Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer
It was one of the first prominent “fake news” conspiracy theories to metastasize from Internet rumor all the way to the White House: In the summer of 2016, stories began to circulate in various online forums that Seth Rich, a fairly low-level Democratic National Committee staffer who died in July, wasn’t the victim of a botched robbery at all, but had actually been assassinated by a contract killer working for Hillary Clinton. Rich, the theory went, was actually the secret source who had leaked DNC emails to WikiLeaks—a theory that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appeared to lend credence to when he offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the identity of Rich’s killer or killers. “Our sources take risks,” he said.
As these theories were being spread by Reddit users, denizens of 4chan forums and even Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity, suspicion arose that there were shadowy forces trying to promote the loony-sounding conspiracy. But it wasn’t clear who exactly these forces were, or what their intentions were. On Tuesday, Yahoo News investigative reporter Michael Isikoff announced that he had tracked down the original source of the theory: A fake report concocted by the Russian intelligence agency SVR (short for Sluzhba vneshney razvedki Rossiyskoy Federatsii), a unit of the former KGB. The phony “bulletin,” designed to look like an authentic intelligence report, was released just 3 days after Rich’s death, Isikoff writes.
The idea that the Rich conspiracy theory was distributed by agents acting on behalf of the Russian government is not a new one. When information started to come out about the activities of the so-called Internet Research Agency during the 2016 election—which engaged in a sustained campaign of disinformation and outright propaganda on Facebook and other platforms—the Seth Rich assassination theory turned out to be one of the many pieces of fakery the IRA distributed as a way of destabilizing the campaign. But the agency was a privately run, arm’s-length entity (albeit one run by a close associate of Russian president Vladimir Putin). Until Isikoff’s report, it was not clear that this conspiracy theory originated from Russian intelligence itself.
Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer
Anyone who has been paying attention over the past year is probably well aware that Facebook has a problem with misinformation, but a number of recent events have highlighted an issue that could be even more problematic for the company and its users: namely, harassment and various forms of abusive conduct in private groups. In the latest incident, ProPublica reported on Monday that members of a Facebook group frequented by current and former Customs and Border Patrol agents joked about the deaths of migrants, talked about throwing burritos at members of Congress who were visiting a detention facility in Texas, and posted a drawing of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in oral sex with a migrant. According to ProPublica, the group is called “I’m 10-15,” which is the code that CBP agents use when they have illegal migrants in custody, and has 9,500 members.
It’s not clear whether the administrator of the Facebook group made any effort to restrict membership to actual or former Customs and Border Patrol agents, so it’s probably not fair to conclude that the views expressed in the group are indicative of how a majority of the CBP feels about immigrants. But that didn’t stop many commentators on Twitter and elsewhere—including a number of congressmen—from expressing their concerns about whether attitudes at the agency need to be investigated. “It’s clear there is a pervasive culture of dehumanization of immigrants at CBP,” Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said on Twitter, while her fellow candidate Ocasio-Cortez said “This isn’t about ‘a few bad eggs.’ This is a violent culture,” and described CBP as “a rogue agency.” If agents are threatening violence against members of Congress, Ocasio-Cortez said, “how do you think they’re treating caged children+families?”
In response to the ProPublica story, a spokesman for the CBP said that the agency has initiated an investigation into the “disturbing social media activity,” and Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost said the posts are “completely inappropriate and contrary to the honor and integrity I see—and expect—from our agents.” But the Customs and Border Patrol group is only the latest in a series of such examples that have come to light recently. A recent investigation by Reveal, the digital publishing arm of the Center for Investigative Reporting, reported that hundreds of current and retired law enforcement officers from across the US are members of extremist groups on Facebook, including those that espouse racist, misogynistic, and anti-government views.
Note: This is something I originally wrote for the New Gatekeepers blog at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer
When it comes to disinformation, the latest buzzword on everyone’s lips is “deepfake,” a term used to refer to videos that have been manipulated using computer imaging (the word is a combination of “deep learning” and “fake”). Using relatively inexpensive software, almost anyone can create a video that makes the person in a video appear to be saying or doing something they never said or did. In one of the most recent examples, a Slovakian video artist named Ctrl Shift Face modified a video clip of comedian Bill Hader imitating Robert De Niro, so that Hader’s face morphs into that of the actor while he is doing the imitation. Another pair of artists created a deepfake of Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg making sinister comments about his plans for the social network.
Technologists have been warning about the potential dangers of deepfakes for some time now. Nick Diakopolous, an assistant professor at Northwestern University, wrote a report calledReporting in a Machine Reality last year about the phenomenon, and as the US inches closer to the 2020 election campaign, concerns have continued to grow. The recent release of a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—slowed down to make her appear drunk—also fueled those concerns, although the Pelosi video was what some people have called a “cheapfake” or “shallowfake,” since it was obvious it had been manipulated. At a conference in Aspen this week, Mark Zuckerberg defended the fact the social network didn’t remove the Pelosi video, although he admitted it should not have taken so long to add a disclaimer and “down rank” the video.
Riding a wave of concern about this phenomenon, US legislators say they want to stop deepfakes at the source. So they have introduced something called the DEEPFAKES Accountability Act (in a classic Congressional move, the word “deepfakes” is capitalized because it is an acronym—the full name of the act is the Defending Each and Every Person from False Appearances by Keeping Exploitation Subject to Accountability Act). The law would make it a crime for anyone to create and distribute a piece of media that makes it look as though someone said or did something they didn’t say or do without including a digital watermark and text description that states it has been modified. The act also gives victims of “synthetic media” the right to sue the creators and “vindicate their reputations.”
Mutale Nkonde, a fellow with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard and an expert in artificial intelligence policy, advised Congress on the Deepfakes Accountability Act and wrote in a post on Medium that the technology “could usher in a time where the most private parts of our lives could be outed through the release of manipulated online content — or even worse, as was the case with Speaker Pelosi, could be invented [out of] whole cloth.” In describing how the law came to be, Nkonde says that since repealing Section 230 of the Communications and Decency Act (which protects the platforms from liability for third-party content) would be difficult, legislators chose instead to amend the law related to preventing identity theft, “putting the distribution of deepfake content alongside misappropriation of information such as names, addresses, or social security numbers.”
Not everyone is enamored of this idea. While the artists who created the Zuckerberg video and the Hader video might be willing to add digital watermarks and textual descriptions to their creations identifying them as fakes, the really bad actors who are trying to manipulate public opinion and swing elections aren’t likely to volunteer to do so. And it’s not clear how this new law would force them to do this, or make it easier to find them so they could be prosecuted. The Zuckerberg and Hader videos were also clearly created for entertainment purposes. Should every form of entertainment that takes liberties with the truth (in other words, all of them) also carry a watermark and impose a potential criminal penalty on creators? According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the bill has some potential First Amendment problems.
Some believe this type of law attacks a symptom rather than a cause, in the sense that the overall disinformation environment on Facebook and other platforms is the problem. “While I understand everyone’s desire to protect themselves and one another from deepfakes, it seems to me that writing legislation on these videos without touching the larger issues of disinformation, propaganda, and the social media algorithms that spread them misses the forest for the trees,” said Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of fact-checking site Snopes.com, who now works for a similar site called Truth or Fiction. What’s needed, she says, is legislation aimed at all elements of the disinformation ecosystem. “Without that, the tech will continue to grow and evolve and it will be a never-ending game of legislative catch-up.”
A number of experts, including disinformation researcher Joan Donovan of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center (who did a recent interview on CJR’s Galley discussion platform), have pointed out that you don’t need sophisticated technology to fool large numbers of people into believing things that aren’t true. The conspiracy theorists who peddle the rampant idiocy known as QAnon on Reddit and 4chan, or who create hoaxes such as the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, haven’t needed any kind of specialized technology whatsoever. Neither did those who promoted the idea that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Even the Russian troll armies who spread disinformation to hundreds of millions of Facebook users during the 2016 election only needed a few fake images and plausible-sounding names.
There are those, including Nieman Lab director Joshua Benton, who don’t believe deepfakes are even that big a problem. “Media is wildly overreacting to deepfakes, which will have almost no impact on the 2020 election,” Benton said on Twitter after the Pelosi video sparked concern about deepfakes swamping voters with disinformation. Others, including the EFF, argue that existing laws are more than enough to handle deepfakes. In any case, rushing forward with legislation aimed at correcting a problem before it becomes obvious what the scope of the problem is—especially when that legislation has some obvious First Amendment issues—doesn’t seem wise.
Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer
Every once in a while, a company comes along that becomes a lightning rod for criticism from almost all directions, whether justifiably or not. At one point, this awkward mantle was held by IBM, and for a time Microsoft also played the role, but there’s no question who holds that title today: Facebook. The globe-spanning social network has become such a magnet for criticism that virtually anything it launches is questioned, if not dismissed outright as the work of a megalomaniac. That was certainly the dominant reaction to the company’s launch of a proposed cryptocurrency, known as Libra, which it announced with much fanfare on Tuesday. Although still very much in the formative stages, the proposal was roundly criticized by almost everyone, including a number of cryptocurrency experts, financial analysts, opponents of Big Tech, and financial regulators in both the US and the European Union (people born under the astrological sign Libra are apparently also upset).
To be fair, Facebook has brought much of this negative attention on itself. It has spent the past several years at first denying and then scrambling to fix (or cover up, depending on your perspective) multiple privacy breaches and failures that have exposed the personal data of hundreds of millions of users, including the Cambridge Analytica fiasco. The company has also been slow to react to the reality that its massive platform for targeted content and advertising has also been weaponized by professional trolls and agents of foreign governments, some of whom have used its tools in an attempt to influence elections in at least half a dozen countries. If anyone has done their best to poison the well when it comes to launching ambitious new projects like a global cryptocurrency, it is Facebook.
This explains why even in the most positive coverage of Facebook’s new currency, there was an unmistakeable sense that—as The Verge wrote about the Facebook Portal, a video screen product that the company released last year—this would have been a much more interesting (and potentially even positive) development if it had come from literally any other company. A global cryptocurrency? I’d like to know more! Controlled by Facebook? Er, no thanks. To make matters more frustrating for the company, it has gone to considerable lengths to make it clear that a) Libra won’t be controlled by Facebook, but by a non-profit consortium of members, and b) that none of the data provided by users will find its way into Facebook’s other operations—unless users explicitly say they want it to.
Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer
Every year, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which is based at Oxford University in the UK, comes out with its Digital News Report, a survey of global trends and attitudes towards online news. Depending on your position in the media industry, it can be either good news or bad news. According to the latest edition, which came out Wednesday morning, if you’re a prosperous digital giant with a well-established subscription program, then you are probably in great shape, thanks to the growth of digital and mobile consumption of the news. If you’re a small publisher that still relies predominantly on print and your subscription plan still isn’t lucrative, however, the report is probably going to cause nightmares. As Facebook and Google continue to vacuum up the lion’s share of digital advertising around the globe, the landscape is looking increasingly barren for any publisher that isn’t already a market leader. (Google helps fund the Reuters report.)
One of the big headlines from the study is that, despite the efforts of news publishers to pivot away from advertising revenue and focus more on subscriptions and membership plans, there has only been a tiny increase in the number of people who pay for online news in any form in the past year, and the bulk of what little growth did occur came primarily in Nordic countries like Norway and Sweden. In the US, the so-called “Trump bump,” which led many news consumers to sign up for subscriptions to newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post, seems to have slowed into a virtual flat line. The number of people who paid for news in the US jumped sharply in 2017, the Reuters report says, but it currently remains relatively “stable” (i.e. it isn’t growing) at 16 percent of the population.
On a related note, the study found that even in countries where fairly large numbers of news consumers pay for their news, the vast majority of those consumers only have a single subscription. As the report points out, this phenomenon—which turns subscription revenue into a scarce resource that virtually every other news outlet is also fighting for—suggests that there is a “winner take all” aspect to online news. That might benefit the Times or the Post, or newspapers like The Guardian in the UK, but as those outlets grow stronger, their smaller competitors could find it even more difficult to sign up new subscribers, no matter how good their coverage is. Some media analysts believe there is a distinct possibility that this could create a polarized market, where the big get bigger and the small get smaller, and those in the middle either dramatically change their models or die out.
Like many other music fans, I was saddened to hear last week that Leon Redbone had died at the age of 69 — which isn’t really that old, in the grand scheme of things (I find that as I get older, my definition of old continues to increase). According to friends of the family, he had suffered from dementia for some time, which could be why he stopped performing in 2015. I saw him play in Toronto just two years earlier, at Hugh’s Room in The Junction, a lovely little bar/restaurant that itself seemed like something from another time, with a handful of tables grouped around a low stage in the corner.
Leon came out and sat in a chair with a small lamp beside him and a stool, and a young man accompanied him on piano as he ran through some of his favorites, like Shine On Harvest Moon, Walking Stick, and Marie. In between, he indulged in some classic Redbone patter, making jokes about himself and his music, starting and stopping songs multiple times to offer asides about this or that. After the show, I stopped him in the lobby where he was signing CDs to tell him how much I enjoyed his music, and he growled “Thank you very much” in that classic Redbone way. I didn’t want to bother him, but I’m really glad now that I took the time — those were his last filmed performances, and they appear in a short documentary about him that came out this year entitled “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone.”
Every fan says this about their favorite musicians, but I’m pretty sure there was no one quite like Leon — he appeared seemingly out of nowhere in Toronto in the late 1960s, playing at various folk and jazz clubs. Word got around about this strange man with the unusual name, who played ancient blues and ragtime songs from the 1920s and 1930s, with the low growly voice and the amazing finger-picking style. I first saw him on Saturday Night Live, and he seemed like something from another time, with his riverboat-gambler style outfit, fedora and sunglasses, staring at the floor as he played the ancient hit “Champagne Charlie” (starts around 25:25 in the video below).
Note: This is something I originally wrote for the New Gatekeepers blog at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer
A New York Times story published on Sunday contains an eye-opening allegation: it says that Google “made $4.7 billion from the news industry in 2018,” according to a new report. The lede of the story quotes the figure again, with all of the zeroes, and mentions that this number is “more than the combined ticket sales of the last two Avengers movies,” and is more than what most professional sports teams are worth (the writer of the story usually covers college sports, according to his Times bio). As it turns out, the report was published by the News Media Alliance, a media-industry lobby group formerly known as the Newspaper Association of America, and the figure quoted by the Times—without any critical assessment whatsoever—appears to be based almost entirely on questionable mathematical extrapolation from a comment made by a former Google executive more than a decade ago.
After quoting the head of the News Media Alliance, David Chavern, as saying newspapers deserve a cut of that $4.7 billion, and that the NMA believes this estimate is actually “conservative,” the Times story notes the number is based in part on a study done by a consulting firm called Keystone Strategy. That study in turn relies on a public comment by then-Google executive Marissa Mayer at a public event in 2008, when she estimated that Google News brought in $100 million in revenue. The News Media Alliance appears to have come up with the current figure in part by extrapolating from this comment, assuming that Google News revenue would make up the same proportion of the company’s revenue as $100 million was in 2008, and also that news consumption via Google’s main search is 6 times larger than via Google News (the report says this is based on referral traffic to newspaper websites).
A number of prominent journalists and media-industry observers have publicly scoffed at both the number and the report itself, and also questioned the desire of the Times to publicize such a thinly-sourced study without more skepticism (the Times didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment from CJR). Aron Pilhofer, former head of digital at The Guardian in the UK, and now the Chair of Journalism Innovation at Temple University, called the report’s conclusions “nonsense,” while Dan Gillmor, who runs the News Co/Lab at Arizona State University, said the Times embarrassed itself by running the story. Damon Kiesow, a journalism professor at Missouri University, said the NMA report was “a recap of all the complaints publishers have spouted at Google in the past decade,” and that it contained “no rational economic argument aside from the specious math the NYT reported.”
A group called the News Media Alliance got the NYT to run a piece last night saying that Google made "$4.7 billion" from the news industry.
And now that the study is out, the number appears to be just as shaky as it initially seemed to a few of us. 1/5 https://t.co/LKUkZqUGDw
Several observers noted the story was timed in such a way as to provide maximum publicity for a bill that the New Media Alliance has been promoting to Congress, called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. The proposed legislation would exempt newspaper companies from competition laws, which prevent industry-leading entities from colluding to set prices. The NMA argues this would allow publishers to lobby Google and other platforms for better financial compensation together instead of individually. Congress is holding hearings this week looking into whether Google and Facebook’s market dominance requires anti-trust action.
The main reason the NMA study had to jump through the kind of hoops it did in order to come up with a number for its report is that Google News doesn’t carry any advertising, and doesn’t generate any direct revenue from the headlines and excerpts of news content it provides. One of the most glaring omissions from the report, mentioned by a number of media-industry observers is that the headline-grabbing number doesn’t take into account any of the ad revenue newspapers have generated from the page views they get via links on Google News and Google’s main search page. The search company says publishers get more than 10 billion clicks every month (the value of which differs depending on the publisher). The NMA told CJR the purpose of the report was to look at how much Google benefits from news, not the opposite.
My 2 cents on the Google and News “study”: There are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticize big platforms approach to news. But: Making up numbers randomly and calling it a study is NOT the way to go. “Calculations” like this show an embarrassing lack of business acumen. pic.twitter.com/VGHwNIkWG4
Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, said the NMA report’s framing was not a helpful way of looking at the kind of digital disruption the news media has gone through since the arrival of the internet. “Framing Google/FB and the effect on the ‘news industry’ in terms of $ amounts is not very helpful,” Bell said on Twitter. “Framing it as the concentration of money and data in the advertising market is better.” Elizabeth Hansen, a researcher working on local news business models at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, pointed out that “Internet platform economics were going to swamp the majority of publishers no matter what—there is (almost) no market for their products any more; not because they couldn’t make one, but because that’s not how internet economics work.”
In other words, the premise of the NMA’s report—and the argument behind the legislation it is promoting—is based on a misunderstanding of how the marketplace for information has evolved. While it’s true that revenue for newspapers has declined sharply over the past two decades, and revenue for Google and Facebook has increased just as dramatically, it’s not accurate to say that one caused the other. The ad market changed for a number of reasons—many having to do with an expansion of choice—and Google and Facebook took advantage of that. Newspaper publishers did not, again for a variety of reasons. So asking Google or Facebook to pay back something they theoretically took from the industry is mistaking cause for effect, and so is thinking that bargaining collectively with the platforms will somehow produce revenue that will save the media industry from the change occurring all around it.
This is a fascinating video, consisting of a series of remastered prints from the early days of film, with scenes of downtown Paris from sometime in the 1890s or early 1900s. The speed was adjusted to make it more life-like, and the film was also colorized. Ambient sounds were added later. The films were taken by the Lumiere brothers, who more or less invented modern cinema — you can see the two of them at the end of the second-from-last clip, where they jump onto a moving sidewalk that was built for the World’s Fair in Paris in 1900.
Sarah Lockwood Winchester was the widow of William Wirt Winchester, who died in 1881 of tuberculosis and left Sarah his fortune, which at the time amounted to $20 million (about $450 million in today’s dollars), since he was a member of the family that invented the Winchester repeating rifle. She moved to the Santa Clara Valley and started building a house, one that she kept adding onto until her death in 1922, which has come to be known as the Winchester Mystery House. By the time she died, the building covered more than 24,000 square feet.
The main mystery is why she built the house the way she did — not only did it have 160 rooms (including 40 bedrooms) and a number of towers and other features, but it also contained a number of bizarre rooms and features that seemed to have no purpose. There’s a staircase that ends at a ceiling, a closet that is only an inch deep, a “door to nowhere” that opens into empty space, and a magnificent stained glass window that is behind a wall, and so doesn’t receive any light with which to illuminate it (the house has about 10,000 other panes of stained glass to make up for it though).
This was something I had absolutely no knowledge of until I read about this at Jason Kottke’s blog — which is a must-read by the way. Many ancient cultures used a variety of methods to create 3D physical representations of information they needed to know, like the one below, which is a visualization of ocean wave patterns created by Micronesians in the Marshall Islands. They would apparently pass these on from person to person and memorize them before heading out to sea in their boats. Straight sticks represent regular currents, curved sticks are ocean swells and seashells are islands.
Kottke also writes about how the Yakima tribe of native Americans used strings of hemp tied into balls as a kind of visual or tactile journal of their lives. So every major event was represented by a knot, a bead, or a shell. It was called an Ititamat or a counting-the-days ball or just a “time ball,” and it allowed the owner to recall specific events and times merely by touching and unwinding it. Those who lived long lives might have several, and when they passed away, the balls were buried with them.
Pitts stayed hidden until the library closed for the evening. Alone, he wandered through the stacks of books until he came across Principia Mathematica, a three-volume tome written by Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead, which attempted to reduce all of mathematics to pure logic. For three days he remained in the library until he had read each volume cover to cover—nearly 2,000 pages in all—and had identified several mistakes. The boy drafted a letter to Russell detailing the errors. Not only did Russell write back, he was so impressed that he invited Pitts to study with him as a graduate student at Cambridge University. Pitts couldn’t oblige him, though—he was only 12 years old
This is a fascinating story about someone I had never heard of before. Walter Pitts was born to a working-class family in Detroit, and had taught himself Greek, Latin and high-level mathematics by the age of 12. After getting the letter from Bertrand Russell, he eventually ran away to Chicago and found odd jobs at the university, until he met Warren McCulloch, a 42-year-old, chain-smoking philosopher poet who “lived on whiskey and ice cream and never went to bed before 4 a.m.” At the time, Walter was just 18, a shy young man with a squat, duck-like face.
McCulloch was trying to come up with a mental model of the brain, and a paper by Alan Turing convinced him the brain was a computing machine, and the functioning of the neurons could be modeled just like the Principia modeled complex mathematics. He and Pitts started working on it, and Pitts moved into McCulloch’s house in a suburb of Chicago. Together, they described what would become an entire field of mathematics and computing called “neural networks.”
Soon, Pitts had also impressed Norbert Weiner, one of the leading scientists at MIT and the father of cybernetics. Weiner was so taken with Pitts’ ability that he promised him a PhD in mathematics, despite the fact that he had never graduated from high school. He soon started collaborating with John von Neumann, a leading Princeton mathematician and physicist and one of the inventors of the first “stored program binary computing machine.” Von Neumann used Pitts’s theories about a mathematical model of memory to design the modern computer. McCulloch described Pitts this way:
He has become an excellent dye chemist, a good mammalogist, he knows the sedges, mushrooms and the birds of New England. He knows neuroanatomy and neurophysiology from their original sources in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and German for he learns any language he needs as soon as he needs it. Things like electrical circuit theory and the practical soldering in of power, lighting, and radio circuits he does himself.”
McCulloch made it to MIT as well, and he and Pitts started working together again. But Wiener’s wife disapproved of the late-night parties at McCulloch’s farm in Connecticut, where whiskey flowed and everyone went skinny-dipping. She told Wiener that several of McCulloch’s friends had tried to seduce their daughter Barbara, who was staying at McCulloch’s house in Chicago. Wiener cut off Pitts, and Pitts sank into depression. He started drinking heavily, never finished his PhD and eventually set fire to his notes and papers. He died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1969, at the age of 53.
I love it when I find out about something that I literally had no idea even existed, and “fantasy birding” definitely falls into that category. What is it? Well, it’s basically competitive bird-watching, but instead of having to go out and actually find the exotic birds yourself, you bet on whether someone is going to do that for a specific bird in a specific region. Finds are tracked using a public-domain database called eBird, which is run by Cornell University and allows anyone to track their bird sightings. The fantasy part was the creation of Matt Smith, who tells Deadspin:
“Fantasy birding is basically the offspring of three unrelated obsessions of mine. One is obviously birding, which I fell into pretty hard as a kid in Mississippi. The second is sports, baseball in particular, which always turned me on because of all the numbers. And the third is making things for the web.”
Players select single locations on a map each day, and they get credit for a bird if a real-life birder spots that species within a 10-kilometer radius on that day. The fantasy birding league has already drawn 358 players, according to the Deadspin piece, and the user with the handle MaxBirding was in first place as of March, having spotted 549 species, including 50 rarities, since the competition began in January. My favorite comment from Matt Smith comes at the end, where he says:
“It doesn’t matter how ridiculous the thing you’re doing is. If enough people do it together, it’ll be a good time.”
As some of you already know, for the past half a dozen years or so, I’ve made an annual trip to Perugia, a lovely little hill town in the middle of the Umbria region of Italy, about two hours north of Rome. The main reason is an amazing journalism conference run by my friends Chris Potter and Arianna Ciccone, a five-day extravaganza that involves more than 600 speakers and a dozen beautiful venues in the old city. Most of the historic center was built in the 13th century, and was constructed on the ruins of an even older city, one of the capitals of the ancient Etruscan empire sometime in the 3rd century BC. And every year, my wife Becky and I take a few days either before or after the conference to visit somewhere in Italy — one year it was Rome, and then Venice, and then Cinque Terre, and then the Amalfi Coast (I put together an interactive travelogue if you want to take a tour of some of the places).
After an amazing week in Perugia, filled with great dinners with old friends and lots of gelato meetings at my “office” (also known as the gelateria near the Brufani Palace), Becky and I took the train to Florence, which is just a couple of hours west of Perugia. We checked into a great little Airbnb apartment right near what everyone refers to as the Duomo, also known as the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Flowers or the Santa Maria del Fiore, and then headed out to visit the Uffizi Gallery, one of the premier collections of Italian Renaissance art in the world. It took us over three hours to see everything, and we still missed a lot — paintings by Giotto and Da Vinci, sculptures and busts and statuary everywhere. An amazing (and tiring) experience.
After the museum, we headed back to the Airbnb to relax a little and change, then we set off to meet friends at a local restaurant just across the Arno river, near the famous Ponte Vecchio bridge. It was a lovely little trattoria — the Trattoria Cammillo — with excellent pasta and fish, including a local specialty called pasta Bottarga, with dried and salted roe (fish eggs) from bluefin tuna. After dinner, we chatted with the owners for awhile, who told us of the history of the building, which was partially destroyed in World War II, and showed us the water mark about eight feet up on the wall where the floods of 1966 crested (a flood that killed over 100 people and damaged millions of priceless works of art).
The next day, Becky and I took advantage of the cheap local train prices and caught a train to Pisa, which is about an hour west of Florence on the coast, a trip that costs about 8 Euros. We walked for about 45 minutes from the train station to where the famous leaning tower is, part of a complex of museums, cathedrals and other religious buildings that were constructed in the 12th century, when Pisa was a pretty powerful port city. In addition to the tower, there’s the Campo Santo — a massive enclosed cemetery lined with crypts and sarcophagi — and a huge cathedral that is almost as large and impressive as the Duomo in Florence. Over one of the many altars in the church is a see-through sarcophagus containing what is supposedly the body of Saint Rainerius, which some poor bugger had to put together from bits and pieces that had been scattered around the countryside.
It was a beautiful sunny day, and we had a great time wandering around the cemetery, the cathedral and the nearby museum — which had some marvelous watercolors that someone did of the massive murals on the walls of the Camp Santo, each of which told a religious tale in great depth, but most of which had been lost to time and the elements. There was also a small “Chapel of the Relics of the Saints,” set into the wall, which contained cabinets filled with goblets and reliquaries with bones and fingers and other bits and pieces of saints (allegedly). After a quick espresso, we made our way back along the river Arno to the train station and caught a local shuttle back to Florence.
After we got back to Florence, we spent the afternoon just walking around and then had dinner at a wonderful little restaurant not far from our Airbnb called La Boheme. And what a dinner it was, featuring a dish known as Il Botteca Florentine, or steak Florentine — a giant, two-inch-thick slab of beef with the bone in, weighing around 1.2 kilograms or so. The waitress seemed concerned that I was ordering it for myself, so I said that Becky would be helping, but as it was I ate most of it single-handedly. We then decided that a long walk around Florence was required, so we wandered down towards the river and through the various alleyways, watching people by the carousel in the main square and catching a sextet playing classical music near the site of the outdoor market. Becky and I both rubbed the nose of the boar statue known as La Porcellina, which brings good luck.
The next day, we had planned to head to the Accademia Gallery, where the statue of Michelangelo’s David is located. We had tried to book tickets online in advance, but by the time we got around to it they were sold out for the Tuesday. So we thought we would just see what the line was like, and when we got there it was about two blocks long, and a security guard said he thought it would take at least two hours. I had just finished saying to Becky that I thought we should just bail, when a man and his wife approached us and asked us if we wanted their advance-booking tickets — they didn’t have time to wait and see the museum, they said. Before we could even say thank you or offer to pay them the 24 Euros, they had left, and about 20 minutes later we were in the museum. And what a sight it was.
Although we didn’t take a tour, I learned a lot about David from reading the sign next to it (and also from eaves-dropping on other people’s tours). I didn’t know that a different sculptor started the legs of the statue and then either died or lost the commission for some reason, and the block of stone sat outside for more than 25 years, until Michelangelo — who was only 26 at the time — asked if he could complete it. The hands and the head are disproportionately large, which leads some historians to believe it was originally designed to sit high up on the roof of a cathedral, but when it was done it weighed about three tons (it’s 17 feet high) and so they decided not to put it there after all. The toes of the left foot were damaged by a deranged artist with a hammer who attacked them in 1991.
After seeing David and the rest of the paintings and sculptures in the Accademia Gallery (there’s a small musical instrument museum as well), we headed for the train station to pick up our bags — the free tickets for the gallery covered the cost of the bag drop service, so that worked out well. And then it was back on the train to Rome, which took a couple of hours. We had dinner with a friend who lives there and stayed overnight at the same quaint little hotel we have stayed at several times, and then caught our flight back to Canada. Another great trip in Italy, and lots of great memories. Until next time!
In a pattern that has also been seen in a number of other countries, people in Spain have been moving away from small villages in the countryside into larger centres, and as a result many small towns are dying — and being put on the market. In some cases, you can buy a hamlet with half a dozen buildings for less than $100,000. A site called Aldeas Abandonadas specializes in selling both small villages and stately manor houses that have been abandoned. One listing describes a village with nine houses and about 4,000 square metres of land for just 73,000 Euros or about $80,000 US, and another is for an 18th century manor built for a judge, including a former dungeon that has been turned into a guest house, as well as a pool and an attached farm, for 275,000 Euros or about $300,000 US.
For her recent holiday gift guide, Gwyneth Paltrow advertised a village that was for sale on Aldeas Abandonadas for just $172,000. According to Spain’s prime minister, over half of the country’s municipalities have less than 1,000 residents, and many of them continue to shrink because there is nothing to keep young inhabitants interested in staying and the existing population is aging rapidly. In 2014, the mayor of a municipality in the Barcelona region was willing to give away an ancient village of 12 buildings to anyone who would promise to restore them, and a village called O Penso was for sale for about $230,000 — for 100 acres of land, half a dozen houses, two farms and an ancient wood-fired oven bakery.
If I ever manage to get to Lviv, Ukraine, I would very much like to visit this restaurant, which is referred to as The Most Expensive Galician Restaurant. It isn’t really, but it might be the most bizarre. According to the description by Atlas Obscura, the only way to get access to the restaurant is to request entry from a man sitting in a cluttered room in what looks like someone’s apartment. In most cases, he will turn you away, saying he doesn’t know what you are talking about. He may do this several times before you gain entry.
If you are persistent, however, he will allow you to enter — at which point you might notice a number of things, including a piano, but also a full-size automobiles hanging from the ceiling, and another parked in the middle of the restaurant. You may be serenaded by musicians, or entertained by actors, while eating your meal. When the bill comes, it could easily be thousands of dollars — but then, all you have to do is ask for “the 90 percent discount” and magically your bill will be several times smaller.
