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From Ara The Rat: “In 2001, two boys playing in the woods in Radnor, Pennsylvania, found a strange three-foot sealed PVC pipe hidden inside a concrete drain. Inside, they discovered documents relating to numerous bank robberies and instructions on how to clean a Baretta firearm. Police found a three foot deep bunker filled with more PVC pipes and waterproof containers, containing books, maps, notes on 160 banks from Virginia to Connecticut, 5 guns, 500 rounds of ammunition and 8 Halloween masks. It didn’t take long before they realized who was behind this. For almost three decades, someone had been successfully robbing banks with a professionalism that had earned grudging respect. He was the most prolific bank robber in U.S. history netting himself around $2 million, more than John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde combined.”

Famous painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec invented chocolate mousse

From Tasting Table: “In addition to being a prolific painter, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was, as the Art Institute of Chicago puts it, gifted at representing the celebrity brand. One of his most famous works, “At the Moulin Rouge” (1892) depicts a bustling metropolitan nightlife scene that’s full of electricity and the hum of the after-hours-underworld. To say that Toulouse-Lautrec had a “palette” for the decadent would be accurate. But while other artists like Picasso and Van Gogh were chasing the green fairy under the absinthe drip, Toulouse-Lautrec was using his spoon to carve into bowls of rich chocolate mousse. While it might seem like an emblem of fine dining, but it wasn’t invented by a chef at all – it was created by Toulouse-Lautrec during the late 1800s. But he was less adept at naming foods. Mousse used to be called “chocolate mayonnaise.”

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Continue reading “He was the most prolific bank robber the US has ever seen”

From Inverse: “George Lucas didn’t plan on making Darth Vader the secret father of Luke Skywalker. As much as fans have been told that Lucas had a massive plan for the Star Wars saga prior to 1977, the sources closest to that process say the opposite. “When I was his wife, I never knew there were nine stories,” Marcia Lucas says in the new docuseries Icons Unearthed: Star Wars. “I never knew there were two stories.” But perhaps the greatest revelation in this under-the-radar documentary involves the origin of the franchise’s most famous twist. It turns out the “I am your father” moment started as an offhanded joke at a dinner party. Lucas was struggling to come up with some kind of big twist for Empire’s third act when he invited screenwriters Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz over for dinner. When Lucas described his struggles with writing the Empire story, Huyck joked, “You can always make Darth Vader Luke’s father.”

The children’s classic Goodnight Moon was inspired by a stormy lesbian romance

From The Hornet: “A biography of Margaret Wise Brown by Amy Gary reveals that Brown, author of the classic children’s books Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, had a tumultuous love life which included an affair with a married woman. Brown never married or had children. Instead she had a string of apparently torrid romances, including one with Blanche Oelrichs (who used the male nom de plume Michael Strange for her erotic poetry), a married woman 20 years her senior. The two women’s romance was actually the inspiration behind the beloved children’s book classic Goodnight Moon. During one breakup, she wrote a poem about a girl who moved from the country to the city and to soothe herself imagined her old room. Later, the poem returned to her in a dream along with images of her downstairs neighbor’s apartment — its bright green walls, red furniture with yellow trim. The result was Goodnight Moon.”

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Continue reading “The idea of Darth Vader being Luke’s father started as a joke”

From JSTOR Daily: “According to new DNA findings, General Casimir Pulaski, the Polish aristocrat who aided the American Revolution as the Father of the American Cavalry, seems to have been intersex. That is, a person who combines both male and female traits. In Pulaski’s case, the bodily remains include a pelvis and facial structure that are characteristically female, but Pulaski was baptized as a boy, and is usually pictured with facial hair. Exiled from Poland, Pulaski arrived in Massachusetts in July 1777 with a letter of introduction from the Marquis de Lafayette, after hearing the call of the American revolution from afar. That led to a meeting with George Washington. Soon Pulaski was put in charge of the 700 men of the Continental Army’s cavalry, and using European methods of horse-mounted warfare, Pulaski rode into American, and Polish history.”

Hans Christian Andersen wrote about climbing Mount Vesuvius while it was erupting

From The Marginalian: “In mid-February of 1834, while touring Europe, 29-year-old Andersen arrived in Naples just as the mighty Mount Vesuvius was in the midst of one of its then-regular and dramatic eruptions, three centuries after the first of them had drowned dozens of Italian villages in hot lava and killed an estimated 3,000 people. In his diary, there is a breathtaking account of his visit to Vesuvius and his crazy quest to climb the mount as it was erupting. “We stood before the mountain itself, whose rounded contours were covered with blocks of lava and ash,” he wrote. “We were now ascending a fairly steep grade, sinking up over our knees into ash. With every other step we slid backward by one. Large, loose rocks went sliding downward when we stepped on them. Coal-black smoke swirled upward; then a ball of fire and gigantic, glowing boulders rolled down onto the plain that we had to cross to get to the lava flow.”

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Continue reading “A Polish aristocrat who helped the US in the 1700s was probably intersex”

In December, the New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI—the creator of the popular artificial intelligence software known as ChatGPT—and Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s primary financial backers and partners. As reported by the Times, the suit alleged that OpenAI used millions of Times articles to train “automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information” by reproducing Times articles. By doing this, the suit argued, OpenAI was trying to “free-ride” on the newspaper’s investment in journalism, and Microsoft was guilty of doing the same, because it used ChatGPT technology in its Bing search engine and in many Microsoft Office products. The Times didn’t ask for specific financial damages from OpenAI or Microsoft, but said that the behavior alleged in the lawsuit should result in “billions of dollars” in damages from both companies. The Times also asked the court to force OpenAI to destroy any AI models, databases, and training data that were based on copyrighted material from the paper.

As I reported for CJR in January, OpenAI’s response to the lawsuit was twofold: On the one hand, it argued that the Times was not being transparent about the process it had used to get ChatGPT to produce the copies of Times articles, and that getting ChatGPT to do this involved a bug that users would likely never experience. At the same time, OpenAI argued that its scanning or “ingestion” of data from sources such as the Times to feed its AI engine was permissible under the fair use exemption in American copyright law. As I explained in October, according to the fair use principle, copyrighted material can be used for certain purposes without permission, and without paying the owner a fee for licensing, provided the use meets certain criteria (as outlined in the “four factors” test that judges use when hearing fair use cases).

Last week, OpenAI filed an official response to the Times lawsuit that echoes and expands on many of the arguments the company originally made in January. Despite the allegations that ChatGPT could become a competitor to the Times by reproducing articles, OpenAI said in its response that ChatGPT is “not in any way a substitute for a subscription to the New York Times.” In the real world, OpenAI said, people not only do not use ChatGPT for that purpose, but would not be able to do so even if they wanted to, since “in the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will.” According to OpenAI, the allegations in the Times’ lawsuit “do not meet its famously rigorous journalistic standards.” In reality, the company said, the Times paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products, and it took this person or persons tens of thousands of attempts to generate the kinds of results included in the suit.

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

Continue reading “OpenAI and Microsoft respond to the Times while Musk also sues OpenAI”

From The Chronicle: “In the 1930s, the married anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead had seen themselves as scientists seeking to expand the accepted limits of “normal” human behavior, communication, and consciousness. By the 1940s they came to believe that their project could help ensure the survival of humanity itself. By 1963 Bateson and Mead were divorced. But Bateson continued to see himself as pushing the boundaries of science to prevent feedback loops of conflict, which led him to the psychoanalyst John C. Lilly’s Communications Research Institute on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Lilly’s résumé was impeccable: degrees from Caltech and Dartmouth, a stint teaching at Penn, previously the head of a government research lab at the NIH. For reasons that remained somewhat mysterious, he had managed to persuade NASA to fund his efforts to teach dolphins how to speak English.”

What it’s like to live on one of the US Navy’s nuclear-powered submarines

From Vanity Fair: “Under cover of darkness, I boarded a Navy vessel at a heavily guarded military base along the Eastern Seaboard. The location and time of departure, as well as the direction and distance of travel, were unknown to me. Adding to the sense of secrecy, a towering sailor in camouflage stood in the rain, examining my belongings for electronics that might leave a digital trail an adversary could intercept and exploit. Buffeted by strong winds and high Atlantic seas, the support ship sailed through the night for more than 15 storm-tossed hours toward a destination somewhere off the continental shelf. Just after dawn, a sleek, inky object appeared in the distance, right above the waterline. It was the protruding bridge of what sailors call a “boomer”—a submarine armed to the gills with nuclear missiles—which is considered the most lethal, stealthy, and survivable weapon in America’s strategic arsenal.”

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 “These scientists thought LSD would help them talk to dolphins”

From The Smithsonian: “In the summer of 1978. A helicopter was skimming the treeline a hundred or so miles from the Mongolian border when it dropped into a thickly wooded valley. Then the pilot saw something that should not have been there: a clearing, 6,000 feet up a mountainside, wedged between the pine and larch and scored with what looked like long, dark furrows. It was an astounding discovery. The mountain was more than 150 miles from the nearest settlement, and there were no records of anyone living in the district. The sight that greeted the geologists as they entered the cabin was like something from the middle ages. Jerry-built from whatever materials came to hand, the dwelling was not much more than a burrow, with a floor consisting of potato peel and pine-nut shells. It was cramped, musty and indescribably filthy, propped up by sagging joists—and, astonishingly, home to a family of five.”

Phantom of the Opera creator Andrew Lloyd Webber called priest to rid his house of a ghost

From The Telegraph: “He is probably best known for his hit musical The Phantom of the Opera, but Andrew Lloyd Webber has disclosed that, in real life, he shared his home with the poltergeist of Eaton Square. The composer has told The Telegraph that a mischievous spirit took up residence in his home in Belgravia, central London. He eventually called on the services of a priest to persuade it to leave the 19th-century property. Lord Lloyd Webber mentioned the poltergeist when asked by The Telegraph whether any of the theatres he owns are haunted. Lloyd Webber said he had never seen a ghost, but added: “I did have a house in Eaton Square which had a poltergeist. It would do things like take theatre scripts and put them in a neat pile in some obscure room. In the end we had to get a priest to come and bless the house, and then it left.”

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 “Russian family was cut off from all human contact for 40 years”

From the WSJ: “University of Florida officials went back and forth with documentary filmmaker Jo Franklin, an alumnus, over details for a planned gala in her honor at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington. She had pledged $2 million to her alma mater, and her guest list included the entire staff of the PBS NewsHour. A day before the gala, officials learned her seven-figure check had bounced. They boarded a flight to Washington, hoping to straighten everything out. The next day, they found out Franklin hadn’t arrived at the Four Seasons, and the credit card number that she gave the hotel wasn’t working. They soon found out that the school’s esteemed graduate, once a well-known journalist and documentary filmmaker, was a troubled but gifted fabulist. The $2 million gift was an illusion, one in a yearslong string of fantasies concocted by Franklin, who tumbled from a life of apparent success to homelessness.”

Nick Offerman paddles a badass canoe he built down the Los Angeles river

From Outside: “In the 25 years I’ve called the city my home, I’ve done a great many things that I would categorize as fun. I have, of course, worked as an actor. But I’ve also been paid to build various decks and cabins as a carpenter, plus one exquisite post-and-beam yoga studio. I worked as a production assistant on a few music videos, trained by a tall, handsome, surfing porn actor who taught me to get up and stay up. I constructed an octagon-style wrestling cage for an episode of Friends. I’ve hiked hundreds of miles of trails in Los Angeles County, some while hallucinating, but mostly sober and high on the views from Griffith Park, the San Gabriels, and the Santa Monica Mountains. The point is, the one thing I never dreamed I would do is launch my beloved handmade cedar-strip canoe, Huckleberry, into the concrete-clad L.A. River, just a few miles north of the location of the drag-race scene in Grease.”

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 “She talked like a millionaire but slept in a parking garage”

From Outside magazine: “Talon Vance, 13, lived in an apartment complex in suburban Colorado Springs with his mom and Aunt. Other relatives lived nearby. Typically, he spent much of the week with his father, half brother, half sister, and grandparents, all of whom lived together not far away in a different town. All of that would change in August 2022: Talon’s mother, Rebecca Vance, had hatched a plan to disappear from Colorado Springs and go permanently off-grid. Christine said to their stepsister that they would be heading into the wilderness to live off the grid. Rebecca had spent much of the pandemic glued to her computer, growing increasingly obsessed with conspiracy theories and the end of the world. She feared vaccines, technology, and the power of global elites, and thought the only escape was to get far away.”

She spent a week rescuing food from the trash and here’s what she ate

From the NYT: “A childhood memory, from the family table in Mumbai, still plays on a loop in my mind: “Don’t waste your food,” my mother would admonish daily. “Too many starving children everywhere,” my father would chime in. Decades later, now living in New York City, I still can’t toss those leftovers. At least not like some of my friends do, with cool nonchalance, or like restaurants and shops regularly do when they’ve prepared too much. So, I decided to try Too Good To Go, one of several apps that connect eaters with unsold restaurant food. It claims to have 155,000 businesses, like restaurants and markets, that offer surplus meals, often discounted, to about 85 million users.”

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 did she take her son and try to live off the grid during a Colorado winter?”

From Big Think: “Seven countries each have staked a claim to a slice of Antarctica, but all those claims have been frozen by the Antarctic Treaty of 1959. Together, those claims cover most of the continent at the bottom of the world — except Marie Byrd Land, which is the largest unclaimed territory in the world. At least, it was until 2001, when naval intelligence specialist Travis McHenry said he found a loophole in the Antarctic Treaty: While it prohibits countries from laying claim to parts of Antarctica, it says nothing about individuals. So, McHenry proclaimed himself consul-general of this freezing no man’s land. In 2004, McHenry upgraded the territory to a grand duchy and renamed it Westarctica, and crowned himself Grand Duke Travis I.”

Inside the biggest art fraud in history

From the Smithsonian: “Norval Morrisseau was certain. “I did not paint the attached 23 acrylics on canvas,” he wrote to his Toronto gallery representative, who had sent him color photocopies of works that had recently sold at auction. Morrisseau, then in his late 60s and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, was the most important artist in the modern history of Canada’s Indigenous peoples—the “Picasso of the North.” By 2001, Morrisseau paintings routinely fetched thousands of dollars on the market. The works he now denied having painted were no exception. The auctioneer had advertised them as being from Morrisseau’s hand and claimed that he had no reason to doubt their authenticity—he had already sold 800 of them without a single buyer’s complaint.”

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 claimed part of Antarctica and then set up his own nation”

In May of 2023, agents from the FBI showed up at Tim Burke’s home in Tampa and seized several computers, hard drives, his cellphone, and other equipment that he uses as a freelance journalist. As I wrote for CJR, the reasons for the seizure were unknown at the time, because the affidavit the FBI used to justify the search was sealed. (It was later partially unsealed so Burke could see it for the purposes of his defense but has not been made public.) In an interview with me in 2023, Mark Rasch—Burke’s lawyer, and a former prosecutor with the Department of Justice—said the government seemed to believe that Burke somehow gained unauthorized access to a server and downloaded content he didn’t have explicit permission to access or copy. The problem, Rasch said, is that this description would also cover a wide range of normal journalistic activity.

Last week, Burke was indicted by a grand jury in Florida on fourteen charges, including conspiracy, accessing a protected computer without authorization, and intercepting or disclosing wire, oral, or electronic communications. The indictment accuses Burke and an unnamed person, referred to in the indictment as CONSPIRATOR 2, of using “compromised credentials” to gain unauthorized access to protected computers and then “scouring” those machines before ultimately “stealing electronic items and information deemed desirable,” in addition to intercepting and disclosing the contents of electronic video communications.

What reportedly triggered the initial investigation into Burke was the leak of behind-the-scenes footage of an interview conducted by Tucker Carlson, then a Fox News host, in which Kanye West, the musician now known as Ye, made some anti-Semitic remarks. That footage was among the video streams that Burke downloaded from a server normally used by broadcasters to distribute streams of their shows to affiliates and other outlets. As Rasch explained to me in 2023, many broadcasters livestream continuously, and these streams are in high definition and encrypted. However, many also use third-party services to distribute low-definition, unencrypted feeds.

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

Continue reading “Indictment of Florida journalist raises troubling questions”