Hack and the Bean Stalk

Getting in Your Head, Feel Good Friday

I know some days I get inside your head. I share some disturbing news and you find yourself thinking about it more than you want to. It’s like an earworm melody that gets stuck in your head long after you’ve stopped listening. Songs and words get inside your head the old fashioned way—through your eyes and ears. The next generation of technologies aren’t taking such a meandering route. They’re attaching directly to your brain. Like all new technologies, that’s both good news and potentially really disturbing news. Let’s join Linda Kinstler in the NYT Magazine(Gift Article) as she does something as simple as putting on what looks like an ordinary pair of grey eyeglasses. Before long, she was using her mind to move a robotic soccer ball set on a table in front of her. “The ball had been programmed to light up and rotate whenever my level of neural ‘effort’ reached a certain threshold. When my attention waned, the soccer ball stood still. For now, the glasses are solely for research purposes. At M.I.T., [scientist Nataliya] Kosmyna has used them to help patients with A.L.S. communicate with caregivers — but she said she receives multiple purchase requests a week. So far she has declined them. She’s too aware that they could easily be misused.” The Next Privacy Battleground Is Inside Your Brain. Scientists have used these kinds of brain computer interfaces to allow “people with locked-in syndrome, who cannot move or speak, to communicate with their families and caregivers and even play video games. Scientists have experimented with using neural data from fMRI imaging and EEG signals to detect sexual orientation, political ideology and deception, to take just a few examples.” (I’m thinking of wearing a pair of brain-sensing glasses while I write NextDraft. I want to see how many news tabs I have to open before the robotic soccer ball rolls off the table and deflates.)

2

The U (of You)

“Higher education has by and large embraced influencer culture, which already dominates beauty, travel, health and so much of everyday society. Plenty of schools, like Miami, funnel marketing dollars toward student creators as a recruiting tool or have embraced the RushTok phenomenon of viral sorority selections. But influencing can also be messy, mean and unpredictable, as the college of the Hurricanes discovered last month, when a tearful spat between two freshman influencers spilled offline, generating weeks of tabloid headlines for the university and spiraling into the office of the dean of students.” WaPo (Gift Article): Influencers are royalty at this college, and the turf war is vicious. “Miami no longer had two influencers earning social cred for the school; it had a digital slap fight that hundreds of thousands of people were watching. The student newspaper couldn’t keep the print copies on the news stands fast enough ... The New York Post ran a story titled, ‘Campus influencers are in tears over having fewer followers than their peers — and the grift is ruining their college experience.’”

+ NPR: As social media grows more toxic, college athletes ask themselves: Is it worth it? “College basketball players are more at risk than athletes in other sports, the NCAA has found, especially around March Madness, when thousands of abusive or threatening messages flood athletes, many of them from gamblers — some of it so severe and alarmingly specific that the NCAA must alert law enforcement.”

3

Trump Calls His Lawyer

Trump has launched his latest salvo in the war over the Epstein files. He says he’s asking Justice Department to investigate Epstein’s ties to slew of high-profile figures (who all happen to be political opponents or enemies). I’m not sure Trump’s strategy will slow down this scandal. But it points to an even bigger one: The way the president has turned the FBI and Justice Department into his own personal legal force. And they way the leaders of those institutions are going along with it.

+ Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker: The Epstein Scandal Is Now a Chronic Disease of the Trump Presidency. “The point is that no matter how much you might want to avoid paying attention to this truly unsavory story, it is not going away. The veteran journalist Jonathan Alter, who’s covered his share of Washington scandals, compared this one to ‘a bad case of herpes,’ that might lie low for a while but will never stop afflicting Trump and shadowing his Presidency.” (Just as Trumpism continues to afflict America...)

+ Courier created a searchable database with all 20,000 files from Epstein’s Estate.

4

Weekend Whats

What to Binge: “Marissa Irvine arrives to collect her young son Milo from his first playdate, but the woman who answers the door isn’t a mother she recognizes. She doesn’t have Milo and has never heard of him.” Sarah Snook stars in All Her Fault on Peacock.

+ What to Book: “You knew I’d write a book about you someday...” Heart the Lover by Lily King is a new novel about desire, friendship, and the lasting impact of first love. (I only experienced the first two in college, so it was nice to at least read about the third...)

+ What to Movie: Guillermo del Toro’s reimagining of Frankenstein on Netflix features some excellent performances. The sets, cinematography, and costumes alone make this worth a watch. And after you watch the movie, be sure to watch the short behind the scenes documentary on the making of the movie. Frankenstein: The Anatomy Lesson.

5

Extra, Extra

The Fix is In: “The Trump administration is preparing broad exemptions to certain tariffs in an effort to ease elevated food prices that have provoked anxiety for American consumers.” (Wait, I thought consumers didn’t pay for tariffs?) So they’re trying to solve a problem they created. And their base will probably give them credit for it.

+ A Teachable Foment: “Texas A&M University System regents voted Thursday to limit how instructors may discuss matters like gender identity and race ideology in classrooms, tightening the rules in a conservative state where debates over academic freedom have flared for months.” They have to check with the university president first. Seriously. NYT (Gift Article): Texas A&M Tightens Rules on Talking About Race and Gender in Classes.

+ We’re All in This Together: “As dozens of frog species have declined across Central America, scientists have witnessed a remarkable chain of events: With fewer tadpoles to eat mosquito larvae, rates of mosquito-borne malaria in the region have climbed, resulting in a fivefold increase in cases.” WaPo (Gift Article): First, the frogs died. Then people got sick. “An emerging area of research is uncovering surprising links between nature and human health.”

+ Your Tax Dollars at Work: “The Justice Department has been discussing settlements with Michael Flynn and Stefan Passantino, two former officials from Donald Trump’s first term, who claim they’re owed major payouts from the US government as victims of politically-motivated actions.” Bloomberg (Gift Article): Michael Flynn, DOJ in Settlement Talks Over $50 Million Claim.

+ Sniper Safari? “The public prosecutor’s office in Milan has opened an investigation into claims that Italian citizens travelled to Bosnia-Herzegovina on “sniper safaris” during the war in the early 1990s. Italians and others are alleged to have paid large sums to shoot at civilians in the besieged city of Sarajevo.”

+ The Heist Zeitgeist: “It’s not just the Louvre. Minimal security and the high price of gold have fueled nine robberies over the past year.” France Is Awash in Museum Heists.

6

Feel Good Friday

“Last year, as his economics class at the Brooklyn Friends school studied the national housing crisis, he and a classmate hatched an idea for an online housing platform that could help people find homes they could afford. First, he taught himself to code.” NYT(Gift Article): New York Lacked an Affordable Housing Portal. So These Teenagers Made One.

+ “If I get the opportunity to fight like this for the rest of my life, I would be totally OK with that.” West Chicago brothers are on the front lines against ‘Operation Midway Blitz.’ And they’re only teenagers.

+ “The cyclists arrive at sunrise, rolling through Chicago’s Latino neighborhoods and stopping at tamale carts, elote stands and candy stalls. They buy out every last item — every tamale, every corn cob, every bundle of sweets. Then they load up the food and deliver it to shelters and families in need.” Chicagoans buy out street vendors amid a federal immigration crackdown.

+ In praise of a refrigerator, still chugging after 75 years.

+ A study finds that sperm whales use vowels like humans. (So they be good at playing Whale of Fortune...)

+ And if you missed it yesterday, the Naked man making phone call after steam and shower at local health club could be an endangered species.