Shorthand

• Each day, its trains deliver 800,000 passengers to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington and points in between.
• My new book, “The Northeast Corridor,” shows how America’s most important rail line has shaped the Northeast’s cultural identity and national reputation for almost 200 years.
• In my view, this bond between transit and territory will only strengthen as new federal investments in passenger service draw more Northeasterners aboard trains.

Forming a great chain

• It was not until 1830 that the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad opened the nation’s first public passenger line.
• The Philadelphia & Trenton cast another in Pennsylvania, and the Philadelphia, Wilmington, & Baltimore hammered out a third through Delaware and Maryland.
• Named for the cities they linked, these carriers helped turn a collection of rival ports into a cohesive economic unit.

Connecting a megalopolis

• Railroading became a way of life for Northeasterners.
• Physicist Albert Einstein liked watching trains click-clack through Princeton Junction during his time at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey in the 1930s and 1940s.
• One of Gottman’s adherents, Rhode Island Sen. Claiborne Pell, imagined the Northeast in 1962 as “one long metropolitan industrial unit.” A frequent rider, Pell believed that trains played an essential role in the region’s interlocking economy.

Amtrak takes over

• He called the tracks between Boston and Washington a “passageway for gargantuan surges of movement along our Northeast seaboard” – or, a “corridor” for short.
• When Amtrak took over U.S. intercity passenger rail travel in 1971, the Northeast corridor hosted its most popular trains – including the stylish, if breakdown-prone Metroliners, which whisked business-class passengers between New York and Washington at velocities topping 100 mph.
• In 2000, Amtrak debuted the Acela Express, a sleek and pricey train that was billed as the first U.S. high-speed passenger rail service.
• High-speed rail projects in California, Nevada and Texas, meanwhile, promise to bring world-class service to the West and South.
• This article has been updated to reflect that the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey is not affiliated with Princeton University.

David Alff does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• WASHINGTON, March 6, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) voted 3-2 to approve much-anticipated climate disclosure rules.
• "The new rule, unfortunately, does little to prevent companies from making vague, untested and, most significantly, unsubstantiated, statements about their carbon footprints," says former SEC Commissioner Allison Herren Lee , now Of Counsel at the whistleblower firm Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto .
• "Under the new rule companies will not have to disclose the bulk (or in some cases any) of their GHG emissions," explained Lee.
• Lee served as SEC Commissioner from July 2019 until her term expired in July 2022.

• This week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the government was seeking to strengthen laws to combat doxing.
• Its ongoing review into Australian privacy law will now be expanded to include doxing, as will other laws covering hate crime and hate speech.
• Doxing (sometimes doxxing) is shorthand for “document drop” and is the act of publishing identifying material about someone publicly, without their consent.

What are other countries doing?

• Dutch conspiracy theorist Huig Plug was arrested earlier this month under the new legislation for allegedly doxing a member of the public prosecutor’s staff.
• California has a special part of its law around so-called “indirect cyber harassment”, which is defined essentially as doxing.
• So, if Australian law follows this pattern, it could be difficult for plaintiffs to prove that being doxed has caused them genuine harm.

Not a new problem

• One of the most famous global events was the Ashley Madison data breach in 2015, which resulted in job losses and suicides.
• I wrote at the time the law wouldn’t help victims that much, partly because it was practically impossible to police.
• While the current discussion into changes in the law around doxing are happening, it’s worth revisiting some of these issues.

How can we police the internet?

• The first thing to note is that it’s really hard to police what happens on the internet.
• There’s a mess of different laws around the world, and no real way to use them if you’re in a different country.
• This means if someone in The Netherlands doxes you in Australia, you can’t sue them under their laws, because you aren’t a citizen there.
• You also can’t do anything under Australia’s laws, because the perpetrator is not a citizen here.

Jennifer Beckett receives funding from the Australian Research Council, through the Discovery grants scheme for work on online hostility in Australia.

• And even if some few have somehow survived, they are moth-eaten and in a state of decay, and remembered about as well as if they had never existed.
• By making the manuscripts into a book, he would preserve the knowledge they contained – but not the manuscript, not the artefact itself.
• He does not mention how difficult his Byzantine manuscripts were to read and transcribe, even for someone familiar with the language.
• Every manuscript is its own text, its own space of knowledge, and an irreplaceable part of our shared cultural histories.

Preserving the Past

• Our knowledge of the past, and the wisdom we can gain from it, is bound in material objects – whether manuscripts, paintings, ruined buildings or clay pots – that are decaying.
• What will we preserve of the past?
• We are lucky if we can now read a text in 50 manuscripts.
• Read more:
  Uncovering the mysteries of The Book of Kells – from myopic monks on magic mushrooms to superhuman detail

• Manuscript tourism became a popular activity for wealthy scholars like Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631), whose collection became the core of the British Museum’s collection.
• Of course, many of these collectors simply stole or smuggled what they wanted from struggling monasteries in what are now Greece, Sinai and Israel.
• But their work made possible the rise of printed editions of classical and medieval works.
• Our modern editions of the Bible and the Iliad, for example, do not exactly match their underlying manuscripts.

Read more:
Dogs in the middle ages: what medieval writing tells us about our ancestors’ pets

Digital decay

• Even if we prefer the edited versions, printed books decay faster than manuscripts, and take up just as much space.
• Print does not solve the problem of preservation; it only postpones it.
• In the 20th century, digital scanning tools and computer-based storage seemed to offer a new kind of solution.

• Second, digital images are often in proprietary formats, meaning that without the library’s viewing software you cannot actually examine the manuscript.
• The digital format is still chained to its digital shelves in a private space.
• Third, as a recent cyber-attack on the British Library demonstrates, the digital space seems not to be safer than the physical one.
• The digital library space, with its proprietary viewing software and its specialised file formats, is now shuttered.

Conservation and accessibility

• Yet physical conservation comes at the expense of accessibility.
• We can, however, use advances in AI and computer technology to improve approaches to digital conservation and enable wider access to the uniqueness of individual manuscripts.
• To avoid digital decay, we need to devote the same attention to digital conservation as to material conservation.

• Images of manuscripts would then have a readable text and all the unique elements of the material original – its decorations and artistry, its errors and doodles.
• In this enhanced digital form, manuscripts could come to local museums, libraries and galleries, where they would be accessible to everyday visitors as well as specialists.
• But unlike him, we can now offer the experience of the manuscript as well as the text, and to a much wider audience.

Jonathan L. Zecher receives funding from the Templeton Religion Trust.