LINKS - March 13th, 2024
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human . LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Book Review: The Mysteries and Quirks of Human Memory
By Erica Goode, Undark
“But that doesn’t mean something is wrong. ‘The problem isn’t your memory, it’s that we have the wrong expectations for what memory is for in the first place,’ Ranganath writes in his introduction, a theme that he returns to throughout the book. ‘Severe memory loss is undoubtedly debilitating, but our most typical complaints and worries around everyday forgetting are largely driven by deeply rooted misconceptions.’”
Jiaqi Wang’s game channels the eccentricity of New York street style
By Yaya Azariah Clarke, It’s Nice That
“All in all, We Dress A Certain Way isn’t just a lens on a city, but an interactive and playful way to look at a population, as an observer. We say it’s uncommon nowadays: people either have their heads in a book or phone, or maybe feel too awkward to look around themselves. Although Jiaqi met her challenges, she is proud of sustaining this throughout the length of the project, and wants to inspire others to embark on interactive projects. ‘Sometimes it can be hard for us to connect to an audience with our art, but my making it interactive is like a warm invitation welcoming them into your world.’"
Inspired by the Confederacy and Czarist Russia, “Ortho Bros” Are on the Rise
By Meagan Saliashvili, Texas Monthly
“Much of this growth has a distinctive cast. Other than cleaving to a fierce anti-communism, Russian Orthodoxy in America has long been a relatively apolitical force, and most of its congregants have been ethnic Russians—
families who follow the faith that has been handed down to them. Whiteford and many of his peers, by contrast, are converts to Orthodoxy, and though Whiteford says he stays out of purely political discussions, others in his orbit have used their faith and online megaphones to further the cause of far-right politics. Some of them have found common cause with the Confederacy, fascism, monarchism, and white supremacy.”
‘Young Indian Method’ Teaches TikTok Spammers How to Hire and Control 'Third World Country Workers'
“What these hustle bros are doing, of course, is very similar to what gigantic corporations have been doing for decades. It is also the explicit playbook through which many of today’s buzziest and most valuable AI behemoths have created billions of dollars in wealth for their investors using a strategy where they steal content then use poorly paid workers in developing countries to refine, process, tag, and train data and moderate the unexpected and horrific outcomes from their AI products.”
Ancient malaria genome from Roman skeleton hints at disease’s history
By Tosin Thompson, Nature
“Malaria has long been a leading cause of human deaths. ‘With the development of treatments such as quinine in the last hundreds of years, it seems clear [humans and malaria] are co-evolving,’ says Carles Lalueza Fox, a palaeogenomicist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain. ‘Discovering the genomes of the ancient, pre-quinine plasmodia will likely reveal information about how they have adapted to the different anti-malarial drugs.’”