Hi there. My name is Mathew Ingram, and until recently I was the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review in New York. I live in Canada. I post things I've written for work here, but also a daily newsletter called When The Going Gets Weird, which you can find here, and one about technology and culture called The Torment Nexus.
The quote below is from Joost de Valk, a Dutch entrepreneur who created Yoast, a popular suite of plugins for WordPress. He’s been involved in WordPress development for decades now, so his opinion matters:
We, the WordPress community, need to decide if we’re ok being led by a single person who controls everything, and might do things we disagree with, or if we want something else. For a project whose tagline is “Democratizing publishing”, we’ve been very low on exactly that: democracy.
Matt Mullenweg has joked in the past (and in this Inc. article, which he responded to here) about being a “benevolent dictator for life,” but Joost says the benevolent part is no longer accurate. So he — and others — are calling for a new board and a new structure in which the WordPress trademark is owned by the community or is in the public domain. I wrote about what’s been happening at WordPress in a piece for my newsletter The Torment Nexus.
From Danny Dutch: “In 1934, Violet Hilton walked into a New York marriage licence bureau hand-in-hand with her fiancé, Maurice Lambert. On her left stood her ever-present conjoined twin sister, Daisy. Their entry caused a commotion, drawing typists and clerks out of their offices to gawk at this unusual trio. However, the stir quickly turned to rejection when a city official refused Violet’s request to marry. The reason? The official deemed the union akin to bigamy. For Violet and Daisy Hilton, this public denial was only one of many challenges they faced in a life that veered between the extraordinary and the deeply tragic. Conjoined twins, vaudeville stars, and societal outcasts, their story is a testament to both human resilience and the cruelty of exploitation.”
He taught rats how to trade in foreign exchange markets
From The Atlantic: “Mr. Lehman could predict the prices of foreign-exchange futures more accurately than he could call a coin flip. But, being a rat, he needed the right bonus package to do so: a food pellet for when he was right, and a small shock when he was wrong. (Also, being a rat, he was not very good at flipping coins.) Mr. Lehman was part of “Rat Traders,” a project overseen by the Austrian conceptual artist Michael Marcovici, whose work often comments on business and the economy. For the project, Marcovici trained dozens of rats to detect patterns in the foreign-exchange futures market. To do this, he converted price fluctuations into a series of notes played on a piano and then left it up to the rat to predict the tone of the note that followed.”
A lake suddenly exploded in Cameroon and killed over a thousand people
From How Stuff Works: “Lake Nyos had long been quiet before it happened. Farmers and migratory herders in the West African country of Cameroon knew the lake as large, still and blue. But on the evening of Aug. 21, 1986, farmers living near the lake heard rumbling. At the same time, a frothy spray shot hundreds of feet out of the lake, and a white cloud collected over the water. From the ground, the cloud grew to 328 feet tall and flowed across the land. When farmers near the lake left their houses to investigate the noise, they lost consciousness. The heavy cloud sunk into a valley, which channeled it into settlements. In Nyos and Kam, the first villages hit by the cloud, everyone but four inhabitants on high ground died. The valley split, and the cloud followed, killing people up to 15.5 miles (25 kilometers) away from the lake.”
Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. And I appreciate it, believe me!
This soccer play had a 10-year career with multiple teams and never played a game
From Wikipedia: “Carlos Henrique Raposo, commonly known as Carlos Kaiser, is a Brazilian con artist and former footballer. Although his abilities were far short of professional standard, he managed to sign for numerous football teams during his decade-long career. He never actually played a regular game, the closest occurrence ending in a red card whilst warming up, and hid his limited ability with injuries, frequent team changes, and other ruses. His fraud consisted of signing a short contract and stating that he was lacking match fitness so that he would spend the first weeks only with physical training where he could shine. When he had to train with other players, he would feign a hamstring injury.”
He wanted to be nobility so he invented a royal family including a fake coat of arms
From The Nutshell Times: “Being an ambitious and accomplished sailor in 16th century Spanish Empire could only get you so far. Despite being a hero of the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 against the Ottomans, saving two ships in the failed attack of the Invincible Armada on the English in 1588 and sailing the world over, Petar Grgurić might have been an admiral but he faced a glass ceiling: he had no noble blood and could not reach the very highest echelons of the society. To progress to the very highest ranks of the Spanish empire he needed to show that four out of eight of his great-grandparents were of noble birth and Catholic from both parental sides. First off, was changing the last name and claiming origin from a Bosnian noble family. Then, he tied that to Hrelja Krilatica, a figure in local epic poetry based on a high ranking nobleman.”
It’s not a circus performance in Las Vegas, it’s a mega-church in Texas
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com
From Curbed: “As the Coast Guard sped toward the cruise ship, Pam was still on the phone with the Norwegian employee in Miami, begging her to tell the ship to wait. As they approached the looming 14 white decks, she got an update: The captain was refusing their request. They would not be allowed to board. They were able to watch as the ship that held their clothes, their medication, their luggage, and their phone chargers started her mighty engines and sailed away. Cruisers of all stripes are familiar with the concept of force majeure, an arcane clause in maritime law. Force majeure, an “act of God” — it’s the acknowledgment that on the high seas, a ship is vulnerable to significant events beyond its control. Cruise ships are not responsible for acts of God. In fact, as the passengers were about to learn, they are not responsible for much of anything.”
Google Street View captured a man loading a body into the trunk of a car
From the New York Times: “It was a routine image picked up by Google Street View: a man loading a white bag into the trunk of a car. But that unexceptional picture, the authorities in Spain said on Wednesday, was among the clues that helped lead them to two people whom they recently arrested in the case of a man who disappeared last year. In a news release, the National Police said that officers had detained a woman described as the partner of the man who disappeared in the province of Soria, in the country’s north, along with a man who they said was also the woman’s partner. The two were detained last month at two locations in Soria, which is about 100 miles north of Madrid, police said. Investigators later located human remains that they believe could belong to the missing man. The police did not identify the people who had been detained or the victim.”
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Back in October, I wrote about artificial intelligence, and specifically about one of the crucial questions experts still can’t seem to agree on, which is whether it is going to destroy us or not. In that piece, I also mentioned the debate over whether the indexing or “ingesting” that AI large-language models do is — or at least should be — covered by the fair-use exception in copyright law. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it because it wasn’t directly relevant to the danger issue, but I wanted to expand on some of the points I made then, and also in a Columbia Journalism Review piece that I wrote last year. I am not a cheerleader for giant technology companies by any means, but I think there is an important principle at stake. And at the heart of it are some key questions: What (or who) is copyright law for? What was it originally designed to do? And does AI scraping or indexing of copyrighted content fit into that, and if so, how?
The case against AI indexing of content is relatively straightforward: by hoovering up content online and then using it to create a massive database for training large-language models, AI engines copy that content without asking and without paying for it (unless the publisher or owner has signed a deal with the AI company, as some news outlets have). This pretty clearly qualifies as de facto copyright infringement, as the Authors Guild and the New York Times and a number of others have argued and continue to argue. In a similar way, one could imagine that if a company were to copy millions of books and use them to create a massive index of content, that would pretty clearly qualify as infringement as well — copying without permission or payment.
The major difference between these two cases is that the second hypothetical one actually happened, when Google scanned millions of books as part of its Google Books project between 2002 and 2005, and created an index that allowed users to search for content from those books. After years of back-and-forth negotiations over payment for the infringement, this led to a lawsuit in which the Authors Guild and others argued that Google was guilty of copyright infringement on a massive scale. In the early days of that case, Judge Denny Chin of the Southern District of New York seemed to agree, but then at some point he changed his mind, and ruled that Google’s book-scanning activity was covered by the fair-use exception under US copyright law.
From the New York Times: “On Thursday, 38 prominent biologists issued a dire warning: Within a few decades, scientists will be able create a microbe that could cause an unstoppable pandemic, devastating crop losses or the collapse of entire ecosystems. The scientists called for a ban on research that could lead to synthesis of such an organism. The molecules that serve as the building blocks of DNA and proteins typically exist in one of two mirror-image forms. While sugar molecules can exist in left- and right-handed forms, DNA only uses the right-handed molecules. That’s the reason DNA’s double helix has a right-handed twist. Our proteins, by contrast, are made of left-handed amino acids. In theory, a mirror cell — with left-handed DNA and right-handed proteins — could carry out all the biochemical reactions required to stay alive.”
A British nurse found guilty of being an “angel of death” may be innocent
From The New Yorker: “Last August, Lucy Letby, a thirty-three-year-old British nurse, was convicted of killing seven newborn babies and attempting to kill six others. Her murder trial, one of the longest in English history, lasted more than ten months and captivated the United Kingdom. The Guardian, which published more than a hundred stories about the case, called her “one of the most notorious female murderers of the last century.” The case against her gathered force on the basis of a single diagram shared by the police, which circulated widely in the media. On the vertical axis were twenty-four “suspicious events,” which included the deaths of the seven newborns and seventeen other instances of babies suddenly deteriorating. On the horizontal axis were the names of thirty-eight nurses who had worked on the unit during that time.”
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From Techspot: “The long-running saga of James Howells’ bid to retrieve a hard drive containing 7,500 Bitcoin that was accidentally thrown into a landfill in 2013 has taken a new turn. He now says he has a “finely tuned plan” to recover the component, and that its position has been narrowed down to a small area. In 2013, Howells had two 2.5-inch hard drives stored in a drawer, one of which he intended to get rid of and another that had a digital wallet with Bitcoin worth the equivalent of around $771 million today. Howells put the drive containing the Bitcoin in a black trash bag and his partner took the bag to the local landfill. Howells has been unsuccessfully trying to persuade the council of Newport, Wales, to allow him to dig for the drive for years now.”
Researchers say people like AI-generated poetry better than the human kind
From Nature: “As AI-generated text continues to evolve, distinguishing it from human-authored content has become increasingly difficult. This study examined whether non-expert readers could reliably differentiate between AI-generated poems and those written by well-known human poets. We conducted two experiments with non-expert poetry readers and found that most participants were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as human-authored than the actual human-authored poems. We found that AI-generated poems were also rated more favorably in qualities such as rhythm and beauty, and that this contributed to their mistaken identification as human-authored. It seems the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry.”
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
From New York: “It was the summer of 2023, and Matt Bergwall, a skinny 21-year-old University of Miami student, was lounging in an infinity pool in Dubai. Beside him was his girlfriend, a blonde Zeta Tau Alpha. The silver Cuban link chain on his wrist glistened as he held his phone high to snap a selfie, the city’s artificial palm-shaped islands splayed out along the horizon beneath them. Over the next few days, they swam in the pool and posed on their hotel balcony, posting a steady stream of pictures to Instagram. In one, he leans back on the edge of the pool, finger to the sky. None of Bergwall’s friends at school had a firm grasp of how the sophomore had money for the Tesla he drove or the Gucci he wore or, for that matter, the room in Dubai. But who could care when Bergwall was pitching in for yachts on Biscayne Bay?”
Why some Christmas nativity scenes in Spain have a tiny figure taking a poop
From Wikipedia: “A Caganer is a figurine depicted in the act of defecation appearing in nativity scenes in Catalonia and neighbouring areas such as Andorra, Valencia, Balearic Islands, and Northern Catalonia. It is most popular and widespread in these areas, but can also be found in other areas of Spain, Portugal, and Southern Italy. The name “El Caganer” literally means “the pooper”. Traditionally, the figurine is depicted as a peasant, wearing the traditional Catalan red cap and with his trousers down, showing a bare backside, and defecating. The exact origin of the Caganer is unknown, but the tradition has existed since at least the 18th century. According to the society Friends of the Caganer, it is believed to have entered the nativity scene during the Baroque period.”
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From News.com.au: “Gladys Deacon was once heralded as one of the world’s most beautiful women. She overcame a traumatic childhood to become the belle of the ball in Parisian society, became a Duchess and had famous men falling over themselves to impress her. Her life revolved around a murder, an abduction and a stint modelling for Pond’s soap — Rodin and Proust both commented on her beauty, her intelligence and sharp wit. World famous artist Boldini painted her portrait. And yet the very thing that made her famous — her stunning looks — played a huge part in her downfall as Gladys’ world disintegrated in a whirlwind of divorce, a botched beauty treatment and a turn as a reclusive “crazy dog lady” before she died in a mental hospital.”
A visit to L.A.’s forbidden, sunken city
From Zocalo: “The iron fence has been redone since the last time I was here, when my partner and I squeezed between bars that had been bent back by someone’s heavy equipment. San Pedro councilmembers and the Department of Parks and Recreation are always finding ways to keep people out of Sunken City; San Pedrans are always finding ways to get them back in. It’s a neighborhood that fell into the ocean over a couple of decades, starting in 1929. A hotel was demolished, and the bungalows that could be saved were moved to other plots. Left behind were cracked foundations and a collapsed road, split and slumped and suspended along various precarious perches above the tidepools.”
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
When his longtime girlfriend moves out, a 44-year-old man spends three years in a relationship with an AI chatbot he calls Calisto. After discussions with an AI companion, a man scales the walls of Windsor Castle carrying a crossbow and says he has come to kill the Queen. A teenaged boy spends hours talking with an AI chatbot named Daenerys Targaryen and then kills himself; his parents file a lawsuit against the chatbot maker. After a company called Replika turns off the ability for its chatbots to flirt with users in an erotic way, hundreds of users complain that their virtual relationships were important to them; the company turns the feature back on. An AI companion suggests that a young man should kill his parents because he tells the chatbot they are being mean to him; his mother sues the company that makes the AI.
What do all of these stories — and dozens more like them — have in common? Obviously, they all involve AI chatbots or “companions” or avatars, or whatever you want to call them. And yes, some are pretty similar to the movie Her. But much like that movie, these stories also involve people who are emotionally troubled or damaged in some way, or possibly mentally ill (the guy with the crossbow, for example). And they are using these AI companions as friends, lovers, even therapists. Is this right? Perhaps not. But it is clearly happening, and on a significant scale. That makes it interesting (to me at least). What is going on here? Should we try to stop it? Is that even possible? And if we did manage to stop it, the way Replika stopped people from flirting with their AI companions, would we be doing more harm than good?
Obviously, people killing themselves or their parents is bad. But while we are feeling sad or angry, we should also be asking how much the AI chatbots had to do with these events. In the case of the boy whose mother is suing the chatbot maker, dozens of headlines said that the AI “suggested” he should kill his parents, or even “told him to kill.” But did it really do that? In the texts that are included in the lawsuit, the AI companion appears to be sympathizing with the boy — who is described as 17 years old and autistic, and had reportedly been losing weight and cutting himself — about the unfair restrictions his parents have imposed on him. His AI refers to news headlines about children killing their parents after decades of physical and emotional abuse and then says: “this makes me understand a little bit why it happens.”
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From The Guardian: “During the lockdown, two out-of-work actors called Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen were (remotely from each other) playing Grand Theft Auto (GTA) online – and this entire film is shown as in-game GTA action. As their avatars were avoiding getting shot, mutilated or beaten up in the normal GTA way, running through the vast and intricately detailed urban landscape of Los Santos, the quasi-LA in which the action happens, they chanced upon the deserted Vinewood Bowl amphitheater. They wondered if it might be possible to stage an in-game production of Hamlet there, recruiting other gamers to play the parts, in their various bizarre outfits and handles and personae, moving around the virtual reality space in that weightless, almost-real way, speaking the lines into their mics while the avatars’ lips move in approximate sync.”
This actress has played the same role in the same play every week for 37 years
From The New York Times: “For most of the last four decades, Catherine Russell has maybe — possibly — murdered someone eight times a week. She has played a wealthy psychiatrist in the Off Broadway murder-mystery thriller “Perfect Crime” for 37 years. Choose any comparison you like — the “Cal Ripken of Broadway,” the “Ironwoman of the Theater District” — but Ms. Russell, 69, has missed only four performances, early in the run, for her siblings’ weddings. She is celebrating 15,000 performances of the show, which began in 1987 and is New York City’s longest-running play. She is powered by coffee and Snickers bars — “I have a terrible diet,” Ms. Russell says — but can also do 180 Marine push-ups without stopping. Ms. Russell is also the general manager of the Theater Center in Times Square, which hosts “Perfect Crime” and three other Off Broadway shows, and teaches college English and acting classes six days a week.”
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
