Category: Newsletters

From the SCMP: “Organ transplants save lives – but, a recent study suggests, they may also come with an unexpected side effect: profound personality changes. A paper published in the medical journal Transplantology discusses how a number of transplant recipients have experienced major, long-lasting changes in their thoughts, actions and behaviour. Researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in the United States set out to investigate the question of whether transplants affect personality, and surveyed 23 heart recipients and 24 other organ recipients. Almost 90 percent of transplant recipients reported personality changes following their surgery.”

This sci-fi author had a secret life writing Army manuals on psychological warfare

From Annalee Newitz: “Cordwainer Smith was a mid-twentieth century author who wrote about human-animal hybrids of the distant future who led a revolution against their cyborg masters. It was only later that I discovered that Cordwainer Smith was the pen name of Paul Linebarger, an intelligence operative who wrote the first Army manual devoted to the practice of psychological warfare in 1948. Linebarger’s father was a judge in the Philippines who became a devoted follower of Chinese nationalist Sun Yat-Sen. So Paul published science fiction as Cordwainer Smith and realist fiction under the name Felix C. Forrest, and worked to overthrow the Communists in China – not for the glory of America, but to continue the nationalist project of his mentor Sun Yat-Sen.”

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 “Organ transplants can lead to changes in personality”

From Crimereads: “The prisoner hauled before a Brooklyn judge in 1928 did not look the part of one of the most notorious criminals in history. He squinted at the world through round-framed spectacles. When he removed his broad-brimmed hat, the sudden exposure of the baldness beneath added years to his appearance. The man was sixty-eight, born the year before the outbreak of the Civil War. He had been arrested more than a dozen times and had spent years in New York’s infamous Sing Sing prison. In the press, he was crowned the “dean of confidence men” and “the biggest of the big-time” swindlers. His name was John McCarthy. And he was the con man who sold the Brooklyn Bridge.”

This town kept its nuclear bunker a secret for more than three decades

From The Smithsonian: “West Virginia’s Greenbrier resort has been a playground for princes and politicians since its opening in 1778. Nestled in the Allegheny Mountain town of White Sulphur Springs, the Greenbrier has expanded over the centuries, so, when the resort broke ground on a new wing in late 1958, no one was surprised. But locals soon noticed something odd about the project. The hole dug for the foundation was enormous, and vast amounts of concrete arrived every day on trucks, along with puzzling items: 110 urinals, huge steel doors. But locals kept their suspicions private, and nearly 35 years passed before the rest of the country learned the truth: the bunker buried 720 feet underground was equipped to hold every single member of Congress.”

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 con artist who sold the Brooklyn Bridge”

From the CBC: “A group of parents has filed a lawsuit against a Montreal-area high school art teacher and his school board after students found their classroom artwork available for purchase on the teacher’s personal website last month. The parents of 10 young students at Westwood Junior High School in Saint-Lazare, Que., an off-island suburb west of Montreal, filed the lawsuit for $1.575 million, or $155,000 per plaintiff plus punitive damages, against the teacher, Mario Perron, and the Lester B. Pearson School Board for copyright infringement. According to the lawsuit, the teacher assigned his 96 students a project called “Creepy Portrait” in January, in which students drew a portrait of a classmate or themselves inspired by the style of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The students submitted their projects in February and were shocked to stumble upon their classroom artwork being sold after finding their art teacher’s website.”

The butterfly in the prison yard: Life in an Iranian prison

From The Sunday Longread: “Conservationist Niloufar Bayani was released, along with three of her colleagues, after spending six years in a notorious Iranian prison. Six years passed after Bayani was arrested by the IRGC. Apart from a five-day period when she was released on furlough, she spent the entire time behind bars. The IRGC is a separate entity from Iran’s regular armed forces, operating as one of the most powerful paramilitary organizations in the Middle East and a locus of power that has control over much of Iran’s politics. “I was interrogated blindfolded while standing, spinning, or sit-and-standing,” Bayani wrote in letters published by the BBC. “Threatened with the arrest and torture of my 70-year-old mother and father… threatened with physical torture by being shown images and descriptions of torture devices…[and] heard hours of detailed descriptions of suffering and pain.”

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 “Parents sue teacher for selling students’ artwork online”

From CBC News: “We may soon learn more about what happened when dozens of crew members from the movie “Titanic” were fed soup laced with a hallucinogenic drug while filming in Nova Scotia. A new report from the province’s privacy commissioner told Halifax Regional Police to disclose more details about the August 1996 incident, which sent around 80 “Titanic” crew members to hospital in Dartmouth, N.S., including director James Cameron. Initially fearing food poisoning, all had in fact unknowingly eaten lobster chowder spiked with the drug phencyclidine, which is also known as PCP and angel dust. Speaking about the infamous incident, crew members have described a long and strange night of chaos and confusion that even involved a hospital conga line.”

Eugene Fodor’s famous travel guide was written in part by CIA spies

From Why Is This Interesting: “Much is written in the press about the link between the Central Intelligence Agency and Hollywood, but what’s less well-known is the U.S. government’s influence on the travel industry. Eugene Fodor, publisher of one of the most successful guide book series of all time, was an officer for the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor to the CIA) during WWII. He specialized in psychological warfare, interrogated prisoners, and wrote propaganda leaflets that were airdropped into the Neapolitan territories. After the war he founded his eponymous company where he employed not only traditional stringers to write copy but also, at the behest of the CIA,  spies—“travel writer” being a good cover for an agent sent into enemy territory.”

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 cast and crew of Titanic were drugged with PCP”

From SFist: “OJ Simpson’s father, who came out as gay and was largely absent from the family once Simpson turned four years old, became a local drag queen known as Mama Simpson. A documentary on OJ interviewed one of his childhood friends, Calvin Tennyson, who recalled a visit he and OJ made to Jimmy Lee Simpson’s apartment. “When his dad opened the door, he was in a bathrobe, which is not a crime. But then his dad kind of opened the door more, and there was a guy in the back in a bathrobe too. So it was obvious that his dad was gay.” A book about OJ quoted a source as saying Mama Simpson frequently dressed in drag and “everyone knew he was O.J.’s dad.”

What happened when a journalist went undercover as a high school student

From The Chronicle: “San Francisco Chronicle reporter Shann Nix probably should have been on her honeymoon in September 1992 when she took on an assignment she would still be thinking about decades later. Nix, then 26, changed her home answering machine, instructed her new husband to act like her father if he answered the phone and then went undercover for a month, posing as a student at George Washington High School in San Francisco. The result was the four-part “Undercover Student” project, a front-page exposé that today is both increasingly fascinating and increasingly shocking. It had an impact on a lot of people, including students who are now adults, and the reporter herself. And 32 years later, they still have a lot to say about it.”

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 “OJ Simpson’s father was a San Francisco drag queen known as Mama”

From Slate: “The waves were already crashing over the Toyota’s hood when they found it. It was a blustery September Sunday in 2021, and the Hilux pickup sat far down the gray sand in a remote cove on the wild west coast of New Zealand’s North Island. The truck was parked below the high-tide line, facing the sea, and was nearly swamped by the waves. The men couldn’t help but notice empty child seats strapped into the back. The disappearances were just the beginning of an ordeal that has not yet ended—a case that has only grown stranger and more ominous in the two and a half years since, prompting pleas from family, increasing public astonishment, online speculation, a shocking crime, and a community’s closing ranks around one of its own.”

Her Highness Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi is forced to couch-surf

From Town & Country: “As they say in Italian, “Finita la commedia”: The farce has come to an end; the party is over. Or so it seemed in April 2023, when a squadron of carabinieri arrived at the Villa Aurora, a crumbling mansion in the center of the Eternal City with the world’s only known Caravaggio ceiling painting. Their mission that day: escort off the premises its 74-year-old chatelaine, none other than the San Antonio–born Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi, née Carpenter, the former model, actress, and real estate agent who had refused to leave the property amid a bitter inheritance dispute with her three stepsons.”

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 “First they vanished into the bush and then it got weird”

From Deseret.com: “Why is there 1.4 billion pounds of cheese stored in a cave in Missouri? It started in the 1970s, during former President Jimmy Carter’s era and his promise of giving farmers a break. He wanted to raise the price of milk, but the government couldn’t just buy milk and store it, so it started to buy as much cheese as people wanted to sell. Then farmers were producing way too much cheese, raising the question: What should the government do with all the cheddar? To tackle this, former President Ronald Reagan started food assistance programs to distribute 30 million pounds of cheese. In the 1990s, the government also started making deals with fast-food restaurants to help sell the surplus.”

A crucial component for microchips is a byproduct of the food additive MSG

From MIT: “In microchips, a material is placed between the chip and the structure beneath it in order to keep the signals from getting crossed; this material, called dielectric film, is produced in sheets that are as thin as white blood cells. For 30 years, a single Japanese company called Ajinomoto has made billions producing this particular film, and has more than 90% of the market. If you recognize the name Ajinomoto, you’re probably surprised to hear it plays such a critical role: the company is better known as the world’s leading supplier of MSG seasoning powder. In the 1990s, it discovered that a by-product of MSG made a great insulator, and it has enjoyed a near monopoly ever since.”

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 “Why a cave in Missouri holds more than a billion pounds of cheese”

From Science.org: “Harvard University honesty researcher Francesca Gino, whose work has come under fire for suspected data falsification, may also have plagiarized passages in some of her high-profile publications. A book chapter co-authored by Gino, who was found by a 2023 Harvard Business School (HBS) investigation to have committed research misconduct, contains numerous passages of text with striking similarities to 10 earlier sources. The sources include published papers and student theses, according to an analysis shared with Science by University of Montreal psychologist Erinn Acland. Science has confirmed Acland’s findings and identified at least 15 additional passages of borrowed text in Gino’s two books.”

The Brazilian special-forces unit that is fighting to save the Amazon

From The New Yorker: “The men—fighters with combat gear and assault rifles—belonged to a tiny special-forces unit known as the Specialized Inspection Group, or G.E.F. Their leader and co-founder was Felipe Finger, a wiry man in his forties with a salt-and-pepper beard. Finger trained in forestry engineering, and his unit works under the Brazilian ministry for the environment. But he has spent much of his adult life in armed operations to protect the wilderness, and he talks like a soldier, with frequent references to operations and objectives and neutralizing threats. The current mission was known to national authorities as Operation Freedom. Finger and his men called it Operation Xapirí, from a Yanomami word for nature spirits.”

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 “Harvard expert in honesty accused of plagiarism”

You see a news story talking about the need for a national privacy law and how Congress is working on one—or, at least, should be. What year is it? 

Trick question: it could be almost any year in the last two decades. Including, now, 2024. Last week, the Washington Post reported that the leaders of two key congressional committees were “nearing an agreement on a national framework aimed at protecting Americans’ personal data online.” (The news was first reported by Punchbowl News, a political newsletter). As the Post noted, this would mean that Congress is close to passing legislation that has “eluded them for decades.” Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican representative from Washington State who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Maria Cantwell, a Democratic senator from the same state and chairperson of the Senate Commerce Committee, are expected to announce the deal next week.

According to The Hill, the two members of Congress decided that the time is right to push for a national privacy law, in part because of recent fears that social platforms are harming children (a debate that I wrote about last week in this newsletter), but also due to concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence. In a statement, Cantwell said that a federal data privacy law must “make privacy a consumer right, and it must give consumers the ability to enforce that right,” adding that the bill is the protection “Americans deserve in the Information Age.” Under the draft law, companies would face limits as to what data they can collect and use, and individuals would be allowed to sue “bad actors” for violating their privacy. New data security standards would also hold companies accountable if data is hacked or stolen. And the Federal Trade Commission would form a new bureau in order to enforce the law.

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

Continue reading “Lawmakers fight over privacy — on two very different fronts”

From The Gazette: A former University of Iowa Hospital employee pleaded guilty to living under another man’s identity since 1988, which caused the other man to be falsely imprisoned for identity theft and sent to a mental hospital. Matthew David Keirans, 58, was convicted of one count of false statement to a National Credit Union Administration insured institution — punishable by up to 30 years in federal prison — and one count of aggravated identity theft — punishable by up to two years in federal prison. Keirans worked as a systems architect in the hospital’s IT department from 2013 to 2023, when he was terminated for misconduct related to the identity theft.”

A six hundred year old blueprint for weathering climate change

From The Atlantic: “Beginning in the 13th century, the Northern Hemisphere experienced a very dramatic climatic shift. First came drought, then a period of cold, volatile weather known as the Little Ice Age. In its depths, the annual average temperature in the Northern Hemisphere may have been 5 degrees colder than in the preceding Medieval Warm Period. It snowed in Alabama and South Texas. Famine killed perhaps 1 million people around the world. But native North Americans and Western Europeans responded very differently to the changes. Western Europeans doubled down on their preexisting ways of living, whereas Native North Americans devised whole new economic, social, and political structures to fit the changing climate.”

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 stole someone’s identity and used it for 35 years”

From Quillette: “In the fall of 2004, Frank came up with an idea for a project. After work, he’d drive through the streets of Washington, D.C., with stacks of self-addressed postcards. At metro stops, he’d approach strangers. “Hi,” he’d say. “I’m Frank. And I collect secrets.” Some people shrugged him off, or told him they didn’t have any secrets; others were amused, or intrigued. They took cards and, following instructions he’d left next to the address, wrote down secrets they’d never told anyone before, and mailed them back to Frank. All the secrets were anonymous. They told stories of infidelity, longing, abuse. Some were funny. By 2024, Frank would have more than a million.”

How Japanese Americans created an art form while interned in WWII camps

From High Country News: “As a child, I’d creep down the basement stairs and watch him: hunched over a table, a single lamp lighting his work. The end result: a bird pin so delicate it could fit into the palm of my 8-year-old hand. I always thought they were unique to him. But in recent years, I’ve learned that he was part of something much larger. It all began in February 1942, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which led to the incarceration of roughly 122,000 Japanese Americans. Many were given just 48 hours to pack, forcing them to sell their houses, farms, businesses and possessions. They were sent to 10 War Relocation Authority camps in remote parts of Wyoming, California, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho and Arkansas.”

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 “PostSecret is the repository of America’s hidden truths”

From the Chicago Sun-Times: “DEAR ABBY: My grandfather sold me an old farmstead that has been in the family for 200 years. Last week, he showed me a wooded area behind the barn with a human skull. He told me that when his father died more than 50 years ago, he was curious about how long it would take a body to decompose, so he left his body in the woods to keep track of its progress. He has 50 years’ worth of pictures and notes. He told the rest of the family that Great-Grandpa had been cremated, and apparently no one questioned him about the ashes. I checked with a lawyer, who tells me that in my state no laws were broken. My husband says I should quietly bury thes kull, burn the pictures and notes and forget about it. That just doesn’t feel right to me.”

Scientists say they aren’t sure how animals will react to the solar eclipse

From the New York Times: “Cows may mosey into their barns for bedtime. Flamingoes may huddle together in fear. The giant, slow-motion Galápagos tortoise may even get frisky and mate. Circadian rhythms might take a noticeable hit, with nocturnal animals mistakenly waking up and starting their day only to realize that, whoa, nighttime is already over. And then there will be some animals, perhaps particularly lazy domestic cats or warthogs focused on foraging, who might not give the dark sky a second thought. One study in 1560 cited that “birds fell to the ground.” Other studies said birds went to roost, or fell silent, or continued to sing and coo — or flew straight into houses. Dogs either barked or whimpered, or did not bark or whimper.”

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 “Dear Abby letter reveals a daughter’s dark legacy”

From USA Today: “Just before Thomas Randele died, his golfing buddies and co-workers from the car dealership came by to say goodbye to a guy they called one of the nicest people they’d ever known – a devoted family man who never bent the rules, a friend to so many that a line stretched outside the funeral home a week later. He never told them his secret: that he was a fugitive wanted in one of the largest bank robberies in history, living in Boston under a new name he created six months after the heist in 1969. Not even his wife or daughter knew until he told them in what authorities described as a deathbed confession.”

People with this form of synesthesia see subtitles when someone speaks

From Scientific American: “My brain automatically translates spoken words into written ones in my mind’s eye. I see subtitles that I can’t turn off whenever I talk or hear someone else talking. This same speech-to-text conversion even happens for the inner dialogue of my thoughts. This mental closed-captioning has accompanied me since late toddlerhood, almost as far back as my earliest childhood memories. And for a long time, I thought that everyone could “read” spoken words in their head the way I do. What I experience goes by the name of ticker-tape synesthesia. It is not a medical condition—it’s just a distinctive way of perceiving the surrounding world that relatively few people share.”

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 “On his deathbed he told his wife that he robbed a bank”

From Science.org: “In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a succession of wars ravaged Europe. Massive armies squared off and massacred each other using cannon and rifle fire and mass cavalry charges that claimed tens of thousands of casualties in hours. At the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s final battle, more than 10,000 men and as many horses were killed in a single day. Yet today, archaeologists often struggle to find physical evidence of the dead from that bloody time period. How did so many bones up and vanish? An international team of historians and archaeologists argues the bones were depleted by industrial-scale grave robbing. The introduction of phosphates for fertilizer and bone char as an ingredient in beet sugar processing at the beginning of the 19th century transformed bones into a hot commodity. Skyrocketing prices prompted raids on mass graves.”

The US tried permanent Daylight Saving Time but people hated it

From The Washingtonian: “Congress voted on December 14, 1973, to put the US on daylight saving time for two years. President Nixon signed the bill the next day. The US had gone to permanent daylight saving time before, during World War II. Then, too, the measure was enacted to save fuel. Permanent DST wasn’t close to the wackiest idea about time floating around—Paul Mullinax, a geographer who worked at the Pentagon, came up with the idea of putting the continental US on a single time zone. “USA Time” would apply from Bangor to Barstow, eliminate jet lag, and standardize TV schedules. But permanent DST quickly proved dangerous: A 6-year-old Alexandria girl was struck by a car on her way to school on January 7; the accident broke her leg. Two Prince George’s County students were hurt in February. In the weeks after the change, eight Florida kids were killed in traffic accidents. Florida’s governor, Reubin Askew, asked for Congress to repeal the measure and it did so.”

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 “Where did all the bones from ancient battles go?”

Over the past decade or so, The Atlantic has published a series of articles warning of the harm that social media and smartphone apps are doing to teenagers. These articles have had headlines like “The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood,” “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks,” “The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls,” and “Get Phones Out of Schools Now.” These articles have one other thing in common: they were all written by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a co-author of the 2019 book The Coddling of the American Mind.

Now Haidt is out with a new book (whose themes will be familiar to readers of his Atlantic articles), The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. After 2010, there was a sharp increase in depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicide among young people, Haidt writes; rates of depression and anxiety in the US, for example, rose by more than 50 percent over the following decade, a figure that rises to 130 percent for girls between the ages of ten and nineteen. Haidt says that similar patterns arose around the same time in other countries, including Canada, the UK, and Australia. And he says that they were caused by smartphones and social media. Giving young people smartphones in the early 2010s was “the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children,” he writes in The Anxious Generation, adding that we may as well have sent “Gen Z to grow up on Mars.”

Haidt wrote last year, in another of his Atlantic essays, that smartphones and social media “impede learning, stunt relationships, and lessen belonging,” and that they have created an environment for children that is “hostile to human development.” In his view, governments, schools, and other organizations should take a number of steps in response, including banning social media for children under sixteen and removing smartphones from schools. All children “deserve schools that will help them learn, cultivate deep friendships, and develop into mentally healthy young adults,” he writes. And he notes that last year, Vivek Murthy, the US Surgeon General, issued a public advisory warning that social media can create a “profound risk” of harm to the “mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”

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

Continue reading “Is social media harming teens? Yes and no”