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.

Both sides of the sleep-training debate come with their own experts; whatever you decide to do, you’re going to be able to find a person with some type of credential to back you up. Parents who find the “cry in crib” approach abhorrent can cite the work of British attachment-parenting expert Sarah Ockwell-Smith, whose Gentle Sleep Book includes sentences like “It is indeed true that sleep deprivation is a form of torture.” Craig Canapari, director of the Yale Pediatric Sleep Medicine Program, argues that we should worry less about the crying. “I find the argument that crying harms your child ludicrous.” He recalled when his 5-year-old cried because there was an ant on his doughnut: “I wasn’t worried about him being brain-damaged afterward.”

Fifth Circuit court decision pretends the First Amendment doesn’t exist

Mike Masnick of Techdirt (which you should read if you aren’t already) looks at what he says is an extremely stupid court decision that just came down on platform moderation: “As far as I can tell, in the area the 5th Circuit appeals court has jurisdiction, websites no longer have any 1st Amendment editorial rights,” says Masnick. “That’s the result of what appears to me to be the single dumbest court ruling I’ve seen in a long, long time, and I know we’ve seen some crazy rulings of late. However, thanks to judge Andy Oldham, internet companies no longer have 1st Amendment rights regarding their editorial decision making.”

Continue reading “TikTok has fueled a debate over sleep training for babies”

If you’ve ever been to Algonquin Park in Ontario, you know it’s one of the largest parks in Canada, if not the world. It’s about 7,600 square kilometres in size — that’s about one-quarter the size of Belgium — and it has about 2,400 lakes and 1,200 kilometres of rivers. Most people who go to Algonquin camp or canoe on the west side, or just off Highway 60, which runs right through the park. But there is a jewel on the far eastern side of the park that is worth visiting, and that is Barron Canyon.

Barron Canyon is a massive, narrow canyon with walls that are about 300 feet high in spots — almost twice as high as Niagara Falls. After the end of the last ice age, the Barron River carried the entire outflow from Lake Aggasiz (the precursor of today’s Great Lakes), and carved the canyon out like a huge knife. It is less than 50 feet wide in spots, which makes the massive granite walls seem even more impressive. There’s a great hiking trail along the top of the canyon that is definitely worth it, but it’s a great day paddle as well.

Continue reading “A kayak trip up Barron Canyon in Algonquin Park”

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

On August 23rd, the Washington Post and CNN published stories about alleged security failures at Twitter, based on documents provided by Peiter Zatko, the company’s former head of security. Among Zatko’s more serious allegations were that Twitter executives, including Parag Agrawal, its CEO, deliberately misled both the company’s board of directors and federal regulators about Twitter’s security procedures, and that the company gave agents of foreign governments access to “sensitive user data.” The document that Zatko gave to the Post and CNN was also shared with several members of Congress as well as the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Justice Department, and the Senate Intelligence Committee. On Tuesday, Zatko appeared before a hearing of the Senate Justice Committee to discuss the document, and spent more than two-and-a half hours providing more detail on his accusations.

Some of the most serious allegations came during Zatko’s testimony about foreign agents he said were on Twitter’s payroll. Zatko told the committee that just a week before he was fired by Twitter, the FBI notified the company that “there was at least one agent” of China’s Ministry of State Security “on the payroll inside Twitter.” Zatko also alleged that Twitter was incapable of tracking when and where its own employees accessed its systems, and this made it impossible for Twitter to find foreign agents who might be gaining access to internal data. According to Zatko, the company was only able to find these agents when informed of their presence by external entities such as the FBI. In one case, Zatko said he told a Twitter executive he was “confident” there was a foreign agent inside the company. “Their response was: ‘Well, since we already have one, what does it matter if we have more. Let’s keep growing the office,’” Zatko told the committee.

In 2019, the New York Times reported that two former Twitter employees were charged with acting as agents of the government of Saudi Arabia and using their positions to get access to information about users who were critical of the Saudi government (one of the individuals was convicted last month by a court in California, and the other left the country before he could be arrested). Zatko also told the committee that , the Chinese government could easily have gotten information about Twitter users who clicked on ads, including the locations of those users. “Twitter’s unsafe handling of the data of its users and its inability or unwillingness to truthfully represent issues to its board of directors and regulators have created real risk to tens of millions of Americans, the American democratic process, and America’s national security,” Zatko told the committee.

Continue reading “Twitter whistleblower, Congress, and social media”

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.

The official beekeeper to the Royal Family, John Chapple, 79, told MailOnline how he travelled to Buckingham Palace and Clarence House on Friday following news of The Queen’s death to inform the bees of the monarch’s passing. The ritual, which dates back hundreds of years, involves notifying honey bees of major events such as a death or marriage. While the traditions varied, “telling the bees” always involved notifying the insects of a death in the family—so that the bees could share in the mourning. This generally entailed draping each hive with black crepe. It was required that the sad news be delivered to each hive, by knocking once and then verbally relaying the tale of sorrow.

This man can identify any image from Google Maps in less than a second

Trevor Rainbolt has a special talent for being able to look at any image on Google Maps and pinpoint where it was taken with astonishing speed and accuracy. He can do so after only looking at the image for 0.1 seconds, five times in a row, and even if he is looking at images from two separate countries at once. Rainbolt can identify a country using only half of a distorted image, or an image that has been scrambled into pieces. He can look at only the trees. Or only the grass. Or only the sky. Sometimes, he can even name a country while blindfolded, just by having someone else describe the dirt.

Continue reading “The man who had to tell the bees the Queen was dead”

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.

Tulsi Gowind Gowda has spent most of her more than 80 years planting and nurturing trees in southern India. “I like them more than anything else in my life,” she said. She has walked for miles, deep into tropical rainforests, carefully cutting healthy branches from hundreds of trees and replanting and grafting them. Her eyes light up when she talks about rare seeds or a sapling. And when she dies, she would like to be reborn, she says, as a big tree. Gowda — who doesn’t know the year of her birth but believes she is more than 80 — has devoted her life to transforming vast swaths of barren land in her native state of Karnataka, in southern India, into dense forests.

Chess player Hans Niemann hits back over ‘cheating’ controversy in St Louis

Chess master Magnus Carlsen’s shock withdrawal from the $350,000 Sinquefield Cup in St Louis following his third-round defeat to the newcomer Hans Niemann has triggered a variety of “cheating” claims. It is potentially the most serious such case for international chess since the 2005 Toiletgate world championship match, when Veselin Topalov accused Vlad Kramnik of analysing games in the lavatory. Carlsen’s loss to Niemann, 19, was his first for several years with White to a much lower rated opponent, and it was the first withdrawal of the Norwegian’s entire career. His only explanation was a cryptic video clip of José Morinho saying “If I speak I am in big trouble,” during a press conference about referees.

Continue reading “The woman who is bringing India’s forests back to life”

from The Gift of India by Sarojini Naidu, via Stacy-Marie Ishmael’s newsletter

Is there aught you need that my hands withhold,
Rich gifts of raiment or grain or gold?
Lo! I have flung to the East and West
Priceless treasures torn from my breast,
And yielded the sons of my stricken womb
To the drum-beats of duty, the sabres of doom.

Gathered like pearls in their alien graves
Silent they sleep by the Persian waves,
Scattered like shells on Egyptian sands,
They lie with pale brows and brave, broken hands,
They are strewn like blossoms mown down by chance
On the blood-brown meadows of Flanders and France.

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 December 2003, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the first flight of the Wright brothers, the New York Times ran a story entitled “Staying Aloft; What Does Keep Them Up There?” The point of the piece was a simple question: What keeps planes in the air? To answer it, the Times turned to John D. Anderson, Jr., curator of aerodynamics at the National Air and Space Museum and author of several textbooks in the field. What Anderson said, however, is that there is actually no agreement on what generates the aerodynamic force known as lift. “There is no simple one-liner answer to this,” he told the Times. People give different answers to the question, some with “religious fervor.”

Hidden items found in Vermeer’s famed ‘Milkmaid’ painting

The discoveries in the work painted some 350 years ago shed new light on the technique of the enigmatic artist, ahead of the largest ever exhibition of Vermeer’s work starting at the museum in 2023. Advanced scanning techniques revealed that beneath the plain white wall that makes the milkmaid’s bright yellow and blue clothes stand out, Vermeer had originally painted extra details. “This reveals a new unexpected Vermeer, it’s astonishing,” Gregor Weber, head of fine arts and at the Rijksmuseum, told a news conference.

Continue reading “No one can explain exactly how planes stay in the air”

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.

Shoji Morimoto has what some would see as a dream job: he gets paid to do pretty much nothing. The 38-year-old Tokyo resident charges 10,000 yen ($71) an hour to accompany clients as a companion. “Basically, I rent myself out. My job is to be wherever my clients want me to be and to do nothing in particular,” Morimoto told Reuters, adding that he had handled some 4,000 sessions in the past four years. Morimoto now boasts nearly a quarter of a million followers on Twitter, where he finds most of his clients. Roughly a quarter of them are repeat customers, including one who has hired him 270 times.

The fascinating case of the legless duchess

As The Browser describes this story from The Critic: “This story has it all: The world’s most expensive painting; the model for Holmes’s Professor Moriarty; J.P. Morgan (twice); a ransomed prisoner; a “gambler and sometime art dealer named Patrick Francis Sheedy”; a casino in Constantinople; a Murillo stolen from a monastery in Mexico; a chief of police who kept his composure while a tiger ate his arm; and the 11th Duke of Devonshire.” It all began in 1876, when Thomas Agnew & Sons in London put on display Gainsborough’s portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. The portrait was not just a spectacular work of art, but the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.

Continue reading “Dream job: the Japanese man who gets paid to do nothing”

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.

Deep in the waters along a volcanic ridge in the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, sea explorers using a remotely operated vehicle to examine largely unexplored areas found a pattern of holes in the sand. During the dive, north of the Azores, near Portugal’s mainland, on July 23, they saw about a dozen sets of holes resembling a track of lines on the ocean floor, at a depth of 1.6 miles. Then about a week later, on Thursday, there were four more sightings on the Azores Plateau, which is underwater terrain where three tectonic plates meet. Those holes were about a mile deep and about 300 miles away from the initial discovery. There is no known cause for the holes, which appear to have been excavated.

The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse

Author Douglas Rushkoff writes about being invited to speak at an event organized by a group of millionaires and billionaires, who wanted to know how they should save themselves from the coming apocalypse. “They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination?”

Continue reading “Scientists can’t explain these holes in the ocean floor”