Category: Newsletters

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.”

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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”

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”

From GWAS: “The first reports of deaths in patients who received the human growth hormone surfaced in 1985 both in the USA and UK. Post-mortem examinations revealed that all the deaths were due to a prion disease called Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, which led the government to shut down the program. But by then, more than 30,000 children were already dosed, who would later become the subjects of what might be the longest natural history study in medical history, running for more than 40 years. One major revelation was the discovery of amyloid beta protein aggregates in the grey matter resembling Alzheimer’s, which led scientists to speculate that Alzheimer’s disease could be transmitted from one human to another via infectious proteins.”

A nursing student’s murder sends a wave of fear through Athens, Georgia

From The Atlantic: “Laken Riley, a junior at the University of Georgia, went out for her morning jog in Athens. Riley was an avid runner, well known in the local running community, and had recently competed in the annual AthHalf, one of Athens’s beloved institutions. She took her regular route around Lake Herrick, an on-campus trail near the campus’s Intramural Fields. When she failed to return home, her roommate, a fellow runner and Riley’s best friend, called the police. Within the next hour, they found Riley’s lifeless body in a wooded area just off the trail. Her skull had been crushed.I know exactly where Riley was killed, because I also live in Athens, and I’m also a runner. Riley’s murder, the first homicide on campus in more than 30 years, sent a wave of terror through Athens, but it hit the running community particularly hard.”

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 “Growth hormone injections for dwarfism also gave patients Alzheimer’s”

From Ara The Rat: “In 2001, two boys playing in the woods in Radnor, Pennsylvania, found a strange three-foot sealed PVC pipe hidden inside a concrete drain. Inside, they discovered documents relating to numerous bank robberies and instructions on how to clean a Baretta firearm. Police found a three foot deep bunker filled with more PVC pipes and waterproof containers, containing books, maps, notes on 160 banks from Virginia to Connecticut, 5 guns, 500 rounds of ammunition and 8 Halloween masks. It didn’t take long before they realized who was behind this. For almost three decades, someone had been successfully robbing banks with a professionalism that had earned grudging respect. He was the most prolific bank robber in U.S. history netting himself around $2 million, more than John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde combined.”

Famous painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec invented chocolate mousse

From Tasting Table: “In addition to being a prolific painter, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was, as the Art Institute of Chicago puts it, gifted at representing the celebrity brand. One of his most famous works, “At the Moulin Rouge” (1892) depicts a bustling metropolitan nightlife scene that’s full of electricity and the hum of the after-hours-underworld. To say that Toulouse-Lautrec had a “palette” for the decadent would be accurate. But while other artists like Picasso and Van Gogh were chasing the green fairy under the absinthe drip, Toulouse-Lautrec was using his spoon to carve into bowls of rich chocolate mousse. While it might seem like an emblem of fine dining, but it wasn’t invented by a chef at all – it was created by Toulouse-Lautrec during the late 1800s. But he was less adept at naming foods. Mousse used to be called “chocolate mayonnaise.”

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 was the most prolific bank robber the US has ever seen”

From Inverse: “George Lucas didn’t plan on making Darth Vader the secret father of Luke Skywalker. As much as fans have been told that Lucas had a massive plan for the Star Wars saga prior to 1977, the sources closest to that process say the opposite. “When I was his wife, I never knew there were nine stories,” Marcia Lucas says in the new docuseries Icons Unearthed: Star Wars. “I never knew there were two stories.” But perhaps the greatest revelation in this under-the-radar documentary involves the origin of the franchise’s most famous twist. It turns out the “I am your father” moment started as an offhanded joke at a dinner party. Lucas was struggling to come up with some kind of big twist for Empire’s third act when he invited screenwriters Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz over for dinner. When Lucas described his struggles with writing the Empire story, Huyck joked, “You can always make Darth Vader Luke’s father.”

The children’s classic Goodnight Moon was inspired by a stormy lesbian romance

From The Hornet: “A biography of Margaret Wise Brown by Amy Gary reveals that Brown, author of the classic children’s books Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, had a tumultuous love life which included an affair with a married woman. Brown never married or had children. Instead she had a string of apparently torrid romances, including one with Blanche Oelrichs (who used the male nom de plume Michael Strange for her erotic poetry), a married woman 20 years her senior. The two women’s romance was actually the inspiration behind the beloved children’s book classic Goodnight Moon. During one breakup, she wrote a poem about a girl who moved from the country to the city and to soothe herself imagined her old room. Later, the poem returned to her in a dream along with images of her downstairs neighbor’s apartment — its bright green walls, red furniture with yellow trim. The result was Goodnight Moon.”

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 idea of Darth Vader being Luke’s father started as a joke”