As the founder of Adventures with Purpose, Jared Leisek carved a lucrative niche in the YouTube sleuthing community. Then the sleuths came for him, Rachel Monroe writes.
Insider Business (July 28, 2023) – Artisans have been producing traditional olive oil soap at Masbanat Awaida for over 140 years. A century ago, there were dozens of soap factories like this in Tripoli, Lebanon. Today, Masbanat Awaida is the only one remaining.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (July 30, 2023) – In this week’s cover story, David Quammen reports on the ongoing mystery of Covid’s origin, what we do know — and why it matters. Plus, a profile of a poet who was kidnapped from his Black father by his white grandparents and a look at a group of English activists’ fight for the right to access public lands.
We still don’t know how the pandemic started. Here’s what we do know — and why it matters.
By David Quammen
Where did it come from? More than three years into the pandemic and untold millions of people dead, that question about the Covid-19 coronavirus remains controversial and fraught, with facts sparkling amid a tangle of analyses and hypotheticals like Christmas lights strung on a dark, thorny tree. One school of thought holds that the virus, known to science as SARS-CoV-2, spilled into humans from a nonhuman animal, probably in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a messy emporium in Wuhan, China, brimming with fish, meats and wildlife on sale as food. Another school argues that the virus was laboratory-engineered to infect humans and cause them harm — a bioweapon — and was possibly devised in a “shadow project” sponsored by the People’s Liberation Army of China.
A group of English activists want to legally enshrine the “right to roam” — and spread the idea that nature is a common good.
By Brooke Jarvis
The signs on the gateat the entrance to the path and along the edge of the reservoir were clear. “No swimming,” they warned, white letters on a red background.
On a chill mid-April day in northwest England, with low, gray clouds and rain in the forecast, the signs hardly seemed necessary. But then people began arriving, by the dozens and then the hundreds. Some walked only from nearby Hayfield, while others came by train or bus or foot from many hours away. In a long, trailing line, they tramped up the hill beside the dam and around the shore of the reservoir, slipping in mud and jumping over puddles. Above them rose a long, curving hill of open moorland, its heather still winter brown. When they came to a gap between a stone wall and a metal fence, they squeezed through it, one by one, slipping under strings of barbed wire toward the water below.
Socialist leader assures party ‘democracy can find a formula for government’ as left and right blocs try to form viable coalitions
The Spanish Socialist leader, Pedro Sánchez, has ruled out a return to the polls following Sunday’s inconclusive snap general election, insisting a new government can be formed after his ruling coalition was narrowly beaten by the opposition conservative People’s party (PP).
Plenty of people will tell you the East Neuk of Fife in Scotland is the best place in the world to eat fish and chips. So what happens when its chippies – and chippies across the UK – start to close?
The New Yorker – July 31, 2023 issue: The ‘rich and famous’ above the law, a small-town newspaper lands ‘Big Stories’, how Larry Gagosian reshaped the art world, and more…
With a common touch that appeals to juries and a client list that includes Elon Musk, Jay-Z, and Megan Thee Stallion, he’s on a winning streak that makes his rivals seethe.
In the summer of 2018, four years before he bought Twitter, the entrepreneur Elon Musk was facing legal consequences for two of his more reckless forays on the social-media platform. A boys’ soccer team in Thailand had been trapped in a flooded cave for more than two weeks, and a caver involved in the rescue said on CNN that a bespoke submarine Musk had sent to save the children was a “PR stunt.” Infuriated, Musk told his twenty-two million Twitter followers, without basis in fact, that the caver, Vernon Unsworth, was a “pedo guy.” The tweet went viral, and Unsworth’s attorney threatened to sue Musk for defamation.
It was the Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend on Further Lane, the best street in Amagansett, the best town in the Hamptons, and the art dealer Larry Gagosian was bumming around his eleven-thousand-square-foot modernist beach mansion, looking pretty relaxed for a man who, the next day, would host a party for a hundred and forty people. A pair of French bulldogs, Baby and Humphrey, waddled about, and Gagosian’s butler, Eddie, a slim man with a ponytail and an air of informal professionalism, handed him a sparkling water.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (July 23, 2023) – In this issue, Robert Kolker on a family’s struggle with a genetic mutation that leads to dementia in middle age; Caity Weaver tries to track down Tom Cruise; Jon Gertner on the future of Wikipedia as A.I. feeds off its human input; and more.
They all have a 50-50 chance of inheriting a cruel genetic mutation — which means disappearing into dementia in middle age. This is the story of what it’s like to live with those odds.
By Robert Kolker
Barb was the youngest in her large Irish Catholic family — a surprise baby, the ninth child, born 10 years after the eighth. Living in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, her family followed the football schedule: high school games on Friday night, college games on Saturday, the Steelers on Sunday. Dad was an engineer, mom was a homemaker and Barb was the family mascot, blond and adorable, watching her brothers and sisters finish school and go on to their careers.
Can the online encyclopedia help teach A.I. chatbots to get their facts right — without destroying itself in the process?
By JON GERTNER
In early 2021, a Wikipedia editor peered into the future and saw what looked like a funnel cloud on the horizon: the rise of GPT-3, a precursor to the new chatbots from OpenAI. When this editor — a prolific Wikipedian who goes by the handle Barkeep49 on the site — gave the new technology a try, he could see that it was untrustworthy. The bot would readily mix fictional elements (a false name, a false academic citation) into otherwise factual and coherent answers.
The action star has gone to great lengths to avoid the press for more than a decade. But maybe our writer could track him down anyway?
By CAITY WEAVER
In an interview with Playboy in 2012, Tom Cruise described Katie Holmes as “an extraordinary person” with a “wonderful” clothing line, and someone for whom he was fond of “doing things like creating romantic dinners” — behavior that, he confided, “she enjoys.” It would prove to be his last major interview with a reporter to date. Despite what may be recalled through the penumbra of memory, this sudden silence was not directly preceded by either of Cruise’s infamous appearances on television: not by his NBC’s “Today” show interview (in which he labeled host Matt Lauer both “glib” and “Matt — MattMattMattMatt”), nor even by his appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” (in which he reverse-catapulted himself onto Winfrey’s fawn-colored couch multiple times in a demonstration of his enthusiasm for Holmes).
When the result of the Hollywood actors’ strike ballot was announced last Thursday, the big-name stars of Oppenheimer left the film’s London premiere.
This show of solidarity by Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh was a demonstration of the far-reaching effects of creatives taking to the picket lines. For our big story, arts reporter Vanessa Thorpe looks at what the historic joint walkout by writers and actors means for all of us as movie-goers and TV viewers as well as the stars, lesser-known actors and technicians struggling to make a living.
And we look at what lies behind the dispute with our film editors Catherine Shoard and Andrew Pulver while Los Angeles reporter Lois Beckett hears from actors finding it ever harder to make a living in the age of streaming and the use of AI in the entertainment industry.
FRANCE 24 English Films (July 18, 2023) – Known as the Wonder of the West, Mont-Saint-Michel looks as if it could have been plucked from a fairytale. The religious sanctuary on France’s Normandy coast turns 1,000 this year.
Since the first stone was laid in 1023, it has been home to monks, monarchs and prisoners; a historic pilgrimage site that welcomes 3 million visitors each year. In this edition we meet some of the people who preserve its magic.
Harper’s Magazine – August 2023 issue: The New Science Wars – The COVID Response and Its Discontents; Freud Shrinks Woodrow Wilson; Lawrence Jackson on Colson Whitehead, and more…
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not unusual to enter common spaces across the United States—grocery stores, malls, office buildings—and experience a kind of perceptual whiplash. People wearing N-95 masks and latex gloves stood beside others wearing no mask at all—or else letting their mandatory face coverings slouch flaccidly beneath their chins.
Twenty-two years ago, a six-year-old girl—my cousin—got lost in the Arkansas Ozarks, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state’s history. Her disappearance would eventually connect my family to another story, a dark and bizarre one involving kidnapping, brainwashing, murder, and a cult that believed in the imminent end of the world, laced with the kind of eerie coincidences or near-coincidences that cause perfectly rational people to question what they think they know about reality.
Tennessee’s government has turned hard red, but a new set of outlaw songwriters is challenging Music City’s conservative ways—and ruling bro-country sound.
On March 20th, at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, a block from the honky-tonks of Lower Broadway, Hayley Williams, the lead singer of the pop-punk band Paramore, strummed a country-music rhythm on her guitar. A drag queen in a ketchup-red wig and gold lamé boots bounded onstage. The two began singing in harmony, rehearsing a twangy, raucous cover of Deana Carter’s playful 1995 feminist anthem “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”—a twist on a Nashville classic, remade for the moment.
The Governor’s strategy for revitalizing her state has two parts: to grow, Michigan needs young people; to draw young people, it needs to have the social policies they want.
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