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From Maxine Bernstein for Oregon Live: “Husband-and-wife chauffeurs are accused of stealing $34 million from wealthy publisher Win McCormack over seven years. Sergey Lebedenko and his wife, Galina provided rides to McCormack through their limousine service and then made unauthorized charges of up to $34 million to his American Express card.The couple used the money to buy lavish vacation homes and a $1.5 million executive jet. While executing search warrants at the couple’s homes, federal agents seized more than $100,000 in cash and 150 ounces of gold bullion worth about $300,000. It is the largest alleged heist against a single person in the history of Oregon.”

The US government created a battle plan in case of a zombie invasion

From Thaddeus Morgan for History: “The United States may have one of the largest armies on earth, but even the Pentagon has taken no chances at being caught off-guard by an unusual foe. In fact, in 2011, the U.S. Department of Defense released a strategy to combat a potential zombie apocalypse. While the potential opponents might be fictional, the military took it seriously. In fact, the first line of the Counter-Zombie Dominance Plan, or “CONPLAN 8888-11,” states, “This plan was not actually designed as a joke.” The origins of the plan can be traced to training exercises held in 2009 and 2010, during which young officers realized the potential upsides to planning for a hypothetical zombie attack.”

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 “His staff stole $34 million from him and he didn’t notice”

From Alan Prendergast for WestWord: “Located a hundred miles southwest of Denver, just outside the high-desert town of Florence, ADX houses more than 300 terrorists, gang leaders, drug lords and other high-risk prisoners. Its guest list includes Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols and shoe bomber Richard Reid, and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was housed there for decades until he committed suicide. And then are the two guys in The Suites, the most solitary of men. They are each entombed behind double doors in a seven-by-twelve-foot cell; the men are under scrutiny 24 hours a day, by cameras and listening devices in the cells. FBI agents read their mail and listen in on their phone calls.”

Why did this New England college campus see a wave of student suicides?

From Jordan Kisner for the NYT: “The first death happened before the academic year began. In July 2021, an undergraduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute was reported dead. The administration sent a notice out over email, with the familiar, thoroughly vetted phrasing and appended resources. The week before the academic year began, a second student died. A rising senior in the computer-science department who loved horticulture took his own life. This brought an intimation of disaster. One student suicide is a tragedy; two might be the beginning of a cluster. Some faculty members began to feel a tinge of dread when they stepped onto campus. A third student died before September was up.”

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 “Jimmy Sabatino may be the loneliest prisoner in the US”

From the New York Times: “It was the kind of tragic accident that reverberates through a community: a first-year college student, out late in New York City on New Year’s Eve, falls onto the subway tracks and is killed by an oncoming train. Word of the 19-year-old’s death spread quickly among the people who knew the young man, Matthew Sachman, who went by Matteo. But when they typed his name and what little they knew into the search bar, they found a blizzard of poorly written news articles, shady-looking YouTube videos and inaccurate obituaries. Some said that Sachman had not fallen onto the tracks at all, but had been stabbed to death in a Bronx subway station.

Top Harvard cancer researchers accused of scientific fraud in 37 studies

From Beth Mole for Ars Technica: “The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is seeking to retract six scientific studies and correct 31 others that were published by the institute’s top researchers, including its CEO. The researchers are accused of manipulating data images with simple methods, primarily with copy-and-paste in image editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop. The accusations come from data sleuth Sholto David and colleagues on PubPeer, an online forum for researchers to discuss publications that has frequently served to spot dubious research and potential fraud.”

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 “His death was accidental so why did some call it murder?”

From Jonathan Nunn for The Guardian: “If you were a young person living in London in the early 1970s and you were looking for a bargain, the word of Nicholas Saunders was something close to holy scripture. Whatever you sought, Saunders had the answer. If you wanted to start an anarchist squat or self-publish a Trotskyist pamphlet, you consulted Nicholas Saunders. If you wanted to know how much a gram of cocaine should cost, or where to get free legal advice if you were arrested, you consulted Nicholas Saunders. If you just wanted to find out which supermarkets were cheaper for which goods, or how to fly all the way to India on a ticket to Frankfurt, you consulted Nicholas Saunders.”

What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back?

From Eric Berger for Ars Technica: “Taylor Wang was deeply despondent. A day earlier, he had quite literally felt on top of the world by becoming the first Chinese-born person to fly into space. But now, all of his hopes and dreams, everything he had worked on for the better part of a decade had come crashing down around him. He asked the NASA flight controllers if he could take some time to try to troubleshoot the problem and maybe fix the experiment. But on any Shuttle mission, time is precious. After being told no, Wang said something that chilled the nerves of those in Houston watching over the safety of the crew and the Shuttle mission. “Hey, if you guys don’t give me a chance to repair my instrument, I’m not going back,” Wang said.”

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 forgotten genius who changed British food forever”

By Kevin Hazzard for The Atavist: “Today the role is clearly defined: A paramedic is certified to practice advanced emergency medical care outside a hospital setting. They’re the people who shock hearts back into beating, insert breathing tubes into tracheas, and deliver pharmaceuticals intravenously whenever and wherever a patient is in need. Until the mid-1960s, however, the field of emergency medical services, or EMS, didn’t formally exist. Training was minimal; there were no regulations to abide by. Emergency care was mostly a transportation industry, focused on getting patients to hospitals, and it was dominated by two groups: funeral homes and police departments. Then came the medics of Freedom House, who formally hit the streets in July 1968, a few months after the riots that erupted in the wake of King’s assassination.”

Tardigrades are basically indestructable and scientists finally figured out why

From Meghan Bartels for Scientific American: “Tiny tardigrades have three claims to fame: their charmingly pudgy appearance, delightful common names (water bear and moss piglet) and stunning resilience in the face of threats ranging from the vacuum of space to temperatures near absolute zero. Now scientists have identified a key mechanism contributing to tardigrades’ resilience—a molecular switch of sorts that triggers a hardy dormant state of being. The researchers hope that the new work, published on January 17 in the journal PLOS ONE, will encourage further exploration of the microscopic creatures’ ability to withstand extreme conditions.”

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 “Black men helped create the first US paramedic corps”

Last July, Meta launched a new social network called Threads as a spinoff from Instagram and a thinly veiled competitor to X, then (just about) still known as Twitter. In the days following the launch, I wrote about my initial impressions of the app (so-so but with some promising signs), and also did a Q&A with my colleague Jon Allsop about what it was like to use the new service and whether I thought it would last. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and CEO, the new app had two million sign-ups in less than two hours, and hit thirty million within a day of launch; it then hit fifty million, then a hundred million, making it one of the fastest-growing new apps ever. (Elon Musk, the owner of X, responded by challenging Zuckerberg to a “literal dick measuring contest.”) Some of that early enthusiasm seemed to ebb, however: while the app is now estimated to have a hundred and sixty million monthly users, Business Insider reported in August that its daily user base had fallen by more than 80 percent, to eight million.

Twitter/X fans searching for an alternative amid that app’s slow-motion implosion are undoubtedly among the millions who signed up for Threads, seeking a new home for their conversations. But Meta promised that its new service wouldn’t just be another real-time chat service; indeed, when Threads launched, Adam Mosseri, the executive in charge of both Instagram and Threads, said that the new app would soon add the ability to integrate with the “fediverse”—a term that refers to a loosely affiliated collection of services, sites, and apps that all use open-source standards, giving users more control over how they use social media (allowing them, for instance, to move their account from one server to another that follows different rules) and how their data is handled. The most well-known Twitter-like app in the fediverse is Mastodon, which I wrote about in 2022. There are also fediverse versions of Instagram (Pixelfed) and YouTube (PeerTube), as well as Twitter alternatives based on the blockchain, such as Nostr, which counts Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder, as a supporter. Dorsey also helped launch BlueSky, a platform that was itself mooted as a possible Twitter replacement and which has its own federation standard known as the AT protocol.

Mosseri said that Meta originally planned to launch Threads with fediverse support built in thanks to a protocol called ActivityPub, which powers many open-source social apps (including Mastodon), but that the team behind Threads couldn’t get the protocol working in time. However, Mosseri assured users that the company was committed to embracing open standards, and that support for ActivityPub would be coming soon. “If you’re wondering why this matters, here’s a reason,” he wrote. “You may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.”

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

Continue reading “Is Meta sincere about joining the social media “fediverse,” and if so, why?”