The Feather Thief
Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century
by Kirk Wallace Johnson · first published 2018
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On a cool June evening in 2009, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist grabbed hundreds of bird skins - some collected 150 years earlier - and escaped into the darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? This is the gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice.
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"The Feather Thief" by Kirk Wallace Johnson is the book that piece is about. It's a much more thrilling and fascinating read than you might expect. Absolutely worth a read/listen!
on “Charles Darwin notebooks lost and assumed stolen” ↗…Fredenslund's Danish Rights Alliance forced takedowns at The Eye, Hugging Face, and EleutherAI. A year later, Andrea Bartz (The Lost Night), Charles Graeber (The Good Nurse), and Kirk Wallace Johnson (The Feather Thief) filed Bartz v. Anthropic before Judge William Alsup, accusing Anthropic of using Books3, LibGen, and PiLiMi to train Claude; the case settled for $1.5 billion, about $3,000 per work.
on “Anthropic blocks users for anything touching training larger models” ↗…choice now that the birds that were rare then have become even rarer (or extinct): Tie with something else, or find a source of authentic feathers. The segment was an interview with the author of The Feather Thief[0], who investigated the lengths one "enterprising" tier went to to acquire authentic feathers, destroying the historical scientific record for whole species in the process. It seems insane that a fad…
on “The rise, fall, and rise of the status pineapple” ↗