A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
The Battle of Fishkill
“Domenic Broccoli, the IHOP kingpin of the Bronx, lives a good life. He drives a nice car, spends time with his six grandkids, and golfs often enough to have a tan for most of the year. He owns a four-bedroom home in Pelham Manor, a house upstate, and IHOPs throughout the borough where he grew up, each of which runs smoothly enough to give Broccoli the time and resources to devote himself, at the age of 66, to the animating force in his life: destroying his enemies.”
Delts Don’t Lie
“In 1925, artist Bryson Burroughs analyzed Michelangelo’s draft drawings for the Sibyl and noted that the artist used a male model in depictions of her mostly unclothed body. On one side of the paper is a male figure with a hyper-muscular backside, the sort that might be expected in a portrayal of Hercules. But there’s empty space where the figure’s hair should be, as “nothing would have been gained by drawing the hair of this model in a study which was to serve for a female figure.” The reverse of the same sheet shows a pair of female legs. The final fresco is a sort of male-female chimera, something that Burroughs calls “beyond sex—beyond mankind.””
Lessons From Operation “Denver,” the KGB’s Massive AIDS Disinformation Campaign
“The KGB and Stasi relied on forged documents and inaccurate testimony from purported experts to suggest that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, had originated not from infected animals in Africa but from biological warfare research carried out by U.S. military scientists at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Operation Denver proved remarkably effective, writes historian Douglas Selvage in an article featured in a recent issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies; indeed, even more effective than the KGB and Stasi had originally expected. Before long, immense numbers of people around the world (including in the United States) came to believe, falsely, that the U.S. government was responsible for AIDS.”
Mending at the Margins
“I’m sitting with Moshda after-hours at the dry cleaners she owns with her sister. In between her stories, she pauses intermittently to let me write notes. She also stops to adjust the small space heater on the shop floor towards me and implores me to drink my tea and eat from the plate of biscuits, dates and sponge cakes she has laid out in my honour. She tells me stories of how as a young girl in Afghanistan, she’d sit and keenly watch her grandmother at home on her sewing machine. It sparked Moshda’s interest in also learning, not to necessarily become a tailor (the term she uses over the pointedly gendered ‘seamstress’) but to acquire the skills in creating something from nothing.”
Synth Wars: The Story of MIDI, the One Interface that Ruled Them All
“Soon other synth makers realised that creating a synth ‘that played itself’ could be more than just a synth nerd’s novelty. Creating a programmable sequencer could literally liberate music, freeing for the first time the act of composition from the ability to play an instrument. Make no mistake: this was going to be big. The problem for all these upstart synth companies was that after all having the same idea at the same time, they all went about creating the utopian ‘synth that plays itself’ vision in different ways.”
This is the Hometown of San Francisco’s Drug Dealers
“This is the Siria Valley, a cluster of villages about 80 miles north of the capital, Tegucigalpa, in the Francisco Morazan department of central Honduras. A typical resident here earns $8 a day doing farmwork and scoops buckets of water for showering, washing dishes and flushing toilets out of a tub known as a pila.
The valley is also the hometown of a high concentration of people who, fleeing poverty and a country with one of the world’s highest murder rates, migrate to San Francisco, where they ultimately sell drugs, according to an 18-month investigation by The Chronicle.”
Welcome to the Ambaniverse
“Imagine if everything in your home came from just one company. Or, to be more precise, from companies that are ultimately led by one individual: a single person whose brands sell you the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the fuel you fill your car with, and even the internet you’re reading this with. That’s the reality for many Indians, who rely on products, food, and services from the vast array of companies controlled by or partnered with Mukesh Ambani. He’s not just among India’s richest men, according to Forbes; with a net worth of $90.7 billion, he’s also been in the top 10 of its Billionaires List for the past three years.”