Month: March 2024

From The Guardian: “I think I was about 10 years old when I discovered my mother was a sex worker. I arrived home one afternoon from school and caught her at work. Hearing sounds I vaguely associated with sex, I let myself in, then quietly straight back out again. I wasn’t actually sure what I knew for quite a while. Eventually, I put it together: an unusually high level of phone calls, whispered conversations in the hall and a too-young viewing of the film Pretty Baby meant I realised what her new business was. She certainly wasn’t a secretary any more, as I had always believed her to be. She was in her mid-40s, and maybe she had long ago found other ways to support us. I am unsure of much of my personal history – where one lie ends, and another begins.”

Note: I neglected to include a link to yesterday’s top story about Havana Syndrome, so if you still want to read it, you can find it here.

How Frank Oppenheimer differed from his more famous brother Robert

From Knowable magazine: “During the post-World War II years, the emotionally close ties between the brothers (Robert — the “father of the atom bomb” — and his younger brother, Frank — the “uncle” of the bomb, as he mischievously called himself) were strained and for a time even fractured. Both hoped that the nascent nuclear technology would remain under global, and peaceful, control. Both hoped that the sheer horror of the weapons they helped to build could lead to a warless world. They were on the same side, but not on the same page when it came to tactics. Robert — whose fame surged after the war — believed decisions should be left to experts who understood the issues and had the power to make things happen — that is, people like himself. Frank believed just as fiercely that everyday people had to be involved. It took everyone to win the war, he argued, and it would take everyone to win the peace. In the end, both lost.”

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Continue reading “When I discovered that my mother was a sex worker”

From Scientific American: “In late 2016 U.S. diplomats and family members based in Cuba began reporting a wide swath of neurological symptoms, including dizziness, headaches, deafness and difficulty concentrating, following exposure to ear-splitting noises around their homes. This “Havana syndrome” outbreak disrupted U.S. relations with Cuba, spawned congressional hearings on the “attacks” and left some people with years of disabling symptoms, leading to years of debate among scientists about possible causes, which ranged from pesticides to group psychology to noise from crickets. Now two medical studies conducted by the National Institutes of Health might finally have an answer. The researchers compared more than 80 of these affected individuals with healthy people. The results, detailed in the Journal of the American Medical Association, show no clinical signs of any brain or medical illness.”

Trailblazing French artist Rosa Bonheur is finally getting the attention she deserves

From The Smithsonian: “The richest and most famous female artist of 19th-century France, Marie-Rosalie Bonheur lived and worked here at her small Château de By, above the Seine River town of Thomery, for almost 40 years. There were other female painters in her day, but none like Bonheur. Shattering female convention, she painted animals in lifelike, exacting detail, as big and wild as she wanted, studying them in their natural, mud-and-odor-filled settings. That she was a woman with a gift for self-promotion contributed to her celebrity—and her notoriety. So did her personal life. She was an eccentric and a pioneer who wore men’s clothes, never married and championed gender equality, not as a feminist for all women but for herself and her art. Her paintings brought her fame and fortune and she was sought after by royals, statesmen and celebrities.”

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 “People with Havana Syndrome show no signs of brain damage or other illness”

From The Guardian: “Christopher Knight was 20 years old when he walked away from society, not to be seen again for more than a quarter of a century. He had been working for less than a year near Boston, Massachusetts, when abruptly, without giving notice to his boss, he quit his job. He never even returned his tools. He cashed his final pay cheque and left town. Knight did not tell anyone where he was going. He drove north to Maine, where he had grown up, then parked the car and tossed the keys on the console. He had a tent and a backpack but no compass, no map. Without knowing where he was going, he stepped into the trees and walked away. His departure from the outside world was a confounding mix of incredible commitment and complete lack of forethought. It was as if he went camping for the weekend and then didn’t come home for 25 years.”

China’s emerging psychedelic scene looks a lot like the scene in Silicon Valley

From Vox: “Professor of Chinese Studies Fan Pen Li Chen writes that the history of Chinese psychedelic use is a conspicuous blank in contemporary English language accounts. In modern times, too, China has rarely been included in talks of the psychedelic renaissance. Gearin notes that ayahuasca’s introduction into modern China is similarly tough to pin down, though accounts of Indigenous ayahuasca shamans begin in the early 21st century. Gearin spent years embedded with ayahuasca users across mainland China. He chronicled the experiences of people like “Ting Ting,” a Chinese woman in her early 30s who manages a large technology firm and hopes that drinking ayahuasca will help advance her career, and “Wang,” a 34-year-old executive manager at a fast-food franchise who drinks ayahuasca to become more successful at his job.”

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 “He walked into the woods and disappeared for 27 years”

Over the past decade or so, as social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have become significant forums for public speech, governments in the US and elsewhere have made informal recommendations to them about their handling of issues such as hate speech, terrorist content, and disinformation. In legal parlance, this kind of contact is known as “jawboning,” a word that generally connotes an act of persuasion. But some critics, especially on the right, argue that it actually amounts to government censorship. 

In 2022, the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration, alleging that officials violated the First Amendment by “coercing” or “significantly encouraging” social media companies to block content related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the efficacy of vaccines, and the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. Last July (as I wrote at the time for CJR), a federal judge in Louisiana handed down an injunction that forbade government agents from engaging in behavior of this type. He also described the discussions between the administration and the platforms as the “most massive attack against free speech” in US history. The Biden administration appealed. In September, a judge of the Fifth Circuit appeals court upheld the injunction.

That judge also struck down some parts of the injunction, ruling that it was overly broad. The Biden administration was still not happy with the outcome, however. Elizabeth Prelogar, the solicitor general, asked the Supreme Court to block the order in its entirety, arguing that one of the cornerstones of presidential power is the ability to “seek to persuade Americans—and American companies—to act in ways that the president believes would advance the public interest.” Allowing the injunction to stand, Prelogar wrote, would result in “grave and irreparable harms.” She called on the Supreme Court to rule, once and for all, on whether the administration’s discussions with the platforms were lawful or not. 

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

Continue reading “The Supreme Court hears arguments about government ‘jawboning’”

From JSTOR Daily: “It takes a lot to be branded the most dangerous woman in the world. This was life for Mary Ann Duignan, a.k.a. May Churchill Sharpe, a.k.a. “Chicago May,” who made her way from Europe to America and back again as one the most notorious criminals of the early 1900s. Duignan was born in Ireland in 1871. But life across the ocean was calling her, and she answered by leaving home in 1890. May left home in the middle of the night, taking her family’s life savings with her, and unlike other European emigrants, she made that transatlantic trip in luxury, using her stolen gains to travel first-class. May, like many women in the city, turned to sex work to make ends meet, but she preferred to call herself a ‘badger,’ the term for a con-woman who entices her victim with sex, then robs him before she has to complete her part of the bargain.”

A second man is charged in the theft of Judy Garland’s famous red slippers

From the New York Times: “A second man has been charged in connection with the 2005 theft of a pair of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz,” according to the authorities, who said that he had threatened to release a sex tape of a woman if she told the authorities about the theft. The man, Jerry Hal Saliterman, 76, of Hennepin County, Minn., was charged on Friday with one count of theft of major artwork and one count of witness tampering. The famed red-sequined pumps were stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minn., in 2005. Their whereabouts were a mystery for years until 2018, when the F.B.I. announced that they had been recovered. According to the indictment, Saliterman received the slippers, which he knew were stolen, and tried to intimidate an unidentified woman by threatening to reveal a sex tape of her to her family if “she did not keep her mouth shut.”

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 “Chicago May was “the most dangerous woman in the world””

From The Guardian: “Laurie Anderson, the American avant garde artist, musician and thinker says she has grown hopelessly hooked on an AI text generator that emulates the vocabulary and style of her own longtime partner and collaborator, Velvet Underground co-founder Lou Reed, who died in 2013. She fed a vast cache of Reed’s writing, songs and interviews into the machine. A decade after his death, the resulting algorithm lets Anderson type in prompts before an AI Reed begins “riffing” written responses back to her, in prose and verse. “I’m totally 100%, sadly addicted to this,” she laughs. “I still am, after all this time. I kind of literally just can’t stop doing it, and my friends just can’t stand it.” The results, Anderson says, can be hit and miss. “Three-quarters of it is just completely idiotic and stupid. And then maybe 15% is like, ‘Oh?’. And then the rest is pretty interesting. And that’s a pretty good ratio for writing, I think.”

She can tell whether someone has Parkinson’s based on the way they smell

From the BBC: “A Scottish woman who found she could detect Parkinson’s through smell has inspired scientists to develop a swab test that could be used to diagnose it. Researchers in Manchester have created a new method which they say can detect the disease in three minutes. Their work was inspired by Joy Milne, a retired nurse from Perth. Joy, 72, knew her husband Les had Parkinson’s more than 12 years before he was diagnosed when she identified a change in the way he smelled. “He had this musty rather unpleasant smell especially round his shoulders and the back of his neck and his skin had definitely changed,” she said. She only linked the odour to the disease after Les was diagnosed and they met people at a Parkinson’s UK support group who had the same distinctive smell. Now a team in the University of Manchester, working with Joy, has developed a simple skin-swab test which they claim is 95% accurate under laboratory conditions when it comes to telling whether people have Parkinson’s.”

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 “Laurie Anderson is addicted to an AI version of Lou Reed”