A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
Winners of International Landscape Photographer of the Year, 2024
The judges selected the top 101 images out of the 3,643 entries. These images and all of the winning images will be included in the International Landscape Photographer of the Year Awards Book.
DC’s Metro Made a Comeback. Meet the Man Behind It
Across the country, Covid hit public transit hard, as regular weekday commuters and their fare dollars stayed home—some never to return. Yet despite suffering one of the nation’s most precipitous ridership nosedives at the onset of the pandemic, WMATA has led comparable transit systems in recovering, far outpacing BART in San Francisco, the L in Chicago, and the MBTA in Boston, according to the American Public Transportation Association. At various points in the past year, Metrorail ridership has reached 85 percent of its pre-2020 averages, while bus ridership has even exceeded those.
Growing Beyond the Computer
As a gardener, my job is to help things grow — but right now I’m actually focused on growing myself. Personal growth is something we do throughout our lives, and it feels intense for me right now because I just went through a huge lifestyle shift. The process has made me feel extra vulnerable. Things are a little shaky, so there is lots for me to do to feel stable again.
The Streaming Wars Didn’t Kill the Little Guys. In Fact, They’re Thriving
Executives from the Hallmark Channel made a curious decision this fall: They started a new streaming service.
It seemed like an awfully late date to do so. Most media companies entered the streaming fray years ago, and few have had success going head-to-head against titans like Netflix, Amazon and Disney.
But Hallmark executives decided the timing was not an issue. Their app, Hallmark+, did not need to appeal to the whole country, they said, just their core audience — the people who regularly flock en masse to the network’s trademark holiday and feel-good programming.
Why Luxury Cheese Is Being Targeted by Black Market Criminals
The theft made global headlines, and was nicknamed “the grate cheese robbery”. British chef Jamie Oliver warned his followers on X: “If anyone hears anything about posh cheese going for cheap, it’s probably some wrong’uns.”
In late October, a 63-year-old man was arrested in London, then released on bail. And there has been no news since. The 950 truckles of cheese – roughly the weight of four full-sized elephants – have disappeared without a trace.
Who Can Claim Aristotle?
I’m an Aristotle scholar but also an enthusiast for his ideas. I’ve studied his work in the original Greek, and even made a pilgrimage to his birthplace and the various places he lived. He was the most brilliant philosopher ever to have lived. I believe that his Nicomachean Ethics offers us a guide for how to live good lives and flourish. Oddly, though, for a writer whose thinking was so clear and, in many ways, modern, people with radically different stances have tried to claim him for their own.
US Army Soldier Arrested in AT&T and Verizon Extortions
Roen said that prior to her son’s arrest he’d acknowledged being associated with Connor Riley Moucka, a.k.a. “Judische,” a prolific cybercriminal from Canada who was arrested in late October for stealing data from and extorting dozens of companies that stored data at the cloud service Snowflake.
In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Judische said he had no interest in selling the data he’d stolen from Snowflake customers and telecom providers, and that he preferred to outsource that to Kiberphant0m and others. Meanwhile, Kiberphant0m claimed in posts on Telegram that he was responsible for hacking into at least 15 telecommunications firms, including AT&T and Verizon.