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From Michael Idov for GQ in 2011: “The rumors started seeping out of Ukraine: A young Russian film director had holed up on the outskirts of Kharkov, a town of 1.4 million in the country’s east, making…something. If the gossip was to be believed, this was the most expansive, complicated, all-consuming film project ever attempted. A steady stream of former extras and fired PAs talked of the shoot in terms usually reserved for survivalist camps. The director, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, orced the crew to dress in Stalin-era clothes, fed them Soviet food out of cans and tins, and paid them in Soviet money. Khrzhanovsky had taken over all of Kharkov, they said, shutting down the airport. Others insisted, the entire thing was a prison experiment, filmed by hidden cameras.”

When a giant pink bunny appeared on a hill in the Italian countryside

From Dan Lewis at Now I Know: “The Italian village of Frabosa Sottana is located in the northwestern part of the country, in the foothills of the Alps. It’s a small, nondescript municipality, home to only about 1,500 people. And one day, the residents woke up to find a giant pink rabbit lying on the hill of the local ski resort. This was no child’s toy – it was 200 feet long and about 20 feet high. It turned out that the rabbit was put there by a Vienna-based art collective, which does all sorts of weird things like this; in 2014, they built a giant nose in an open space in Germany. The rabbit was knitted from wool and stuffed with hay, and was designed to make a statement about decay – and it did, since it rotted away and was almost completely gone by about 2016.”

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 movie set turned into a totalitarian prison camp”

It’s been a big week for AI regulation—or at least, the idea of it. On Monday, the Biden administration published an executive order on “the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence”; while AI has the potential to help solve a number of urgent challenges, the EO said, the irresponsible use of the same technology could “exacerbate societal harms such as fraud, discrimination, bias, and disinformation,” and create risks to national security. Then, yesterday, the British government opened a two-day summit on AI safety at Bletchley Park, the site where codebreakers famously deciphered German messages during World War II. Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, said that AI will bring changes “as far reaching as the industrial revolution, the coming of electricity, or the birth of the internet,” but that there is also a risk that humanity could “lose control” of the technology. And the European Union has been trying to push forward AI legislation that it has been working on for more than two years.

AI and its potential risks and benefits are at the top of many agendas at the same time. Yesterday, Vice President Kamala Harris, who is attending the Bletchley Park summit, gave a speech in which she rejected “the false choice that suggests we can either protect the public or advance innovation,” adding, “We can—and we must—do both.” Ahead of time, a British official told Politico that the speech would show that the summit was a “real focal point” for global AI regulation (even if, as Politico noted, it “may overshadow Bletchley a bit.”) When it comes down to it, though, the US, the UK, and the EU are taking different approaches to the problem—differences that are, in many cases, the result of political factors specific to each jurisdiction. 

In the US, the Biden administration’s order aims to put some bite behind voluntary AI rules that it released earlier this year—but it doesn’t go as far as an actual law because there’s no chance one of those would pass. That’s because Congress—as Anu Bradford, a law professor at Columbia University, told the MIT Technology Review—is “deeply polarized and even dysfunctional to the extent that it is very unlikely to produce any meaningful AI legislation in the near future.” Partly as a result, some observers have accused the White House of resorting to “hand waving” about the problem. The full executive order is over a hundred pages long; some of those are filled with definitions of terms that not every reader will be familiar with (“floating point operation”; “dual-use foundation model”) but there is also some rambling as to the potential of AI, both positive and negative. 

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

Continue reading “The world grapples with how to regulate artificiaI intelligence”

From John Reed for Vice: “When I was four or five, sometimes I’d walk into my grandmother’s bedroom to find her weeping. She’d be sitting on the side of the bed, going through boxes of tissues. People were always dying around Grandma—her children, her husbands, her boyfriend—so her lifelong state of grief was understandable. To see her sunken in her high and soft bed, enshrouded in the darkness of the attic, and surrounded by the skin-and-spit smell of old age, was to know that mothers don’t get what they deserve. Today, when I think back on it, I don’t wonder whether Grandma got what she deserved as a mother; I wonder whether she got what she deserved as a murderer.”

Inside the capital of Lithuania there’s a tiny micronation called Uzupis

From Daisy Alioto for Dirt: “The Republic of Užupis—a 7,000-resident micronation inside the country’s capital—is located adjacent to Vilnius’s Old Town, just across the Vilnia river. Since its founding on April 1st, 1997, the 148-acre micronation has captured the imagination of the world. Most of this fascination stems from the republic’s unusual constitution, which includes articles like “11. Everyone has the right to look after the dog until one of them dies.” Užupis was born from tragedy. The micronation was founded by Tomas Čepaitis and Romas Lileikis in an attempt to reclaim the derelict area known primarily for its high crime rate. What was once a thriving Jewish neighborhood had fallen into ruin after the murder of 95% of Lithuania’s Jewish population.”

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 “When you think you have a murderer in the family”

From the New York Times: “I know I look like a man. I know I sound like a man and maybe even walk like a man and dress like one, too. But I’m not a man; I’m a woman. Playing sports and having muscles and a deep voice make me less feminine, yes. I’m a different kind of woman, I know, but I’m still a woman. I began running competitively as a teenager in South Africa, and by age 18 I was competing on the international stage. In 2009, as I prepared to run in the Berlin World Championships, athletic authorities sent me for some medical testing. Because of my looks, there had been speculation from my fellow athletes, sports officials, the media and fans that I was not what I said I was.”

Vladimir Nabokov’s fame is thanks in large part to the work of his wife Vera

From Stacy Schiff for The New Yorker: “Vladimir Nabokov was famous at Cornell, where he taught between 1948 and 1959, for a number of reasons. None had anything to do with the literature; few people knew what he had written, and even fewer had read his work. Tearing Dostoyevski to shreds in front of two hundred undergraduates made an impression, as did the pronouncement that good books should not make us think but make us shiver. The fame derived in part, too, from the fact that the professor did not come to class alone. He arrived on campus driven by Mrs. Nabokov, he crossed campus with Mrs. Nabokov, and he occasionally appeared in class on the arm of Mrs. Nabokov, who carried his books. In fact, the man who spoke so often of his own isolation was one of the most accompanied loners of all time.”

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 “Caster Semenya on being persecuted by her sport”

Editor’s Note: Sorry to interrupt your reading, but I thought I would mention something that will hopefully make things easier for some of you. In yesterday’s newsletter there was a story titled “The grift, the Indian prince, and a shocking twist,” from a subscription newsletter called AirMail (founded by Graydon Carter, former editor of Vanity Fair). Since the newsletter has a hard paywall, I included a link that got around the payall, using a service called 12ft.io. But that service seems to have shut down, at least temporarily, and so has another I used to use called archive.today. So I have saved a copy of that story to a shared folder on Instapaper, which you should be able to access here. For the Bloomberg story included here, that method didn’t work, so I have copied the entire story to my website, and included a link to the page.

As a professional journalist, I realize this is somewhat hypocritical of me. Don’t paywalls help support journalism? Perhaps. But then, Graydon Carter is extremely wealthy, and so is Bloomberg, so I don’t feel that bad about getting around their hard paywall for a single story. They could make their paywalls more porous, and give readers who come only once in a while a free story, but they choose not to do that. So I am helping them 🙂 And I am promoting their work as well, by allowing you to read these stories. That’s my rationale, anyway. I’m planning to do this for other similar stories in the future – either putting them in the shared Instapaper folder or posting them to my site (which no one ever goes to). If the links don’t work or you can’t access the shared folder, let me know and I will find another way. And now, back to the links!

Update: 12ft.io was apparently taken down without warning by its hosting service, for alleged terms of service violations. As for archive.today (also at archive.is, archive.ph etc.) it doesn’t work for me on Chrome but it does in Firefox. If you have problems with any of my links please let me know and I will find a way to get the article to you!

From Daniel Villareal at LGBTQ Nation: “Flames shot through the crowded Up Stairs Lounge as bartender Buddy Rasmussen opened the front door to see who had been ringing the downstairs buzzer. Someone had lit the popular bar’s stairwell carpet on fire, and it burned its way up the wooden stairs into the bar, quickly igniting the lounge’s red wallpaper, curtains, and posters of Burt Reynolds naked on a bearskin rug and Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz wearing his seven gold medals, a star-spangled Speedo, and a smile. Some patrons saw the blaze and ran for the nearest exits or down the stairwell, emerging with their clothes on fire as neighbors raced to pour pitchers of water onto them. Many were too shocked by the exploding blaze to move. The June 24, 1973, conflagration, likely set by a sex worker ejected from the New Orleans bar earlier that night, killed 32 people and injured at least 15 others.”

Lululemon founder is racing to cure the rare disease destroying his muscles

From Ari Altstedter for Bloomberg: On the outskirts of Silicon Valley, at a private clinic inside a two-story office building near the highway, Chip Wilson was undergoing an experimental medical procedure to retain the use of his legs. Wilson is 68 and has a net worth of $7.1 billion, thanks largely to his development in the late 1990s of a type of yoga pants he could sell to women for $100 a pair. The company he founded, Lululemon Athletica, more or less invented an apparel category, athleisure, which it continued to dominate even after he stepped away in 2013 following some particularly insensitive comments about how the pants looked on some women’s bodies. Unknown to the public, throughout his long career Wilson was watching his own body slowly waste away.”

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 gay mass murder and the cover-up that followed”

Note: This is a Bloomberg story that I included in my email newsletter When The Going Gets Weird (which you can find here), as a way of allowing readers behind the Bloomberg paywall. I am not monetizing this story in any way, and if asked I will take it down.

By Ari Altstedter

October 20, 2023 at 5:00 AM EDT

On the outskirts of Silicon Valley, at a private clinic inside a two-story office building near the highway, Chip Wilson was undergoing an experimental medical procedure to retain the use of his legs. Wilson is 68 and has a net worth of $7.1 billion, thanks largely to his development in the late 1990s of a type of yoga pants he could sell to women for $100 a pair. The company he founded, Lululemon Athletica, more or less invented an apparel category, athleisure, which it continued to dominate even after he stepped away in 2013 following some particularly insensitive comments about how the pants looked on some women’s bodies.

Unknown to the public, throughout his long career Wilson was watching his own body slowly waste away from muscular dystrophy. Lying supine as Matt Cook, the clinic’s proprietor, ran an ultrasound wand over his legs, Wilson surveyed the damage the disease had done. Where images of healthy muscles are largely black, with only specks and striations of white indicating fat, Wilson’s were heavily marbled.

“His muscles kind of look like Kobe beef,” Cook remarked. It was the result of inflammation, the first stage of the muscle death wrought by the disease. Cook, who started off as an anesthesiologist before getting into regenerative medicine, has been using two experimental techniques to stem or even reverse the process. The one Wilson was undergoing involves injecting plasma distilled from his own blood into the inflamed areas, a treatment long used by professional athletes to overcome injury but unproven against muscular dystrophy. The other involves injections of stem cells, which secrete a protein Cook thinks might work even better. Because stem cell therapies are restricted in the US, Wilson’s twice-yearly sessions require him to fly from Vancouver, where he lives, to Tijuana, Mexico, stopping to pick up Cook on the way.

Continue reading “Lululemon’s founder is racing to cure the rare disease destroying his muscles”

From Hannah Ghorashi for Air Mail: “My husband received a call from his acquaintance Amar Singh—a women’s-rights activist, art patron, film producer, and Indian prince—and said he had a wild story to tell him. It concerned Amar’s relationship with a young Swedish woman named Liza-Johanna Holgersson, whom he had met online. They had broken up on August 6 when, he claimed, he had discovered she had been living a secret life. She had, he said, been a grifter, a con woman, taking him and multiple other men for a ride. But what I thought would be a cautionary tale of online dating among the 0.1 percent became something else: by the end of my research, I had twice been offered bribes to stop writing Amar’s story. Both times they had been offered to me by Amar.”

How many ghost sightings were due to carbon-monoxide poisoning?

From Jeanette Winterson for The Paris Review: “There’s a theory I like that suggests why the nineteenth century is so rich in ghost stories and hauntings. Carbon monoxide poisoning from gas lamps. Street lighting and indoor lighting burned coal gas, which is sooty and noxious. It gives off methane and carbon monoxide. Outdoors, the flickering flames of the gas lamps pumped carbon monoxide into the air—air that was often trapped low down in the narrow streets and cramped courtyards of industrial cities and towns. Indoors, windows closed against the chilly weather prevented fresh oxygen from reaching those sitting up late by lamplight. Low-level carbon monoxide poisoning produces symptoms of choking, dizziness, paranoia, including feelings of dread, and hallucinations. Where better to hallucinate than in the already dark and shadowy streets of Victorian London? Or in the stifling interiors?”

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 grift, the Indian prince, and a shocking twist”

From Jon Schuppe for NBC: “Seven months of searching for her lost son brought Bettersten Wade to a dirt road leading into the woods, past an empty horse stable and a scrapyard. The last time she’d seen her middle child, Dexter Wade, 37, was on the night of March 5, as he left home with a friend. She reported him missing, and Jackson police told her they’d been unable to find him, she said. It wasn’t until 172 excruciating days after his disappearance that Bettersten learned the truth: Dexter had been killed less than an hour after he’d left home, struck by a Jackson police car as he crossed a nearby interstate highway. Police had known Dexter’s name, and hers, but failed to contact her, instead letting his body go unclaimed for months in the county morgue.”

Do you think your plastic is being recycled? A huge amount of it is not

From Douglas Main at MIT Technology Review: “To date, humans have created around 11 billion metric tons of plastic. This amount surpasses the biomass of all animals, both terrestrial and marine. About 430 million tons of plastic is produced yearly, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. One-third of this total takes the form of single-use plastics, which humans interact with for seconds or minutes before discarding. A total of 95% of the plastic used in packaging is disposed of after one use, a loss to the economy of up to $120 billion annually. One-third of this packaging is not collected. What doesn’t get reused or recycled does not chemically degrade but rather becomes a fixture of our world; it breaks apart to form microplastics.”

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 “Police hid the truth about her missing son for months”

As artificial intelligence programs have become ubiquitous over the past year, so have lawsuits from authors and other creative professionals who argue that their work has been essential to that ubiquity—the “large language models” (or LLMs) that power text-generating AI tools are trained on content that has been scraped from the web, without its authors’ consent—and that they deserve to be paid for it. Last week, my colleague Yona Roberts Golding wrote about how media outlets, specifically, are weighing legal action against companies that offer AI products, including OpenAI, Meta, and Google. They may have a case: a 2021 analysis of a dataset used by many AI programs showed that half of its top ten sources were news outlets. As Roberts Golding noted, Karla Ortiz, a conceptual artist and one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against three AI services, recently told a roundtable hosted by the Federal Trade Commission that the creative economy only works “when the basic tenets of consent, credit, compensation, and transparency are followed.”

As Roberts Golding pointed out, however, AI companies maintain that their datasets are protected by the “fair use” doctrine in copyright law, which allows for copyrighted work to be repurposed under certain limited conditions. Matthew Butterick, Ortiz’s lawyer, told Roberts Golding that he is not convinced by this argument; LLMs are “being held out commercially as replacing authors,” he said, noting that AI-generated books have already been sold on Amazon, under real or fake names. Most copyright experts would probably agree that duplicating a book word for word isn’t fair use. But some observers believe that the scraping of books and other content to train LLMs likely is protected by the fair use exception—or, at least, that it should be. In any case, new debates around news content, copyright, and AI are building on similar debates around other types of creative content—debates that have been live throughout AI’s recent period of rapid development, and that build on much older legal concepts and arguments.   

Continue reading “If an AI program scans a book, is that copyright infringement or fair use?”