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This piece by Patricia Lockwood in the London Review of Books, which she also gave as a lecture, is really quite extraordinary in the way it describes what it’s like to have your brain infected by the viral Internet.

The amount of eavesdropping was enormous. Other people’s diaries streamed around her. Should she be listening to the conversations of teenagers? Should she follow with such avidity the compliments rural sheriffs paid to porn stars, not realising that other people could see them? She lay every morning under an avalanche of details, blissed: pictures of breakfasts in Patagonia, a girl applying foundation with a hardboiled egg, a shiba inu in Japan leaping from paw to paw to greet its owner, white women’s pictures of their bruises – the world pressing closer and closer, the spider web of human connection so thick it was almost a shimmering and solid silk.

Source: Patricia Lockwood · The Communal Mind: The Internet and Me · LRB 21 February 2019

This personal essay in The Atlantic raises a difficult ethical question. The author and his wife found out that she had about three years to live, but didn’t tell their three young children because they didn’t want them to worry. So they knew she had cancer and that it had returned, but didn’t know it was terminal. The good news is that she wound up living for 10 years, and her children all say they are glad they didn’t know, because they would have worried too much. But it’s still a really tough question. Shouldn’t they have known the truth?

My father died of cancer, and he refused to talk about his prognosis because he didn’t want to dwell on the negative — he wanted to focus on getting better (which was never really an option). I respected his choice, but it meant that we couldn’t really talk about his eventual death, or what would happen afterwards, or even about his life, because to do so was to acknowledge what he didn’t want to talk about. I wish we had had the ability to do that, but then I wasn’t a young child, so my perspective is probably significantly different.

We decided not to tell the kids. Marla knew that once our three daughters understood that their mother had been given 1,000 days to live, they’d start counting. They would not be able to enjoy school, friends, their teams, or birthday parties. They’d be watching too closely—how she looked, moved, acted, ate, or didn’t. Marla wanted her daughters to stay children: unburdened, confident that tomorrow would look like yesterday.

Source: My Wife and I Didn’t Tell Our Children About Her Cancer – The Atlantic

It’s an odd feeling to have an otherwise unremarkable passage you wrote appear as an exhibit in a case of plagiarism, especially when those accusations relate to the former executive editor of The New York Times, and especially when the allegedly plagiarized passages appear in a book about the state of modern media and journalistic ethics. And yet, here we are. Just to recap, a chunk of a blog post I wrote for CJR in May of last year, about Facebook cracking down on “low quality” news, appears with what are arguably minor alterations in former Times executive editor Jill Abramson’s book “Merchants of Truth.” I know this because Michael Moynihan, a correspondent for Vice News Tonight on HBO, collected a number of examples of alleged plagiarism in a Twitter thread on Wednesday, and my blog post was one of them.

Do I feel as though something has been stolen from me? Not really. It was a fairly factual description in a fairly factual blog post, not something creative that I agonized over for weeks. And yet, it’s still irritating that there’s no mention of where it appeared at all. Would it have been that hard to say “as mentioned in CJR?” That would have been nice. And that’s in part what plagiarism is — it’s not a law, it’s more of a standard of behavior that we hopefully aspire to, especially as journalists. It may be an antiquated concept with all the aggregation that happens in our current media environment, but this isn’t a quickly lashed-together blog post, it’s a book by the former executive editor of The New York Times, who theoretically should know better. And it undoubtedly reminds some (including me) of the nonchalance with which that newspaper often does stories that other news outlets have covered without mentioning or linking to them, something the paper’s own public editor referred to as a failing.

There also appear to be much more egregious examples than the one involving me. In all, Moynihan listed six examples in which material from other places appeared with relatively minor alterations in Abramson’s book, and he only looked at the chapters that referred to Vice. That’s six examples from two chapters. Writer Ian Frisch also posted more than half a dozen examples from the book where large sections from a piece he wrote about Vice — a piece that was only ever published on his personal website — were used, including quotes from interviews he did. Frisch later noted that while credit is given in the end notes of Abramson’s book, “the endnotes do not go into the depth of how much this section about Thomas relied on my article. She quotes Thomas as if he’s speaking to her directly. This would not fly for a mag article.” Moynihan noted that at least two of the examples he gave — including one where a paragraph was used virtually verbatim — were not cited in the book’s end notes at all.

In a response on Fox News, where she was being interviewed by Martha MacCallum, Abramson said “I most certainly did not plagiarise in my book,” but later added on Twitter that she takes the allegations seriously and would “review the passages in question.” She also said she “endeavored to accurately and properly give attribution to the hundreds of sources that were part of my research,” and that the attacks on her book from Vice staff reflected their unhappiness with her portrayal of the company, which she referred to as “balanced.” Her publisher, Simon & Schuster, which paid a rumored $1 million for the rights to the book, issued a statement saying the book was “exhaustively researched and meticulously sourced,” but that if any changes or attributions were necessary, “we stand ready to work with the author in making those revisions.” (I reached out to Abramson for comment but as of publication time had not received anything. If I do get a response, I will add it here).

A number of people have defended Abramson’s approach, including NYU law professor and intellectual property expert Christopher Sprigman, who said that the “so-called plagiarism controversy is fake,” since Abramson just took “basic facts and re-phrased them.” True plagiarism, he said, is taking others’ original ideas or distinctive expressions without credit. But while that may be the way some people see the concept, it’s not the way Jill Abramson described it when she was the managing editor of The Times, when the newspaper was accused of plagiarizing two sentences from a piece written for The Miami Herald. Even though the sentences were factual, Abramson told Slate writer Jack Shafer that the Times writer had committed plagiarism. “I think when you take material almost word-for-word and don’t credit it,” that qualifies as plagiarism, she said.

There’s no question that the word “plagiarism” has a fairly wide range of definitions, depending on who is doing the defining. A guide to how to avoid plagiarism published by Sprigman’s university, for example, has 11 different variations on the term, including The Ghost Writer and The Misinformer. It defines what it calls the “too-perfect paraphrase” as when a writer cites a source “but neglects to put in quotation marks text that has been copied word-for-word, or close to it.” And as Moynihan mentioned, at least two of the sections that Abramson used that are virtually verbatim — a section from Malooley’s Time Out article and one from the Ryerson Review of Journalism magazine in Toronto — are not referred to in the end notes at all. It’s not that doing this should be considered a capital crime, it’s more that if you’re the former executive editor of one of the leading journalistic institutions in the country, and you’re writing a book at least in part about journalistic ethics, you should maybe be held to a somewhat higher standard than if you were a freelancer writing your 15th blog post of the day.

This is such a fascinating story — how Audrey Munson, a young girl from Rochester, became the muse for dozens of famous artists and sculptors around the turn of the century, her face and body immortalized in statues and busts all around New York. And then, just as suddenly, she was out of fashion, fell on hard times and was eventually committed to a mental institution.

She modeled for the greatest sculptors and painters in New York, including Alexander Stirling Calder, Daniel Chester French, and Karl Bitter. She made thirty-­five dollars a week and lived simply, in a small one-bedroom apartment that she shared with her mother. The art that she posed for, however, was a gateway into the upper echelon of society. When Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands commissioned Bitter to create a Venus de Milo statue “with arms,” Audrey’s arms served as the inspiration. The Rockefeller

Source: Descending Night – Believer Magazine

They may have taken place at a much slower pace — months or even years instead of minutes or hours — but the 17th century saw its share of social warfare and accusations of “fake news.” Christy Henshaw writes at the Wellcome Collections website about an argument that took several years to play out. And the subject? Whether or not one Richard Dugdale was possessed by a demon.

This is a fascinating story that I was unaware of: As Jason Kottke points out, the iconic picture of a mother cradling her children during the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s has become a symbol of the Great Depression, but there is a lot more to it than it first appears. For one thing, the woman in question wasn’t a resident of the migrant camp where it was taken — she had stopped to fix the family’s car — and she was also a full-blooded Cherokee

If I ever decided to quit my regular life and become a monk, I think I would like to join this Japanese sect, who are devoted to nature

Source: A Beautiful Documentary About the Yamabushi Monks in Japan Who Immerse Themselves In Nature

One day awhile back, I saw someone post on Twitter that they had created an interactive travel log that combined a regular blog-style overview of a number of trips with a map that automatically flew to and then zoomed in on the place the person was writing about. It looked pretty cool, and the person who created it — Lauren Hallden, a product designer with Stitch — made the code open-source by putting it on Github. So since I’ve been playing around on a test server I have, I decided to see if I could replicate what she did, and I think I’ve gotten it working pretty well. I liked it so much I created a second one focused solely on our trips to Italy, including our time in Turin, Venice, Cinque Terre and the Amalfi Coast: Travelog: Italy.

In a nutshell, it uses a relatively small amount of CSS and JavaScript, combined with a map API from MapBox, which is free to use as long as you don’t make a lot of calls to the database. Lauren did a really good job of marking up the code and explaining it on Github, so it’s obvious where to input your API key, where and how to add the GPS co-ordinates (naturally, Google’s GPS co-ordinates are the opposite of the way that MapBox does it, so that takes some manual editing) and where to put your images. I had an issue with permissions on my pics, but once I got that sorted out it was dead easy to put together and I think it looks pretty cool.

Best part of doing this was it forced me to go back through all of my photos from our various trips last year, and that reminded me of how many amazing places we had been and how much fun it all was. I’m thinking I might make other travel logs for individual trips. Thanks for doing this, Lauren, and for allowing others to re-use your code.

This is such a fascinating piece, about the rustic buildings called “bothies” that dot the hillsides in rural England, Wales and Scotland — free for hikers to use.

My overnight home, the Hutchison Memorial Hut, colloquially called the Hutchie Hut, which I visited in late October, is one of more than 100 rustic shelters scattered throughout England, Wales and Scotland that are frequented by a motley assortment of outdoor adventurers. Left unlocked, free to use and with most offering little more than a roof, four walls and perhaps a small wood-burning stove, the buildings, called bothies (rhymes with “frothy”), are an indispensable — if for many years underground — element of British hill culture.

Source: In Britain, Enraptured by the Wild, Lonely and Remote – The New York Times

This is incredible: A professional restorer has painstakingly recreated a Hupfeld Phonoliszt-Violina, something I didn’t even realize existed until now — like a giant player piano but with violins:

Three violins (each with only one active string) mounted vertically were played by a round rotating bow made of 1300 threads of horse hair, according to the program on the roll of perforated paper. The small bellows replaced the violin player’s fingers, pressing on the strings to obtain the necessary notes. The piano can be driven either unaccompanied or together with the violins. It controls 38 accompaniment keys with 12 high notes (one octave) in extension. The whole pneumatic systems are controlled by an electric engine of uninterrupted current.

Source: A Beautifully Restored Hupfeld Phonoliszt-Violina, A Self-Playing Mechanical Violin Orchestrion Player

There is a mystery lighting up the northern hemisphere — thin ribbons of glowing purple and green that have come to be known to photographers and scientists as “Steve.”

Source: Scientists slowly cast light on celestial mystery known as Steve | CBC News

When you play a game, it’s handy to have a score, so you know how you did compared to all the other players. But what if the score is one that Facebook assigns you based on your estimated “trustworthiness,” and the criteria behind the score is kept secret from you? That appears to be the case, according to a report from the The Washington Post on Tuesday. A Facebook product manager in charge of fighting misinformation (there’s a job title for the ages) told the paper that the social network has developed the ranking system over the past year as it has tried to deal with “fake news” on the platform. Every user is given a score between zero and one, which indicates whether they are considered to be trustworthy when it comes to either posting content or flagging already posted content as fake.

It’s “not uncommon for people to tell us something is false simply because they disagree with the premise of a story or they’re intentionally trying to target a particular publisher,” product manager Tessa Lyons told the Post. The trustworthiness score is designed in part to guard against this kind of gaming of the process. Facebook also took pains to point out that there is no single “reputation score” given to users, and that the trustworthiness ranking is not an absolute indicator of a person’s credibility. It is just one measurement among thousands of behavioral clues, Lyons said, which are used to determine whether a post is legitimate and/or whether a post was flagged improperly.

The speed with which Facebook tried to reassure users that they don’t have a single reputation score isn’t surprising, given all the attention on what is happening with social activity in China. There, the government is assigning all Chinese citizens a “social credit score” based on their behavior both online and offline, including what they share via networks like WeChat (which is a little like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and PayPal combined into a single app). This social credit score can then be used to determine who gets access to certain services, including schools. No one is suggesting that anything quite so dystopian is going on at Facebook, but still the idea of being assigned a secret trustworthiness score by a network that controls the information diet of more than two billion people feels a tad uncomfortable.

After initially refusing to take action against notorious conspiracy monger Alex Jones—even after virtually every major platform had removed him for publishing hate speech—Twitter seemed to reluctantly admit that it had a problem, and put Jones in “Twitter jail” by suspending his account for seven days. Now, in a wide-ranging interview with the Washington Post, part-time CEO Jack Dorsey has promised to look closely at ways to solve Twitter’s troll problem, up to and including changing some of the “incentives” that are built into the social network and the way it rewards users for certain kinds of behavior.

Dorsey’s promises might seem like a magnanimous gesture, a kind of “we will stop at nothing” declaration of purpose. But for anyone who has paid attention to Twitter for more than a nanosecond, there are a couple of significant issues with what the Twitter CEO said. For example, the Post notes that “Dorsey said Twitter hasn’t changed its incentives, which were originally designed to nudge people to interact and keep them engaged, in the 12 years since Twitter was founded.”

In other words, only now, more than a decade after Twitter was founded, is Dorsey finally willing to take a hard look at some of the potential negative effects of the technology he and his company created, years after those problems were first brought to their attention. What took so long? The most obvious answer, as with Facebook’s deliberate attempt to ignore similar problems, is that avoiding or side-stepping those negative aspects was far more lucrative than trying to solve them—harassment and flame wars and misinformation are also known as engagement.

But that’s only part of the problem with Dorsey’s mea culpa. The second statement in the interview that should set off warning bells is when the Post says the Twitter CEO is thinking about “redesigning key elements of the social network, including the like button and the way Twitter displays users’ follower counts,” because they no longer reflect what the social network wants people to do.

All that’s necessary, Dorsey appears to be saying, is a few tweaks to Twitter’s design interface—maybe highlight some things in a different typeface, make a button a little larger or give it a different name—and boom! Problem solved. It’s like seeing racism and homophobia and other forms of harassment as byproducts of a poorly designed user interface, or some kind of bug in the software, and believing that if we could just do enough A/B testing, we could solve it once and for all.

The reality is that Twitter’s problems (and Facebook’s, and Instagram’s, and even Pinterest’s) are not flaws in programming, or reactions to design incentives, they are the result of deep-seated social, cultural, and psychological issues, some of which have been around for hundreds—if not thousands—of years. The walls of the ancient ruins in Pompeii are covered in political graffiti that could have been taken directly from Twitter (“All the deadbeats vote for Thucydides”).

The idea that a tweak in how the network prioritizes retweets or labels favorites is going to alter that kind of behavior is absurd, especially coming from Twitter, which seems to have spent a majority of its time as a company almost completely in the dark about how or why people use it.

It may even be the case, as John Herrman argues in The New York Times, that Twitter is simply too large to function in the way it wants to, as a kind of town square where ideas compete with one another and everyone’s speech has exactly the same weight as everyone else’s. It’s possible that human beings aren’t designed to work properly in a “community” that consists of 350 million people. But regardless of whether the problem is unsolvable or not, the idea that Twitter can do so by turning a few software dials is nonsense on stilts.

If you’re a journalist, chances are you’ve either read or been forwarded links to a story in The Australian, a newspaper based in Sydney that contains some explosive commentary from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg behind its paywall (the Daily Beast has a summary of it). According to the story, Campbell Brown—Facebook’s head of news partnerships—said in a meeting with the paper’s senior executives that “Mark doesn’t care about publishers,” and also warned that if media companies didn’t work with the giant social network on business model solutions, “in a few years, I’ll be holding your hand with your dying business, like in a hospice.”

These comments were held up by some as conclusive proof that Facebook hates journalists and can’t wait for the industry to die. After all, the sentiment seemed to fit right in with some of the social network’s recent moves, which have reduced traffic to media outlets by significant amounts. Some even believe the company is trying to deliberately distance itself from media because it is such a political and social minefield, and that all of this represents a retreat from having to deal with journalism altogether. But would Facebook really come out and say it doesn’t care if the media dies?

Sources at Facebook, not surprisingly perhaps, say Brown’s comments were taken out of context and in some cases appear to have been manufactured wholesale. “These quotes are simply not accurate and don’t reflect the discussion we had in the meeting,” Brown said in a prepared statement. The company says they don’t reflect its actual thinking either about journalists or the media industry as a whole. No one has used the term “fake news,” but it’s obvious people within Facebook are thinking it. The social network says it has a recording of the meeting that proves its case, but so far the company hasn’t released it.

As usual when the Facebook is involved, there are a number of layers to this latest dust up. One is that Facebook probably is trying to distance itself from the media—whenever it gets involved, it raises issues like the company’s role in misinformation, censorship, and other unpleasantness. Also, as Josh Benton has pointed out at Nieman Lab, it appears that Facebook really is a lot less interested in driving traffic to publishers, based on the available evidence from publishers like Quartz.

On top of that, Campbell Brown’s bald statement that “we are not interested in talking about your referrals any more” has the ring of truth, given some of what she said at a Recode conference earlier this year, when she told publishers they could basically take it or leave it. “If anyone feels this isn’t the right platform for them, they should not be on Facebook,” she said at the time. Some journalists even appear to support her latest comments as a no-holds-barred assessment of where things stand.

Whether Facebook is making the changes it has (de-emphasizing traffic to media outlets, etc.) because it literally hates the media and wants it to die is anybody’s guess, of course, but the fact remains they are happening. So the comments from Brown might have seemed like a veiled threat, but they could also have been just a statement of fact: If Facebook won’t provide the revenue or the traffic necessary for some outlets to survive, publishers might start going on life support. Journalists wish this wasn’t true, but are afraid that it might be.

Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been blocked, banned or removed from a host of platforms, including Facebook, Spotify, YouTube, Apple, and even MailChimp. One major social service has so far refused to join the anti-Jones bandwagon, however: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took to his own service on Tuesday to reiterate that he has no plans to ban Jones or his ilk. Why has the company chosen this path when everyone else seems convinced banning him is the right thing to do?

In part, it could be about boosting engagement and revenue—the same answer that many give when asked why Twitter allows the troll-in-chief, Donald Trump, to remain on the network. But the answer also likely has a lot to do with the company’s history as a social platform, and its vision of itself as a bastion for free speech.

You can see this in Dorsey’s responses to the Infowars controversy. His first message is simple: Twitter hasn’t banned or suspended Jones or Infowars because they haven’t violated Twitter’s rules of behavior. In a followup message, he suggests that having Jones on the service is the best approach, because that allows journalists to “document, validate and refute such information directly so people can form their own opinions.” This approach is what “serves the public conversation best,” says Dorsey.

Many journalists responded antagonistically to this, since it implied journalists should be cleaning up the platform instead of the company itself. “You know, Jack, our days are pretty full as it is without cleaning up your website for you pro bono,” said the Portland Press Herald. On a deeper level, however, Dorsey’s message fits with his view of what Twitter is—an information network populated in part by journalists, who perform a kind of crowdsourced fact-checking service, and thereby create a marketplace of ideas where controversial views are encouraged and free speech reigns.

This is markedly different from what Facebook has been trying to do since it first appeared on the world stage. Although CEO Mark Zuckerberg likes to talk about free speech, Facebook’s purpose has always been much more about community, about building connections between family members and friends. Free speech has always taken a back seat to those goals, and to the goal of building a multibillion-dollar revenue generating machine—in fact, Facebook has shown time and time again that it is more than happy to take down or block content for a variety of reasons, including government pressure.

Twitter, by contrast, has always seen itself as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party,” as former Twitter executive Tony Wang put it in 2012. From the beginning, the company’s focus has been protecting the right of users to say whatever they wanted, even if it was problematic—as it did in 2013 when it fought a French demand to censor homophobic and anti-Semitic comments. The company has also fought numerous attempts by various governments to block or censor content, although it does censor certain kinds of posts where it is required to do so by law (including pro-Nazi sentiment in Germany).

This helps explain why Twitter has tried to define what is and isn’t acceptable so narrowly, saying tweets have to contain explicit statements of violence towards specific individuals before they contravene the rules. In a sense, the company is trapped in the utopian vision of the future it had when it started: That giving people the tools to share information in real time would create a kind of intellectual meritocracy where the best information would win. To some, that now seems like a hopelessly naive way to look at the internet, given overwhelming evidence that networks like Twitter and Facebook have enabled hate speech and harassment and even contributed to violence on a scale never before possible.