Kickoff For April 29, 2024
We're moving into winter here at the bottom of the world. A season I never cared for, even when I lived in the northern hemisphere. If nothing else, I can take comfort in that fact that it doesn't snow where I currently live.
Hope you're all doing well, though. And welcome to all the new subscribers. Nice to see you here! And, as always, thanks to the longer-term subscribers who've stuck with me. I'm humbled by your support.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links.
The Greatest Scam Ever Written — Wherein we learn the story of a driven, but shady, copywriter who claimed to be acting on behalf of a well-known psychic and how that got him arrested and tried for fraud.
From the article:
More than a million people in Canada and the United States were captivated enough to mail money in exchange for various psychic services. Some people, though, eventually began to question whether they were truly corresponding with a legendary psychic and felt they had been cheated.
A Bad Office Can (Maybe) Become a Good Apartment — Wherein we learn about how property developers are trying to turn 60s and 70s Brutalist corporate buildings in Manhattan into modern dwellings.
From the article:
Office buildings are not, alas, the great quarry of future living space the city needs, the untapped resource that could simultaneously solve the housing crisis and restore the midtown tax base. They’re only the start of a solution, especially because the cost and complexity of these reconstructions means the rents are high and therefore can’t be held down by regulation.
How To Design A Better Urban Soundscape — Wherein we learn how noise pollution has changed the Earth's environment, its effects on us and on animals, and ways that people are trying to mitigate those effects.
From the article:
This architecture, which results in a space between the parallel walls of two buildings, creates a so-called urban canyon. These canyons are as good at keeping sound out as they are at amplifying the sounds within, as sound waves bounce back and forth between the two close, regular, vertical surfaces.
An Untold Story of LSD Psychotherapy in Communist Czechoslovakia — Wherein we learn about the work of psychiatrist Milan Hausner, about about psychotherapy using hallucinogens in the former communist state.
From the article:
After several weeks, the patients who’d received LSD and individual therapy showed the most improvement, displaying new insights and changed attitudes in their relationships with staff and other patients.
What the 'future histories' of the 1920s can teach us about hope — Wherein Thomas Moynihan examines the positive visions of the future from a century (and more) ago, and how they can be an effective counterpoint (and alternative) to the gloomy prognostications with which we're bombarded almost daily.
From the article:
There are grave threats in our collective future, but let's not forget that approaching it with buoyant openness, as much as sombre gravity, can shift things towards what's better.
Ancestral Structures on the Trailing Edge — Wherein Lauret E. Savoy examines what race in American means, connecting the evolution of the concept with the various forces that shaped a key region of early America.
From the article:
Nearly lost to history is any expansive sense of lives entwined by converging diasporas from Africa and Indigenous America with immigrants from Europe. Mostly gone are hints of shared intimacies beyond those of force and violence.
The Scientist Using Bugs to Help Solve Murders — Wherein we get a glimpse into the work of forensic entomologist Paola Magni, and the ways in which her work (and the work of her colleagues) is influencing and assisting in criminal investigations.
From the article:
Even now, however, when local police departments have their own forensic laboratories and investigators, forensic entomology remains an obscure speciality. “We are not mainstream,” says Gail Anderson, a forensic entomologist and the co-director of the Center for Forensic Research at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. In the United States, fewer than 20 people are accredited by the American Board of Forensic Entomology.
Fentanyl, the portrait of a mass murderer — Wherein we're taken on a frightening journey into how the cheap, highly addictive, and deadly drug is made and how it winds up on the streets.
From the article:
Fentanyl’s status as a valuable medical tool makes it difficult to combat: it simply cannot be made illegal. It’s not so easy to criminalize precursors, either: many of them are used in the manufacturing of cleaning products or commonly-used medications, such as ibuprofen.
Next slide please: A brief history of the corporate presentation — Wherein we learn how companies used, before the advent of PowerPoint, dynamic slideshows to inform and entertain and awe.
From the article:
Douglas Mesney likes to say that if you never saw a slide show, you never will. The machines to show them have been landfilled. The slides themselves were rarely archived. Occasionally a few boxes containing an old multi-image “module” will turn up in a storage unit, and occasionally those will even be undamaged. But with the exception of a few hobbyists and retired programmers, the know-how to restore and stage multi-image slideshows is scarce.