohen writes, “and they spend more on lottery tickets annually than on video streaming services, concert tickets, books, and movie tickets combined.”

A top female gamer talks about the sexism in the industry

Stevie “KillCreek” Case’s dominance in first-person shooters made her gaming’s first female superstar. Her conquest and sharpshooting skills scored her a sponsorship as the industry’s first professional female gamer. After beating legendary Quake developer John Romero at his own game, she started dating him, and became the Pamela Anderson to his Tommy Lee – they were influencers long before the advent of social media. Today, Case is a successful 46-year-old single mother and Silicon Valley executive. Two decades after she left the gaming industry with no explanation, she’s breaking her silence about the abuse she suffered during her KillCreek years because she says that little has changed.

Continue reading “What we’ve lost as a result of our addiction to lotteries”

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.

Peter Schjeldahl, a poet who was also the longtime art critic for the New Yorker, died recently at the age of 80. He wrote a piece called “The Art of Dying” in 2019, after he was diagnosed with lung cancer. “Why me? Why not me?,” he wrote. “Dying is my turn to survey life from its far—now near—shore. Like a camera situated nowhere and taking in every last detail of the pulsating world. God creeps in. Human minds are the universe’s only instruments for reflecting on itself. The fact of our existence suggests a cosmic approval of it. We may be accidents of matter and energy, but we can’t help circling back to the sense of a meaning that is unaccountable by the application of what we know.”

She’s the only woman working in a remote oil-drilling camp. This is her story

When Cindy Marchello walks onto an all-male oilfield fracking site, if you don’t notice her, you’ll likely hear her voice. “What are you looking at?” she’ll yell at a male worker if he stares at her for longer than she likes, “I’m old enough to be your mom!” If that doesn’t work, she’ll ask, “What’s your wife’s name?” while hacking up a wad of saliva and spitting it at him. If the man keeps looking, she’ll threaten to throw rocks. Marchello is a short, 56-year-old grandmother with wispy blond and gray hair, pale skin with rosy cheeks, and a curvy figure. She once visited a dusty well-drilling site surrounded by cornfields and heard a man’s voice hollering over the loudspeaker: “Woman on location, woman on location.”

Continue reading “The New Yorker’s art critic on the art of dying”

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.

In the mid-1800s, travelers moving up and down the Hudson River would have been witness to an abnormal sight: Mayan ruins and artifacts a thousand miles north of where they should be. Some of the settlers in that area seem to have felt something of an inferiority complex toward the antiquities of Europe, and one of those was John Cruger, who owned an island on the Hudson that now carries his name. In 1840, while in Honduras, he purchased the land containing the ruined city of Copan for $50, and took casts of the collapsed buildings and sent them north. They were assembled in New York, and Cruger would show them off to his guests by taking midnight boat rides.

Deepfakes of celebrities are showing up in ads

Last year, Russian telecommunications company MegaFon released a commercial in which a simulacrum of Hollywood legend Bruce Willis helps defuse a bomb. Just last week, Elon Musk seemed to star in a marketing video from real-estate investment startup reAlpha Tech Corp. And last month a promotional video for machine-learning firm Paperspace Co. showed talking semblances of the actors Tom Cruise and Leonardo DiCaprio. None of these celebrities ever spent a moment filming these campaigns. In the cases of Messrs. Musk, Cruise and DiCaprio, they never even agreed to endorse the companies in question.

Continue reading “How Mayan ruins wound up on the banks of the Hudson”

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.

Hidden beneath Christian texts, scholars have discovered what seems to be part of the long-lost star catalogue of the astronomer Hipparchus — believed to be the earliest known attempt to map the entire sky. Scholars have been searching for Hipparchus’s catalogue for centuries. James Evans, a historian of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, describes the find as “rare” and “remarkable”. Evans says it proves that Hipparchus, often considered the greatest astronomer of ancient Greece, really did map the heavens centuries before other known attempts. It also illuminates a crucial moment in the birth of science, when astronomers shifted from simply describing the patterns they saw in the sky to measuring and predicting them.

How a child’s chronic pain and a nurse’s misdiagnosis tore a family apart

Beata and Jack Kowalski told the hospital that their daughter Maya suffered from a neurological disorder called complex regional pain syndrome, or CRPS. They said that she was acutely sensitive to stimuli of all kinds and that disabling pain radiated through her legs and feet, requiring the use of a wheelchair. When a nurse attempted to conduct an ultrasound, her mother insisted that the only way Maya could tolerate the contact was if she received an infusion of ketamine. Hansen agreed that it was strange for Beata to demand medication before allowing a test. A parent being uncooperative or failing to heed a medical professional’s suggestions is considered a red flag for neglect, and so a hospital staffer filed a formal notice with the state. And thus began a torturous odyssey that would tear the Kowalski family apart.

Continue reading “First map of the night sky hidden in ancient parchment”

This footage was taken by NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson during a spacewalk on the International Space Station on Thursday, March 30, 2017. There’s a longer version here (via Wonder of Science on Twitter).

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

Last week, The Wire—an independent news outlet based in India—reported that Amit Malviya, the social-media manager for India’s ruling BJP party, was able to remove images from Instagram without having to go through the normal moderation channels. As evidence, The Wire published an internal Instagram report that appeared to corroborate its reporting, with timestamps for when the images were removed, and a note that the usual moderation process wasn’t required because they were flagged by Malviya. When Meta, the parent company of both Instagram and Facebook, denied that this was possible, The Wire published a second story, including a screenshot of what it said was an email from Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta. In the email, Stone seemed upset about the leak of the original report, and asked his staff to put the journalists who published The Wire‘s initial story on a watchlist.

In a response to that story, Guy Rosen, chief information security officer at Meta, wrote that the email from Stone also appeared to have been fabricated. The Wire then published a third story, in which it described the technical method it used to verify the email, and included a video showing the process. The story also had screenshots of emails sent by two unnamed internet security experts, who said they had reviewed a copy of the Stone email and the process The Wire used to verify it, and they were convinced that it was genuine. Some reporters, however, noted that the emails from the experts were dated in 2021, not 2022. Devesh Kumar, the Wire reporter who handled the verification story, said this was a simple mistake due to a glitch in his operating system.

in an interview with Platformer, Casey Newton’s technology newsletter, Jahnavi Sen, deputy editor of The Wire, said someone from the site met with one of the original sources for the report about Instagram, and that this source verified their identity by providing a number of documents, including their work badge and pay slips. Kumar told Platformer that when The Wire approached its original source about the Instagram takedowns, the source send a copy of the internal report within 20 minutes. When The Wire reached out to a different source, they said they didn’t know anything about the Instagram report, but “they had insight into the discussions happening internally. Seven minutes later, the source responded with the email allegedly from Stone.”

Continue reading “The Wire pledges transparency as it reviews its Meta coverage”