From Mark O’Connell for The Guardian: “Among Irish people old enough to remember the summer of 1982, Malcolm Macarthur is as close to a household name as it is possible for a murderer to be. He grew up in County Meath in the east of Ireland, on a grand estate with a housekeeper, a gardener and a governess. In his 20s, he received a large inheritance, and lived well on its bounty. But on the brink of middle age, he found he was going broke. At the time, the IRA was conducting a campaign of bank heists to fund their struggle. Macarthur was a clever and capable man, he reasoned, and so why should he not be able to pull off something along those lines? But he did not bring off the heist; in the effort to attain a gun and a getaway car, he murdered two complete strangers.”
Why those who are dying often experience a sudden burst of lucidity
Jordan Kinard writes for Scientific American: “For decades, researchers, hospice caregivers and stunned family members have watched as people with Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia suddenly regain their memories and personalities just before death. To their family members it might seem like a second lease on life, but for experienced medical workers, it can be a sign the end is near. Christopher Kerr, chief executive officer and chief medical officer at the Center for Hospice and Palliative Care in Buffalo, N.Y., has studied the lucid visions of several hundred terminally ill people. He says these events “usually occur in the last few days of life.” Such ‘terminal lucidity’ is defined as the unexpected return of cognitive faculties such as speech and ‘connectedness’ with other people.”
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.
Franks Mayancha and Francesca Mezzenzana write at Slate: “The story of four children’s 40-day survival after a plane crash, in a remote stretch of the Amazon rainforest in Colombia, has gripped the world’s imagination since their rescue on June 9. Traumatized by the loss of their mother a few days after the crash, the siblings were stranded, left to fend for themselves, with no immediate access to water, at continuous risk of encountering predators, venomous snakes, and poisonous plants. Conjuring images of hope and resilience in such a remote place, this story has left many in a state of admiration and surprise. But we feel that a crucial aspect of the story has been overlooked.”
What life is like inside North Korea
From the BBC: “On 27 January 2020, North Korea slammed shut its border in response to the pandemic, stopping not just people, but food and goods, from entering the country. Its citizens, who were already banned from leaving, have been confined to their towns. Aid workers and diplomats have packed up and left. Guards are under order to shoot anyone even approaching the border. The world’s most isolated country has become an information black hole. Under the tyrannical rule of Kim Jong Un, North Koreans are forbidden from making contact with the outside world. With the help of the organisation Daily NK, which operates a network of sources inside the country, the BBC has been able to communicate with three ordinary people.”
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.
From Patrick Whittle for AP: “Roger Payne, the scientist who spurred a worldwide environmental conservation movement with his discovery that whales could sing, has died. He was 88. Payne made the discovery in 1967 during a research trip to Bermuda in which a Navy engineer provided him with a recording of curious underwater sounds documented while listening for Russian submarines. Payne identified the haunting tones as songs whales sing to one another. He saw the discovery of whale song as a chance to spur interest in saving the giant animals, who were disappearing from the planet. Payne would produce the album “Songs of the Humpback Whale” in 1970. A surprise hit, the record galvanized a global movement to end whale hunting.”
If AI software creates a new episode of Seinfeld, is it copyright infringement?
Aharon Schreiber writes: “On December 14, 2022, a new season of Seinfeld debuted on the streaming site Twitch, airing continuously, 24 hours a day, every day for a few months. Ok, not really. The AI generated Seinfeld parody “Nothing, Forever,” did run 24 hours a day until February 6, 2023, but the show was completely procedurally generated via artificial intelligence. While the show was pretty well received, with even the official Seinfeld twitter account linking to the Twitch channel, “Nothing, Forever” opens up a series of new questions regarding the intersection of copyright law and artificial intelligence. Most importantly, does Seinfeld, Jerry, the actors, NBC, or any other person or entity with rights to Seinfeld the show have a copyright claim against “Nothing, Forever?”
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.
From Patrick Whittle for AP: “Roger Payne, the scientist who spurred a worldwide environmental conservation movement with his discovery that whales could sing, has died. He was 88. Payne made the discovery in 1967 during a research trip to Bermuda in which a Navy engineer provided him with a recording of curious underwater sounds documented while listening for Russian submarines. Payne identified the haunting tones as songs whales sing to one another. He saw the discovery of whale song as a chance to spur interest in saving the giant animals, who were disappearing from the planet. Payne would produce the album “Songs of the Humpback Whale” in 1970. A surprise hit, the record galvanized a global movement to end whale hunting.”
If AI software creates a new episode of Seinfeld, is it copyright infringement?
Aharon Schreiber writes: “On December 14, 2022, a new season of Seinfeld debuted on the streaming site Twitch, airing continuously, 24 hours a day, every day for a few months. Ok, not really. The AI generated Seinfeld parody “Nothing, Forever,” did run 24 hours a day until February 6, 2023, but the show was completely procedurally generated via artificial intelligence. While the show was pretty well received, with even the official Seinfeld twitter account linking to the Twitch channel, “Nothing, Forever” opens up a series of new questions regarding the intersection of copyright law and artificial intelligence. Most importantly, does Seinfeld, Jerry, the actors, NBC, or any other person or entity with rights to Seinfeld the show have a copyright claim against “Nothing, Forever?”
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.
From Michelle Butterfield for Global News: “For weeks, the world has been watching with interest as groups of orcas, also known as killer whales, appear to be ambushing boats off the coasts of Spain and Portugal. A boat captain says that after his boat was attacked for a second time he now thinks these groups of orcas know “exactly what they’re doing.” Captain Dan Kriz, a sailor with Reliance Yacht Management, had his first orca encounter in 2020. “I was sailing with my delivery crew through the Strait of Gibraltar delivering a yacht when I was surrounded with a pack of eight orcas, pushing the boat around for about an hour,” Kriz said. “We were one of the first boats experiencing this very unusual behavior.”
Tea drinking was good for the rich in the 1800s, but bad for the poor
Livia Gershon for JSTOR Daily: “The practice of taking afternoon tea spread from fashionable Dublin to upper and middle classes around Ireland in the 1800s. Women could demonstrate their families’ status with tasteful tea parties governed by rules of etiquette imported from England. Among these were that the tea must be of good quality, refreshments should be placed on a silver tray, and nothing serious or controversial should be discussed. But when it came to the urban poor and farm laborers, popular discourse was very different. As early as 1745, a treatise on tea by British writer Simon Mason promoted afternoon tea drinking as a digestive aid for elites, but discouraged “an imprudent Use of Tea, by Persons of an inferior Rank, and mean Abilities.” When it came to women who “work hard and live low,” he argued, tea “makes them peevish and unkind to their husbands.”
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.
From Michelle Butterfield for Global News: “For weeks, the world has been watching with interest as groups of orcas, also known as killer whales, appear to be ambushing boats off the coasts of Spain and Portugal. A boat captain says that after his boat was attacked for a second time he now thinks these groups of orcas know “exactly what they’re doing.” Captain Dan Kriz, a sailor with Reliance Yacht Management, had his first orca encounter in 2020. “I was sailing with my delivery crew through the Strait of Gibraltar delivering a yacht when I was surrounded with a pack of eight orcas, pushing the boat around for about an hour,” Kriz said. “We were one of the first boats experiencing this very unusual behavior.”
Tea drinking was good for the rich in the 1800s, but bad for the poor
Livia Gershon for JSTOR Daily: “The practice of taking afternoon tea spread from fashionable Dublin to upper and middle classes around Ireland in the 1800s. Women could demonstrate their families’ status with tasteful tea parties governed by rules of etiquette imported from England. Among these were that the tea must be of good quality, refreshments should be placed on a silver tray, and nothing serious or controversial should be discussed. But when it came to the urban poor and farm laborers, popular discourse was very different. As early as 1745, a treatise on tea by British writer Simon Mason promoted afternoon tea drinking as a digestive aid for elites, but discouraged “an imprudent Use of Tea, by Persons of an inferior Rank, and mean Abilities.” When it came to women who “work hard and live low,” he argued, tea “makes them peevish and unkind to their husbands.”
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.
Gina DeMuro writes for All That’s Interesting: “In May 1901, the attorney general of Paris received a strange letter declaring that a prominent family in the city was keeping a dirty secret. The wealthy family had a spotless reputation. Madam Monnier was known in Parisian society for her charitable works, and her son was a respectable lawyer. The Monniers had also had a beautiful young daughter, Blanche, but no one had seen her in close to 25 years. Described by acquaintances as “very gentle and good-natured,” the young socialite had simply vanished in the prime of her youth. The police made a search of the estate and did not come across anything out of the ordinary until they noticed an odor coming from one of the upstairs rooms.”
Nancy Grace Roman: The life and legacy of a NASA star
Known as the “mother of the Hubble,” Dr. Roman was the first chief of astronomy at NASA and the first woman to hold an executive position there. She was instrumental in making the Hubble Space Telescope a reality. In addition to her trailblazing accomplishments, Dr. Roman left a legacy for future generations. In 2019, AAUW received a generous bequest from Nancy’s estate to ensure more girls and women can pursue scientific careers, particularly in engineering and the physical sciences. “I was told by many people that a woman could not be an astronomer,” Dr. Roman said when she was honored at the 2016 National Conference for College Women Student Leaders. “I’m glad I ignored them.”
This Dutch suburb boasts the world’s most unusual neighborhood design
From Tim Nelson at Architectural Digest: “As you wind your way through The Netherlands’ extensive network of canals, you’ll float by a whole lot of noteworthy buildings spanning from exemplars of low-country Renaissance style to architectural manifestations of modernism and the early 20th century’s De Stijl movement. Yet, for all the diversity that is Dutch design, few examples of it have inspired curiosity quite like an odd collection of concrete orbs found in one neighborhood of s-Hertogenbosch (colloquially known as Den Bosch). Though the buildings in the area may look like golf balls when viewed from the air, these Bolwoningen (“bulb houses”) are functional—albeit cramped—homes.”
Balloons in stratosphere record mysterious sounds of ‘completely unknown’ origin
From Vishwan Sankaram for The Independent: “Large 6-7-metre-long balloons were sent to the stratosphere – the relatively calm layer of Earth’s atmosphere which is rarely disturbed by planes or turbulence – by researchers, including Daniel Bowman of Sandia National Laboratories in the US. In this layer of the Earth’s outer atmosphere, scientific instruments on balloons can pick up a range of sounds that are unheard elsewhere, including the natural sounds of colliding ocean waves and thunder, as well as human-made ones like wind turbines or explosions. Researchers reported in a presentation at the Acoustical Society of America that they also managed to record strange sounds that could not be identified.“There are mysterious infrasound signals that occur a few times per hour on some flights, but the source of these is completely unknown,” Dr Bowman said.
The untold story of the boldest supply-chain hack ever
By Kim Zetter for Wired magazine: “Steve Adair wasn’t too rattled at first. It was late 2019, and Adair, the president of the security firm Volexity, was investigating a digital security breach at an American think tank. Adair figured he and his team would rout the attackers quickly and be done with the case—until they noticed something strange. A secondgroup of hackers was active in the think tank’s network. They were going after email, making copies and sending them to an outside server. Adair and his colleagues dubbed the second gang of thieves “Dark Halo” and booted them from the network. But soon they were back. As it turned out, the hackers had planted a backdoor on the network three years earlier—code that opened a secret portal, allowing them to enter whenever they wished.”
How much is a smidgen?
From Claire Cock-Starkey for Lapham’s Quarterly: “In evidence given to Parliament’s 1862 Select Committee on Weights and Measures, a Mr. Greenall remarked on the extraordinary number of different historical weights and measures in use at that time across Britain, listing the grain, dram, drop, ounce, pound, stone, score, ton; the wool measure of clove, tod, wey, pack, sack or last; the straw measure of truss and load; the draper’s measure of inch, nail, ell and yard; the long measure and land measure of line, size, hand, foot, palm, span, pace, step, link, knot, rood, hide, rod, pole or perch, fall, chain, mile and league; plus various other scales of measurement including the strike, peck, pot, gill, pint, quart, tierce, boll, coomb, pipe, butt, tun, and score. This impressive array of measurements not only shows the plethora of competing and coexisting weights and measures in Britain but also reveals the innate human desire to create order.”
How Steve Jobs replied to a request for his autograph
If you use the internet, you may think of Reddit—if you think of it at all—as a largely harmless repository of discussion forums about nerdy topics like Star Wars. Last week, however, even those who don’t follow news about the platform may have seen a blizzard of articles about a “moderator revolt” that caused thousands of its most popular forums, or “subreddits,” to go offline by changing their status to private, a process the moderators referred to as “going dark.” The unlikely-sounding catalyst for this uprising was a change to the company’s application programming interface, or API, a set of software instructions that allow third-party apps to access Reddit’s data. Reddit had announced plans to start charging for access to its AP, which used to be freeI. On June 8,Christian Selig, the creator of Apollo, a popular app used for browsing Reddit, said that the new rates would cost him at least twenty million dollars a year. He had no choice, he said, but to shut down his app.
In interviews with The Verge and CNBC, Steve Huffman, the co-founder and CEO of Reddit, suggested that the company decided to implement the API changes because it didn’t want to continue subsidizing third-party apps like Apollo, which essentially compete with Reddit’s official app. But some of the volunteers who moderate the site’s most popular forums seemed to see things differently: they have argued that they rely on third-party apps like Apollo to do the work of moderating posts, because such apps are faster and have more features than the official one. Some critics have also speculated that the API changes—which reportedly involve fees that are hundreds of times higher than those charged by other social-media services—have been driven not by a desire to improve the site, but by to boost revenue so that Reddit can go ahead with an initial public offering, a step that it has been eyeing since 2021.
Reddit was founded in 2005 by Huffman and his college roommate, Alexis Ohanian. In 2006, it was acquired by the magazine publisher Condé Nast, which is owned by the Newhouse family, through their holding company, Advance Publications (the site was spun off as an independent unit in 2011, but Advance is still the majority shareholder). Huffman left Reddit for a time to start a travel company called Hipmunk, but he returned as CEO in 2015. Some still see Reddit as little more than an overgrown discussion forum or a politer version of extremism-riddled communities like 4chan. But according to one estimate, the site has more than five hundred million visitors per month, which would make it the sixth most popular website in the US, behind Google and Facebook but ahead of Amazon and Yahoo. Some observers argue that Reddit now going dark not only affects regular users of the site, but could also mean lower-quality results for some Google searches, which draw on user-generated content from such communities.
Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
Kyle Mizokami writes for Popular Mechanics: “Charles Gandy, an electrical engineer with the National Security Agency, was charged with figuring out if the U.S. embassy in Moscow had been compromised. Counterintelligence had reason to believe that somehow, information was getting out that compromised American intelligence agents. It had to be something inside the embassy. The NSA eventually shipped all of the electronics located at the embassy back to the U.S. for study. They struck gold: parts inside an IBM Selectric typewriter had been cleverly duplicated but rigged to transmit the typist’s keystrokes. The typewriter still worked, but it also quietly broadcast the keystrokes, using over-the-air TV signals as a form of electronic camouflage.”
A man won a French world Scrabble title without knowing how to speak French
From Bill Chappel for NPR: “Nigel Richards, a New Zealand native, has won several English-language Scrabble titles over the years, but he took it to the next level in 2015 when he won the French-language Scrabble World Championships after spending a single week memorizing a French dictionary. “He doesn’t speak French at all, he just learnt the words,” his friend and former president of the New Zealand Scrabble Association told the New Zealand Herald. “He won’t know what they mean, wouldn’t be able to carry out a conversation in French, I wouldn’t think.” It was only in late May that Richards began his quest to win the French world title. “Nigel Richards is the best Scrabble player all-time, hands down,” said Scrabble expert Stefan Fatsis, who has written a book about the game.”
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.
Kyle Mizokami writes for Popular Mechanics: “Charles Gandy, an electrical engineer with the National Security Agency, was charged with figuring out if the U.S. embassy in Moscow had been compromised. Counterintelligence had reason to believe that somehow, information was getting out that compromised American intelligence agents. It had to be something inside the embassy. The NSA eventually shipped all of the electronics located at the embassy back to the U.S. for study. They struck gold: parts inside an IBM Selectric typewriter had been cleverly duplicated but rigged to transmit the typist’s keystrokes. The typewriter still worked, but it also quietly broadcast the keystrokes, using over-the-air TV signals as a form of electronic camouflage.”
A man won a French world Scrabble title without knowing how to speak French
From Bill Chappel for NPR: “Nigel Richards, a New Zealand native, has won several English-language Scrabble titles over the years, but he took it to the next level in 2015 when he won the French-language Scrabble World Championships after spending a single week memorizing a French dictionary. “He doesn’t speak French at all, he just learnt the words,” his friend and former president of the New Zealand Scrabble Association told the New Zealand Herald. “He won’t know what they mean, wouldn’t be able to carry out a conversation in French, I wouldn’t think.” It was only in late May that Richards began his quest to win the French world title. “Nigel Richards is the best Scrabble player all-time, hands down,” said Scrabble expert Stefan Fatsis, who has written a book about the game.”
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.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-493216257-32c9c3575d704488bcb73702c010750e.jpg?w=525&ssl=1)
