Month: November 2023

From Vanessa Vaselka for the Smithsonian: “Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felso-Szilvas, an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat born in 1877, was a notorious figure in his day. A wild genius with a flair for the dandyish and the dramatic, he was an explorer, spy, polyglot and master of disguise. He crossed the Albanian Alps on foot, and was nearly crowned King of Albania. Later in his life, he was known for chasing villagers from his estate with a pistol. But the baron was also one of the great scholars and scientific minds of his time. He was one of the first scientists to look at fossilized dinosaur bones and see a living creature. And he was a staunch believer in the relationship between birds and dinosaurs, decades before the idea became widely accepted among paleontologists.”

Why you might find a shoe hidden inside the walls of your house

From Katrina Gulliver for JSTOR Daily: “If you live in an old house, there may be more than you realize behind its walls or under its floors. For centuries, there was a custom in Great Britain (which spread to Britain’s colonies in the Americas) of ritual concealment, placing objects in different parts of the house as totems. The practice seems to have been widespread in Britain from the medieval period into the twentieth century. Often, the concealed object was a shoe. The oldest such hidden shoe was found at Winchester Cathedral and dated to 1308. Cases of hidden shoes also “abound” in New England. John Adams Birthplace, a house built by Joseph Penniman in 1681, contained an incredible forty-four shoes and boots, discovered during restoration.”

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Continue reading “He discovered dinosaurs but died penniless”

From Alex Mar for The Guardian: “In the spring of 1985, Paula Cooper was 15 and on her lunch break at Lew Wallace high school in Indiana. She and her friends Karen and April decided to skip their afternoon classes and head over to Candyland Arcade around the corner. Karen was Paula’s best friend at school. At 16, Karen was a large girl, often out of breath; everyone called her Pooky, maybe because of her sweet face. She had a child, who was three, and he mostly stayed at home with her godmother. April, too, was pregnant – though she could still hide it. April mentioned an old woman who lived in the house just behind hers, the home of Ruth Pelke. April told them she was a Bible teacher, an elderly white woman, and that, since her husband’s death, she had lived alone.”

The mysterious death of Lord Kitchener

From Jeremy Paxman at the Financial Times: “On a sunny day, Marwick Head is a glorious place to be. At the top of the headland stands a squat, crenellated tower. Almost 50ft high and visible for miles, it has no obvious function – too fat to be a lighthouse, too small to be a castle. A stone panel explains: “This tower was raised by the people of Orkney in memory of Field Marshall Earl Kitchener of Khartoum. He and his staff perished along with the officers and nearly all the men of HMS Hampshire on 5th June, 1916.” Though it is hardly remembered at all today, the wreck of the Hampshire was seen at the time as little short of a national disaster. Hundreds of men perished that night, among them the best-known soldier in the English-speaking world. The conspiracy theories began almost at once. How could such an important figure, in the full protection of the greatest navy in the world, be dead?”

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Continue reading “A violent murder in Indiana and a child left on death row”

From Jacob Judah for MIT Tech Review: “Tokelau, a necklace of three isolated atolls strung out across the Pacific, is so remote that it was the last place on Earth to be connected to the telephone—only in 1997. Just three years later, the islands received a fax with an unlikely business proposal that would change everything. It was from an early internet entrepreneur from Amsterdam, named Joost Zuurbier. He wanted to manage Tokelau’s country-code top-level domain, or ccTLD—the short string of characters that is tacked onto the end of a URL. Until recently, its .tk domain had more users than any other country’s: a staggering 25 million. But nearly all the websites and others that have used .tk  have been spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals.”

The secret room where Michelangelo drew on the walls while he was in hiding

From Open Culture: “In the year 1530, Michelangelo was sentenced to death by Pope Clement VII. The Florence-born Michelangelo had come to the aid of his hometown by working on its fortifications, and that drew the ire of the Medici. They pardoned him before long, so he could finish his work on the Sistine Chapel, but while he was in hiding he spent several months making dozens of drawings, all of which he drew directly on the walls. Their existence remained unknown until 1975 when Paolo Dal Poggetto, then the director of the Medici Chapels, one of five museums that make up the Bargello Museums, was searching for a suitable space to create a new exit for the museum.”

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 “A tiny Pacific Island became a hotspot for cybercrime”

From Emily Zarevich for JSTOR Daily: “It was exactly the kind of thing a reckless twenty-something-year-old would do. But why would a rational, academically accomplished, thirty-year-old philosophy teacher do it? For whatever reason, Sartre made the decision to get high on mescaline, used at the time to treat alcoholism and depression, and recruited a doctor friend to inject him with it at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris. If Sartre was looking for some kind of epiphany, it presented itself to him in a very bizarre form. For days he was tormented by illusions of crustaceans. Not the charming, singing, Disney-style ones, but demonic, taunting sea beasts that followed him wherever he went. His clock became an owl, his umbrella metamorphosed into a vulture.”

A QAnon cult set up a compound in a small town but the locals are fighting back

From Mack Lamoureux for Vice: “Hugh Everding, a bald hulking man of about 6’4”, stares out of the kitchen window as police vehicle after police vehicle rolls down the street headed towards a check stop manned by a half-dozen cops. Every entry point into this town has such a check stop, ready to interrogate both locals and miscreants on what their business is. There’s little doubt that at this moment, Richmound, Saskatchewan, population 130, is the most fortified town in all of Canada. You can always spot a storm brewing in the Prairies, and in Hugh’s case, it was just across the street, where the so-called QAnon Queen of Canada and her followers had taken over an abandoned school.”

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 “That time Jean-Paul Sartre got high on mescaline”

From Eamon Javers for CNBC: “As he was cheering on his team in LA in 2019, Jimmy Zhong couldn’t have known that a small group of agents from the IRS Criminal Investigation unit, were painstakingly trying to solve a crime that dated back years. It was a 2012 hack in which someone had stolen 50,000 bitcoins from a site on the dark web called Silk Road. Over the years, the value of the bitcoin stolen by the Silk Road hacker had soared to more than $3 billion. Investigators could track the location of the currency on the blockchain, but they couldn’t see the identity of the owner. Then the hacker made a tiny mistake. He transferred around $800 worth to a crypto exchange that required real names and addresses. The account was registered in Zhong’s name.”

The Paris catacombs don’t just play host to millions of skeletons, there are parties too

From Frank Jacobs for Atlas Obscura: “Most people have heard of the Catacombs of Paris: subterranean charnel houses for the bones of around six million dead Parisians. They are one of the French capital’s most famous tourist attractions—and undoubtedly its grisliest. But they constitute only a small fragment of what the locals themselves call the mines of Paris, a collection of tunnels and galleries up to 300 km long, most of which are off-limits to the public, yet eagerly explored by so-called cataphiles. The Great Southern Network takes up around 200 km beneath the city, all south of the river Seine, and smaller networks run under other parts of Paris. But how did they get there?”

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 Bitcoin thief who stole and then lost $3 billion”

From Michael Idov for GQ in 2011: “The rumors started seeping out of Ukraine: A young Russian film director had holed up on the outskirts of Kharkov, a town of 1.4 million in the country’s east, making…something. If the gossip was to be believed, this was the most expansive, complicated, all-consuming film project ever attempted. A steady stream of former extras and fired PAs talked of the shoot in terms usually reserved for survivalist camps. The director, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, orced the crew to dress in Stalin-era clothes, fed them Soviet food out of cans and tins, and paid them in Soviet money. Khrzhanovsky had taken over all of Kharkov, they said, shutting down the airport. Others insisted, the entire thing was a prison experiment, filmed by hidden cameras.”

When a giant pink bunny appeared on a hill in the Italian countryside

From Dan Lewis at Now I Know: “The Italian village of Frabosa Sottana is located in the northwestern part of the country, in the foothills of the Alps. It’s a small, nondescript municipality, home to only about 1,500 people. And one day, the residents woke up to find a giant pink rabbit lying on the hill of the local ski resort. This was no child’s toy – it was 200 feet long and about 20 feet high. It turned out that the rabbit was put there by a Vienna-based art collective, which does all sorts of weird things like this; in 2014, they built a giant nose in an open space in Germany. The rabbit was knitted from wool and stuffed with hay, and was designed to make a statement about decay – and it did, since it rotted away and was almost completely gone by about 2016.”

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 “How a movie set turned into a totalitarian prison camp”

It’s been a big week for AI regulation—or at least, the idea of it. On Monday, the Biden administration published an executive order on “the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence”; while AI has the potential to help solve a number of urgent challenges, the EO said, the irresponsible use of the same technology could “exacerbate societal harms such as fraud, discrimination, bias, and disinformation,” and create risks to national security. Then, yesterday, the British government opened a two-day summit on AI safety at Bletchley Park, the site where codebreakers famously deciphered German messages during World War II. Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, said that AI will bring changes “as far reaching as the industrial revolution, the coming of electricity, or the birth of the internet,” but that there is also a risk that humanity could “lose control” of the technology. And the European Union has been trying to push forward AI legislation that it has been working on for more than two years.

AI and its potential risks and benefits are at the top of many agendas at the same time. Yesterday, Vice President Kamala Harris, who is attending the Bletchley Park summit, gave a speech in which she rejected “the false choice that suggests we can either protect the public or advance innovation,” adding, “We can—and we must—do both.” Ahead of time, a British official told Politico that the speech would show that the summit was a “real focal point” for global AI regulation (even if, as Politico noted, it “may overshadow Bletchley a bit.”) When it comes down to it, though, the US, the UK, and the EU are taking different approaches to the problem—differences that are, in many cases, the result of political factors specific to each jurisdiction. 

In the US, the Biden administration’s order aims to put some bite behind voluntary AI rules that it released earlier this year—but it doesn’t go as far as an actual law because there’s no chance one of those would pass. That’s because Congress—as Anu Bradford, a law professor at Columbia University, told the MIT Technology Review—is “deeply polarized and even dysfunctional to the extent that it is very unlikely to produce any meaningful AI legislation in the near future.” Partly as a result, some observers have accused the White House of resorting to “hand waving” about the problem. The full executive order is over a hundred pages long; some of those are filled with definitions of terms that not every reader will be familiar with (“floating point operation”; “dual-use foundation model”) but there is also some rambling as to the potential of AI, both positive and negative. 

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

Continue reading “The world grapples with how to regulate artificiaI intelligence”

From John Reed for Vice: “When I was four or five, sometimes I’d walk into my grandmother’s bedroom to find her weeping. She’d be sitting on the side of the bed, going through boxes of tissues. People were always dying around Grandma—her children, her husbands, her boyfriend—so her lifelong state of grief was understandable. To see her sunken in her high and soft bed, enshrouded in the darkness of the attic, and surrounded by the skin-and-spit smell of old age, was to know that mothers don’t get what they deserve. Today, when I think back on it, I don’t wonder whether Grandma got what she deserved as a mother; I wonder whether she got what she deserved as a murderer.”

Inside the capital of Lithuania there’s a tiny micronation called Uzupis

From Daisy Alioto for Dirt: “The Republic of Užupis—a 7,000-resident micronation inside the country’s capital—is located adjacent to Vilnius’s Old Town, just across the Vilnia river. Since its founding on April 1st, 1997, the 148-acre micronation has captured the imagination of the world. Most of this fascination stems from the republic’s unusual constitution, which includes articles like “11. Everyone has the right to look after the dog until one of them dies.” Užupis was born from tragedy. The micronation was founded by Tomas Čepaitis and Romas Lileikis in an attempt to reclaim the derelict area known primarily for its high crime rate. What was once a thriving Jewish neighborhood had fallen into ruin after the murder of 95% of Lithuania’s Jewish population.”

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 “When you think you have a murderer in the family”