mathewingram.com/work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading “So long, and thanks for all the fish”

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

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

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

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Continue reading “Faked research may have caused almost a million deaths”

From The New Yorker: “Everyone hopes for a miracle. And in Kenya—where evangelical Christianity is so popular that the President frequently prays with preachers during official events—the more miracles a pastor performs, the more followers he will gain. Some swiftly build large congregations and become multimillionaires. In 2018, Halua Yaa, a woman in the coastal town of Malindi, heard about a pastor named Paul Mackenzie, who, it was said, could heal the sick. Mackenzie ran a Pentecostal church called Good News International Ministries, on a spacious compound in Malindi, where he also lived. He urged his followers to avoid television, sports, and other secular pastimes, to refuse Western medicine, and to take their children out of school.”

She was an advocate for the disabled but she probably never actually existed

From IGN: “On March 4, 2019, the accessibility community mourned a prominent advocate: Susan Banks. Banks’ partner, Coty Craven, announced her passing on social media platforms such as Twitter/X. The industry lamented the loss of an individual that helped raise awareness for accessibility in games, particularly for Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. However, in the years since Banks’ alleged death, mounting evidence and accounts from those close to her work suggest that she was not the person she claimed to be. In fact, some are convinced that Banks may never have existed at all. Her various jobs are said to have included being a professional model, an asset manager at a financial firm, and a professor of Deaf Studies at Gallaudet University, all before the age of 30. IGN reached out to Gallaudet University’s Deaf Studies program, and they said nobody by the name of Susan Banks was ever employed at the University.”

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Continue reading “A pastor led his followers into the woods. Hundreds have been found dead”

From CBC: “When a 44-year-old man from France started experiencing weakness in his leg, he went to the hospital. That’s when doctors told him he was missing most of his brain. The man’s skull was full of liquid, with just a thin layer of brain tissue left, a condition is known as hydrocephalus. “He was living a normal life. He has a family. He works. His IQ was tested at the time of his complaint. This came out to be 84, which is slightly below the normal range … So, this person is not bright — but perfectly, socially apt,” explains Axel Cleeremans. Cleeremans is a cognitive psychologist at the Université Libre in Brussels. When he learned about the case, which was first described in The Lancet in 2007, he saw a medical miracle — but also a major challenge to theories about consciousness. “It is truly incredible that the brain can continue to function, more or less, within the normal range — with probably many fewer neurons than in a typical brain.”

The killer lakes of Cameroon

From Damn Interesting: “On the night of 15 August 1984, a truck sagging with the weight of a dozen passengers trundled along a misty road in Cameroon, Africa. Although there had been no indication of a problem mere moments before, the vehicle suddenly sputtered and stalled. The driver turned the key, but the churning ignition was unable to reanimate the engine. Most of the Cameroonians clambered out of the vehicle to investigate, but two remained atop the truck. Within a few moments, each of the ten passengers who had stepped off the vehicle slumped to the ground. Within minutes, they were dead. They weren’t the only ones. In the neighboring low-lying villages, twenty-seven other residents inexplicably passed away in their sleep, and an unspecified number of animals perished in the vicinity. Investigators were at a loss to explain the mass fatalities.”

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Continue reading “Man who is missing 90% of his brain leads a normal life”

From Vanity Fair: “At 12:30 P.M. on November 22, 1963, bullets fired into the open roof of the presidential limousine tore through John F. Kennedy’s body. The first shot to hit the president went through his neck, but did not kill him. Within five seconds another shot damaged his brain and skull. During the critical time between the first shot and the fatal blow—about five seconds in which the president’s life might have been saved—the Secret Service agents within a few feet of the man they were duty-bound to protect—failed to take evasive action. Nine of the 28 Secret Service men who were in Dallas with the president the day he died had been out until the early hours of the morning. A few of them were sleep deprived and had been drinking while traveling with the president, an activity that was clearly prohibited in the Secret Service rulebook.”

Grocery billionaire claimed a tax deduction for the ransom paid after his kidnapping

From Wikipedia: “Theodor Paul Albrecht was a German entrepreneur who established the discount supermarket chain Aldi with his brother Karl Albrecht. In 2010, Theo was ranked by Forbes as the 31st richest person in the world, with a net worth of $16.7 billion. In 1971, Albrecht was kidnapped. A ransom of seven million German marks (approximately US$2 million at the time) was paid for his release. He was held at gunpoint by Heinz-Joachim Ollenburg, a lawyer, and his accomplice Paul Kron. The ransom sum was delivered by Franz Hengsbach, then Bishop of Essen. His kidnappers were eventually caught by authorities, but only half of the money was recovered. Albrecht later unsuccessfully claimed the ransom as a tax deductible business expense in court.”

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Continue reading “JFK’s Secret Service agents were too hungover to react quickly in Dallas”

From The Guardian: “Over the course of the day, about 30 people sat with Emily. Some used their three minutes for quiet reflection. Others wanted conversation, asking her questions or sharing why they had come to see her. Usually you’d describe a project like this as performance art, but Emily isn’t an artist: she’s a terminally ill 32-year-old who doesn’t know how much time she has left. Her performance is part of a project titled Time to Live, designed by the Australian Cancer Research Foundation (ACRF) to raise awareness and funds. Each participant has effectively “bought” a slice of Emily’s time. Some were complete strangers, others were family and friends; either way, the experience provoked strong emotions. Afterwards, I meet another participant, Helen, who is visibly moved. It has raised a lot for both of us: we speak about the grief of losing our mums to cancer, the anxiety of living with a genetic predisposition.”

This Nazi villa is falling apart but the German government doesn’t know what to do with it

From the New York Times: “No one knows what to do with the estate beside the Bogensee lake in Brandenburg. It was built for Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, by his grateful country just before the start of World War II. Owned by the State of Berlin today, it has sat moldering expensively on the public’s tab, along with a set of dramatic dormitories built later by the Communist Party to house an indoctrination school. It is a nearly 20-acre campus that echoes with the pasts of two totalitarian regimes. Too burdensome for the state to continue carrying, prohibitively expensive for most real estate prospectors and tainted by history, Berlin has given up on selling or developing it. Instead, it has offered to give the Nazi mansion away, free. In exasperated comments made to Parliament this spring, Stefan Evers, the state’s senator for finance, made the pitch — take it off our hands, or we will tear it down.”

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Continue reading “Emily is dying. So why is she selling off her remaining time to strangers?”