Month: March 2024

From Theo Padnos: “The thing about life in an electricity-less cell underground is that you soon lose your orientation in time and space. Sometimes you wake up in the early evening believing it to be dawn. Winter couldn’t possibly have come yet, you tell yourself, and then one day, some chance glimpse of the out-of-doors reveals the snow to be sifting down over a courtyard. One’s captors do everything in their power to deepen this disorientation. Whenever you most need to see, that’s when they put you in a blindfold. You’re not meant to know the date, who’s winning the war, where you are, anyone’s actual names. During my time in Syria, I sustained a series of head injuries. Under such circumstances, the more one stares at the walls, the more the room spins. Which way is the floor? Off which walls is the gunfire ricocheting? You can guess, but really you have no idea.”

Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic work, but not in the way scientists originally thought they did

From The Atlantic: “When scientists first created the class of drugs that includes Ozempic, they told a tidy story about how the medications would work: The gut releases a hormone called GLP-1 that signals you’re full, so a drug that mimics GLP-1 could do the exact same thing, helping people eat less and lose weight. The rest, as they say, is history. The GLP-1 revolution birthed semaglutide, which became Ozempic and Wegovy, and tirzepatide, which became Mounjaro and Zepbound—drugs that are rapidly changing the face of obesity medicine. They work as intended: as modulators of appetite. But at the same time that they have become massive successes, the science that underpinned their development has fallen apart. The fact that they worked was serendipity, Randy Seeley, an obesity researcher at the University of Michigan, told me.”

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 “What it was like to spend two years as a hostage in Syria”

From the NYT: “Like a lot of explosive financial scandals, the story of Michael Quinn and Brendan Cahill could fairly be described as a simple proposition that spun completely out of control. The two had been working in Nigeria since the 1970s, doing small-time deals in the energy and defense sectors, like fixing tanks and siting oil wells. But in the mid-2000s, they spied a bigger opportunity. They knew that Nigeria’s refineries were burning off most of the gas during oil drilling, so they proposed a plant that would take in that gas and use it to power the grid. Then the government changed its mind, so they went to arbitration. Quinn and Cahill hadn’t laid a single pipe for the gas-leaning facility, but this was immaterial. When the arbitration finished, the government of Nigeria was defeated and the decision was in P.&I.D.’s favor. The damages were $6.6 billion.”

The founder of Alcoholics Anonymous tried LSD and ignited a controversy still raging today

From Inverse: “It’s August 29, 1956. A philosopher, a psychiatrist, and his research assistant watch as the most famous recovering alcoholic puts a dose of LSD in his mouth and swallows. The man is Bill Wilson and he’s the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, the largest abstinence-only addiction recovery program in the world. By the time the man millions affectionately call “Bill W.” dropped acid, he’d been sober for more than two decades. His experience would fundamentally transform his outlook on recovery, horrify A.A. leadership, and disappoint hundreds of thousands. All this because Wilson believed other recovering alcoholics could benefit from taking LSD as a way to facilitate the “spiritual experience” he believed was necessary to successful recovery. “

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 two Irish businessmen almost took Nigeria for $11 billion”

From The Economist: “The wake-up call in cell number nine of the ik-6 prison colony in the Siberian town of Omsk comes at 5am in the form of the Russian national anthem blasting from a loudspeaker. Vladimir Kara-Murza, a journalist and politician, knew as soon as he heard the opening chord that he had only five minutes to get up before prison guards would take away his pillow and mattress. By 5.20am his metal bed frame, attached to the wall, would be locked up so that he could not use it for the rest of the day. Kara-Murza’s cell, painted in bright blue, was five metres long and two metres wide. In the middle, a table and a bench were screwed to the floor. The only objects he was allowed to keep were a mug, a tooth brush, a towel and a pair of slippers. The light was never turned off. Later in the morning a mug of tea and a bowl of gluey porridge made from an unidentifiable grain would be pushed through a small hatch.”

He conned 18th-century London society by inventing his own language

From The Atlantic: “A Modest Proposal makes a passing reference to “the famous Psalmanazar, a native of the island Formosa.” This blond, blue-eyed “savage” claimed people ate children in his homeland. “When any young person happened to be put to death,” Jonathan Swift recounted, “the executioner sold the carcass to persons of quality as a prime dainty.” George Psalmanazar claimed to be a kidnapping victim who was snatched from Formosa (now known as Taiwan) by a Jesuit named Father de Rode of Avignon. In eighteenth-century England, Psalmanazar gained the same level of fame or infamy as a modern-day reality-television-star train wreck. Nobles and rich merchants invited him to their dinner tables, where he spoke gibberish while inhaling mouthfuls of bloody food. (According to imaginary custom, Formosans ate their meat raw.)”

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 “What life is like in one of Putin’s Siberian gulags”

Last month, Reddit announced that it had filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering of shares on the New York Stock Exchange, an event that observers had been anticipating for several years. (The company filed an initial statement of intention to go public in December 2021). It is expected to start trading later this month. In a blog post, Reddit described itself as a “community of communities, built on shared interests, passion, and trust” and said that it is home to the most “open and authentic conversations on the internet.” 

Ironically, at least some of those open and authentic conversations have recently concerned how terrible the Reddit stock offering will be for the community, which has developed a reputation for its somewhat anarchic attitude. One member of r/WallStreetBets, a subreddit (which is what Reddit calls its forums), suggested that others should “short the shit out of” Reddit’s stock. (Short sellers profit from a stock by betting that its price will go down.) Some users called the IPO the “beginning of the end.”

In what appeared to be an attempt to win over some of these skeptics, Reddit set aside a certain number of IPO shares for the community’s most active users. Fortune reported that in early March, some of these users logged into their accounts to find a message asking if they wanted the option to buy stock at the same price as institutional investors taking part in the IPO, with a deadline of March 5 to indicate their interest. The company called the share program a way of saying thank you to “redditors who have contributed to making Reddit what it is today.” It said that 8 percent of the total had been set aside for users, but didn’t say how it had decided which users would receive the offer. According to Fortune, Reddit is not the only company to take this approach: Uber and Airbnb both offered some of their users the option to buy shares at the IPO price when they went public, in 2019 and 2020, respectively.

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

Continue reading “Reddit tries to monetize its unruly community”

From Huck magazine: “In the week Hattie Wiener spends a copious amount of time alone in her Manhattan studio, propped up in bed with a heating pad – a tool many use to help relieve back pain and other aches. On Sundays, however, the 87-year-old transforms, prancing around her apartment in her laciest lingerie, while a friend snaps photos of her to post on OnlyFans. “You would think that perhaps my oldness would be a turnoff sexually. But it isn’t to young men,” she said. “It’s heartening to know that so many young men allow themselves to be admirers of older women’s bodies.” Hattie is one of a number of women who have launched OnlyFans accounts in their later life, demonstrating that old age is not just Alzheimer’s and wheelchairs and nursing home and smells, but that it is also interesting and adventurous and exciting and beautiful.”

It just got easier to visit a vanishing glacier, but is that a good thing?

From the NYT: “For thousands of years, humans have raced to be the first to scale a peak, cross a frontier, or document a new species or landscape. Now, in some cases, we’re racing to be the last. The term last-chance tourism, which has gained traction in the past two decades, describes the impulse to visit threatened places before they disappear. Studies have found that the appeal of the disappearing can be a powerful motivator. But in many cases, the presence of tourists at a fragile site can accelerate the place’s demise. There is some evidence that a visit to a threatened place can inspire meaningful behavioral change in visitors, potentially helping to offset the negative impacts of a trip. But research is still in its early stages, and results are mixed. In a place like Chamonix — where tourism is the mainstay of the economy, and where climate change is already having palpable effects on tourist offerings — such tensions are playing out in real time.”

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 “Senior citizens fight myths about age with sexy OnlyFans”