Links for January 30, 2022

💊 The Rise & Fall of Silk Road — Wired

In the early 2010s, the Silk Road was an illicit marketplace on the dark web offering a wide range of drugs.

After evading the FBI for years, the site's mastermind was unmasked with a simple Google search.

To access Silk Road you needed special cryptographic software. Combining an anonymous interface with traceless payments in the digital currency bitcoin, the site allowed thousands of drug dealers and nearly 1 million eager worldwide customers to find each other—and their drugs of choice—in the familiar realm of ecommerce. For a brief time, from 2011 to 2013, it was a wild success. In that relatively short span, Silk Road managed to rack up (depending on how you count) more than $1 billion in sales.

📖 I Have to Believe This Book Cured My Pain — NY Times

Juno DeMelo discovered that journaling was the solution to her chronic pain. And she's not alone:

Let me rewind a bit. For more than a decade, I had a near-constant throbbing in my left piriformis, a small muscle deep in the butt. I tried treating it with physical therapy, ultrasound and Botox injections. At one point, I even considered surgery to cut the muscle in half in order to decompress the sciatic nerve that runs underneath.

Then, in 2011, I picked up a library copy of the 1991 best seller “Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection.” It claimed that, in order to distract the sufferer from repressed anxiety, anger or feelings of inferiority, the brain creates pain in the neck, shoulders, back and butt by decreasing blood flow to the muscles and nerves.

And more:

🥔 How the Potato Chip Took Over America — Smithsonian Magazine

🐶 Dogs Can Distinguish Speech from Gibberish—and Tell Spanish from Hungarian — Scientific American

🚇 Sinking 1,000 NYC subway cars in the Atlantic to create a reef didn’t go as planned — Fast Company

📺 A Little Circus

Michael Davis is a brilliant comedic juggler: