Month: August 2023

From Becky Little for History.com: “After World War II, a critical MI5 spy named Juan Pujol Garcia faked his own death, and kept it secret for almost four decades. And that’s not even the most interesting thing about him. Pujol was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and when Britain went to war with Germany in 1939, he was determined to join the British war effort as a spy against Germany; so determined that he wasn’t deterred when British officers turned him down because he didn’t have any connections or credentials. Posing as a Spanish official who was flying to London, Pujol made contact with Nazi officials in Madrid and told them that he was interested in spying on Britain for the Third Reich. After that, he began sending the Nazis fabricated information that they thought was from London, but which was actually fed from Lisbon and Madrid. Essentially, Pujol became a rogue double-agent whom Britain didn’t even know it had.”

On the trail of the guerrilla programmer who is archiving the Internet

From Jani Patokallio at Gyrovague: “Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can’t afford to pay what can be hundreds of dollars a year in subscriptions? If so, you may have already stumbled on archive.today, which provides easy access to these and much more: just paste in the article link, and you’ll get back a snapshot of the page, full content included. For a long time, I assumed that this was some kind of third-party skin on top of the venerable Internet Archive, whose Wayback Machine provides a very similar service, at the very similar address archive.org. But the Internet Archive is a legitimate non-profit with a budget of $37 million and 169 full-time employees in 2019. Archive.today, by contrast, is an opaque mystery. So who runs this and where did they come from?”

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.

Continue reading “This World War Two spy faked his own death for 36 years”

Do journalists need to change the way we write about Elon Musk? Casey Newton, who writes the Platformer newsletter, is among those who think that we do. Musk’s behavior as the owner and (until recently) CEO of X, the company formerly known as Twitter, may have started out  mesmerizing, like a multi-car pileup on the freeway, but at some point, his penchant for making statements and promises that are not only untrue, but will likely never become true, raises questions about how we should cover him. To take just one recent example cited by Newton, Musk bragged about a proposed martial-arts fight with Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta. Musk promised that the fight would be live-streamed on X, with the proceeds going to charity; he also hinted that the fight might take place at the Colosseum, in Rome. Behind the scenes, however, Musk reportedly ignored attempts to book a time for the fight, then said he needed more time, and might need surgery.

A grudge match between Zuckerberg and Musk is the kind of thing that gets played for laughs, but other examples of the growing gap between Musk’s statements and the truth have been more serious. Despite Musk’s claim that he is a free speech maximalist, earlier this month, X launched a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a research group that investigated hate speech on the platform and found that it has been increasing. X alleges that the researchers violated the platform’s terms of service in a “scare campaign to drive away advertisers.” The suit also claims that the center “engaged in a series of unlawful acts designed to improperly gain access to protected X Corp. data,” as well as breach of contract, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, intentional interference with contractual relations, and inducing breach of contract. (In turn, Imran Ahmed, the center’s CEO, accused Musk of “a brazen attempt to silence honest criticism and independent research.”)

To take another example, Musk said in February that X would start sharing ad revenue with creators on the platform. This promise generated some favorable coverage from business and technology journalists. As Newton notes, however, after sending a small number of creators a single payment last month, X announced that too many creators had applied and that it had thus decided to delay the rollout of the plan indefinitely. Then, over the weekend, after a NASCAR driver was suspended for liking a post that made fun of the police killing of George Floydin 2020, Musk promised to pay the legal bills of anyone whose employer has “unfairly treated” them as a consequence of their activity on X. But many observers are skeptical that this will ever happen. “Given that Musk won’t even pay his own vendors,” Newton wrote, “it strains credulity that he would file unlimited lawsuits” to defend ordinary users from attack. (And Musk, reportedly, has also fired a number of employees for criticizing him.)

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

Continue reading “Covering Elon Musk raises some of the same questions that covering Trump did”

From Daniel Russell at Unanticipated Consequences: “At the start of World War II, all kinds of ideas for novel weapons were being explored as ways to end the war. Perhaps the most unlikely was Project X-Ray, an attempt to arm Mexican free-tailed bats with tiny incendiary charges. The idea came from a dental surgeon, Lytle S. Adams, who had seen the vast clouds of bats flowing out of Carlsbad caverns. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adams thought of combining the bats with small, fiery charges that would go off after the bats were dropped from a plane. If the bats were dropped at dawn over a Japanese city, they would look for a comfortable place to spend the daylight hours, then the timed fuses would go off, setting the building ablaze.” (Thanks for this items, David Weinberger!)

How an amateur diver became a true-crime sensation

From Rachel Monroe for The New Yorker: “In December, 2020, Brandy’s husband showed her a video he’d seen on YouTube. It was made by a group called Adventures with Purpose, volunteer salvage divers who investigated cold cases by searching for cars in lakes and rivers. Brandy spent the evening binge-watching their videos, including one about Nicholas Allen, a North Carolina teen-ager who had disappeared a few months earlier, and whose submerged vehicle and body had been recovered by A.W.P. divers. The video showed Allen’s mother, Judy Riley, standing on the shore of a muddy river, sobbing. “I’ve known he was here. I’ve known and I’ve begged and I’ve asked, and today you guys got me my answers,” she said in the video. That evening, Brandy sent A.W.P. a Facebook message: “I’m hoping to find out how you determine which missing persons cases you work? My mother and her car have been missing without a trace since 1991.”

Continue reading “Bat bombs: A World War II idea that didn’t turn out so well”

From Suzanne Raga for Mental Floss: “For Lyudmila Pavlichenko, killing Nazis wasn’t complicated. “The only feeling I have is the great satisfaction a hunter feels who has killed a beast of prey,” she once said of her job. But Pavlichenko wasn’t just any soldier: She was the most successful female sniper in history, and one of the most successful snipers, period. As a member of the Soviet Army during World War II, she killed 309 Nazis, earning the sobriquet “Lady Death.” She also became a public figure who toured North America and Britain, befriended Eleanor Roosevelt, and spoke candidly about gender equality—especially when she was fed up with American reporters. Pavlichenko killed hundreds of enemy combatants in Odessa, Moldavia, and Sevastopol. “We mowed down the Hitlerites like ripe grain,” she later said.”

Switched at birth, two Canadian men discover their roots at the age of 67

From Norimitsu Onishi at the New York Times: “Richard Beauvais’s identity began unraveling two years ago, after one of his daughters became interested in his ancestry. She urged him to take an at-home DNA test. Mr. Beauvais, then 65, had spent a lifetime describing himself as “half French, half Indian,” or Métis, and he had grown up with his grandparents in a log house in a Métis settlement. So when the test showed a mix of Ukrainian, Ashkenazi Jewish and Polish ancestry, he dismissed it as a mistake. But around the same time, in the province of Manitoba, a young member of Eddy Ambrose’s extended family had shattered his identity with the same test. Mr. Ambrose had grown up attending Mass in Ukrainian, but he wasn’t Ukrainian at all. He was Métis.”

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.

Continue reading “Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the greatest female sniper of all time”

For much of the last decade, academic researchers have been trying to persuade Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, to share internal data about the behavior of users on its platforms, so that they might understand how—if at all—the sites’ algorithms influence people’s political views and behavior. The company suggested that it might offer such access; back in 2018, it even launched a project designed to share data. But the amount of usable information it ended up offering to researchers was minuscule, and in some cases, significantly flawed. As I reported for CJR two years ago this month, Meta also thwarted attempts by social scientists to collect their own data through scraping, and even disabled the accounts of some researchers. All this left the impression that the company had no interest in facilitating academic scrutiny.

It was more than a little surprising, then, when social scientists last week published not one but four new studies based on user data that Meta had shared with them, part of a research project that the company launched in 2020 to analyze users’ behavior both during and immediately after that year’s presidential election. Meta provided twenty million dollars in funding (the company did not pay the researchers involved directly), and the project was coordinated by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, a nonpartisan organization that also helped to collect and distribute some of the data. The research was initially scheduled to be released in the summer of 2021, but was delayed a number of times; the lead researchers said that the job of sorting and analyzing all the data was “significantly more time-consuming” than they had expected. The January 6 riot at the Capitol also extended the project’s timeline. 

According to several of the researchers involved and an independent observer of the process—Michael W. Wagner, a professor of journalism and communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison—Meta provided virtually all the data that they requested, and did not restrict or try to influence the research. A number of Meta staffers are named as co-authors of the papers. And the project isn’t done yet—another twelve research projects are set to drop soon.

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

Continue reading “Meta let researchers study whether it stokes polarization. The results were polarizing”

From Nathan Lawrence for IGN: “If you’re a Luc Besson fan, you’ve likely seen at least one of the flashy trailers for his latest movie, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Like many big-budget movies these days, Valerian is based on a comic. If the Valérian and Laureline comics don’t ring a bell, that’s okay: you’re not alone in not knowing about the French source material. The thing is that while the trailers for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets may look like a colourful Star Wars prequel rip-off, the reality is that the Valérian and Laureline comics were birthed a decade before the original Star Wars movie hit the big screen in 1977. There’s been a lot of discussion about just how much of an influence Valérian was on Star Wars. It’s a controversial topic.”

In many best-selling trucks and cars, the engine noise you hear is at least partly fake

From Drew Harwell for the Washington Post: “Stomp on the gas in a new Ford Mustang or F-150 and you’ll hear a meaty, throaty rumble — the same style of roar that Americans have associated with auto power and performance for decades. It’s a sham. The engine growl in some of America’s best-selling cars and trucks is actually a finely tuned bit of lip-syncing, boosted through special pipes or digitally faked altogether. And it’s driving car enthusiasts insane. Fake engine noise has become one of the auto industry’s dirty little secrets, with automakers from BMW to Volkswagen turning to a sound-boosting bag of tricks. Softer-sounding engines are actually a positive symbol of just how far engines and gas economy have progressed. But automakers say they resort to artifice because they understand a key car-buyer paradox: Drivers want all the force and fuel savings of a newer, better engine — but the classic sound of an old gas-guzzler.”

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.

Continue reading “Star Wars was inspired in part by a French science-fiction comic”

From the University of Alaska, via Kottke.org: “An unexpected find in a University of Alaska Fairbanks archive has revealed more information about the oft-debated April 1910 Sourdough Expedition climb of Denali, North America’s highest mountain. Photographs found by UAF Geophysical Institute professor Matthew Sturm in the university’s Rasmuson Library archives in October show the climbing party at about 16,500 feet — far higher on the 20,310-foot mountain than previously seen. The New York Times on June 5, 1910, carried three full pages about the climb under the headline “First account of conquering Mount McKinley” and included a photograph made at about 11,000 feet. Within weeks of the Times story, however, the climb was largely discredited as a hoax and remained so until 1918 when Hudson Stuck published his book on his successful 1913 ascent of the south — and higher — summit.” (More here)

Mozart’s musical creations were inspired in part by his pet starling

From Emily Hogstad for Interlude magazine: “On 27 May 1784, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart bought a pet starling bird at a Viennese pet shop. Normally historians and musicologists don’t pay much attention to composers’ pets, but this starling wasn’t your average pet. Because when Mozart recorded the thirty-four kreutzer expense in his diary, he also transcribed a melody purportedly sung by his new bird. He included two versions: one that the bird sang, and another that was “cleaned up” for insertion into a piece of concert music. This pet store purchase actually raises some serious musicological questions. Mozart wrote on the score that he completed the work April 12, and he wrote in his expense diary that he bought the concerto-singing bird on May 27. The earliest public performance of the concerto (that we know of, anyway) was by a Mozart student on June 13. So what came first: the concerto or the birdsong?”

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.

Continue reading “Amateurs got to Denali’s peak first, but no one believed them”

From Rosemary Giles for War History Online: “Nakano Takeko was born into a well-respected samurai family in April 1847. From an early age – sources indicate she began as early as six years old – she was exposed to the ways of combat and weaponry. Her teacher, Akaoka Daisuke, also taught her the literary arts and calligraphy and she was taught to wield the naginata, a Japanese pole weapon with a curved blade. The Boshin War marked the end of the Tokugawa shogunate and the restoration of imperial rule in Japan. Even though she was immensely qualified, Nakano Takeko wasn’t supposed to fight, given she was a woman. This didn’t stop her. At only 21 years old, she put together an ad hoc group of female warriors (Onna-musha) called the Jōshitai. Alongside her 40-year-old mother and 16-year-old sister, several other women joined.”

Michelangelo and the invention of the Star Fort

From Sheehan Quirke, also known as The Cultural Tutor: “An unusual little village in the Netherlands’ called Bourtange is built in and around a star fort. This was a type of military fortification which first appeared in Italy in the 15th century as a response to the rise of cannons in warfare. They were, in essence, replacements for the old Medieval castles with their huge towers and ramparts. The star fort was designed with low, angled walls to deflect cannon balls and built from brick rather than stone, which shattered upon impact with cannon balls. Its unsual overall plan ensured that enemies would always be in the line of fire, even when right up against the walls. None other than Michelangelo who played a major role in the early development of the star fort, when he was employed to design defences for the city of Florence. They soon spread all around Europe and, despite being a necessary reaction to the changing technologies and realities of war, even started to shape some ideas about city and urban planning.”

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.

Continue reading “The female warrior who was one of the last Samurai”