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Laura Young was browsing through a Goodwill store in Austin, Texas, in 2018 when she found a bust for sale. It was resting on the floor, under a table, and had a yellow price tag slapped on its cheek: $34.99. She bought it.Turns out, it wasn’t just another heavy stone curio suitable for plunking in the garden. It was an actual Roman bust from the late 1st century B.C. or early 1st century A.D., which had been part of a Bavarian king’s art collection from the 19th century until it was looted during World War II.

Turns out, it wasn’t just another heavy stone curio suitable for plunking in the garden. It was an actual Roman bust from the late 1st century B.C. or early 1st century A.D., which had been part of a Bavarian king’s art collection from the 19th century until it was looted during World War II.

How it got to Texas remains a mystery. But the most likely path suggests it was taken by an American soldier after the Bavarian king’s villa in Germany was bombed by Allied forces.

via the New York Times

An amusing story about how Stefan Banach, a Polish mathematician and the founder of functional analysis got his PhD:

“He was being forced to write a Ph.D. paper and take the examinations, as he very quickly obtained many important results, but he kept saying that he was not ready and perhaps he would invent something more interesting. At last the university authorities became nervous. Somebody wrote down Banach’s remarks on some problems, and this was accepted as an excellent Ph.D. dissertation.

But an exam was also required. One day Banach was accosted in the corridor and asked to go to a Dean’s room, as “some people have come and they want to know some mathematical details, and you will certainly be able to answer their questions”. Banach willingly answered the questions, not realising that he was just being examined by a special commission that had come to Lvov for this purpose.”

via Math Overflow

“A bachelor tax existed in Argentina around 1900. Men who could prove that they had asked a woman to marry them and had been rebuffed were exempt from the tax. In 1900, this gave rise to the phenomenon of “professional lady rejectors”, women who for a fee would swear to the authorities that a man had proposed to them and they had refused.”

This reminds me of a recent conversation with an Italian friend when we were traveling around Puglia, in southern Italy. She said it used to be commonplace for landowners to burn down forests or olive groves so they could build or expand their existing property. So the government passed a law saying landowners couldn’t build anything for 10 years anywhere there had been a fire. Then people started to set fires on their neighbour’s land, to prevent them from building or expanding their real estate. The law of unintended consequences at work 😀

“Wondering why so many Russian and Ukrainian cities have Greek names (eg Sebastopol)? Catherine the Great had a secret plan to resurrect Byzantium and install her appropriately-named grandson Constantine as New Roman Emperor. Step 1 was to found a lot of new cities with Greek names. Step 2 was to ally with the Austrian Empire. Then the Austrians got distracted with other things and they never reached Step 3.”

via Astral Codex Ten

“I felt a little stupid, to be honest, and when you look that dumb you have to go quickly,” said skier Jack Kuenzle, who set a new record for ascending and then descending Mount Hood, wearing nothing but a tiny pair of shorts that looked like underwear. Why? “My body just puts out an enormous amount of heat during these climbs—so that’s why I do it,” he said. “But yeah, when I went past people, it was hard to tell whether they were cheering or laughing at me.”

I really liked this poem, “Some Kind of Magic,” by Ken Giesbrecht

I dreamt of you last night
as I have so often this past year.
It is the same dream
It always is.
In it we are witches
living secluded on some coast,
Although where I could not tell you.

What I can tell you is that we are content.
That we spend our days with the windows open
Our hearts fluttering,
curtains caught in a gentle breeze.
Our heads bow together in the garden.
You favour the flowers, and I the herbs.

I see you among blossoms
my mind cannot separate your petals from their stem.
You are both soft and strong,
and very beautiful.

Even on the days the mist gathers in
rolling in like deep waves off the sea,
and we must close the shutters
for fear of damaging the stores,
I am not sad.

We sit together,
Yarrow hanging to dry above our heads,
there is comfort in this companionship,
we are Circe and Penelope,
or something like them anyway.

I do not hesitate to reach for your hand.
I know it like my own.
I know it is foolish
dreaming of what will not be,
you are not a witch,
and I am not a gardener,
I know this.

No matter how I try,
I cannot make things grow.
Still, you must have some kind of magic in you,
if even the thought of you,
makes something in me bloom.
Lush and green,
in places where the earth was scorched.

So, you probably like riding a bicycle, and you like camping, and you like paddling around in a tiny boat — so why not a product that puts all of those things into one amazing gizmo? Now you can do this! It’s called the BeTriton, and it just launched, and it is the craziest thing I have seen in a long time. Trying to imagine the bong sessions that not only led to this design, but actually resulted in the creation of a prototype, marketing plan, etc. Absolutely bonkers.

Now and then, I like to remember some of the people and stories I have come across during my 35-year career in journalism, and one of the strangest — and most amazing — of them all was a guy named Chuck Fipke. When I came across him in Edmonton around 1989 or so, Chuck was an oddball loner with an almost impossible story: he claimed that there were diamonds in the Northwest Territories. And not just a few diamonds, but enough for a diamond mine. At this point, Chuck was mostly known for sleeping in his car while prospecting in the far north, and for baking soil samples in his oven at home.

The idea that there might be diamonds in the Northwest Territories might seem pretty straightforward today, since there are not one but three massive diamond mines in the Northwest Territories, which at their peak produced close to $3 billion worth of high-quality diamonds every year. But in 1989, this seemed like a crackpot idea that almost no one in their right mind — other than Chuck — believed was possible. It was like someone saying they’ve invented a time machine or a faster-than-light warp drive. It wouldn’t be overstating it to say Chuck was probably laughed at more than he was listened to.

Continue reading “Chuck Fipke, the man who struck diamonds”

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

Last week, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, reported its quarterly financial results, and said that while the number of Facebook users increased during that period, the company’s revenues grew at the slowest rate since Facebook first went public a decade ago. This news came on the heels of a similarly gloomy financial report in February, when Meta said that its profit shrank, and also announced that its user base fell for the first time since Facebook went public in 2012. After this report was released, the company’s share price plummeted, reducing Meta’s market value by almost $240 billion, the largest one-day decline in US history. The stock has recovered since then, but is still about 35 percent lower than it was in January.

In his remarks about Meta’s most recent results, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO, tried to reassure investors and analysts that the social network still has a rosy future. He pointed to several things Meta plans to change, including a reduction in costs to help defray the company’s investment in the metaverse, since the unit devoted to those projects lost nearly $4 billion in the most recent quarter. Zuckerberg also talked about how the company plans to change the news feed at both Facebook and Instagram in order to compete with TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform that has grown at a rapid pace over the past few years (Facebook has also reportedly hired a PR firm to spread negative news stories about TikTok).

Many industry analysts believe TikTok has become a significant competitive threat to Facebook’s dominance. Meta has been “focused on its far-off vision for virtual existence [and] has been caught unprepared by the growing popularity of short-form video,” Tae Kim wrote at Bloomberg in February, after Meta’s stock fell. Instagram has its own short-form video feature, called Reels, which the company has been pushing as an alternative to TikTok, but while Instagram’s version is growing quickly, it doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact on the Chinese company’s growth. TikTok hit the four-billion-user mark last year, a goal it reached almost twice as fast as Facebook, and its advertising revenue is expected to surpass both Snapchat and Twitter by 2024. Analysts believe that the app’s recommendation algorithm is the key to its success.

Continue reading “Facebook’s news feed: Fewer friends, more AI”

Not long ago, a song showed up on one of my Spotify playlists — the ones based on previous songs you’ve listened to — and something about it caught my ear. I listen to a lot of old folk songs, but this one sounded even older than usual, like turn-of-the-century even. It also used a term I had never heard before, with the singer saying “Oh lordie me, didn’t I shake sugaree.” I looked up the artist, and the guitar part was played by a woman named Elizabeth Cotten, a fascinating folk and blues singer who was born in the late 1800s. The singer, Brenda Evans, turns out to be Cotten’s great-grandaughter, who was only 12 when the song was recorded in 1967.

Elizabeth was born to a poor family in North Carolina, near Chapel Hill, and had to leave school at the age of nine to work as a maid. She earned a dollar a month, and when she was 12, her mother bought her a guitar at Sears & Roebuck for $3.75 (about $100 in current dollars). She was left-handed, but the guitar was strung for a right-handed player, so she just learned to play it upside down, using her fingers for the bass line and her thumb for the melody — a style that became known as “Cotten picking.”

Continue reading “Elizabeth Cotten and the “Shake Sugaree””

Kyle Chayka writes in the New Yorker about the life and death of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, an iconic building designed by Kisho Kurokawa and completed, in 1972, as part of the Japanese architectural movement Metabolism. It looks like something from a dystopian science-fiction movie — tiny little cubes with just enough space for a bed, desk, and a tiny porthole window — but Chayka argues it was a symbol of an imagined future in which cities would grow and change over time, and in which artists and others would have multiple places to live, including their own pied a terre in the city.

Like many other utopian dreams, the Capsule Tower fell victim to reality: the capsules proved to be leaky and difficult to repair and/or replace, and the tower soon fell into disrepair and is being dismantled. Some hope to save a few of the capsules as a testament to the original architects’ vision.

The Nakagin capsules suggest a kind of utopian urban life style. Their paucity of space and equipment meant that activities typically done at home, like eating and socializing, would instead be conducted out on the street. The Nakagin capsules were not full-time residences but pieds-à-terre for suburban businessmen or miniature studios for artists and designers. The individual capsules were pre-assembled, then transported to the site and plugged in to the towers’ central cores. Each unit—two and a half metres by four metres by two and a half metres, dimensions that, Kurokawa noted, are the same as those of a traditional teahouse—contained a corner bathroom fit for an airplane, a fold-down desk, integrated lamps, and a bed stretching from wall to wall. Televisions, stereos, and tape decks could also be included at the buyer’s discretion.

The New Yorker

I don’t usually do product stuff here, but this is pretty amazing. It wasn’t that long ago that drones cost thousands of dollars and were the size of your microwave. Snap is launching something called Pixy, a palm-sized yellow drone that will hover near and/or follow you, taking photos or video. When you are done, you put your hand underneath it and the drone lands. It sends the photos and video to your phone, where they are stored (of course) in your Snapchat. And it’s $230. According to Snap, it captures 2.7k videos and 12MP photos, and it weighs only 101g, with a replaceable battery that lasts for five to eight flights.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer. On Monday April 25, Twitter accepted Musk’s $44 billion takeover offer

Elon Musk’s attempt to acquire Twitter for $44 billion has caused some concern among regular Twitter users, including a fear that right-wing trolls may see some of Musk’s remarks promoting unrestrained freedom of speech as an excuse to engage in harassment, and his promise to “authenticate all humans” as a sign that anonymity will no longer be allowed. But some believe the biggest challenge Musk will face if he is successful in acquiring Twitter could come from China, where his interest in protecting free speech could run headfirst into the Chinese government’s desire to control the information that gets distributed about the country. And China has a significant point of leverage over Musk in Tesla, his electric-car manufacturing company.

Tesla and Musk have benefited from some unique concessions in China. Tesla was the first foreign carmaker to own its auto-assembly plant outright (other carmakers were required to partner with local companies, who then owned a majority stake in the factories.) The funding for Tesla’s “Giga Shanghai” plant reportedly included $1.3 billion in loans from Chinese banks, and the plant is the company’s largest, producing almost half a million cars last year, almost half Tesla’s production. China accounted for $14 billion worth of the company’s revenue, a quarter of the total in 2021. Musk has responded by “lavishing praise” on the country in the past, according to the Journal, and has refrained from criticism—including remaining silent on the draconian measures China has taken to halt COVID, after calling milder US restrictions “fascist.”

Twitter under Musk “will need to confront China’s leverage,” the Wall Street Journal wrote. Fergus Ryan, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told the Journal that China has a record of pressuring businesses to extract political concessions. “There will be lots of opportunities for Beijing to put the squeeze on Musk,” Ryan said. Nina Xiang, founder of the China Money Network, wrote that investors should “expect high drama” between Musk and China. “As the owner of Twitter, which is banned in China, Beijing may feel that it is able to pressure Musk to take down content that it does not like,” she wrote. “If Musk refuses, Beijing could start squeezing Tesla.”

Continue reading “Twitter plus China could equal pressure for Elon Musk”