Month: July 2023

From Matthew Wills at JSTOR Daily: “When Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Garden of Eden was published in 1986, it changed our reading of the author’s life and work. Uncompleted at his death in 1961, the Garden manuscript revealed the “depth of his interest in homosexuality and the mutability of gender,” writes literary scholar Valerie Rohy. Combined with his widow Mary Welsh Hemingway’s diary and memoir, the book suggested a different way of looking at an author who wore his hypermasculinity on his safari jacket sleeve. In the novel, David and Catherine, a honeymooning American couple in Europe, explore switching gender roles. Catherine bobs her hair to a boyish cut, explaining, “I’m a girl, but now I’m a boy, too.”

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the rebirth of Western Occultism

From Mitch Horowitz at Medium: “The history of the Golden Dawn began in fall of 1887, when London coroner and Freemason William Wynn Wescott came into possession of a folio of alchemical symbols and encrypted ritualist writings in English, French, Latin, and Hebrew. The 60-leaf folio was accompanied by a sheet with the name and address of a mysterious (and possibly invented) German countess whom the bearer could contact for guidance. Wescott said that he received these “Cypher Manuscripts” from the Rev. A.F.A. Woodford, a fellow Freemason who died that year. For his part, Woodford is sometimes said to have purchased the manuscripts from an antiquarian bookdealer in 1880; other accounts have him receiving them from Masonic scholar Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie, who died in 1886. Wescott claimed to have received from the countess news of hidden masters called “Secret Chiefs,” from a Hermetic-Rosicrucian order.”

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Continue reading “Hemingway was fascinated by the idea of gender fluidity”

From Ilir Gashi at The Guardian: “Since she started taking passengers between Sarajevo and Belgrade 20 years ago, Rada has been performing an additional function, working as part of an informal postal network. She transports anything anyone wants to send, as long as it’s legal and can fit in a car. And if it wasn’t for Rada, for many people this would be much more difficult. All across the former Yugoslavia, the Bosnian war created borders that cut through families and friendships and all other sorts of relationships (perhaps with the honourable exception of organised crime “families”); this was followed by a steady dissolving of infrastructure – roads, transport routes, bus lines, postal services – that once kept Yugoslavia together. It was almost as if someone wanted to make sure that we were all kept away from each other, inside our walled ethnic communities.”

Liberland, Europe’s would-be Bitcoin micronation

From Matt Broomfield for UnHerd: “Chugging down the Danube in a fisherman’s boat, past the unrecognised exclave known as Liberland, it’s hard to reconcile fantasy with reality. This patch of land — lushly forested, mosquito-ridden and boggy — remains unclaimed by neighbouring Croatia and Serbia, allowing a coterie of libertarian crypto enthusiasts to claim it as a nominally-sovereign micronation. But this sleepy cartographical quirk is a far cry from the visionary design generated by Zaha Hadid Architects to represent Liberland in the Metaverse, where silhouetted avatars stroll down deforested avenues lined with grand, neo-futurist architecture. The idea of setting up an “independent” nation has always been attractive to libertarians, even though a half-century of attempts to establish tax-free idylls have produced no tangible results.”

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Continue reading “Inside the Balkans’ alternative postal system”

From Marcus Webb for Delayed Gratification magazine: “I remember every moment of my fall,” says Lijana Wallenda, one of the fourth generation of the Wallenda family to perform on a high wire – and, in 2017, the latest member to suffer a horrific accident. “I can see the ground getting closer, closer, closer to my face before I hit it. All I could think about was my sons, nephew and niece… I’m not letting them do high-wire walking for a living. No, the generations of wire-walking end here.” The Wallendas’ long line of aerialists started with Karl. Born in Germany in 1905, he began learning stunts as a young child, and was performing by the age of six. In 1922 he formed the Flying Wallendas high-wire act with his brother Herman, schoolfriend Joseph Geiger and Helen Kreis, who would become his wife. The Flying Wallendas spent several years touring Europe before moving to Sarasota, Florida, in 1928 to join the famous Ringling Bros circus.”

What kind of person can run in a tiny, maddening circle for 24 hours straight?

From Stephen Lurie for Slate: “Gagz had been running for 17 hours and 20 minutes when he made it to the southeast corner of the loop. He’d already chugged past this spot 370 times, but on his 371^st lap, he started walking across the lanes. “I’m takin’ five,” he told me. “I have to. I just don’t want my lead to dwindle.” He reached the edge and laid down, propping his tattooed legs up against a waist-high chain-link fence, long gray beard falling toward the damp red track. He planned to sleep for exactly five minutes. It was midnight for civilians, but at Dawn to Dusk to Dawn—a grueling 24-hour ultramarathon in Sharon Hills, Pennsylvania—hour 17 meant more to the runners. Gagz, 47, wasn’t the only one who’d started to creak. Harvey, the race leader who had already run more than four back-to-back marathons that day (107.87 miles), needed to change his shoes.”

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Continue reading “The fourth generation of the Flying Wallendas just can’t stop”

From Susanne Rust for the Los Angeles Times: “Since mid-June, an otter has been attacking and terrorizing surfers off the Santa Cruz coastline — in at least one case, stealing a board. In recent days, the attacks have grown increasingly aggressive. “At first, we were like, ‘Look how cute?’ But then it bit down on the board and chewed off a piece, and we were like. ‘What’s going on?’” said one surfer. He said the otter jumped on his board and began biting it. He tried to flip the board, but the otter got right back on — and started lunging at him. An adult sea otter can weigh 30 to 100 pounds, and reach 5 feet in length. The force of an otter’s bite has been estimated to be 615 pounds per square inch, while a wolverine’s can reach 1,720 pounds per square inch. The average person’s bite force is about 162 pounds per square inch.”

America suffered from an opioid crisis following the end of the civil war

From Livia Gershon for JSTOR Daily: “When veterans of the US Civil War returned home, one of the barriers many faced to reintegrating into civilian life was opiate dependency. Prior to the Civil War, American doctors prescribed opiates, including opium, morphine, and laudanum, for a vast range of conditions, from painful injuries to loose bowels to fever. But doctors, and many members of the general public, were well aware of the dangers of the drugs. An 1849 article in Scientific American described addicted men as “ready to sell wife and children, body and soul for the continuance of his wretched and transient delight.” But they had little choice but to offer opiates to soldiers who otherwise would have been useless due to pain, vomiting, diarrhea, or other debilitating conditions. Some soldiers also took opiates before battle to calm their nerves.”

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Continue reading “A renegade sea otter is terrorizing California surfers”

From Erik Wills for GQ magazine: “When he first alighted on the scene, Jason Belmonte – or Belmo, as he’s known to his fans – resembled an alien species: one that bowled with two hands. And not some granny shot, to be clear, but a kickass power move in which he uses two fingers (and no thumb) on his right hand, palms the front of the ball with his left, and then, on his approach, which is marked by a distinctive shuffle step, rocks the ball back before launching it with a liquid, athletic whip, his delivery producing an eye-popping hook, his ball striking the pins like a mini mortar explosion. Not everyone welcomed his arrival. He’s been called a cheat, told to go back to his native Australia; a PBA Hall of Famer once called the two-hander a “cancer to an already diseased sport.” He’s won 15 major titles, four more than anyone else in history, and seven Player of the Year awards, tied for the most all-time.”

The Stradivarius Murders

Brent Crane writes for Bloomberg: “On October 22 of 2021, Bernard von Bredow was found lifeless in his compound in Paraguay, sprawled beside his living room table. He’d been shot in the neck, and his body bore signs of torture. Fourteen-year-old Loreena was found dead in the bathtub. She’d been shot in the abdomen. Blood was everywhere—on the carpet, in the hall, in the kitchen. Belongings had been tossed about, maybe from a struggle, a search or both. Missing from the property, the local police announced later, were four specimens of the world’s most expensive musical instrument, the Stradivarius violin. The roughly 600 remaining violins built in the 17th and 18th centuries by the Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari can fetch as much as $20 million each.”

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Continue reading “The man who broke bowling”

From Dalya Alberge for The Guardian: “A 14th-century bureaucratic document requesting time off work for a civil servant has been identified as the only surviving handwriting of Geoffrey Chaucer, revered as the father of English literature. While it was known that the individual seeking a leave of absence was the author of The Canterbury Tales – during his 12-year employment as controller of the London Wool Quay – the application was assumed to have been made on his behalf by a clerk. Now a leading scholar argues that it was actually written by Chaucer and submitted by him for King Richard II’s approval. Prof Richard Green, a Canadian academic, said: “This would be the only known example of his hand.” From 1374 to 1386, Chaucer was the king’s controller, overseeing the payment of duty on exported and imported wool, among other goods.”

This Ukrainian group is archiving Russian soldiers’ graffiti

From Lisa Korneichuk for Hyperallergic: “After the liberation of the Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson regions, Ukrainians discovered graffiti and inscriptions left by Russian soldiers on the streets and inside the buildings they had occupied. The Ukrainian cultural nonprofit Mizhvukhamy is documenting these findings in Wall Evidence, an open archive created for future research and analysis of the Russian invasion. “These writings need to be documented before people wash them away,” said Anastasia Olexii, the archive’s project manager. Olexii stayed in Kyiv during the region’s occupation and visited nearby villages as soon as the Russians retreated in early April 2022. That’s when she and her colleagues, Mizhvukhamy’s founder Pavlo Haidai and philosopher Oleksandr Filonenko, discovered the various graffiti and decided to begin documenting them.”

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Continue reading “Geoffrey Chaucer wrote a note asking his boss for time off work”

Over the past few years, officials from a number of federal agencies have met regularly with senior executives from the major social platforms to talk about foreign troll armies, the fight against disinformation, and other areas of mutual interest. Last week, such discussions suddenly became illegal as a result of an injunction imposed by Terry Doughty, a federal judge in Louisiana, who ruled that they likely constitute an attempt by the government to coerce the social platforms, and as such a violation of the First Amendment. Doughty ordered officials across large parts of the US government to (at least temporarily) stop talking to tech companies about content moderation and removal. He also prohibited officials from “collaborating, coordinating, partnering, switchboarding, and/or jointly working with” certain academics who focus on social media.

In his 155-page, forty-five-thousand–word decision, Doughty, who was appointed by Donald Trump in 2017, wrote that the lawsuit that led to his decision—which was filed last year by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri—addressed no lesser stakes than “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” The attorneys general, Doughty said, had presented evidence of “a massive effort” by the White House to “suppress speech based on its content.” He went on to list the types of speech that the government had allegedly coerced the platforms into blocking, including the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the lab-leak theory of the origins of COVID-19, the efficacy of masks and lockdowns, the efficacy of COVID vaccines, the 2020 election, the security of voting by mail, “parody content,” negative posts about the economy, and negative posts about President Biden.

A Biden administration official said after the ruling that in talking to the platforms, the government has merely been involved in efforts to promote “responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security,” and that it never coerced anyone. Either way, the ruling quickly had an effect on such talks: last Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that the State Department had canceled a meeting with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, in which they had planned to discuss foreign influence campaigns. The next day, the Justice Department asked for Doughty’s injunction to be stayed, arguing that it was “both sweeping in scope and vague in its terms.” The government also characterized the injunction as internally contradictory: it prohibits officials from speaking publicly about social media posts, but at the same time assures the government that its officials are free to exercise their own right to free speech.

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

Continue reading “The government talking to the platforms is a First Amendment minefield. A judge just blew it up”

From Lars Wegner for VG: “On 3 June 1995, a young woman is found dead on the bed in Room 2805 of the Oslo Plaza, shot through the forehead with a Browning 9 mm pistol. She checked in as Jennifer Fergate, but the name is false. Who is this stylish woman? Why are the labels removed from her clothes? Why is she carrying 34 rounds of ammunition? Why has no one reported her missing? In 2017, in collaboration with the Oslo police, VG makes a final attempt to learn the identity of the Plaza woman. What really happened in Room 2805? Fake name, clothing labels removed, and nothing at all in the room to indicate the young woman’s identity. No passport. No wallet, no money, no credit card. No handbag, driver’s license or keys. Not even toiletries or make-up.”

The Cold War’s most important hot dog stand

From Dan Lewis at Now I Know: “The hot dog stand in the picture was located in Arlington County, Virginia, embedded inside the U.S. Department of Defense’s headquarters, better known as the Pentagon. During the Cold War, planning operations happened inside the building, of course, but the Pentagon’s design has an outdoor section as well — a courtyard in the center of the facility. And toward the center of the courtyard was the hot dog stand in question. On a nice day — and Virginia has pretty good weather — many a Pentagon employee would go to the hot dog stand (and it served more than just hot dogs) for lunch. Which is what prompted the reported confusion. Reportedly, by using satellite imagery, the Soviets could see groups of U.S. military officers entering and exiting the hot dog stand at about the same time every day. They concluded that the stand was the entrance to an underground bunker.”

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Continue reading “A mysterious death at the Oslo Plaza Hotel baffles investigators”