From Discover Music: “No matter how memorable Bobby Fuller’s signature hit was – and his version of “I Fought The Law” is inarguably a classic rock’n’roll record of any era – it always risks being upstaged by the macabre and never-explained circumstances of his death. Born on October 22, 1942 in Baytown, Texas, Fuller became a noted performer in the El Paso, Texas area to which he and his family relocated.
I think we should force those who use DEI as a swear word to say explicitly which part they are against: Are they against diversity — in other words, against employing women, or black people, or gays? Are they against fairness, otherwise known as equity?
From The Oxford Clarion: “The Eagle & Child is Oxford’s most storied inn. It was here that the Inklings met every Tuesday lunchtime – a writing group including J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Hugo Dyson, who infamously dismissed a plot twist in the Lord of the Rings with “Not another —ing elf!”. Larry Ellison is the billionaire behind US database giant Oracle. He owns the sixth largest island in Hawaii, hired Steve Jobs as his wedding photographer, and was compared to a lawnmower by a disgruntled engineer.
From the NYT: “In the 1850s, Eunice Foote, an amateur scientist, made a remarkable discovery about greenhouse gases that could have helped form the foundation of modern climate science. But the scientific paper she published that might have added her name to the pantheon of early climate scientists was quickly forgotten, and she faded into obscurity. There isn’t even a photograph of her today. Foote’s ingenious and elegant experiment involved two glass cylinders filled with various substances, including moist air and carbon dioxide.
From The Smithsonian: “On the flat top of a steep hill in a distant corner of northern Japan lies the tomb of an itinerant shepherd who, two millennia ago, settled down there to grow garlic. He fell in love with a farmer’s daughter named Miyuko, fathered three kids and died at the ripe old age of 106. In the mountain hamlet of Shingo, he’s remembered by the name Daitenku Taro Jurai.
From USC: Oneida. For most Americans, the name conjures up fine silverware. Few are aware that behind this secular symbol of middle-class respectability lies the story of a 19th-century religious community predicated on radical notions of equality, sex and religion. The community’s founder, John Humphrey Noyes, was the scion of a prominent Vermont family and a graduate of Yale Theological Seminary. He founded his own offshoot of Protestantism called Perfectionism.
From SFist: Clockwise from top left: Gwen Danielson in a 2019 mugshot; Jack “Ziz” LaSota; Alexander “Somni” Leatham; Emma Borhanian; Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt; Maximillian Snyder; Michelle Zajko; and possibly Teresa Youngblut from Instagram
I apologize in advance for this post, which may not interest many of you, or may be too meandering and/or inconclusive for others. Some pieces I write for The Torment Nexus involve a topic where I have a clear point of view that has been established over time — copyright and artificial intelligence, the absurdity of the TikTok ban, etc.
From The Sunday Times: “Somewhere in Boston there is a doctor who treats disorders of the brain: a brilliant woman, a Harvard graduate, a mother of two. But she has a dark secret. Unbeknown to her colleagues or her patients, she is also a writer of thrillers, churning them out at a terrific rate, nearly all of them bestsellers. Four were on the Sunday Times list of top-selling books of 2024.
The good news: Everyone who was afraid of technobros like Sam Altman and Elon Musk controlling AI can relax, because there’s a new cheap competitor
The bad news: It’s Chinese
I know this is a small thing, but we should make the use of the word “discontinued” illegal — just be up front about it and say your service is ending! Looking at you, Dropbox
In this week’s Torment Nexus, I looked at a question that has taken on a new level of urgency (for me at least): Does fact-checking even work? torment-nexus.mathewingram.com/does-fact…
I see a lot of media outlets pursuing what feels like cargo-cult behavior — building the equivalent of fake runways and airplanes made of straw, in the hope that the gods will someday return with their revenue. The gods are not coming back
Some perspective on the TikTok saga, which is becoming stupider by the minute: torment-nexus.mathewingram.com/the-tikto…
So the incoming president of the United States is promoting a crypto coin named after himself. I guess I shouldn’t be shocked, but I confess I didn’t expect things to get this stupid this quickly. My bad! decrypt.co/301691/do…
The argument that TikTok is a national-security risk reminds me of the Underpants Gnome sketch: 1) Launch TikTok 2) ???? 3) Control users’ minds. Like the algorithm is a brainwashing ray-gun: torment-nexus.mathewingram.com/the-tikto…
Are people arguing that an app where people watch video clips of cats riding Roombas is a threat to national security? Yes. And is this just as ridiculous as it was the last time I wrote about it? Yes torment-nexus.mathewingram.com/the-tikto…
The publisher of SCOTUSblog allegedly borrowed $9.5 million between 2014 and 2016 and lost most of it playing high-stakes poker. He also allegedly entered into “sham employment arrangements” with four women he was in intimate personal relationships with www.law360.com/articles/…
In a spectacularly bad – perhaps even deliberately bad – example of terrible UI, when I did a Google Takeout download of my Google Photos, it zipped everything up into 10 GB files including everything that was in the trash
New from me in this week’s edition of The Torment Nexus: The TikTok saga has gotten even stupider, if that’s possible mathewingram.com/work/2025…
Today in “When The Going Gets Weird,” the new hot party drug is blueberry-flavored nitrous oxide, and if you bought this Andy Warhol sketch you might have gotten the real one or one of 999 fakes: mathewingram.com/work/2025…
FreeOurFeeds seems like a worthwhile effort, but I don’t know why they include Mark Ruffalo and Alex Winter at the top of their signatories – I mean, I’m sure they are both nice people, but why do I care what they think about a new social network or an open internet? freeourfeeds.com
In this week’s Torment Nexus, I looked at the recent changes at Meta and how Mark Zuckerberg used to pretend that he cared about hate speech or harassment on his platforms, but he clearly never did torment-nexus.mathewingram.com/mark-zuck…
Just a reminder that I publish two newsletters: When The Going Gets Weird is daily and contains interesting links, and The Torment Nexus is a weekly dose of technology analysis. Both are free but donations are gratefully accepted! All published via Ghost and Substack and at mathewingram.com/work
Not to be too contrarian on the whole “AI slop” problem, but human beings produce an awful lot of slop too, and always have — bad TV shows, worse movies, terrible books. Why not let AI do that?
Nate Silver says the idea of “fact-checking” as a separate subset of specialized journalism requiring special experts is odd, and he’s not wrong: www.natesilver.net/p/the-ris…