3 stars
Glen McCurley Strangled Carla Walker in 1974. Was She His Only Victim? | TexasMonthly
Police officers wearing bulletproof vests piled out of unmarked cars and fanned out around a small, one-story, tan-colored home in a working-class neighborhood of far west Fort Worth. The officers were members of the elite Delta Team of the U.S. Marshals North Texas Fugitive Task Force, a unit specially trained to arrest high-risk criminals. Approaching the house, they unholstered their Glocks. One carried a metal battering ram in case they needed to bash in the front door. Two of the officers circled to the backyard to capture anyone who tried to flee.
It was the afternoon of September 21, 2020. The officer in charge of the operation, a 22-year police veteran named Travis Eddleman, stepped onto the front porch and rang the doorbell. A 77-year-old man opened the door wearing a gray polo shirt, blue jeans, and black dress shoes with white socks. Although he was six feet three inches tall and weighed 240 pounds, he appeared frail. His thinning hair, white with strands of gray, was brushed back over his head, and his brown eyes were sunken into his face.
“Mr. Glen McCurley?” Eddleman asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. “You’re under arrest. Please step outside, and do it now.”
McCurley seemed bewildered. He turned and looked at his wife, Judy, who had appeared beside him, wearing a bathrobe and leaning on a cane. As the officers handcuffed McCurley, Judy told Eddleman that her husband was sick with cancer and that he was scheduled to see a doctor later that day.
“Ma’am,” said Eddleman, “your husband has to come with us.”
McCurley had resided in west Fort Worth for nearly fifty years. He liked working with his hands and watching home improvement shows on television. Each week, he drove Judy to Walmart to buy groceries, and occasionally, they’d go to Pulido’s, a Mexican restaurant just a few minutes down the road. On Sundays he and Judy worshipped at a nearby church.
He seemed to be a good man leading a quiet life. One woman had even sent a letter to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram praising him and Judy for returning her lost wallet. “The world needs more folks like this,” she wrote.
But detectives had developed an entirely different perspective on McCurley. They had compelling evidence that he was responsible for the notorious unsolved murder of a teenage girl in 1974. And they suspected that wasn’t McCurley’s only heinous crime. They considered him a “person of interest” in at least three other killings of young women during the seventies and eighties.
Sam Taggart’s Hard Sell | New Yorker
For eight minutes, Sam Taggart had them all hooked. Relaxed and sincere, he roamed the stage at the Salt Palace Convention Center, selling fifteen hundred door-to-door salesmen on selling. It was a crisp January morning at the fifth D2DCon, an annual conference in Salt Lake City that’s the centerpiece of Taggart’s campaign to elevate a profession reviled by nearly everyone. You can hang up on a telemarketer, but not on the insistent young man who won’t leave your doorstep until you buy some goddam thing—pest control, an alarm system, solar panels, a new roof, magazines, scented candles, paintless autobody dent repair, or perhaps tri-tip steaks from a delivery van that, he swears, just broke down in front of your house.
The best door-to-door salesmen can earn more than a million dollars a year, but it’s a punishing way of life. Unlike the salesman who hawks minivans or enterprise software, the door knocker can’t network at the Rotary Club, make a catchy commercial, or research his prospect’s needs. He faces an unknown and often hostile customer with only his own brain for backup.
“Is selling good?” Taggart asked, from the stage. He wore a Beckett & Robb suit, and his auburn hair was spiked with American Crew gel. “Say yes!”
“Yes!” everyone yelled.
“Is getting sold good? Say yes!”
“Yes!”
Salesmen are particularly susceptible to the American impulse to turn every art into a science. Taggart’s company, the D2D Experts, has an online “university” of hundreds of videos that show sales reps exactly what to say and how to say it. One trusty method is the “yes train,” an idea formalized in the eighteen-eighties by John H. Patterson, who founded National Cash Register. Patterson believed questions that elicit a “yes” prime the customer to agree to a purchase. Encyclopedia salesmen once practiced an “ascending close” that required summoning forty-two yeses—but even that Joycean crescendo of acquiescence didn’t guarantee a sale. “Direct-to-home is the hardest job in the world, outside of being in the military,” Vess Pearson, the C.E.O. of Aptive Environmental, which dispatches some seventy per cent of the knockers in pest control, told me. “You’re working for free every day until you make a sale. The job is repetitive and mundane. And you get rejected over and over and over—you’ll probably only sell two out of a hundred knocks.”
Prison Money Diaries: What People Really Make (and Spend) Behind Bars | The Marshall Project
Prisons typically provide the bare minimum when it comes to food, clothes, shoes and hygiene supplies. Some states provide items such as toothpaste, soap and limited amounts of letter-writing supplies only to the “indigent,” or those who have little to no money. Other goods that many would consider necessities — deodorant, shampoo, sneakers, thermal clothes for winter — are often only available to people who can afford them.
But earning enough from a prison job is nearly impossible: The average prison wage maxes out at 52 cents per hour, according to a new ACLU analysis, and many people make pennies per hour. That means that basics, like a $3 tube of toothpaste, can take days of work to afford. If you get paid, that is. In at least six states — Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas — prisoners aren’t paid at all for their labor.
To make up for their paltry wages, people in prison often take part in a thriving underground economy of side hustles, bartering stamps or commissary items for everything from hand-drawn greeting cards to makeshift home cooking to legal help.
In recent months, The Marshall Project has corresponded with dozens of incarcerated people about the money they make, the money they spend and the lengths to which they go to secure basic needs and comforts. We asked several people to log their transactions for us; they also sent receipts and monthly account statements for commissary purchases. Along with that information, we gathered commissary catalogs and conducted email and phone interviews about their official prison jobs and side hustles. Most are serving long sentences for serious crimes; some have spent decades behind bars.
Read their stories to learn how they navigate and survive, often through sheer determination and ingenuity, the harsh reality of prison economics.
Disaster at 18,200 feet | Business Insider
Perhaps the most dangerous thing about the Autobahn is that it doesn't look very dangerous. It's steep enough to cause climbers to fall with great speed, but not so steep that all climbers exercise proper caution. The park service strongly encourages roping up with protection at this spot, but every year, teams ignore that advice. If the slope was just a bit steeper, it's likely fewer climbers would take the risk.
Most falls on the Autobahn happen on the descent, when climbers are exhausted, having just pushed for the summit after two weeks on the unforgiving mountain, perhaps slightly impaired by the effects of altitude, and quite possibly a little cocky from having made it this far.
Despite his condition, Rawski was not roped up. Standing at the top of the Autobahn, the others had scattered a bit. Wilson had stepped out of sight for a bathroom break. Maynard was slightly downhill from Lance.
And then, Rawski was gone. […]
It was quiet, with no wind. But Maynard hadn't heard a thing. "That's what was so spooky and haunting," she said. "I didn't hear his ice axe hit the ground. I didn't hear his body tumble. I didn't hear a yelp from him."
Maynard and Wilson huddled under a rock, all but certain their friend was dead. They held each other, and cried.
Amazingly, Rawski didn't die that day. He's one of the only climbers known to have survived a fall down the Autobahn. But that's not where the story ends. What none of them knew then was that six months later, one of them would be criminally charged and brought before a judge — and they'd all have to relive the worst day of their lives.
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Meet the Lobbyist Next Door | Wired
At first glance, the posts appeared to have nothing in common. A Philadelphia-area attorney who proffers financial advice urged her 1,700 Twitter followers to sign up for a credit union. A 23-year-old climate activist in Texas rallied her 49,000 fans on TikTok and Instagram to join a mailing list promoting Democrats in statewide offices. A physical therapist for the elderly in Florida prodded her 3,900 Instagram followers to sign a petition demanding that Congress pass paid medical leave, sharing the story of her grandmother’s battle with dementia. Each of these posts was funded by a well-heeled advocacy organization: the Credit Union National Association, the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, and UsAgainstAlzheimer’s Action.
Even though none of the people reading these posts knew it, however, they were all made possible by the same company: Urban Legend, a small ad-tech startup operating out of a loft in Alexandria, Virginia.
Launched in 2020 by a pair of former Trump administration staffers, Urban Legend pledges on its website to “help brands run accountable and impactful influencer campaigns.” Its more comprehensive mission, one rarely articulated in public, is slightly more ambitious.
Staffed by a plucky 14-person team, Urban Legend keeps its largest asset carefully hidden away inside its servers: an army of 700 social media influencers who command varying degrees of allegiance from audiences that collectively number in the tens of millions. The company has painstakingly cultivated this roster to reflect every conceivable niche of society reflected on the internet: makeup artists, Nascar drivers, home improvement gurus, teachers, doulas, Real Housewives stars, mommy bloggers, NFL quarterbacks, Olympians, and the occasional Fox News pundit.
Our Technology Sickness—and How to Heal It | sources
Because of the digital revolution, our lives are being transformed by three grand bargains. The intellectual bargain: we have more knowledge but less capacity to concentrate and focus. The social bargain: we are much more available but much less attentive. And most importantly, the emotional bargain: we are much more connected, but much less empathetic. When we trade away skills for power, attention for availability, empathy for connectivity, and quality for quantity of relationships, we sign up to a Faustian pact that we do not even know exists—one that gives us more control over the outside world, but less control over our inner world.
What then is to be done? What shifts in thinking and behavior will help us reverse course?
What was the Schleswig-Holstein Question anyway? | The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything
Delightful:
“Only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business,” occasional British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston is reputed to have said. “The Prince Consort, who is dead; a German professor, who has gone mad; and I, who have forgotten all about it.”
I do wonder sometimes whether there’s at least a little bit of self-aggrandisement going on in that quote. The Schleswig-Holstein question was messy and complicated, but hardly incomprehensibly so. By making it a byword for impenetrability, perhaps the man who dominated Britain’s foreign policy for a generation was just trying to make his work sound Very Difficult and himself sound Very Clever Indeed. Nonetheless, understanding and explaining complicated bits of European history is my idea of fun, so let’s get on with it.
Why Pelosi’s Visit to Taiwan Is Utterly Reckless | New York Times
Thomas Friedman:
I have a lot of respect for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But if she does go ahead with a visit to Taiwan this week, against President Biden’s wishes, she will be doing something that is utterly reckless, dangerous and irresponsible.
Nothing good will come of it. Taiwan will not be more secure or more prosperous as a result of this purely symbolic visit, and a lot of bad things could happen. These include a Chinese military response that could result in the U.S. being plunged into indirect conflicts with a nuclear-armed Russia and a nuclear-armed China at the same time.
And if you think our European allies — who are facing an existential war with Russia over Ukraine — will join us if there is U.S. conflict with China over Taiwan, triggered by this unnecessary visit, you are badly misreading the world.
Let’s start with the indirect conflict with Russia, and how Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan now looms over it.
There are moments in international relations when you need to keep your eyes on the prize. Today that prize is crystal clear: We must ensure that Ukraine is able, at a minimum, to blunt — and, at a maximum, reverse — Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion, which if it succeeds will pose a direct threat to the stability of the whole European Union.
To help create the greatest possibility of Ukraine reversing Putin’s invasion, Biden and his national security adviser Jake Sullivan held a series of very tough meetings with China’s leadership, imploring Beijing not to enter the Ukraine conflict by providing military assistance to Russia — and particularly now, when Putin’s arsenal has been diminished by five months of grinding war.
The War Economy: Sizing up the New Axis | Noahpinion
I wish I didn’t have to live through an era of renewed great power conflict. I wish the end of the Cold War had meant that such destructive episodes were forever relegated to the history books. But unfortunately, those wishes did not come true. The Ukraine war means that we are now definitely in a long-term Cold War type struggle with Russia. And the substantial chance of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan sometime in the next few years — as highlighted by the furor over Nancy Pelosi’s planned Taiwan visit — means that there’s a high likelihood that we’ll also soon be enmeshed in a contest with China as well.
Hopefully neither of these conflicts will result in direct war between great powers (especially because all the great powers now have plenty of nuclear weapons). I am not arguing that we are headed for World War 3 here. But a sequel to the Cold War — a protracted geopolitical struggle in which both sides prepare for the possibility that they might have to fight each other — seems extremely likely at this point. So likely, in fact, that we can’t afford not to plan for it.
That’s what the concept of the War Economy is about.
Early Europeans Could Not Tolerate Milk but Drank It Anyway, Study Finds | New York Times
For thousands of years, Europeans consumed milk products despite lacking an enzyme needed to avoid gastrointestinal discomfort, according to a new study.
Two decades of Alzheimer's research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives | Daily Kos
Over the last two decades, Alzheimer’s drugs have been notable mostly for having a 99% failure rate in human trials. It’s not unusual for drugs that are effective in vitro and in animal models to turn out to be less than successful when used in humans, but Alzheimer’s has a record that makes the batting average in other areas look like Hall of Fame material.
And now we have a good idea of why. Because it looks like the original paper that established the amyloid plaque model as the foundation of Alzheimer’s research over the last 16 years might not just be wrong, but a deliberate fraud.
Hispaniola's Great Divergence | The Fitzwilliam
Haiti is a country that can’t catch a break.
Any analysis of Haiti must state two facts. First, Haiti is the only country where slavery was defeated by a slave revolution. Second, Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world, and the poorest in the Western Hemisphere. Now that I’ve stated these facts, I’d like to explore deeper. What do we know about Haiti’s poverty? How does this relate to its history? And why does it compare so unfavourably with the Dominican Republic?
America’s Self-Obsession Is Killing Its Democracy | The Atlantic
For decades, the United States has proclaimed itself a “shining city upon a hill,” a beacon of democracy that can lead broken nations out of their despotic darkness. That overconfidence has been instilled into its citizens, leading me a decade ago to the mistaken, naive belief that countries such as Madagascar have something to learn from the U.S. rather than also having wisdom to teach us.
During the Donald Trump presidency, the news covered a relentless barrage of “unprecedented” attacks on the norms and institutions of American democracy. But they weren’t unprecedented. Similar authoritarian attacks had happened plenty of times before. They were only unprecedented to us.
AlphaFold reveals the structure of the protein universe | DeepMind
It’s been one year since we released and open sourced AlphaFold, our AI system to predict the 3D structure of a protein just from its 1D amino acid sequence, and created the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AlphaFold DB) to freely share this scientific knowledge with the world. Proteins are the building blocks of life, they underpin every biological process in every living thing. And, because a protein’s shape is closely linked with its function, knowing a protein’s structure unlocks a greater understanding of what it does and how it works. We hoped this groundbreaking resource would help accelerate scientific research and discovery globally, and that other teams could learn from and build on the advances we made with AlphaFold to create further breakthroughs. That hope has become a reality far quicker than we had dared to dream. Just twelve months later, AlphaFold has been accessed by more than half a million researchers and used to accelerate progress on important real-world problems ranging from plastic pollution to antibiotic resistance.
Today, I’m incredibly excited to share the next stage of this journey. In partnership with EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), we’re now releasing predicted structures for nearly all catalogued proteins known to science, which will expand the AlphaFold DB by over 200x - from nearly 1 million structures to over 200 million structures - with the potential to dramatically increase our understanding of biology.
1 star
How one company has pigeon-proofed all of New York City | FastCompany
Good design often goes unnoticed. That’s the case for Birdmaster, which has used netting to deter pigeons everywhere from the New York Public Library to the Statue of Liberty.
Explicit Content | History Today
Rude words are a constant, but their ability to cause offence is in flux. Historians should know their flim-flam from their fiddle-faddle.
How on-line education affects grading | Marginal Revolution
This paper examines the role of student facial attractiveness on academic outcomes under various forms of instruction, using data from engineering students in Sweden. When education is in-person, attractive students receive higher grades in non-quantitative subjects, in which teachers tend to interact more with students compared to quantitative courses. This finding holds both for males and females. When instruction moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic, the grades of attractive female students deteriorated in non-quantitative subjects. However, the beauty premium persisted for males, suggesting that discrimination is a salient factor in explaining the grade beauty premium for females only.