From Stephanie Clifford at Esquire: “I met Leon in the fall of 1993, when we were new sophomores at Phillips Exeter Academy, a competitive New Hampshire boarding school. He seemed instantly at ease—tall, with excellent posture, a puffed-out chest, and an easy grin. He made the soccer team and soon traveled in a pack with other sporty, handsome guys wearing white baseball caps backward and smooth-haired girls so sophisticated they knotted silk scarves at their necks. He was assured about his life plan: He was going to become a surgeon in Texas. Then I heard a piece of news so unbelievable I thought at first that I’d dreamed it. Leon had been convicted of hiring a hit man to carry out the double murder of his ex-girlfriend and his new partner’s ex-husband and had been sentenced to life in prison. As I began to dig into the wreckage of Leon’s life, a very different picture emerged that was far more complex—and deeply disturbing.”
A touching story of young love emerges from a decades-old comment on YouTube
From Mark Slutsky: “Longtime readers and friends will know that I spent several years of my life poring over YouTube comments and collecting the most poignant I could find for my project Sad YouTube. It was my impossible goal to rescue the countless personal stories I found in the comments sections of old songs. A couple of weeks ago I received an email out of the blue. The message read, “Just wondering if you knew who this 1912Universal person is?” It then quoted a comment I had posted to Sad YouTube in 2012 by a user who went by that name, which talked about how “when this song hit I was totally crazy about a girl named Irene Eckstein from Forest Hills NY.” I had no idea who 1912Universal was. So I wrote back, “Sadly, I do not! You might want to look up Irene Eckstein.” The reply came back a few hours later: “I am Irene Eckstein.”
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From Joaquim Salles for Atlas Obscura: “Just off the coast of Astoria, Queens, at the confluence of the Harlem and East Rivers, is a narrow tidal channel. Hell Gate. Its fast currents change multiple times a day and it used to be riddled with rocks just beneath the surface. Visitors to Randall’s Island Park can see the swirling churn and watch pleasure boaters struggle through. American author Washington Irving wrote an essay about it: “Woe to the unlucky vessel that ventures into its clutches.” But many a vessel did venture into those clutches over the centuries. Traversing it could save sailors navigating between New York Harbor and Southern New England days of travel around Long Island. This expediency often came at a cost. Hell Gate is the final resting place of literally hundreds of ships. Most of them are forgotten but one continues to captivate. Because down there, under the minor maelstroms, is the promise of gold.”
Famous naturalist Alfred Wallace owed some of his fame to a Sarawak teenager
From Matthew Wills for JSTOR Daily: “This year marks the bicentennial of the birth of Alfred Russel Wallace, explorer, naturalist, and co-developer of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Sarawak teenager Ali was initially hired by Wallace as a servant and cook. For seven of the eight years between 1854 and 1862 that Wallace traveled around the Malay Archipelago, Ali ended up being the actual collector of most of the birds (approximately 5,000 of the total 8,000) in Wallace’s collection of 125,000 natural history specimens, many of them new to science. Ali was Muslim, about fifteen years old when hired, and had “grown up on and around boats,” write van Wyhe and Drawhorn in their biography. Together, Ali and Wallace braved fevers, pirates, monsoon downpours, ant invasions, at least one tiger, giant snakes, and the threat of head-hunters.”
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From Tom Donaghy for The Atavist: “In the early 1960s, Harry had a string of Copper Kettle Fudge shops up and down the Shore. So revered were his stores that Harry was known far and wide as the Fudge King. He was even in talks to build a fudge factory—something that would’ve taken his Willy Wonka–ness to the next level—when he was savagely beaten to death on Labor Day 1964. His body was stuffed under the dashboard of his Lincoln Continental, parked at an after-hours nightclub called the Dunes. The case was never solved. I spent the next two years sorting through a trove of whispers and accusations around the murder. At first I was just curious, but the more I learned about Harry—a figure beloved by friends and strangers alike—the more intent I was to identify his killer.”
Researchers who became famous for studying honesty are accused of making up data
From Gideon Lewis-Kraus for The New Yorker: “Honesty researchers have found that fewer people lie about a coin flip—a binary outcome—than exaggerate the number on a die roll, reporting that they rolled a four when they actually rolled a three, especially if a four had come up on a test roll. Ariely has long used conclusions like these to maintain that most people lie a bit. Other researchers argue that the averages are misleading: most people don’t really lie much, but some people are prone to lie a lot. It now seems as though the “fudge factor” was less of an explanation of a phenomenon than a license for it—yet another just-so story about why a little deceit isn’t so bad after all. “I’ll tell you what the research on dishonesty says, but all that came from Dan and Francesca!” the former senior researcher said. “It’s like everything we know about this situation comes from the data that might have been fabricated.”
From Andreas Babst for Neue Zircher Zeitung: “In 1969, the Intercontinental Hotel, Afghanistan’s first luxury hotel, opened. It was built in a time that feels much further away than the year suggests. Afghanistan was at war for more than forty years. Rulers came and went, and every one of them was here, at the Intercontinental. Its former luxury has faded, but the Intercontinental has remained a symbol: Those who rule Kabul rule Afghanistan, and those who rule Kabul rule the Intercontinental. Today, the hotel is run by the Taliban. The new government is forcing Taliban and non-Taliban to work together – in the administration and in government-related businesses. Young men share an office with young fighters they once feared, and young fighters sit next to young men they once despised. A lot depends on this experiment.”
The first algorithmically generated music was developed in the seventeenth century
From Amelia Soth for JSTOR Daily: “The first device for algorithmically composing music comes to us surprisingly early: in the 1600s. Looking something like an overcomplicated and miniaturized chest of drawers, it allowed even complete amateurs to compose four-part church music. They could start with a text in verse to set to music, choose whether they wanted music in a simple or florid style, and the rest was achieved by mixing and matching the entries carved into the device’s many little wooden tablets, ultimately converting the results into musical notes. Only a few examples of the device, known as the Arca musarithmica or “Musical Ark,” remain today. The famous diarist Samuel Pepys owned one, as did Ferdinand III of the Holy Roman Empire. The idea for the device came from polymath and all-around oddball Athanasius Kircher.”
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From Emily Zarevich for JSTOR Daily: “Flamboyant, swashbuckling cross-dressing was nothing new in late nineteenth-century France. Paris’s unique and bohemian lesbian subculture allowed these women to thrive, though it was still illegal for French women to wear pants in public. Yet despite the dangers and the occasional assaults, Belle Époque aristocrat and performer Mathilde de Morny (1863–1944)—better known by her alias “Missy”—still committed to her daring butch look, cutting her hair short, donning tailored three-piece suits, and smoking as many cigars as she pleased. Missy built her artistic career on the publicity raked in from her mannish attire and character, her queer-coded tendencies, and her adoption of masculine nicknames. Besides “Missy,” she answered to “Oncle (Uncle) Max” and “Monsieur de Marquis.” Like the French writer George Sand, who bunked down with composer Frédéric Chopin and poet Alfred de Musset, Missy selected her lovers from among France’s creative elite.”
At Japan’s dementia cafes, forgotten orders are all part of the service
From Michele Ye Hee Lee for the Washington Post: “The 85-year-old server was eager to kick off his shift, welcoming customers into the restaurant with a hearty greeting: “Irasshaimase!”or “Welcome!” But when it came time to take their orders, things got a little complicated. He walked up to a table but forgot his clipboard of order forms. He gingerly delivered a piece of cake to the wrong table. One customer waited 16 minutes for a cup of water after being seated. But no one complained or made a fuss about it.Each time, patrons embraced his mix-upsand chuckled along with him. That’s the way it goes at the Orange Day Sengawa, also known as the Cafe of Mistaken Orders. This 12-seat cafe in a suburb in Tokyo, hires elderly people with dementia to work as servers. A former owner has a parent with dementia, and the new owner agreed to let them rent out the space each month as a dementia cafe. The organizers now work with the local government to get connected to dementia patients in the area.”
The World Brain: H.G. Wells’ prophetic 1930s vision for the internet
From Maria Popova at The Marginalian: “On August 20, 1937 H.G. Wells addressed the archivists, librarians, and bibliographers gathered at the World Congress on Universal Documentation in Paris, where the encyclopedia had been invented two centuries earlier. Wells made a daring proposition: Saving humanity from itself calls for the creation of a new system for “universal organisation and clarification of knowledge and ideas.” He called it a World Brain — a “permanent central Encyclopaedic organisation with a local habitat and a world-wide range,” democratizing that supreme antidote to propaganda and manipulation: knowledge. The World Brain would be readily available to every human being, no matter their income level or the political rule of their society “a sort of cerebrum for humanity, a cerebral cortex which will constitute a memory and a perception of current reality for the entire human race.”
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The lost history of Sextus Aurelius Victor
From Justin Stover for Antigone Journal: “Around 380 AD, the famous and irascible translator, Christian theologian, and general polymath, St Jerome, sat down to write a letter. Unsurprisingly, it was about books. One of them was the History of Sextus Aurelius Victor. Born in rural poverty in North Africa to an unlettered father, Victor rocketed to fame in 361, when he was summoned to Naissus by the Emperor Julian. Julian was so impressed by the North-African historian that he commissioned a bronze statue to be set up in his honour and made him governor of the province of Pannonia Secunda. It is no exaggeration to suggest that Victor was the Latin historian of the later 4th century. Most readers might reasonably wonder, therefore, why they have never heard of him.”
Instructions on how to use the new device known as a telephone, from 1896
From Futility Closet: “To Listen: Place the telephone fairly against the ear, with an upward motion, so that the lower extremity or lobe of the ear is gathered in, into the cavity of the telephone; in this position it will be found to fit snugly and comfortably — the lobe of the ear acting as a cushion and at the same time closing out all ulterior sounds, thus enabling the voice to be heard with clearness and precision.” AT&T promoted a Telephone Pledge that read, “I believe in the Golden Rule and will try to be Courteous and Considerate over the Telephone as if Face to Face.” The winner of a 1910 Bell essay contest wrote, “Would you rush into an office or up to the door of a residence and blurt out ‘Hello! Hello! Who am I talking to?’ No, one should open conversations with phrases such as ‘Mr. Wood, of Curtis and Sons, wishes to talk with Mr. White. In America Calling (1992), Claude S. Fischer notes, “Companies cut off service to abusers and obtained legislation that fined or even jailed profane customers.”
The perils of Pearl and Olga: A true crime story from 1950s Manhattan
From St. Clair McKelway in the New Yorker, in 1953: “On the morning of December 31, 1946, two young women got on a subway train separately at the Fifty-fifth Street station in Brooklyn, and sat down across from each other in a car as the train moved off. They had never met, had never spoken, but their lives had been drawn together and the entwinement was a sinister one. They were both working girls and more than ordinarily attractive. One of them was tall, with pale, clear skin and large, dark eyes and shining black hair; she was twenty-eight years old. She had noticed that the other girl was carrying a gift-wrapped package about the size of a large shoe box. It had an aperture at one end, from which protruded what looked like the lens of a camera. The other girl was barely nineteen and was small and blond. Her name was Pearl Lusk.”
The “Thirty Days Hath November” rhyme dates back to the 1400s
Misinformation and disinformation have arguably never been as prominent or widely distributed as they are now, thanks to smartphones, the social web, and apps such as Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and YouTube. Unfortunately, as the US draws closer to a pivotal election in which trustworthy information is likely to be more important than ever, various researchers and academic institutions are scaling back or even canceling their misinformation programs, due to legal threats and government pressure. At the same time, a number of large digital platforms have laid off hundreds or even thousands of the employees who specialized in finding and removing hoaxes and fakes, in some cases leaving only a skeleton staff to handle the problem. And all of this is happening as the quantity of fakes and conspiracy theories is expanding rapidly, thanks to cheap tools powered by artificial intelligence that can generate misinformation at the click of a button. In other words, a perfect storm could be brewing.
Over the weekend, Naomi Nix, Cat Zakrzewski, and Joseph Menn described, in the Washington Post, how academics, universities and government agencies are paring back or even shutting down research programs designed to help counter the spread of online misinformation, because of what the Post calls a “legal campaign from conservative politicians and activists, who accuse them of colluding with tech companies to censor right-wing views.” This campaign—which the paper says is being led by Jim Jordan, the Republican Congressman from Ohio who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, and his co-partisans—has “cast a pall over” programs that study misinformation online, the Post says. Jordan and his colleagues have issued subpoenas demanding that researchers turn over their communications with the government and social-media platforms as part of a Congressional probe into alleged collusion between the White House and the platforms.
The potential casualties of this campaign include a project called the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of universities and other agencies, led by Stanford and the University of Washington, that has focused on tracking conspiracy theories and hoaxes about voting irregularities. According to the Post, Stanford is questioning whether it can continue participating because of ongoing litigation. (“Since this investigation has cost the university now approaching seven [figure] legal fees, it’s been pretty successful, I think, in discouraging us from making it worthwhile for us to do a study in 2024,” Alex Stamos, a former Facebook official who founded the Stanford Internet Observatory, said.) Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health shelved a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar program aimed at correcting medical misinformation because of legal threats. In July, NIH officials reportedly sent a memo to employees warning them not to flag misleading social-media posts to tech companies.
From Middle East Monitor: “In an effort to modernise while maintaining its Islamic character, Iran is exploring the use of artificial intelligence to assist its religious seminaries. The initiative is centred in the holy city of Qom, home to half of its 200,000 Shia clerics and Iran’s foremost hub of Islamic learning. The clerical establishment sees AI as a way to be more responsive to calls for progress while holding onto traditional values. Qom’s seminaries hope advanced technology can help parse Islamic texts faster and allow religious rulings, known as fatwas, to keep pace with Iran’s rapidly evolving society. “Robots can’t replace senior clerics, but they can be a trusted assistant that can help them issue a fatwa faster,” Mohammad Ghotbi, who heads a tech group in Qom, is reported saying in the Financial Times. While Qom’s clerics have protected traditional values, Iranians increasingly demand technological progress, Ghotbi said.”
In the 1820s, a boat full of scientists set off to build a utopia in Indiana called New Harmony
From Matthew Wills at JSTOR Daily: “In the winter of 1825–1826, the president, librarian, and several members of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences headed west from Pittsburgh on the Ohio River. Academy President William Maclure, “father of American geology,” had gathered them all aboard the keelboat Philantropist [they used the French spelling]: scientists, artists, musicians, and educators, some bringing along their students, and all were eager to settle in Robert Owen’s New Harmony community on the Indiana frontier. Owen described it as a “Boatload of Knowledge.” A Welsh-born Scottish textile mill owner, social reformer, utopian, and early socialist, the already-renowned Owen wanted to establish a “New Moral World” in the New World, a world of enlightenment and prosperity leading to human happiness.”
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From Anika Burgess for Atlas Obscura: “They were known as the “book women.” They would saddle up, usually at dawn, to pick their way along snowy hillsides and through muddy creeks with a simple goal: to deliver reading material to Kentucky’s isolated mountain communities. The Pack Horse Library initiative was part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, created to help lift America out of the Great Depression, during which, by 1933, unemployment had risen to 40 percent in Appalachia. Roving horseback libraries weren’t entirely new to Kentucky, but this initiative was an opportunity to boost both employment and literacy at the same time. The WPA paid the salaries of the book carriers—almost all the employees were women, making the initiative unusual among WPA programs—but very little else. Counties had to have their own base libraries from which the mounted librarians would travel.”
Scientists working in Antarctica unwittingly started to develop a new accent
From Tom Hale at IFL Science: “Antarctica has no native population or permanent residents, but it does have a transitory community of scientists and support staff who live there for part of the year on a rotational basis. In the summer months, there are typically around 5,000 people living in Antarctica, but that drops to just 1,000 in the winter. In 2019, a team from the University of Munich studied the phonetic change in accents among 11 “winterers” recruited from the British Antarctic Survey. This included eight people born and raised in England (five in the south and three in the north), one person from the northwest US, another from Germany, and lastly an Icelandic person. They recorded their voice at the beginning of the study, then made four more re-recordings at approximately six weekly intervals. Over the course of the stay, the researchers noticed significant changes in their accents.”
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From Phil Hoad for Atlas Obscura: “Months after he buried it in darkness, Régis Hauser still dreamed of the hole he dug at 3:30 a.m. on April 24, 1993, three feet deep somewhere in France. How he lugged the hunk of metal from his car trunk and placed it in the dirt. When he told his tale to the French newspaper Libération, he made the entombment sound faintly gothic: “I hadn’t even finished, and my hands were bloody. When it was done, I went far away, to get breakfast. I looked at myself in the mirror at the cafe. I was barely recognizable, disheveled, covered in earth.” No one had seen him in the act, or so Hauser hoped. The object Hauser buried that night was a bronze sculpture of an owl. He had promised that whoever found it could exchange it for an identical owl cast in gold, silver, onyx, diamonds, and rubies, worth about one million francs. Its location could be divined by solving 11 puzzles, a combination of riddles and illustrations, published shortly afterward in a book he wrote called On the Trail of the Golden Owl.”
Airlines are really just banks with airplanes now, thanks to the rise of point programs
From Ganesh Sitaraman at The Atlantic: “Here’s how the system works now: Airlines create points out of nothing and sell them for real money to banks with co-branded credit cards. The banks award points to cardholders for spending, and both the banks and credit-card companies make money off the swipe fees from the use of the card. Cardholders can redeem points for flights, as well as other goods and services sold through the airlines’ proprietary e-commerce portals. For the airlines, this is a great deal. They incur no costs from points until they are redeemed—or ever, if the points are forgotten. This setup has made loyalty programs highly lucrative. A 2020 analysis found that Wall Street lenders valued the major airlines’ mileage programs more highly than the airlines themselves. United’s MileagePlus program, for example, was valued at $22 billion, while the company’s market cap at the time was only $10.6 billion.”
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From Robert Worth for The Atlantic: “On the last morning of his life, Shinzo Abe arrived in the Japanese city of Nara, famous for its ancient pagodas and sacred deer. His destination was more prosaic: a broad urban intersection across from the city’s main train station, where he would be giving a speech to endorse a lawmaker running for reelection to the National Diet, Japan’s parliament. Abe had retired two years earlier, but because he was Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, his name carried enormous weight. No one seems to notice the youngish-looking man about 20 feet behind Abe, dressed in a gray polo shirt and cargo pants, a black strap across his shoulder. Unlike everyone else, the man is not clapping. Abe started to speak. Moments later, his remarks were interrupted by two loud reports, followed by a burst of white smoke. He collapsed to the ground. His security guards ran toward the man in the gray polo shirt, who held a homemade gun—two 16-inch metal pipes strapped together with black duct tape.”
In search of the legendary female eagle hunters of Mongolia
From Asha Tanna for Al Jazeera: “In 2013, Kazakh women in Mongolia captured global attention when a young eagle huntress, Aisholpan Nurgaiv, became the subject of a viral photograph taken by Israeli photographer Asher Svidensky. He returned to the country in 2014 with director Otto Bell, who made a documentary about the teenager. The storyline focused on her being an outlier in Kazakh culture in what Bell described as an isolated community with “a certain kind of ignorance about what woman can do”. These remarks were made during a press interview on CBS’s Mountain Morning Show in January 2016, where he also said she was the “first woman to eagle hunt in the 2,000-year-old male-dominated history”. But Kazakhs and historians say this is not true. “Eagle hunting always included women,” says Adrienne Mayor, a historian at Stanford University.”
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