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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”

From the Washington Post: “Last month, I found out I have Stage 4 uterine leiomyosarcoma, a rare and aggressive cancer. Doctors say I may have just a few months to live. Treatment could buy me a little extra time, but not much. My disease is advanced and incurable. My prognosis has left me shocked, sad, angry and confused. I wake up some mornings raging at the universe, feeling betrayed by my own body, counting the years and the milestones I expected to enjoy with my family. I am leaving behind a husband and 14-year-old daughter I adore, and a writing and teaching career I’ve worked so hard to build. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my life, and in addition to the horror, a surprising feeling has taken hold: I am dying at age 49 without any regrets.”

He lived in a hotel room for five years and it only cost him $200 but then he went too far

From the New York Times: “On a June afternoon in 2018, a man named Mickey Barreto checked into the New Yorker Hotel. He was assigned Room 2565, a double-bed accommodation with a view of Midtown Manhattan almost entirely obscured by an exterior wall. For a one-night stay, he paid $200.57. But he did not check out the next morning. Instead, he made the once-grand hotel his full-time residence for the next five years, without ever paying another cent. Now, that deal could land him in prison. The story of how Mr. Barreto, a California transplant with a taste for wild conspiracy theories and a sometimes tenuous grip on reality, gained and then lost the rights to Room 2565 might sound implausible — another tale from a man who claims without evidence to be the first cousin, 11 times removed, of Christopher Columbus’s oldest son. But it’s true.”

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 “I’m dying at the age of 49 but I have no regrets about my life”

From Every.to: “In 1981, journalists from around the world gathered at NASA’s headquarters to watch as the Voyager 2 spacecraft became the first man-made object to reach Saturn. In the aftermath of this historic event, the main attraction wasn’t NASA’s staff. It was fellow journalist Jerry Pournelle. Pournelle had something none of them had ever seen before: a portable computer, the Osborne 1, the first mass-market personal computer in history. Just six years earlier, when the Altair 8800 was unveiled, Steve Jobs recognized that the future of computing lay in the consumer market, not the hobbyist. But Jobs was not alone. He stood alongside someone who would go on to become a frenemy of sorts: That man was Adam Osborne, Jobs’s first true rival.”

Here’s why the state of Oklahoma is shaped like a panhandle

From JSTOR Daily: “More popularly known as the Panhandle, the three counties extending in a row west of the rest of the “pan” of the state are one of those geographical quirks of history that really jump off of the map. The Panhandle is also the location of the only county in the country with four states on its borders: Cimarron County, the westernmost part of the state, borders Colorado, Kansas, Texas, and New Mexico. Today fewer than 1% of Oklahomans live in the 168 x 34 mile-wide strip. It was Spanish territory until 1821, when it became part of independent Mexico. The Republic of Texas claimed it when declaring independence. But then, upon entering the Union as a slave state in 1845, Texas surrendered its claim to the region because slavery was prohibited north of 36°30′ latitude by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.”

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 rise and fall of Steve Jobs’s greatest rival”

From the BBC: “Des Destinées de l’Ame (Destinies of the Soul) has been housed at Houghton Library since the 1930s. In 2014, scientists determined that the material it was bound with was in fact human skin. But the university has now announced it has removed the binding “due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history”. Des Destinées de l’Ame is a meditation on the soul and life after death, written by Arsène Houssaye in the mid-1880s. He is said to have given it to his friend, Dr Ludovic Bouland, a doctor, who then reportedly bound the book with skin from the body of an unclaimed female patient who had died of natural causes. Harvard said it was looking at ways to ensure “the human remains will be given a respectful disposition that seeks to restore dignity to the woman whose skin was used”.

Plastic manufacturing companies deceived the public about recycling

From The Guardian: “Plastic producers have known for more than 30 years that recycling is not an economically or technically feasible plastic waste management solution. That has not stopped them from promoting it, according to a new report. “The companies lied,” said Richard Wiles, president of fossil-fuel accountability advocacy group the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), which published the report. Plastic, which is made from oil and gas, is notoriously difficult to recycle. Doing so requires meticulous sorting, since most of the thousands of chemically distinct varieties of plastic cannot be recycled together. That renders an already pricey process even more expensive. The industry has known for decades about these existential challenges, but obscured that information in its marketing campaigns, the report shows.”

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 removes human skin binding from book”