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Cormac McCarthy’s secret muse breaks her silence

From Vanity Fair: “Dante and Beatrice, Scott and Zelda, Véra and Vladimir. All famous cases of literary love and inspiration, sure. But these romances lack the 47-year novelistic drama of the craziest story. They lack the stolen gun, the border crossings, the violation of federal law. They lack the forged birth certificate and clandestine love letters. But above all, they lack the leading lady: the secret muse. Cormac McCarthy did not shirk womenkind in his novels. On the contrary, it turns out that many of his famous leading men were inspired by a single woman, a single secret muse revealed here for the first time: a five-foot-four badass Finnish American cowgirl named Augusta Britt. A cowgirl whose reality, McCarthy confessed in his early love letters to her, he had “trouble coming to grips with.”

When the railway industry changed the way that time worked

From Letters From An American: “Until November 18, 1883, railroads across the United States operated under 53 different time schedules, differentiated on railroad maps by a complicated system of colors. For travelers, time shifts meant constant confusion and, frequently, missed trains. And then, at noon on Sunday, November 18, 1883, railroads across the North American continent shifted their schedules to conform to a new standard time. Under the new system, North America would have just five time zones. In Boston the change meant that the clocks would move forward about 16 minutes; in New York City, clocks were set back about four minutes. For Baltimore the time would move forward six minutes and twenty-eight seconds; in Atlanta it went back 22 minutes.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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Someone stole 22 tons of expensive cheddar cheese

From the BBC: “Hundreds of truckles of cheddar worth more than £300,000 have been stolen from London cheese specialist Neal’s Yard Dairy. Fraudsters posing as legitimate wholesalers received the 950 clothbound cheeses from the Southwark-based company before it was realised they were a fake firm. More than 22 tonnes of three artisan cheddars, including Hafod Welsh, Westcombe, and Pitchfork were taken, which are all award-winning and have a high monetary value. Neal’s Yard Dairy sells Hafod Welsh for £12.90 for a 300g piece, while Westcombe costs £7.15 for 250g and Pitchfork is priced at £11 for 250g. Patrick Holden, who owns the farm where Hafod cheddar is made, said: “The artisan cheese world is a place where trust is deeply embedded in all transactions. “It’s a world where one’s word is one’s bond. The degree of trust that exists within our small industry as a whole is due in no small part to the ethos of Neal’s Yard Dairy’s founders.”

In this small Dominican community, children start out as girls and then become boys

From the BBC: “Johnny lives in a small town in the Dominican Republic where he, and others like him, are known as Guevedoces, which effectively translates as “penis at twelve”. Johnny was brought up as a girl because he had no visible testes or penis and what appeared to be a vagina. It is only when he approached puberty that his penis grew and testicles descended. Johnny, once known as Felicita, remembers going to school in a little red dress, though he says he was never happy doing girl things. So why does it happen? In 1970, Dr. Julianne Imperato-McGinley made her way to this remote part of the Dominican Republic, drawn by extraordinary reports of girls turning into boys. When she investigated, she discovered the reason they don’t have male genitalia when they are born is because they are deficient in an enzyme called 5-alpha-reductase.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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Previously unseen footage of JFK shooting sells for $137,000

From RR Auction: “A previously unknown 8mm color film capturing President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade on November 22, 1963, has been sold for $137,500 at auction. The silent color footage, shot by local truck driver Dale Carpenter, Sr., captures the presidential motorcade moving through downtown Dallas, followed by a dramatic sequence of the limousine speeding along North Stemmons Freeway en route to Parkland Memorial Hospital. The film’s most powerful image shows Secret Service Agent Clint Hill on the back of the vehicle, shielding First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy as the car raced toward the hospital at 80 miles per hour. For decades Mr. Carpenter’s 8-millimeter snippets of what transpired in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, have been a family heirloom. When he died in 1991 at 77, the reel, which included footage of his twin boys’ birthday party, passed to his wife, Mabel, then to a daughter, Diana, and finally to a grandson.”

The Hum is a mysterious auditory phenomenon that’s baffled the world for decades

From The Independent: “t was around 2005 that Simon Payne started hearing it. A strange, low, rumbling sound that travels through walls and floors and seems to come from everywhere. At first, he was convinced the noise was from some kind of machinery, but he couldn’t find the source. It didn’t go away; he couldn’t run from it. Even when he travelled 12,000 miles from his Cambridgeshire home to New Zealand, he could still hear it. It wreaked such havoc on his life, he had to quit his job. He became increasingly isolated and stopped seeing friends. But when he started to look around on the internet for more information, he discovered he was not alone. “I found out that it was all over the place,” he says. “There’s no hiding from it.” Payne was hearing “the Hum”, a mysterious global phenomenon that is thought to affect as many as 4 per cent of the world’s population.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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There was a secret Nazi weather station in Canada for decades

From The Weather Network: “The Nazis managed to install an automatic weather station on the coast of Labrador during WWII and it remained undiscovered by Canadians for more than 30 years. The secret German mission remains one of the only known enemy operations to actually take place on North American soil during the second World War and highlights just how much an impact the weather had on the war. In October 1943, German U-boat U-537 sailed undetected to Martin Bay, off the coast of Labrador in what was then the British Dominion of Newfoundland. There, a crew led by civilian meteorologist Kurt Sommermeyer rushed to set up what was, at the time, an incredibly sophisticated weather station.”

She was a chess prodigy but later walked away from the game

From Slate: “During her brief and polarizing career in a male-dominated sport in a chauvinistic society, a focus on looks over brains was typically how it went for Lisa Lane, who died of cancer on Feb. 28 at age 90. When Bobby Fischer was still a brash wunderkind, Lane was a bona fide grown-up media star. In 1961 alone, she was interviewed on the Today show, was profiled in the New York Times Magazine, and appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. She was touted as a great American hope against the scary Russians. Lane marketed herself and elevated chess’s profile in America. Disgusted by the game’s latent sexism and classism, she criticized its leadership and advocated for equal pay. Then, as quickly as she’d arrived, she all but disappeared from the game.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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A post-individual society

You may or may not know the name Yancey Strickler — if you follow startups or venture capital at all you might, since he was a co-founder of Kickstarter, arguably one of the most successful product launches of the last couple of decades. It has taken in about $7 billion in funding over the past 15 years or so, and it was also one of the first companies I know of to become what’s called a “public benefit” corporation, which means that its corporate goals specifically include making a positive impact on society.

Since Kickstarter got big, Strickler has gone on to do a number of things, including writing a book called This Could Be Our Future, about building a society that looks beyond profit as its core organizing principle. The book also introduced a philosophical decision-making framework that Strickler calls “Bentoism,” since it involves the use of quadrant boxes that look a little like the Bento box you might get at a Japanese restaurant and is designed to get people to think about more than just the short-term personal benefits of a particular decision (Strickler says the name is short for “beyond near-term orientation”).

I don’t know about the whole Bentoism thing, but it is an interesting way of trying to get people to broaden their perspectives. But I really wrote this post to highlight a specific essay that Strickler wrote in May about the development of something he called a “post-individual” approach to society. I’m not endorsing everything Strickler writes in this essay, but it is worth reading and it gave me lots to think about. Here’s part of the intro:

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Why was a banana company involved in the creation of radio?

When General Electric formed the Radio Corporation of America or RCA with Marconi assets in 1919, conflicts over patents prompted a push for cross-licensing agreements with the other large electrical and telephone interests. In addition to RCA, General Electric, AT&T and Westinghouse, a fifth partner in the patents pool was the United Fruit Company, a conglomerate whose primary business was banana production in Latin America.

The United Fruit Company actually started out in the railway business: In 1871, U.S. entrepreneur Henry Meiggs signed a contract with the government of Costa Rica to build a railroad connecting the capital city of San José to the port of Limón. He was assisted by his nephew, Minor C. Keith, who took over Meiggs’s business after his death in 1877. Keith began experimenting with the planting of bananas as a cheap source of food for his workers. When the Costa Rican government defaulted on its payments in 1882, Keith had to borrow money from banks and private investors to keep going. 

In exchange for this, and for helping renegotiate Costa Rica’s own debt, in 1884 the government agreed to give Keith 800,000 acres of tax-free land along the railroad, plus a 99-year lease on the operation of the train route. The railroad was completed in 1890, but the flow of passengers proved insufficient to finance Keith’s debt. However, the sale of bananas grown in his lands and transported first by train to Limón, then by ship to the United States, proved very lucrative. Keith eventually came to dominate the banana trade in Central America and along the Caribbean coast of Colombia.

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The US was built on control of the bird poop supply

From Science News: “In December 1855 and January 1856, a trio of vessels set sail from the United States to Jarvis and Baker islands, coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean. The ships carried representatives from the American Guano Company and a guano expert tasked with examining the quality of the islands’ bird poop. After estimating the quantity of guano available and taking samples, the entourage claimed the islands in the name of the United States. That move marked the country’s first effort to acquire territory overseas. U.S. ownership of those islands became official in July 1856 with passage of the Guano Islands Act. That act gave the country “permission” to claim sovereignty over any allegedly uninhabited or unclaimed territory to secure access to guano, a prized fertilizer for American tobacco, cotton and wheat fields.”

Dante cast her as his guide in the Divine Comedy. But who was Beatrice Portinari?

From JSTOR Daily: “She was the great love of the Early Renaissance Italian poet Dante Alighieri. He adored her so much that he cast her as his divine guide to the celestial spheres of heaven in the last book of the Divine Comedy. But his would always be an unrequited love: she was promised to someone else, and so was he. Her name was Beatrice Portinari. Beatrice Portinari belonged to a family of bankers and politicians; her father was Folco Portinari, a prior of Florence. Her family’s upper-class social status allowed her to marry into another rich Florentine set. She wed another wealthy banker, Simone de Bardi, in an arranged marriage. Dante’s wife was an Italian woman named Gemma Donati, though he never wrote a single poem about her.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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Is BlueSky the new Twitter, and if so is that a good thing?

After deciding to write about Bluesky and its recent meteoric growth, I wrote down the headline above, and then I went to look at what I had written in the past about Bluesky while I was at the Columbia Journalism Review (where I was the chief digital writer until recently). And what did I find but a piece I wrote in May of last year with the identical headline 🙂 Two things we can learn from this, I think: 1) I lack imagination when it comes to headlines, and 2) the question about Bluesky and whether it has staying power, and what its future might look like, has been around for awhile now. I thought about changing the headline on this piece, but then I decided against it — I still think both are valid questions, and if anything they might be even more critical at this point.

In case you are a first-time reader, or you forgot that you signed up for this newsletter, this is The Torment Nexus (you can find out more about me and this newsletter — and why I chose to call it that — in this post.)

The news hook here is that Bluesky’s user base has been climbing rapidly following the election of a certain inveterate liar with multiple fraud convictions and two impeachments as president of the United States, and the corresponding rise of his lieutenant and chief booster, Elon “Dark MAGA” Musk. Perhaps it was the continued slide into right-wing mania, or the way that Musk used the network as his personal hype machine for Trump — along with the $200 million or so that he sank into Trump’s campaign via a super-PAC. In any case, Bluesky has been adding literally hundreds of thousands of users every day — The Verge reported on November 11 that users had grown by 700,000 and the next day, the New York Times said it had grown by a million (you can see a live user counter here).

I have seen this happen from my own perspective, as someone who has had an account for over a year now. I don’t recall the exact number of followers I had prior to the election, but I know it was below a thousand — likely in the 600 range. It is now over 2,300 and every time I check the app it says dozens more have followed me. Some I’ve been connected with on Twitter for a long time, but many are completely unknown to me. According to Clearsky, I am on about 30 lists, or what Bluesky calls “starter packs,” so that probably explains it (my favourite list is the one that some user named “not porn”). Here’s a graph that shows Bluesky’s user growth since early this year, which I found here — it begins in February, which is when Bluesky opened to the public.

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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The US deliberately gave hundreds of people STDs

From The Guardian: “From 1946-48, the US Public Health Service and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau worked with several Guatemalan government agencies on medical research paid for by the US government that involved deliberately exposing people to sexually transmitted diseases. The researchers apparently were trying to see if penicillin, then relatively new, could prevent infections in the 1,300 people exposed to syphilis, gonorrhea or chancroid. Those infected included soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis. The commission revealed on Monday that only about 700 of those infected received some sort of treatment. Eighty-three people died. The research came up with no useful medical information, according to some experts.”

A rockstar researcher spun a web of lies and almost got away with it

From The Walrus: “Laskowski revealed that her ambition had drawn her into the web of prolific spider researcher Jonathan Pruitt, a behavioural ecologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Pruitt was a superstar in his field and, in 2018, was named a Canada 150 Research Chair, becoming one of the younger recipients of the prestigious federal one-time grant with funding of $350,000 per year for seven years. He amassed a huge number of publications, many with surprising and influential results. He turned out to be an equally prolific fraud. When Pruitt’s other colleagues and co-authors became aware of outright falsifications in his body of work, they pushed for their own papers co-authored with him to be retracted one by one. But making an honest man of Pruitt would be an impossible task.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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