
The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives - gringoDan
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/28/the-secrets-of-lyndon-johnsons-archives
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matt4077
Who would have thought a story about reading thousands of pages of archived
documents could be so riveting?

For anyone interesting in how this task has changed, there are similar meta-
stories about, as but one example, the process of analyzing the Panama Papers.
The investigative collaboration sharing access to them digitized millions of
pages, and ran (among other things) named entity recognition and clustering /
graph discovery algorithms on them to find the signal in that particular heap
of noise.

If you’re looking for a project exploring / learning some new technology, I
can only encourage you to try to find an angle that explores some public data
or document set. That could yield something far more interesting than yet
another RSS or HN client.

~~~
adamson
Sure, but how do you find a project like that to enter at a useful stage? I
feel like with the Panama Papers, any semi-public plea for help sorting
through that data would have thwarted the journalists

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ALittleLight
The CIA discloses sets of documents from time to time as do other government
agencies. The CIA recently (past few years) released a huge collection of PDFs
regarding their investigation into psychic phenomenon. I only read a few
documents at random of these (bizarrely the CIA seemed or seems to have some
success with psychics) but I'd be interested if someone could synthesize them
into something meaningful or explain exactly what the CIA was doing, to what
extent they believe in psychics, and what evidence they really have.

[https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/stargate](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/stargate)

~~~
rurban
In short, the Russians had a project to transmit psychic messages on
submarines. This was of vital military importance if it would have worked. So
the US tried that also, and then they also tried to use LSD (for
interrogation, and other drugs) and subconscious hallucinogenic orders (for
agents). This worked better, but of course was also shut down (MKULTRA).

They still rely on the equally unscientific lie detector tests, which works
even worse than Scientology methods. But very similar.

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matthewmcg
I enjoy Robert Caro’s biographical writing but his writing about his writing
process is a real treat.

This is so fascinating and so readable.

~~~
radicaldreamer
He has a book coming out about it: [https://www.amazon.com/Working-Robert-
Caro/dp/0525656340/ref...](https://www.amazon.com/Working-Robert-
Caro/dp/0525656340/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=)

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howlingfantods
If you enjoyed the article, I'd highly suggest "The Power Broker" by Robert
Caro (the author). It's the best non-fiction book I've ever read and the only
1300 page book that I felt was too short.

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dwd
Reading his description of the enormity of the research, I found myself doing
a search to see what the Library looked like.

My first impression was that the building itself looks like a giant archive
box.

Amazing dedication to his craft.

~~~
emmelaich
> enormity

enormousness or huge scale; enormity indicates evil

Though maybe the battle is lost!

~~~
r-bryan
Although I join you in deploring the sloppy usage of "enormity" to merely mean
big size, I thought the word perfectly captured the _scariness_ of the size of
the research task ahead. Centuries of usage agree: [https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/enormity#usage-1](https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/enormity#usage-1)

~~~
emmelaich
Thanks, good to know!

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iambateman
I spent a couple hours in the LBJ library/museum last year and Caro is
certainly correct - it’s striking to see the boxes stacked for what feels like
miles.

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Uhhrrr
I was wondering about the "truly sordid" story on Tommy the Cork. I think it
is probably this, about his trying to lobby the Supreme Court in favor of the
El Paso Gas Co. monopoly:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/12/03/l...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/12/03/lawyers-
private-visit-stuns-the-supreme-
court/11cb254d-fcb9-440a-870c-f0e0615cb1ee/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.cdfcaac5d422)

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scottlocklin
Johnson's payola power broker lifestyle was mostly run of the mill stuff. His
relationship with Bobby Baker which was open and completely insane -it would
be nice to know more about this.

