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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.

Just after Christmas, the writer Hanif Kureishi was taking a long walk in Rome, where he and his wife, Isabella D’Amico, were spending the holiday, when he suddenly collapsed onto the sidewalk. He fell awkwardly, twisting his neck and grievously injuring the top of his spine. Taken to the Gemelli Hospital, Kureishi spent the next several days “profoundly traumatized, altered and unrecognizable to myself,” he said on Twitter. Since then, Kureishi, 68, a novelist, screenwriter, playwright and director best known for “My Beautiful Laundrette” and “The Buddha of Suburbia,” has been dictating daily dispatches from his hospital bed. In vivid, poignant prose, he is narrating his ongoing drama but also musing about writing and art and describing the transcendent profundity of being dependent on the love and patience of others.

What it’s like to have a job pretending to be an AI-powered online assistant

Laura Preston writes about providing backup for an AI-driven online assistant: “The recruiter was a chipper woman with a master’s degree in English. Previously she had worked as an independent bookseller. “Your experience as an English grad student is ideal for this role,” she told me. The position was at a company that made artificial intelligence for real estate. They had developed a product called Brenda, a conversational AI that could answer questions about apartment listings. Brenda, the recruiter told me, was a sophisticated conversationalist, so fluent that most people who encountered her took her to be human. But like all conversational AIs, she had some shortcomings. To compensate for these flaws, the company was recruiting employees they called the operators.”

Continue reading “Writer gets a glimpse into what it’s like to be paralyzed”

Via a recent edition of the Why Is This Interesting newsletter comes this from Eurof Uppington, a reformed finance guy turned olive-oil merchant:

“It’s a boom time for small farmers in the eastern Mediterranean, like Greece, Albania, and Turkey, who are seeing bumper harvests and sky-high prices. However, it’s a disaster in Spain, the biggest producer nation, where unseasonal heat early in the year killed the crop. The harvest is down by half. Spain makes 50% of the world’s olive oil. This is a big deal. No one remembers it being like this before. We might think this is just bad news for Andalucian olive farmers and shrug. But this harvest season is going to affect us all in ways we might not notice. Firstly, the price we pay for our olive oil is going to go up. This is on top of price rises for other cooking oils, like sunflower and canola, as Ukraine and Russia are key producers.

Because olive oil brands lack market power, they won’t be able to pass on the full cost increase. What they’re more likely to do is lower the quality of shop-bought olive oil. A dirty secret of the industry is that the amount of extra virgin olive oil produced in the world is less than the amount consumed. The big brands make “more” EVOO by diluting it. The magic number is 0.8%—that’s the maximum amount of free fatty acid (FFA) content an olive oil can have to be extra virgin. Brands will blend 250ml of an excellent EVOO of 0.2% FFA with 750ml of an oil of 1% FFA—a much cheaper “virgin” grade: hey presto! One liter of EVOO with a 0.79% FFA! This practice is likely to increase, but it’s not technically illegal.”

“The air is crisp in Pennsylvania now. With the recent winter solstice ushering in the New Year, the cold season is in full swing. Prisoners in general population have swapped short sleeves and baseball caps for winter coats and wool hats, the same cocoa brown as the rest of our state-issued apparel. The trees have shed their leaves, and a gray haze hangs over the State Correctional Institution at Fayette, a 2,170-bed maximum security prison south of Pittsburgh, where I am serving a life sentence. I am one of the fortunate ones. I have a view through a small window in my prison cell and can see the naked pines standing tall on a hill, beyond the razor-wire and chain-link fences. Nearby, smokestacks climb into the sky.” (via When The Going Gets Weird)

by Charles Simic

Found this one via a recent edition of Luke O’Neill’s excellent newsletter Welcome to Hell World, which you should all subscribe to. This isn’t the whole poem, just the part I liked the most:

Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough,
But the address somehow wrong,
Even death can’t figure it out
Among all the locked doors…
And the rain beginning to fall.
Long windy night ahead.
Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death’s side of the bed.

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.

Amanda Florian writes about coming across an ad that seemed to have her face in it: “I woke up to a text from a friend in Shanghai, China. “Hey, Amanda—is this you?” he wrote via WeChat. I hadn’t even had my morning coffee yet. I pulled my phone closer to get a better look. “Yes, it’s me,” I typed back. “But … how?” While scrolling through Taobao, a Chinese marketplace owned by Alibaba, my friend came across an ad for a camping stove. It was like looking in a mirror—I saw my Puerto Rican mother’s long eyelashes and distinct jawline, my father’s prominent Austrian nose, and my abuela’s long hands. “Is it Photoshop?” “Was I hacked?” “Or perhaps one of my photo apps is to blame?”

A DIY coder created a virtual AI ‘wife’ using the ChatGP program

A coder created a virtual “wife” from ChatGPT and other recently-released machine learning systems that could see, respond, and react to him. The programmer, who goes by Bryce and claims to be an intern at a major tech firm, posted demonstrations of “ChatGPT-Chan” to TikTok. In one video, he asks ChatGPT-chan to go to Burger King, and the bot responds with a generated image of her eating a burger and says out loud, “no way, it smells like old french fries and they never refill their Coke.” The A.I. waifu is an amalgamation of all of these technologies—a language generator, image generator, text-to-speech, and computer vision tools—in ways he finds amusing, he said.

Continue reading “I think my face was deepfaked into a Chinese ad”

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

Former Twitter employees finally get severance offers after months of waiting, only to find them unsatisfactory. Twitter helps drive political mayhem in Brazil. Elon Musk says that Twitter will soon allow users to post tweets that are four thousand characters in length. It may be a new year, but Musk’s ownership of the platform continues to generate ample controversy.

To back up a bit: Musk’s bid to acquire Twitter for forty-four billion dollars, which he initially filed last April, was controversial in part because of his comments about how Twitter needed to do more to protect free speech. His decision to then delay the acquisition, purportedly over concerns about fake accounts, was also widely criticized, since many believed those arguments were a ruse designed to reduce the price, as I wrote at the time for CJR. But the apprehensiveness around all this was a drop in the ocean compared to what has happened since Musk finalized his acquisition of the company in late October (after the most recent edition of this Thursday newsletter came out), getting rid of almost two thirds of the staff—including swaths of the teams responsible for moderating harassment and disinformation on the network—restoring the accounts of prominent right-wing trolls, and suspending a number of journalists, seemingly because he didn’t like what they were writing about.

Musk also stoked the flames of controversy by leaking internal Twitter documents to a number of journalists and right-wing commentators including Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Berenson, in an attempt to show that the previous management of the company colluded with the FBI and others to ban conservative accounts, and to downplay information about COVID and Hunter Biden, Joe’s son. In The Nation, Ross Barkan wrote that many mainstream journalists ignored the Twitter Files because “Musk has evolved into a puerile reactionary, suspending journalist accounts at will and tossing off idiotic gibes to his 122 million followers” (though Barkan concluded that the story did, nonetheless, matter). Oliver Darcy, of CNN, said that the files amounted to “grossly misleading claims” that were “blindly amplified to millions by Fox News.”

Continue reading “Is Twitter dying, and if so, what does that mean for journalism?”

In a Wired magazine article from 1993, before the consumer web even began, Mitch Kapor wrote about the coming Digital Highway and said: “In the worst case, we could wind up with networks that have the principal effect of fostering addiction to a new generation of electronic narcotics (glitzy, interactive multimedia successors to Nintendo and MTV); their principal themes revolving around instant gratification through sex, violence, or sexual violence; their uses and content determined by mega-corporations pushing mindless consumption of things we don’t need and aren’t good for us.

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.

Vicente Lusitano was an African-Portuguese composer and music theorist who was most likely born between 1520 and 1522, and who died sometime after 1562. Probably the child of an enslaved African woman and a Portuguese noble, Lusitano traversed Europe in a career that saw him depart the Iberian Peninsula for Rome as a Catholic priest in 1550 and, around a decade later, relocate from Italy to Germany as a married Protestant. He wrote sacred and secular vocal music, taught extensively and produced scholarship that includes a unique manuscript treatise on improvised vocal counterpoint. But until recently, Lusitano has been mostly overlooked by music histories. He has been omitted altogether in some instances, and his appearances in centuries of academic literature have consistently minimized his biography.

The Renaissance riddle known as the Sola Busca tarot card deck

Considered the oldest complete seventy-eight card tarot deck in existence, the Sola Busca — named for the family of Milanese nobles who owned it for some five generations — was the first to be produced using copperplate engraving. It is also the earliest known tarot deck that illustrates the Major and Minor Trumps in the way that has become the standard, with characters and objects depicting allegorical scenes. In the Renaissance era this would have been revolutionary, while, today, some of these cards may seem familiar. In 1909, when Arthur Edward Waite commissioned artist Pamela Colman–Smith to illustrate his The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), she drew inspiration — and for nearly a dozen cards, the exact imagery — from the Sola Busca deck.

Continue reading “Hundreds of years later, a Black composer gets his due”

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.

Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe used cave drawings to record detailed information about the lives of animals around them, a new study claims. Markings found on paintings dating back at least 20,000 years have long been suspected as having meaning but had not been decoded until now. The initial discovery that the markings related to animal life-cycles was made by furniture conservator Ben Bacon. He then teamed up with professors from two universities to write their paper. Their findings have now been published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal. Bacon spent countless hours of his free time looking at examples of cave painting and analysing data to decipher the markings.

Gustave Zander and the 19th-Century Gym

Long before Muscle Beach, tubs of whey protein powder, or the distinct grade of shame that emanates from an unused fitness club card, Dr. Gustaf Zander (1835–1920) was helping his pupils tone their pecs in his Stockholm Mechanico-Therapeutic Institute. Having opened his first institute in 1865 with twenty-seven machines, by 1877 “there were fifty-three different Zander machines in five Swedish towns”. And not long after, Zander reinvented himself professionally. Once a lecturer in gymnastics at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, he soon became an international fitness entrepreneur, exporting equipment to Russia, England, Germany, and Argentina.

Continue reading “Amateur archaeologist helps crack Ice Age cave art code”

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.

Nearly 200 miles of tunnels snake beneath Helsinki, providing a weatherproof subterranean playground for the Finnish capital’s residents and visitors. Yet hidden behind the bright lights of the underground attractions—which include a museum, church, go-kart track, hockey rink, and more—are emergency shelters fitted with life-sustaining equipment: an air filtration system, an estimated two-week supply of food and water, and cots and other comforts. The shelters reflect a chilling geopolitical reality for a small country that shares an 833-mile border with Russia, its longtime nemesis. Helsinki began excavating tunnels through bedrock in the 1960s to house power lines and sewers and other utilities, then realized the space could also shelter the city’s population of 630,000 in the event of another invasion from the East.

The hit Italian song that sounds like English but is actually gibberish

In 1972, a popular Italian singer named Adriano Celentano released a single called “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” written by him amd performed with his wife Claudia Mori, a singer/actress turned record producer. Both the title of the song and its lyrics are gibberish. Celentano said later that his intention was to explore communication barriers. “Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did,” Celentano said in an interview with NPR. “So at a certain point, because I like American slang—which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian—I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn’t mean anything.”

Continue reading “Cold War fears led Helsinki to build a world underground”

I think I probably learned more about the leadup to the First World War from a recent edition of Talia Lavin’s “The Sword and the Sandwich” newsletter than I probably ever did in history class. The newsletter is ostensibly about sandwiches, but often veers rather sharply into other topics, and this one was about how history only looks inevitable in hindsight:

“In 1903, more than a decade before a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist student would spark the First World War, a coterie of Serbian Army officers entered the royal bedroom in the old Beaux-Arts palace in Belgrade that was the home of the Obrenović dynasty. Armed with revolvers, they hunted down the 26-year-old king, Alexander I, and his deeply unpopular queen Draginja, flushing them out of their hiding place in a wardrobe and filling them with bullets. The assassins then mutilated the bodies beyond recognition with their sabers, and, in an ecstasy of triumph, hurled the corpses from a second-floor window, onto piles of garden manure. 

The army officers’ leader—known by his nom de guerre “Apis,” for the primordial Egyptian bull-god—was a prominent member of the same Black Hand society that would plot the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand a decade later. The point here is that you never know where in history you are. It may well be that the May Coup organizers—decorated military men full of fanatical zeal—could not have imagined a higher drama than the one they engaged in, throwing a disemboweled king and queen onto the dung-heap that fed the royal roses.

Yet it was the tremblingly nervous teenaged fanatic Gavrilo Princip who stepped onto the footboard of the stalled royal motorcar, and shot Franz Ferdinand and his hapless wife. Princip then tried to kill himself, and failed. Another of the conspirators, eighteen years old, threw a bomb that hit the royal motorcade but caused no injuries, ate a cyanide pill that only made him vomit, and finally jumped into a river. It being summertime, the water was less than a foot deep; he died in prison three years later of tuberculosis.”