Month: August 2024

From Afar: “Gary Beeck’s island had all the basic ingredients of a tropical daydream: swaying palms, epoxy-clear water, a blond frill of sand fading to jungle. But a surge of trepidation hit when Beeck, a retiree from Perth, Australia, neared the uninhabited island off Sumatra’s volcano-pocked coast in May. Later that day, the boat and crew that carried him would return to shore; Beeck would stay behind, alone. Beeck had booked a “castaway” stay on the island though the travel company Docastaway. For 12 days and with just a few basic survival supplies, he planned to live off wild coconuts, plus whatever food he could catch and forage. During the drive to the boat launch that morning, a local guide had offered a final chance to purchase provisions before leaving civilization behind—there were ripe mangoes, sweetly starchy bananas. He said no. Later, and only when it was too late to change his mind, Beeck would reconsider.”

The world’s oldest hotel has been operating for more than 1300 years

From Moss and Fog: “The oldest hotels in Europe have nothing on Nisiyama Onsen Keiunkan, a traditional Japanese Ryokan that has been family run for an astonishing 52 generations. Operating since 705 AD, the hotel has all its hot water sourced directly from the local Hakuho Springs. Guests can still enjoy the same hot spring baths that visitors have been using for over a thousand years. It is located at the foot of the Akaishi Mountains, in Yamanashi Prefecture. In addition to being the oldest operating hotel, it may also be the world’s oldest continuously-operating business. Although the facilities are much younger, the business has operated continuously for over 1300 years. The Nishiyama Hot Spring is said to have had many commanders of the warring period visiting it. Amidst the unification of Japan, it is said that Tokugawa Ieyasu visited twice.”

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Continue reading “Some people are paying to be left alone on a deserted island”

From Cracked: “According to Lucy, she was driving home from MGM one evening when “all of a sudden, I heard music!” The beat was really thumping so Lucy looked down to turn off the car radio — except it wasn’t on. The music got louder as she drove, understandably freaking her out as she realized the groove was coming from inside her mouth. The next day on the studio lot, Lucy told the story to Buster Keaton, as one does. Keaton told her to chill, explaining the phenomenon of receiving AM radio through teeth fillings. On a drive home via an alternate route, Ball’s bridgework once again picked up a signal. She described the pulses in her mouth: Da da da dut! Da da da dut! Her pearly whites continued to vibrate with dots and dashes, which she now identified as Morse code. Eventually, Ball claims, her whole jaw was vibrating “and then I got the hell out of there.” She rushed into the MGM security office the next morning, and according to Ball, “they found an underground Japanese transmitting radio station!”

Smedley Butler foiled a high-level plot to overthrow the US government in the 1930s

From Damn Interesting: “In the early 1930s, a secret collection of prosperous men are said to have assembled in New York City to discuss the dissolution of America’s democracy. To assist them in their diabolical scheme, the resourceful plotters recruited the assistance of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, a venerated, highly decorated, and considerably jaded former Marine. It was the conspirators’ earnest hope that their army of 500,000 Great War veterans, under the leadership of General Butler, could overpower the US’ feeble peacetime military and reconstitute the government as a more economical fascist dictatorship. After Butler revealed the plot, MacGuire and the wealthy men he allegedly represented all denied involvement in any such plot, referring to such suggestions as “a joke, a publicity stunt.” But the investigative HUAC committee concluded that there was indeed compelling evidence of a plot.

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Continue reading “Lucille Ball said she caught Japanese spies with her teeth”

From Poles.org: “Born in Pittston PA, Faustin H. Wirkus was destined for the life of a coal miner, but he ran away at 18 and joined the Marines. In 1925, while he was a gunnery sergeant, he was appointed Marine administrator of La Gonave in order to halt internal disputes among the 12,000 natives on the small island. La Gonave had had a king named Faustin, so when Wirkus arrived the natives knelt before him, and Queen Ti Meminne pronounced him the reincarnation of the late ruler. Wirkus became king and wore a two-foot crown. He was admitted to voodoo rituals and was said to have acquired a deeper knowledge of black magic than any other white man of his time. However, officials of Haiti, which claimed jurisdiction over La Gonave became jealous and forced Wirkus to abdicate in 1929. He resigned from the Marines the same year.”

Queen guitarist Brian May has spent a decade fighting to save the badgers

From Scientific American: “Brian May has many strings to his guitar. The musician, who is still touring with his rock band Queen, is also an astrophysicist, specializing in 3D stereoscopic images of distant bodies. And to the UK public, he’s also a passionate campaigner for animal rights. After abandoning his PhD at Imperial College London in 1974 to follow his musical passions, May finally returned to complete his doctorate in 2007. Soon after, the rock star embroiled himself in a polarizing scientific row over whether the European badger was causing mass infection of cattle with bovine tuberculosis. Each year, the problem costs the UK government more than £100 million (US$130 million) and leads to the slaughter of more than 20,000 cows. In a BBC documentary airing in the United Kingdom on 23 August, May describes his decade-long research project to understand what is behind bovine TB.”

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Continue reading “The US Marine who became the king of a tropical island nation”

This is my last newsletter for CJR, as I am moving on from my job as the magazine’s chief digital writer. (In case the headline doesn’t make any sense, it comes from a Douglas Adams book, in which he describes how all the dolphins suddenly vanished from the Earth, leaving behind the message: “So long, and thanks for all the fish!”). As I reflected on the last seven years or so of writing about the intersection of media and technology, I started to think about what (if anything) has changed since my first CJR piece was published in October 2017—an essay headlined “The 140-character president,” about Donald Trump’s obsession with what was then known as Twitter.

Obviously, some things have changed quite a bit. Trump is no longer president (although he is trying hard to regain that position), and Twitter—now known as X—is owned by Elon Musk, the billionaire who also owns Tesla and SpaceX. Much has been written (by me and just about everyone else) about Musk’s problem-plagued acquisition of the platform, and the changes he has made to it; it is reportedly hemorrhaging money and scrambling for both users and revenue. None of this is particularly new—the old Twitter under co-founders Jack Dorsey and Ev Williams also seemed to be continually scrambling for money and users. The reasons have changed, however: Musk, who maintains that his guiding principle is to enable free speech, has enabled many of the worst kinds of speech, including white supremacy, racism, and misogyny. This has (not surprisingly) led to an exodus of both users and advertisers.

These days, one popular conspiracy theory is that Musk is a Russian stooge who is trying to help Trump get re-elected, a theory based in part on rumors about Russian troops in Ukraine using Musk’s Starlink for internet access and whispers that Putin-adjacent sources helped fund the purchase of Twitter. (The evidence for this is circumstantial—at best.) Russia’s involvement in a variety of nefarious projects (or rumors thereof) has been a consistent theme since I started writing for CJR. An early taste of that came in November 2017, when I traveled to Washington and sat in on a series of congressional hearings looking into whether Meta (then known as Facebook), Google, and Twitter had allowed Russia and Russian-aligned agents to use their services as the foundation of a gigantic disinformation campaign. Did this happen? Yes, at least in a limited way. Did it affect the outcome of the 2016 election? Opinion remains divided, but some of the smartest people in the field say no, it likely did not.

A related topic that has resurfaced again and again is whether misinformation and disinformation (Russian or otherwise) is a scourge that should be eradicated—by law if necessary—because it changes people’s behavior, or whether it is just a lot of sound and fury that doesn’t change much of anything. Disinformation experts argue that these kinds of campaigns, including what some like to call “automated propaganda,” do have a deleterious effect, but research shows that even the worst disinformation rarely changes people’s minds in any significant way (although in some cases it can help reinforce things people already believe that are wrong or untrue). And disinformation remains, to some extent in the eye of the beholder. Not so long ago, users who suggested that COVID-19 came from a lab might have had their Facebook accounts suspended. Now there are plenty of scientists who believe that this is a valid theory about the disease.

The broader question of whether the internet and social media are a negative influence has also been a consistent theme of my time at CJR. Multiple scientific-sounding articles have argued that cellphone and social-media use have caused widespread anxiety, depression, and mental health problems among users, particularly teenage girls. This is a plausible-sounding phenomenon, and yet the majority of the research that has been done to date shows no such correlation—and, in some cases, actually shows that smartphone and social media use is a net positive for teens. I think, in general, that we should be wary of theories that tie complex human relationships to a single cause, whether it’s Instagram use or Russian troll farms engaging in what Facebook likes to refer to as “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

As for whether the internet and social media are good for anyone at all, that question, too, has been an undercurrent of my work for CJR—and even before that. I confess that when I first started writing about the social web at the Globe and Mail, a daily newspaper in Toronto, in 2004 or so, I was convinced that it had the potential to change the world for the better. (I even co-founded a conference called Mesh that tried to explore all the ways it might do so.) I helped the Globe and Mail set up a Twitter feed and a Facebook account and do live-blogging and open itself up to reader comments; I even started a wiki to crowdsource reader insights about politics. At Gigaom, I wrote about how Twitter and Facebook helped enable the “Arab Spring” in Egypt, among other phenomena. Networked information seemed to have so much potential.

Unfortunately, the next decade or so—including most of my time here—would provide plenty of evidence that social media, like the internet itself, enables all of the good things about people but also all of the bad things. There was Gamergate, which in many ways helped give birth to the alt-right and its obsession with using freedom of speech to harass and abuse people via social media; then, there was the rise of QAnon and conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton and a sex-abuse ring. Facebook inadvertently helped to enable what many international observers have described as a genocide in Myanmar. To some extent, social media gave birth to the human chaos engine known as Donald Trump, a man who embodies Steve Bannon’s motto that the best route to informational success is to “flood the zone with shit.” (Unfortunately, this tactic often works on journalists and media outlets that should know better.)

Was I too naive about the positive impact of social media, and too dismissive or unaware of its negative effects? Absolutely. (In my defense, so were Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey.) And yet, what can counter these kinds of negative effects but people using those platforms and tools and technologies for good instead of evil? Perhaps that’s part of the reason I haven’t vacated Twitter (or X) despite my misgivings about Musk; if we all abandon these platforms to the bad actors and bots, how does that help? (I should note that I am also there because I enjoy the memes.) Maybe flooding the zone with positive content can counteract the effects of those who are flooding the zone with the other stuff. I’ve also been encouraged by the rise of Threads, Meta’s Twitter clone, and its experiments with the networked “fediverse,” including open-source platforms such as Mastodon and BlueSky, although none of them have really replaced Twitter as of yet.

Another major theme of my time at CJR: Google and Facebook holding themselves out as the saviors of the media multiple times and in multiple ways, something I wrote about at length in a 2018 piece called “The Platform Patrons.” Several years later, the hundreds of millions of dollars that both platforms committed to journalistic efforts—much of which consisted of training in how to use their products, which in turn exacerbated media reliance on those products—has vanished or been spent, leaving many media outlets no further ahead. Meta, in particular, killed the media- and journalism-related projects it once ran (something that I warned about in another piece, “The Facebook Armageddon”), and is now fighting attempts to make it pay for journalism in the US and Canada. The decision on the part of many news outlets and publishers to tie so much of their business to these platforms has truly been the worst kind of Faustian bargain.

All of the topics I’ve mentioned so far, from the challenges of free speech and antitrust to journalism funding and social-media moderation, were the subject of some fascinating debates that I conducted for CJR through an online platform called Galley, which we took over in 2018 after we were approached by its creators, Josh Young and Tom McGeveran. Galley was designed to be a better version of Twitter, allowing users to designate certain followers as trusted and then set up a chat open only to these users. We wound up using it for roundtable discussions with experts from the fields of law, science, sociology, and politics—an approach that I used to describe as being like a podcast, but with more typing. Unfortunately, we stopped hosting those discussions for a variety of reasons (funding being one of them), but I still believe that they added real value to those kinds of debates.

I am often asked whether there is anything worth being optimistic about in journalism and media, given the carnage we see all around us in the industry. Whether I am still naive or not remains to be seen, but I am optimistic about small, digital-native publications run by individuals like Ben Thompson (whose newsletter, Stratechery, was the inspiration for the creation of Substack) and Casey Newton (Platformer), or groups of writers like the teams behind 404 Media, Flaming Hydra (and its predecessor, Brick House), and Drop Site, founded recently by former staffers at The Intercept. Hopefully at least some of them will find funding mechanisms that allow them to prosper, instead of relying on venture capital—a phenomenon that has taken down more than one promising media venture, including BuzzFeed News, Mic, and Gigaom. And, while crypto is still mostly a den of iniquity, I continue to think that Civil—a crypto-powered journalism platform that launched in 2018 and flamed out not long afterward—had some good ideas that might have worked if not for the industry’s speculative excesses.

Despite the challenges the media faces—whether it’s social algorithms, declining ad revenue, or AI-driven fakes—I still believe that there has never been a better time to be a journalist. The journalism business may be tanking, but the practice itself has never been more robust. At what other time in history could someone have started writing and within a matter of weeks reached tens or even hundreds of thousands of readers—and be making a living solely from subscriptions? I.F. Stone would have sold his soul for something like that. I am no I.F. Stone by any means, but I would like to thank all of you for reading me over these seven years, and for helping me draw attention to some of the issues that matter. I hope we can stay in touch in other ways. Onward!

From Vox: “Don Poldermans was a prolific medical researcher at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, where he analyzed the standards of care for cardiac events after surgery, publishing a series of definitive studies from 1999 until the early 2010s. One crucial question he studied: Should you give patients a beta blocker, which lowers blood pressure, before certain surgeries? Poldermans’s research said yes. European medical guidelines recommended it accordingly. The problem? Poldermans’s data was reportedly fake. After the revelations, a new meta-analysis was published in 2014, evaluating whether to use beta blockers before non-cardiac surgery. It found that a course of beta blockers made it 27 percent more likely that someone would die within 30 days of their surgery. One provocative analysis from cardiologists Graham Cole and Darrel Francis estimated that there were 800,000 deaths between 2009 and 2013 compared to if the best practices had been established five years sooner.”

A shark’s case of indigestion revealed that a murder had been committed

From Now I Know: “In April of 1935, a fisherman named Bert Hobson caught a 14-foot tiger shark off the coast of Coogee Beach in Sydney. Hobson’s brother ran the local aquarium, so he brought it there — he figured the shark would make for a good exhibit. But the shark didn’t seem too happy. After a few days in which it seemed to adjust to its new home, the shark became irritable and began behaving erratically. It repeatedly rammed the walls of its tank before sinking to the bottom and swimming in lazy, irregular circles. Then it threw up, and what came out was a human arm. Upon closer inspection, there was something strange about this arm. It appeared to have been severed from its owner by a knife, not teeth. The arm had a distinctive tattoo, so the police asked the press to share a description in hopes that someone would recognize it, and someone did. Edwin Smith said his brother, James, had such a tattoo and had gone missing a few weeks earlier.”

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 “Faked research may have caused almost a million deaths”