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From CBC News: “We may soon learn more about what happened when dozens of crew members from the movie “Titanic” were fed soup laced with a hallucinogenic drug while filming in Nova Scotia. A new report from the province’s privacy commissioner told Halifax Regional Police to disclose more details about the August 1996 incident, which sent around 80 “Titanic” crew members to hospital in Dartmouth, N.S., including director James Cameron. Initially fearing food poisoning, all had in fact unknowingly eaten lobster chowder spiked with the drug phencyclidine, which is also known as PCP and angel dust. Speaking about the infamous incident, crew members have described a long and strange night of chaos and confusion that even involved a hospital conga line.”

Eugene Fodor’s famous travel guide was written in part by CIA spies

From Why Is This Interesting: “Much is written in the press about the link between the Central Intelligence Agency and Hollywood, but what’s less well-known is the U.S. government’s influence on the travel industry. Eugene Fodor, publisher of one of the most successful guide book series of all time, was an officer for the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor to the CIA) during WWII. He specialized in psychological warfare, interrogated prisoners, and wrote propaganda leaflets that were airdropped into the Neapolitan territories. After the war he founded his eponymous company where he employed not only traditional stringers to write copy but also, at the behest of the CIA,  spies—“travel writer” being a good cover for an agent sent into enemy territory.”

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 cast and crew of Titanic were drugged with PCP”

From SFist: “OJ Simpson’s father, who came out as gay and was largely absent from the family once Simpson turned four years old, became a local drag queen known as Mama Simpson. A documentary on OJ interviewed one of his childhood friends, Calvin Tennyson, who recalled a visit he and OJ made to Jimmy Lee Simpson’s apartment. “When his dad opened the door, he was in a bathrobe, which is not a crime. But then his dad kind of opened the door more, and there was a guy in the back in a bathrobe too. So it was obvious that his dad was gay.” A book about OJ quoted a source as saying Mama Simpson frequently dressed in drag and “everyone knew he was O.J.’s dad.”

What happened when a journalist went undercover as a high school student

From The Chronicle: “San Francisco Chronicle reporter Shann Nix probably should have been on her honeymoon in September 1992 when she took on an assignment she would still be thinking about decades later. Nix, then 26, changed her home answering machine, instructed her new husband to act like her father if he answered the phone and then went undercover for a month, posing as a student at George Washington High School in San Francisco. The result was the four-part “Undercover Student” project, a front-page exposé that today is both increasingly fascinating and increasingly shocking. It had an impact on a lot of people, including students who are now adults, and the reporter herself. And 32 years later, they still have a lot to say about it.”

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 “OJ Simpson’s father was a San Francisco drag queen known as Mama”

From Slate: “The waves were already crashing over the Toyota’s hood when they found it. It was a blustery September Sunday in 2021, and the Hilux pickup sat far down the gray sand in a remote cove on the wild west coast of New Zealand’s North Island. The truck was parked below the high-tide line, facing the sea, and was nearly swamped by the waves. The men couldn’t help but notice empty child seats strapped into the back. The disappearances were just the beginning of an ordeal that has not yet ended—a case that has only grown stranger and more ominous in the two and a half years since, prompting pleas from family, increasing public astonishment, online speculation, a shocking crime, and a community’s closing ranks around one of its own.”

Her Highness Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi is forced to couch-surf

From Town & Country: “As they say in Italian, “Finita la commedia”: The farce has come to an end; the party is over. Or so it seemed in April 2023, when a squadron of carabinieri arrived at the Villa Aurora, a crumbling mansion in the center of the Eternal City with the world’s only known Caravaggio ceiling painting. Their mission that day: escort off the premises its 74-year-old chatelaine, none other than the San Antonio–born Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi, née Carpenter, the former model, actress, and real estate agent who had refused to leave the property amid a bitter inheritance dispute with her three stepsons.”

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 “First they vanished into the bush and then it got weird”

From Deseret.com: “Why is there 1.4 billion pounds of cheese stored in a cave in Missouri? It started in the 1970s, during former President Jimmy Carter’s era and his promise of giving farmers a break. He wanted to raise the price of milk, but the government couldn’t just buy milk and store it, so it started to buy as much cheese as people wanted to sell. Then farmers were producing way too much cheese, raising the question: What should the government do with all the cheddar? To tackle this, former President Ronald Reagan started food assistance programs to distribute 30 million pounds of cheese. In the 1990s, the government also started making deals with fast-food restaurants to help sell the surplus.”

A crucial component for microchips is a byproduct of the food additive MSG

From MIT: “In microchips, a material is placed between the chip and the structure beneath it in order to keep the signals from getting crossed; this material, called dielectric film, is produced in sheets that are as thin as white blood cells. For 30 years, a single Japanese company called Ajinomoto has made billions producing this particular film, and has more than 90% of the market. If you recognize the name Ajinomoto, you’re probably surprised to hear it plays such a critical role: the company is better known as the world’s leading supplier of MSG seasoning powder. In the 1990s, it discovered that a by-product of MSG made a great insulator, and it has enjoyed a near monopoly ever since.”

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 “Why a cave in Missouri holds more than a billion pounds of cheese”

From Science.org: “Harvard University honesty researcher Francesca Gino, whose work has come under fire for suspected data falsification, may also have plagiarized passages in some of her high-profile publications. A book chapter co-authored by Gino, who was found by a 2023 Harvard Business School (HBS) investigation to have committed research misconduct, contains numerous passages of text with striking similarities to 10 earlier sources. The sources include published papers and student theses, according to an analysis shared with Science by University of Montreal psychologist Erinn Acland. Science has confirmed Acland’s findings and identified at least 15 additional passages of borrowed text in Gino’s two books.”

The Brazilian special-forces unit that is fighting to save the Amazon

From The New Yorker: “The men—fighters with combat gear and assault rifles—belonged to a tiny special-forces unit known as the Specialized Inspection Group, or G.E.F. Their leader and co-founder was Felipe Finger, a wiry man in his forties with a salt-and-pepper beard. Finger trained in forestry engineering, and his unit works under the Brazilian ministry for the environment. But he has spent much of his adult life in armed operations to protect the wilderness, and he talks like a soldier, with frequent references to operations and objectives and neutralizing threats. The current mission was known to national authorities as Operation Freedom. Finger and his men called it Operation Xapirí, from a Yanomami word for nature spirits.”

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 expert in honesty accused of plagiarism”

You see a news story talking about the need for a national privacy law and how Congress is working on one—or, at least, should be. What year is it? 

Trick question: it could be almost any year in the last two decades. Including, now, 2024. Last week, the Washington Post reported that the leaders of two key congressional committees were “nearing an agreement on a national framework aimed at protecting Americans’ personal data online.” (The news was first reported by Punchbowl News, a political newsletter). As the Post noted, this would mean that Congress is close to passing legislation that has “eluded them for decades.” Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican representative from Washington State who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Maria Cantwell, a Democratic senator from the same state and chairperson of the Senate Commerce Committee, are expected to announce the deal next week.

According to The Hill, the two members of Congress decided that the time is right to push for a national privacy law, in part because of recent fears that social platforms are harming children (a debate that I wrote about last week in this newsletter), but also due to concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence. In a statement, Cantwell said that a federal data privacy law must “make privacy a consumer right, and it must give consumers the ability to enforce that right,” adding that the bill is the protection “Americans deserve in the Information Age.” Under the draft law, companies would face limits as to what data they can collect and use, and individuals would be allowed to sue “bad actors” for violating their privacy. New data security standards would also hold companies accountable if data is hacked or stolen. And the Federal Trade Commission would form a new bureau in order to enforce the law.

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

Continue reading “Lawmakers fight over privacy — on two very different fronts”

From The Gazette: A former University of Iowa Hospital employee pleaded guilty to living under another man’s identity since 1988, which caused the other man to be falsely imprisoned for identity theft and sent to a mental hospital. Matthew David Keirans, 58, was convicted of one count of false statement to a National Credit Union Administration insured institution — punishable by up to 30 years in federal prison — and one count of aggravated identity theft — punishable by up to two years in federal prison. Keirans worked as a systems architect in the hospital’s IT department from 2013 to 2023, when he was terminated for misconduct related to the identity theft.”

A six hundred year old blueprint for weathering climate change

From The Atlantic: “Beginning in the 13th century, the Northern Hemisphere experienced a very dramatic climatic shift. First came drought, then a period of cold, volatile weather known as the Little Ice Age. In its depths, the annual average temperature in the Northern Hemisphere may have been 5 degrees colder than in the preceding Medieval Warm Period. It snowed in Alabama and South Texas. Famine killed perhaps 1 million people around the world. But native North Americans and Western Europeans responded very differently to the changes. Western Europeans doubled down on their preexisting ways of living, whereas Native North Americans devised whole new economic, social, and political structures to fit the changing climate.”

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 “He stole someone’s identity and used it for 35 years”