| | |  Francis Scialabba | IN THIS ISSUE | The new art heist | Why everyone is tracking private planes | A MacArthur genius fills out the Questionnaire |
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“So please have some patience about that.”—China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson asking for more time to follow through on threats issued after Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan “We appreciate the love our fans have for our all-day breakfast menu.”—Cracker Barrel to the Washington Post, in response to the hundreds of angry comments left on a Facebook announcement that it’s adding Impossible Sausage to the menu “It seems absurd to instruct you again that you must tell the truth while you testify. Yet here I am.”—Judge Maya Guerra Gamble to Infowars’s Alex Jones, during his trial for defaming the parents of a Sandy Hook victim | |
 —Ashwin Rodrigues | |  Annabelle Chih/Getty ImagesOn Tuesday, a Boeing C-40C flying from Kuala Lumpur to Taipei became the most-tracked flight of all time. The plane was carrying Nancy Pelosi, who visited Taiwan this week, and the flight had significant implications for America’s relationship with China. But Pelosi’s plane wasn’t the only one being tracked this week: Taylor Swift also came under intense scrutiny for the frequency at which she uses her private plane. There’s been a surge of interest in tracking the private air travel of celebrities and other famous faces. Jack Sweeney, a student at the University of Central Florida, takes some credit for the recent interest. Private plane tracking is a hobby for Sweeney; he started in 2018. While flights like Pelosi’s are searchable on websites including FlightAware and Flightradar24, private flights are often blocked from these sites. Using data from the ADS-B exchange—which does not block any flight data—and some code, Sweeney created Twitter bots and a website that automatically share the flight patterns of various celebrities’ private planes as well as corporate jets. Sweeney popped up on the global radar in 2020, after his account @ElonJet went viral for tracking Musk’s flights. The Tesla CEO and maybe owner of Twitter offered Sweeney $5,000 to stop doing that. Sweeney countered with $50,000, and Musk declined. For others who want to get their plane off his trackers, the offer stands. Prices may vary. “It’s probably $50,000 still. I guess. I don’t know. Maybe more,” Sweeney said. (It may help to own an NBA team: Sweeney disabled the Twitter bot for Mark Cuban’s private jet for free after the Dallas Mavericks owner asked him directly.) According to Sweeney, people track flights for many reasons. Some people might be wondering about an overhead plane’s route, checking on a family’s member’s travel status, monitoring Russia’s ongoing assault on Ukraine, or just wondering where Kylie Jenner is headed. If there’s one thing he’s learned from tracking private jets across the world, Sweeney said, it’s that a ton of people have them. “I think more than people realize,” he told Morning Brew. “I kind of brought that into light.” —Ashwin Rodrigues | |
Move over, TV courtroom dramas—the happenings of real courtrooms are truly more compelling (and stranger) than fiction. @rebmasel, a 27-year-old attorney, uses TikTok to showcase the strangest and most shockingly straight-forward things people say while on the stand with her series “Iconic Court Transcripts.” A sample: “Attorney: When did you and [your husband] get divorced, or how did that marriage end? Witness: He died. A: Sorry to hear that. W: I’m not.” The draw isn’t just the transcripts themselves—her deadpan delivery is spot-on. She’s already made 28 parts to the series, and thanks to the brilliance of the US court system, there’s no shortage of content. These videos make the courts look so lively, they might even have you wishing for jury duty. —Amanda Hoover | | |
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| |  Grant ThomasThe Goblin Asses were gone, likely stolen by a bot. The NFTs were part of a larger project called GoblinAssTown, a series of images that featured crudely drawn wrinkly goblin butts with ears in various poses, created by Fedor Linnik and Vitaly Terletsky and two of their friends. The project, which is an ironic take on the wildly popular NFT series Goblin Town, was still a work in progress, scheduled to launch just days after all of the goblins were taken. Think of it as an art heist for the 21st century. It wasn’t exactly like the “Mona Lisa” being stolen from the Louvre—nothing was ripped off walls and carried out under the cover of night. No secretive international deals were made and art didn’t trade hands. Instead, a scraping bot probably found the collection and created a fake website offering multiple Goblin Ass NFTs for free. The scammer also put up a Goblin Ass collection on OpenSea—the largest NFT marketplace—before the real, authentic Goblin Asses were listed for sale. Linnik and Terletsky put the real sale on hold and went into damage control. The theft was short-lived and the OG project ultimately recovered: its creators listed roughly 8,900 Goblin Asses on several NFT marketplaces including OpenSea. The theft was only unusual for the unusual number of goblins involved—stolen art is a common occurrence in the NFT world. Artists who spoke to Morning Brew said the prevalence of theft in the NFT space shows how its most-touted feature—IP protection—turned out to be its biggest drawback. Aspiring art thieves no longer need deep knowledge of a museum’s layout, security system, and patrol shifts. They just need to know some code. That’s because of the nature of Web3, a decentralized and democratized space. In some ways, Web3 has delivered. Small numbers of artists have made fortunes selling NFTs. But for artists like Eric Proctor, NFT marketplaces are the same as Web2 destinations like Etsy, Amazon, or Redbubble: just another place that he needs to check for stolen artwork. Though the NFT craze is no longer making daily headlines, tens of millions of dollars of NFTs are still traded every day. In the background is the constant whir of theft, even as your normie friend has stopped asking what’s up with those expensive monkey pictures. NFTs have taken a dive since Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton did their Bored Ape show-and-tell on television in January. In July, OpenSea laid off 20% of its workforce, citing “crypto winter and broad macroeconomic instability.” Beeple’s $69 million NFT sale last year couldn’t be replicated now, as daily NFT sales hover around $30 million, compared to sales approaching a quarter-billion dollars last August. The early promise of NFTs was alluring, especially for artists: They were a way to make money while securing the digital rights to one’s work. Bor, who described themselves as a Bay Area artist, once considered getting into NFTs after they were introduced to the concept in December 2020. They recalled a friend promising that NFTs would be “a revolutionary new artform,” describing a medium on the blockchain that would prevent plagiarism. The potential of NFTs at the outset was a promise of protection, but bor’s initial idealism faded and quickly turned into deep distrust. Now they spend their spare time running the Twitter account @NFTtheft, a resource for artists to identify stolen work and to find resources for reporting IP infringement. Part of the problem is that there’s no surefire centralized way to verify if an NFT has been created with stolen art, because, why would there be? “Minting art doesn’t protect artists,” bor said. “Anyone can mint anyone else’s work.” Instead, artists and collectors look to @NFTtheft to see a timeline of contraband, from stolen pixelated cityscapes to Squid Game rip-offs. On July 20, the account reported a $460,000 project based completely on stolen artwork. To bor, the Goblin Ass heist was just another example of how much plagiarism occurs on NFT platforms, and they’ve seen a lot. Continue reading this story on the future of art heists by Ashwin Rodrigues. | |  Chris CharlesTressie McMillan Cottom is a sociologist, professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, columnist for the New York Times, and a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Her 2017 book, Lower Ed, has been cited by influential American policymakers like Bernie Sanders. More recently, Cottom published Thick: And Other Essays in 2019. What’s the best advice you ever received?
The best advice I ever received about life is from my mother. She told me that once you have won whatever you want from a person, you should let them save face. Be gracious. I may be exacting in life, but I try to always be gracious about it. The best business advice is from an Oprah Winfrey episode I watched as a kid. She said always sign all of your own checks. I have no idea why I remembered that but as it turns out, I grew up to need that advice. What’s the most embarrassing song you’ll admit to liking publicly?
I own my tastes. I like it all, from country and roots music to boom bap hip-hop and the City Girls. If anything I like sucks, then fight me. I am too grown to worry about being cool. However, anyone who says “Free Bird” does not go hard in the paint is a liar who hates their mother. What fictional person do you wish were real?
Captain Picard. That does not need an explanation, unless you are a fascist. What real person do you wish were fictional?
Donald Trump should only exist as a cartoon. Then I could ignore him like I do Dilbert. How would you explain TikTok to your great-grandparents?
I knew my great-grandparents. My great-grandmother, in particular, was a real hoot. The creativity on TikTok would have entertained her. She would have abhorred Facebook and Twitter. She believed that having a private life was a virtue. What always makes you laugh?
When I have had a bad day, I choose my poison and queue up a Christopher Guest marathon. It always gets the job done. Mockumentaries may be a low form of entertainment but they work for me. Guest, Eugene Levy, and Catherine O’Hara are geniuses of the genre. I don’t care for Schitt’s Creek. That is strange because the show is designed in a lab to make me laugh. I don’t like its class politics. Or at least that’s what I say to get Schitt’s fans to leave me alone. If you were given a billboard in Times Square, what would you put on it?
I don’t know the right combination of words to make people care about the mess we have made of the modern world. But presumably I have the words if I have the billboard. I’d beam those words up on the screen until people got their shit together. In lieu of that, I would introduce the world to a Black queer filmmaker, activist, and bon vivant named Amber J. Phillips. It’s her time and frankly I want credit for making the introduction. —Interview by Ashwin Rodrigues | | |
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Crypto’s 911: Rich Sanders is the closest thing to 911 that the cryptoworld has, a private investigator who specializes in blockchain forensics. He’s also a dedicated Swiftie. With $14 billion stolen through crypto fraud in 2021, more people are turning to Sanders and his company, CipherBlade, to recover their investments. [Morning Brew] Pink ain’t getting any cheaper: Gender-specific pricing, or an upcharge placed on products and services traditionally intended for women, is very real. But despite real efforts to ban the “pink tax,” it seems to be increasing right along with inflation. [Money Scoop] Choco Taco may be dead, but the Dunkaroo lives: Because everyone loves an excuse to eat frosting straight, General Mills brought back Dunkaroos in 2020 after almost eight years. The company received an amazing four tweets an hour about the product while it was off the shelves and used this online clamor to resurrect a once beloved childhood staple. [Marketing Brew] Processing professional failures: After the 2016 election, comedian Jordan Klepper and Governor John Kasich suffered starkly different professional wins and losses. Kasich lost the presidential primary to then-candidate Donald Trump, and Klepper’s show was canceled by Comedy Central. In this episode, they talk about processing professional failure and how it led them to their new podcast, Kasich & Klepper. [Imposters] For the views: What happens when you turn all your employees into influencers? Aside from daily TikToks and sponsored meetings, hilarity ensues. [Morning Brew] The best thing we read this week: Six months after they were doxxed, the Bored Ape Yacht Club creators finally open up—and address the “f*cking evil” campaign” against them. [Input Magazine] Invest like a billionaire: VALT is the first investing app that unlocks exclusive alternative asset portfolios for everyday investors. Diversify into growing pre-IPO companies, rare sports cards, fine wines, private credit opportunities, and more. Get started today.* *This is sponsored advertising content. | |
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Megyn Kelly -> Pete Hegseth responds to 2017 rape accusation. 🔥 vol. 3, issue 13 | December 6, 2024 Quick Hits All the news you need in...
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