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From Andy Greenberg at Wired: “Since war first broke out broke out between Ukraine and Russia in 2014, Russian hackers have used some of the most sophisticated hacking techniques ever seen in the wild to destroy Ukrainian networks, disrupt the country’s satellite communications, and even trigger blackouts for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens. But the mysterious saboteurs who have, over the past two days, disrupted Poland’s railway system appear to have used a far less impressive form of technical mischief: Spoof a simple radio command to the trains that triggers their emergency stop function. On August 25 and 26, more than 20 of Poland’s trains carrying both freight and passengers were brought to a halt across the country. The saboteurs reportedly interspersed the commands they used to stop the trains with the Russian national anthem and parts of a speech by Vladimir Putin.

Dave the Potter made his mark on history while enslaved in the 19th century

From Sarah Dolezal for JSTOR Daily: “From the trenches of the Antebellum South, enslaved potter David Drake (ca. 1801-1874), otherwise known as “Dave the Potter,” constructed hundreds if not thousands of functional pots while working on plantations and in factories in Edgefield, South Carolina, a region now famous for its ceramics. Dave was heralded for his enormous storage jars and for writing on his pots. Most of the potters at this time, those who were enslaved as well as the white laborers who were not, did not inscribe or mark their work in any identifying way. Dave was different. He signed his name on the walls of his pots. He engraved markings, for example, such as forward slashes and circled X’s that may have been a way to keep inventory, or that hearkened to ancestral roots. Dave also wrote dates, the location where he fashioned the pots, lines of poetry, and Christian proverbs. All of these practices set him apart.”

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Continue reading “The cheap radio hack that disrupted Poland’s railway system”

From Bess Stillman: “Much of the skill in being an ER doctor simply comes from practice: identifying who’s sick and who’s probably okay to nurse themselves at home is really the risk stratification of patients. And sometimes—because this is the nature of being a human being doing a job in a messy, chaotic world—I notice a symptom, and I misunderstand what it means. Early on, I didn’t notice enough about what turned out to be Jake’s cancer. So I’m left wondering: if I’d asked him to let me examine his tongue, instead of suggesting he not chew so quickly when he bit it for what seemed like the third time in a week, would the outcome be different? Was there a window of opportunity in August 2022, before the tumor invaded local nerves, when his first surgery might have been curative? Not acting sooner and pressing Jake to act sooner is the biggest error of my life.”

These beekeepers say you shouldn’t buy any more bees

From David Segal for the New York Times: “Gorazd Trusnovec and other beekeepers, as well as a broad variety of leading conservationists, have come to the conclusion that the craze for honey bees now presents a genuine ecological challenge. “If you overcrowd any space with honey bees, there is a competition for natural resources, and since bees have the largest numbers, they push out other pollinators, which actually harms biodiversity,” he said, after a recent visit to the B&B bees. “I would say that the best thing you could do for honey bees right now is not take up beekeeping.” It’s like Johnny Appleseed announcing, “Enough with the apples.” That’s a jarring message, because there is a widespread and now deeply rooted belief that the global population of honey bees has been running dangerously low for more than a decade and needs to be restored.”

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 “A doctor writes about failing to diagnose her husband’s cancer”

From Nic Rowan for The American Conservative: “When Bill Watterson walked away from Calvin and Hobbes in 1995, he was exhausted. The comic strip had consumed ten years of his life, the latter half of which were spent fighting his syndicate for creative control and warring with himself as he fitfully came to realize that he had nothing left to say about a six-year-old boy and his stuffed tiger. And the decision couldn’t have come at a worse time: Calvin and Hobbes was at the height of its popularity. To quit then seemed like career suicide. It was suicide, the intentional, ritualistic sort. Watterson wasn’t just done with daily newspaper cartoons; he was finished with public life.”

The serial killer and the Texas mom who stopped him

From Julie Miller for Vanity Fair: “It was nearing eight o’clock in the evening on December 11, 1981, and the serial killer Stephen Morin was driving the SUV of his latest captive, Margy Palm, north out of San Antonio. Morin’s reign of terror was sputtering to a clumsy close after a rare mistake earlier that day. He was suspected of the murder, torture, and in some cases rape of more than 30 women in 9 or 10 states—and most of San Antonio now knew that he was on the loose. Morin had pulled a .38 revolver on Margy six hours earlier as she reached her Chevy Suburban in the parking lot of a Kmart. Palm tells me that she didn’t try to fight or fleet: “I’ve never felt that kind of fear.”

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Continue reading “Why the creator of Calvin and Hobbes suddenly disappeared”

From Christopher Blackwell for The Appeal: “Last month, a tiny, colorful barn swallow and her partner began building a nest outside a window at the prison where I am incarcerated. The brightly colored birds worked diligently, assembling their nest one beakful of mud at a time. All the guys in my unit were immediately entranced by the glimpse of nature we so rarely get to experience. In prison, guys act tough and move carefully within a highly segregated environment. But once those birds planted themselves outside our window, those barriers melted away. The dayroom was packed, with guys from different gangs and races squeezing in together to observe the swallows at work. We watched their every move, pointing, laughing, and yelling like we were close friends.”

What’s the world’s oldest language? Experts disagree

From Lucy Tu for Scientific American: “The globe hums with thousands of languages. But when did humans first lay out a structured system to communicate, one that was distinct to a particular area? Scientists are aware of more than 7,100 languages in use today. Nearly 40 percent of them are considered endangered, meaning they have a declining number of speakers and are at risk of dying out. Some languages are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people, while more than half of the world’s population uses one of just 23 tongues. Tracing the oldest language is “a deceptively complicated task,” says Danny Hieber. One way to identify a language’s origins is to find the point at which a single tongue with different dialects became two entirely distinct languages, such that people speaking those dialects could no longer understand each other.”

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 “Prison can be a hostile place. And then the birds came”

From Bert Gambini at the University of Buffalo: “Across three studies involving more than 1,800 participants, the findings — published in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity — indicate that increased levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), which the liver makes in response to inflammation in the body, can promote social media use among middle-aged adults and college students. “It seems that inflammation not only increases social media use, but our results show preliminary evidence that it’s also associated with using social media to specifically interact with other users, like direct messaging and posting to people’s pages. Interestingly, inflammation did not lead people to use social media for other purposes—for example, entertainment purposes like watching funny videos,” says David Lee, PhD, the study’s first author.”

How an Anglican minister at the turn of the century became a leading butterfly researcher

From Horatio Morpurgo for The London Magazine: “The Rev. Arthur Miles Moss may have been a minister of the faith, but his life was largely arranged around a consuming passion for the study of moths and butterflies. In Belém, north-eastern Brazil, shortly before the First World War, he grew ‘food plant’ for the caterpillars collected on his long-distance pastoral rounds. From 1912-45, Moss was vicar of the largest Anglican parish in the world, comprising most of the Amazon basin and sixty thousand miles of navigable waterway. He built an ‘experimental light station’ outside town, a 40ft tower from which lamps totalling 33,600 watts blazed at night into the surrounding countryside. A weather cock and thermometer enabled him to ‘take the wind & temperature on every occasion. He collected and recorded over 3,000 insects in this way.”

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 “Research shows that inflammation can lead to social media use”

From Dan Lewis at Now I Know: “James Cameron, the director and screenwriter of the movie Titanic, sets up Rose’s character as upper-upper class very early in the movie; when she first sees the ship, she comments that it’s not all that special, and when she first arrives in her stateroom board the ship, she hangs some art on the wall, as seen above. But that’s not just something she painted — it’s a masterpiece. The work Rose is holding is supposed to be “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” a famous oil painting by Pablo Picasso. The Spanish artist created the work in 1907, five years before the actual Titanic went down to the bottom of the Atlantic. Toward the end of the film, as just about everything on board makes its way to the ocean’s floor, moviegoers see Les Demoiselles d’Avignon similarly sink to a watery doom. And it turns out that Picasso’s heirs weren’t all too happy about that.”

How should the law treat people with dementia who commit crimes?

From Jessica Wapner for Scientific American: “Some forms of dementia can trigger behaviors that society classifies as criminal. It’s not that these conditions create an intention to violate the law—most dementia-related violations are not what neurologists call “instrumental behaviors,” which are calculated in advance and executed according to a plan. Rather the radical changes in a person’s behavior and demeanor can erase their sense of social norms. They steal. They grope. They shout abusive language at fellow customers in the grocery store. Defendants with psychiatric illnesses may plead not guilty by reason of insanity, or they may insist they didn’t have conscious control over themselves—they were sleepwalking when they stole a candy bar, for example. There are no such protections for elderly people with cognitive disease.”

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 a Picasso painting in the movie Titanic started a legal battle”

Earlier this month, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, started blocking Canadian users from seeing news on its platforms. When a user tries to post a link to a news story on their Facebook or Instagram page, an error message pops up: “In response to Canadian government legislation, news content can’t be shared.” In June, Meta started blocking news links for a small number of users as a test; then, on August 1, it announced that the block would be broadened to include all users and all news sources. Meta said its action was necessitated by a law that the Canadian government passed in late June, called the Online News Act, aimed at forcing digital platforms to pay news publishers for their content. It is set to take effect at the end of the year. (Google also said that it would block news links from its Search and News portals, citing the same legislation, but a recent test by CJR brought up news links from multiple Canadian publishers, in both Search and News.)

In a statement in June, Meta described the new law as “flawed legislation that ignores the realities of how our platforms work [and] the value we provide news publishers.” Google said that it amounted to a “link tax,” and that it was fundamentally unworkable because it creates “uncertainty for our products and exposes us to uncapped financial liability.” Meta’s decision to block the news was a replay of a tactic that it used in Australia in 2021, in protest of a similar law called the News Media Bargaining Code. (Canada’s law was based on the Australian one, as I wrote back in March.) After the Australian government made a number of changes to the law, Meta removed the news block, and both it and Google started cutting deals with news publishers. (Last year, Bill Grueskin, a professor at Columbia Journalism School, dug into that process in a piece for CJR).

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

Continue reading “News blockade on digital platforms creates a vacuum of info on Canadian wildfires”

From Julie Salverson for Maisonneuve magazine: “Long ago, there was a famous rock called Somba Ke—“The Money Place”—on the eastern shore of Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories. Loud noises came from this place and it was bad medicine to pass near it. In the old days, a group of caribou hunters camped at Somba Ke for a night. One of them, named Ehtséo Ayah, had a dream and saw many strange things: men with white faces climbing into a big hole in the ground, a great flying bird, a big stick dropped on people far away. This would happen sometime in the future, after we are all gone, the prophet said. In his vision, everyone died. Theresa Baton recounts this tale, recorded by the elder George Blondin, as we sit in her narrow, smoky trailer. She and her husband Peter are two of the few Dene grandparents left alive in Déline, an indigenous community of several hundred people in the Northwest Territories. Much of the uranium used in developing the atomic bombs dropped on Japan was from Great Bear Lake.”

At 105 years old, Irving Kahn still goes to work every day as an investment banker

From David Dudley at The Daily Beast: “The stock market is imploding, Europe is on the brink, and, if the doomsayers are to be believed, we could be headed for a double-dip recession. None of that worries Irving Kahn, perhaps the world’s oldest working investment banker. In 1928, at the age of 23, he went to work on Wall Street as a stock analyst and brokerage clerk. Until a few years ago, he took the bus or walked the 20 blocks from his Upper East Side home to his midtown office. “For a 105-year-old guy, it’s pretty remarkable,” says Thomas Kahn, Irving’s 68-year-old son and the company’s president. “I get tired just thinking about it.” Two of Kahn’s older sons have already retired. Perhaps his closest rival for the title of oldest person working in the securities industry was the financier Roy Neuberger, who passed away in 2010 at 107.”

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Continue reading “Indigenous people mined the uranium for the atomic bomb”

From Elena Kostyuchenko in n+1 magazine: “I spent March 30, the eve of our trip, in a hotel. I was trying to gather my strength. A colleague from Novaya called me. She asked me if I was going to Mariupol. I was puzzled: only two people from the paper knew I was going to Mariupol. She said, “My sources have gotten in touch with me. They know that you’re going to Mariupol. They say that the Kadyrovites have orders to find you.” The Kadyrovites, a Chechen subdivision of Rosgvardia, were actively engaged in the fighting around Mariupol. My colleague said, “They’re not planning to hold you. They are going to kill you. That’s been approved.” Forty minutes later, my source from Ukrainian military reconnaissance called me. He said, “We have information that an assassination of a female journalist from Novaya Gazeta is being organized in Ukraine.”

Could artificial intelligence help us communicate with animals?

From Kathryn Hulick for Science News: “Gašper Beguš is a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. He got the chance, last summer, to observe sperm whales in their wild Caribbean habitat off the coast of the island nation of Dominica. With him were marine biologists and roboticists. There were also cryptographers and experts in other fields. All have been working together to listen to sperm whales and figure out what they might be saying. They call this Project CETI, which is short for Cetacean Translation Initiative. Project CETI has three listening stations. Each one is a cable hanging deep into the water from a buoy at the surface. Along the cable, several dozen underwater microphones record whale sounds. From the air, drones record video and sounds. Soft, fishlike robots do the same underwater. Suction-cup tags on the whales capture even more data.”

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 “A Russian journalist describes what it’s like to be poisoned”

From Lars Chittka for Scientific American: “Researchers have shown that bees and some other insects are capable of intelligent behavior that no one thought possible when I was a student. Bees, for example, can count, grasp concepts of sameness and difference, learn complex tasks by observing others, and know their own individual body dimensions, a capacity associated with consciousness in humans. They also appear to experience both pleasure and pain. In other words, it now looks like at least some species of insects—and maybe all of them—are sentient. These discoveries raise fascinating questions about the origins of complex cognition. They also have far-reaching ethical implications for how we should treat insects in the laboratory and in the wild.”

The song everyone associates with Top Gun was written for a different movie

From Colin Nagy for Why Is This Interesting: “I re-watched Top Gun on a flight recently with some pretty good headphones. For the first time, I paid close attention to the anthemic theme song that kicks off the credits. It has been embedded into every American brain from the time of first exposure, and reinforced recently with the second film, Maverick, where it was also used. Turns out the track wasn’t originally composed for Top Gun — it was originally composed for a dream sequence in the Chevy Chase movie Fletch. The story goes that while composer Harold Faltermeyer was working on the theme, it was overheard by Billy Idol, who was recording in the studio next door. “That’s great – you should use it for Top Gun,” Idol exclaimed.”

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 “Do insects feel joy and pain? Some scientists believe that they do”

From Maximilian Hess for The Fence: “Jesse Dean Bogdonoff has been many things – proponent of orthopaedic magnetism, star financier, solar installation salesman, spiritual explorer, alleged fraudster, Buddhist devotee and saxophonist. But the peak of his fame came in 1999, when he was appointed to the Tongan royal court – as its jester. Tonga is a distant and unfamiliar place. In December 2021, it was the site of the largest volcanic eruption in the world since at least 1883. When Tonga has made the headlines, it has typically been for the eccentricities of its kings. In 1976, the Guinness Book of World Records named Taufaʻahau Tupou IV the world’s heaviest monarch at a redoubtable 209 kg. His son, Prince Siaosi, made headlines for his aspirations as a film-maker, musicologist, and communications developer.”

Think you’re a good person? That’s up to the Cart Narc and his camera

From Nate Rogers for The Ringer: “Sebastian Davis, a boyish 42-year-old better known as “Agent Sebastian” in his Cart Narcs videos, was dressed like he was going to war. He was wrapped in an actual bulletproof vest (a gift sent by one of his many fans—this one a cop in Louisiana), with a red patch reading “CART NARCS” across his chest, just above a strapped-in GoPro. He carried an orange baton, like one an airport worker would use guiding a plane out of its gate. And he was in Nike Free Runs, ready to bolt at a moment’s notice, light up his voice-siren alert (a deliberately obnoxious variation on the buoy-weep that police will use to pull someone over), and deploy his catchphrase: “That’s not where the cart goes!”

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 man who became the court jester for the King of Tonga”