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I got a gene-edited drug for sickle-cell disease and it changed my life
From Jimi Olaghere for MIT Tech Review: “I opened the mailbox and took out an envelope as thick as a Bible that would change my life. The package was from Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and it contained a consent form to participate in a clinical trial for a new gene-editing drug to treat sickle-cell disease. Before we knew it, my wife and I were flying to the study site in Nashville to enroll me and begin treatment. At the time, she was pregnant with our first child. I’d lived with sickle-cell my whole life—experiencing chronic pain, organ damage, and hopelessness. To me, this opportunity meant finally taking control of my life and having the opportunity to be a present father.”
She left a yam on the Walmart customer service desk every week for 2 years
From Alice on Twitter: “Today, after almost 2 years of leaving a yam on the Walmart customer service desk nearly every week, I was approached by 2 managers who cornered me as I was headed to checkout. Without any other introduction, they looked me in the eyes and whispered “why yams?” My heart dropped. I said “Um.. it’s sort of like a prank!” and they both laughed. Ah, the jig is up I guess, so much for the yamming – but then they said “Oh no, don’t worry! We don’t mind.” They said “We don’t care, it was just driving us insane and we wanted to know who it was.” They agreed to not tell anyone it’s me and they gave me permission to keep doing it because they also think it’s funny.”
A group of radical artists smuggled political messages into Melrose Place
From Isaac Butler for Slate: ” If you look closely at the Melrose Place episode in which Alison miscarries, you might notice something quite odd: There is a reference to abortion in the episode, but it’s visual instead of spoken. Alison Parker is draped in a quilt that bears the chemical structure of RU-486, the so-called abortion pill. And there are other odd props: A pool float in the shape of a sperm. A golf trophy that appears to have testicles. Furniture designed to look like an endangered spotted owl. All of these objects were designed by an artist collective called the GALA Committee. Outside of a select few insiders, no one—including executive producer Aaron Spelling—knew.”
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Pigeon photographers captured some of the first photos of the Earth from above
From Andrea DenHoed for The New Yorker: “In 1907, while human flight was still being measured in metres and minutes, Dr. Julius Neubronner, a German apothecary, submitted a patent application for a new invention: the pigeon camera. The device was precisely what it sounds like—a small camera fitted with straps and equipped with a timer so that pigeons could carry it and take photos in flight. Neubronner first used the device on his own flock of homing pigeons, which he sometimes employed to deliver prescriptions. Later, he showed his camera at international expositions, where he also sold postcards taken by the birds. The images his pigeons captured are among the very early photos taken of Earth from above.”
A gang member was convicted because he had a tattoo of the murder scene
From ABC News: “Anthony Garcia, 25, was convicted Wednesday of first-degree murder for the 2004 shooting at a liquor store in Pico Rivera, California. Garcia had avoided arrest for four years until he was picked up by police for driving with a suspended license in 2008. Because Garcia appeared to be an active member of the Rivera-13 gang, police snapped pictures of his tattoos, along with his mugshot. Garcia’s tattoo captured the night of a shooting, from the Christmas lights outside the liquor store to the bent light post in the store’s parking lot, to the convalescent home called the Rivera, next door to the liquor store.”
A true believer’s flawed research helped legitimize home schooling
From Laura Meckler for the Washington Post: “Brian Ray has spent the last three decades as one of the nation’s top evangelists for home schooling. As a researcher, he has published studies purporting to show that these students soar high above their peers in what he calls “institutional schools.” But Ray’s research is nowhere near as definitive as his evangelism makes it sound. His samples are not randomly selected. Much of his research has been funded by a powerful home-schooling lobby group. A community of home-school alumni has arisen in recent years to forcefully reject this form of education. Among these critics is someone Ray knows well: his oldest daughter, Hallie Ray Ziebart.
Bear cub with balloon stops traffic
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipty engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me.
How Bing Crosby helped revolutionize the world of modern recording technology
From Ted Gioia: “Crosby had to do two different live broadcasts, and the network refused his proposal that they pre-record the later show on 16-inch transcription disks, since the sound quality was noticeably inferior. In 1947, a stranger from Northern California named Jack Mullin made the trek to Hollywood with a big box that not only solved Bing’s dilemma, but set the wheels in motion for a whole host of later innovations. Mullin set up a live performance behind a curtain, then followed it with a playback from his magnetic tape recorder. The audio quality was so true-to-life that many listeners couldn’t tell the difference. A few days later, a letter arrived, and inside was a check from Crosby for $50,000.”
When Hilary Clinton had to step in to stop a trade war over gefilte fish
From Dan Lewis at Now I Know: “Gefilte fish is an acquired taste. It is basically meatloaf, only cold and made of fish, andcommonly served as an appetizer on Passover. It is typically not a matter for the U.S. Department of State, but it became one in 2015. Catfish farmers in Arkansas had started buying Asian carp to combat algae growth, but the carp escaped and started breeding en masse in US waterways. Coincidentally, carp is one of the fish commonly used to make gefilte fish, so Israel seemed like a natural landing spot for Asian carp. In 2010, a Chicago fishery sent 400,000 pounds of carp there, but Israel decided to levy a significant fee on the imported carp. So Clinton got involved.”
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “How Bing Crosby helped revolutionize the world of modern recording technology”They were buried in a field and no one told their families
From Jon Schuppe for NBC: “The unclaimed dead of Hinds County, Mississippi, are buried along a dirt road on the grounds of a jail work farm, their graves marked with just a metal rod and a number. For centuries, the solemn duty of burying people who died with no money or known family has fallen to local governments. Some coroners and medical examiners conduct exhaustive searches for surviving family members, scouring the internet and government databases for clues. But others do not. In several cases, people were buried in the pauper’s field even though their families were looking for them.”
The strange story of government-funded propaganda comic books
From Jon Keegan: “In 1954, the United States Senate held hearings to deal with a raging menace that it feared was fueling a nationwide crisis of juvenile delinquency – the comic book. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover said comic books “may influence the susceptible boy or girl who already possesses definite antisocial tendencies.” But elsewhere in the U.S. government, taxpayer dollars had been funding the creation of a wide variety of government published comic books. Government comics have taught Americans how to prevent forest fires, survive a nuclear blast, learn about the dangers of illegal drugs, and how soldiers should handle homosexuality in the military.”
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “They were buried in a field and no one told their families”Most of what we know about country music is wrong
From Elamin Abdelmahmoud for Rolling Stone: “Ralph Peer was the beginning of the business of country music. He went to the South with the sole purpose of finding competition for Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, a black woman. In the South, he was convinced to record Fiddlin’ John Carson, in what became recognized as the first commercial country-music recording, ‘The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane.’ Peer took credit for inventing something he called ‘hillbilly music,’ which is what country was known as until after the Second World War. It didn’t matter that what he found in the South were white and black musicians recording the same songs and playing the same music with the same instruments.”
Japanese custom requires every school child to have an identical $450 backpack
From One From Nippon: “Every year, around March, a curious social custom occurs in Japanese families. Parents of kids entering elementary school visit the grandparents and gingerly tread the topic of buying the kids a very expensive item: a randoseru. The Japanese school bag costs a whopping $450 on average. During the Meiji Reforms of the late 1800s, Japan aimed to modernize, and one tiny part of these reforms was the introduction of the rucksack for soldiers to carry their baggage, a word that eventually became “randoseru” in Japanese. And schools instituted rules: No commuting by car, rickshaw, or horse and every student had to carry their own books and notebooks in a randoseru.”
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “Most of what we know about country music is wrong”We are all surrounded by “placebo buttons”
From Jacobo Prisco for CNN: “In New York City, only about 100 of the 1,000 crosswalk buttons actually function, confirmed a spokesperson from the city’s Department of Transportation in an email. That number has steadily decreased in recent years: When the New York Times revealed that the majority of New York’s buttons didn’t work in 2004, about 750 were still operational. The world is full of buttons that don’t actually do anything. They’re sometimes called “placebo buttons” – buttons that are mechanically sound and can be pushed, but provide no functionality. Like placebo pills, however, these buttons may still serve a purpose, according to Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist.”
I stopped speaking at 19 and suddenly found my artistic voice
From Henn Kim for The Guardian: “As a teenager living near Busan, South Korea, I felt that the everyday noises around me were like a battlefield. When I was 17, I started wearing headphones to escape. I was 19 when I decided to stop speaking. Despite my silence, friends at school valued me as a listener. We communicated through nods and gestures. Growing up, I felt trapped because I couldn’t express my emotions. Now, without words, I felt inspired. I started to communicate via text messages. Unlike spoken words, these can be edited. I moved to Seoul and began working part-time at a club when I was 22. There I met like-minded people who loved art. Finally, I began to speak a little.”
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
How a mentally disabled man recorded his life through property title deeds
From Word magazine: “Sometime in the mid-60s, George and Pansy began investing their limited resources in real estate; buying and selling valueless plots of land in the Seattle area. These investments never made much money, but they ultimately allowed George to create a strange, disjointed autobiography within the legal records of Washington State. Whenever a parcel of land is bought or sold, the title deed is recorded on 16mm microfilm in the county courthouse. George discovered that, due to a quirk of the law, anyone who pays the nominal per-page fee can record anything they want as a “title deed.” So he began using this recording system for purposes that were never even envisioned.”
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When a Chicago newspaper bought a bar to expose corruption
From the Sun-Times: “The Chicago Sun-Times began publishing an elaborate 25-part series in January 1978, following undercover work by a team of reporters who purchased a run-down dive bar — the Mirage tavern — to expose corrupt city inspectors who glossed over obvious code violations in exchange for bribes. Forty years later, the reporters who worked on the undercover series shared their memories at an event moderated by editor-in-chief of the Sun-Times Chris Fusco. “Even in an era where newspapers did a lot of undercover journalism, heavy-lifting, reporters being able to take months to do work on one story, this one stood out because of its creativity,” Fusco said.
This Japanese shop has been in business for over a thousand years
From Ben Dooley for the NYT: “Naomi Hasegawa’s family sells toasted mochi out of a small, cedar-timbered shop next to a rambling old shrine in Kyoto. The family started the business to provide refreshments to weary travelers coming from across Japan to pray for pandemic relief — in the year 1000. Japan is an old-business superpower. The country is home to more than 33,000 with at least 100 years of history — over 40 percent of the world’s total, according to a study. Over 3,100 have been running for at least two centuries. Around 140 have existed for more than 500 years. And at least 19 claim, like the Hasagewa family, to have been continuously operating since the first millennium.”
When people are going blind, their brain sometimes creates hallucinations
From Julia Rothman for The New Yorker: “When I first saw them, they were in the lobby of my building,” said Ron Markowitz, who suffers from Charles Bonnet syndrome. “These people were moving generally in my direction, but not reaching me. There didn’t appear to be any conversation between anybody. There was no noise or sound. They were on the ground, but there was no walking. They were just gliding. They were in brown tones and dressed in costime from the late nineteenth century. There were no hands or arms. I could see they had faces, but I couldn’t see their features. I was told that what I have is called Charles Bonnet syndrome – my brain is trying to compensate for what my eyes aren’t seeing. It’s trying to help me fill in the blanks.”
In every state but one, the game is called “Duck, Duck, Goose”
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipty engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me.
She got nothing for inventing Ozempic and she’s fine with that
The German magazine Der Spiegel spoke with Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, the Danish chemist whose research laid the foundation for the creation of semaglutide, the diabetes and weight loss medication sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy, which has generated billions of dollars in revenue for Novo Nordisk (so much revenue that the company is now worth more than the entire Danish economy). Knudsen has no share in either the stock of Novo Nordisk or the intellectual property behind the drugs, and has never even asked for a raise in her 34 years working at the pharmaceutical giant. “I don’t care that much about money, I’m a socialist!” she says (via The Browser)
She’s the last of a forgotten and persecuted people
From Sean Thomas for The Independent: “Sitting in her little house near Tarbes, in the French Pyrenees, Marie-Pierre Manet-Beauzac is talking about her ancestry. The story of her bloodline is marked with a unique sadness: because she belongs to an extraordinary tribe of hidden pariahs, repressed in France for a thousand years. Marie-Pierre is a Cagot. If the word “Cagot” means nothing to you, that is not surprising. The history of the Cagot people is obscure; some assert it has been deliberately erased. Marie certainly believes that: “To talk about the Cagots is still a bad thing in the mountains. The French are ashamed of what they did to us, the Cagots are ashamed of what they were.”
Research shows there’s nothing wrong with marrying your first cousin
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From Richard Conniff for Discover: “Charles Darwin, the grandchild of first cousins, married a first cousin. So did Albert Einstein. In our lore, cousin marriages are unnatural, the province of hillbillies and swamp rats. In the United States they are deemed such a threat to mental health that 31 states have outlawed first-cousin marriages. This phobia is distinctly American, a heritage of early evolutionists with misguided notions about the upward march of human societies. Their fear was that cousin marriages would cause us to breed our way back to frontier savagery. But a team of scientists led by Robin L. Bennett, president of the National Society of Genetic Counselors, found cousin marriages are not significantly riskier than any other marriage.”
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “She’s the last of a forgotten and persecuted people”His muscles are failing and doctors don’t know why
From Tom Scocca for New York magazine: “I’ve told the story over and over, to various doctors, till it almost sounds like a coherent narrative. The story, I told them, happened in two parts. In the spring and summer, part one, I chased the swelling and numbness and other symptoms — stiff fingers, shortness of breath, tightness in the chest — in slow motion from doctor to doctor. One symptom would fade and a new one would assert itself. A wheeze or cough would interrupt my talking. On the mile-long walk back from school with my younger son, the route we’d been taking for two years, I lagged behind, guiltily asking him to slow down. I started buying five-pound bags of rice from H Mart instead of ten-pound ones. Then I just started getting rice delivered.”
Volunteers are trying to save the crumbling remnants of the Mason-Dixon Line
From Ashley Stimpson for Popular Mechanics: “Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon spent four grueling years clambering up mountains, cursing under their breath, wondering if what they had set out to do was even possible. No one in North America had ever traced a line of latitude as it curled around the earth, but the border feud between Pennsylvania and Maryland had gone on so long and gotten so bloody, there was nothing left to do but try. So they followed the stars, marking each hard-earned mile with a 500-pound limestone monument quarried and carved in England. Incredibly, they were successful. The 233-mile line they drew was often accurate to within 100 feet. It was, one historian said, the 18th-century equivalent of putting a man on the moon.”
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “His muscles are failing and doctors don’t know why”Viral hit Baby Shark is based on a German camp song
From Twenty Thousand Hertz: “Pinkfong’s version of Baby Shark is especially sticky, but I think that there’s something elementally enticing and irreducibly catchy about Baby Shark no matter what its arrangement. And I think this because the Pinkfong version, it’s not the first time that Baby Shark has gone viral. In 2006, Alexandra Mueller was working at a camp for kids teaching journalism. There was a song they sang at the camp called the Kleiner Hai [Music clip]. Kleiner Hai means little shark in German. As you can hear, the song has a different tune than Baby Shark, but it’s recognizably related. The verses mean more or less the same thing and it comes with all of the same hand motions.”
An engineer got a ticket and his response changed the way traffic lights work
From Thomas Claburn for The Register: “A Swedish engineer’s umbrage at a traffic ticket has led to a six-year legal fight and now a global change in the speed with which traffic light signals are timed. After Mats Järlström lost an initial legal challenge in 2014, a federal judge ruled that Oregon’s rules prohibiting people from representing themselves as engineers without a license from the state are unconstitutional. Järlström’s calculations and advocacy have led the Institute of Transportation Engineers to revisit its guidelines for the timing of traffic signals. As a result, yellow lights around the globe could last longer, since the ITE is an international advisory group of 90 countries.”
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “Viral hit Baby Shark is based on a German camp song”