As Perardi approached the terrace, he saw that his friend, Kota Youngblood, sat at one of the tables. Youngblood was tall and imposing, with a paunch and black hair that framed pale skin. He was dressed in black, with military tattoos on his arms, and the white athletic tape that always seemed to cover his fingers. They found Eventine, Youngblood said. He was dead. Youngblood’s oldest son had been found dead on a beach in Baja California, Mexico. The cartel had cut his throat and dismembered him. In a shaky voice, Youngblood claimed that the cartel had only gone after Eventine because he’d been trying to save Perardi and his family. Youngblood had used all of his military and government contacts to stop Perardi from being killed, and now his own son was dead. The only thing that could save them was if Perardi mustered $70,000. (via Rolling Stone)
Why are there giant arrows made of concrete spread across the United States?
From 1918 until about 1926/1927, the Post Office Department operated the nation’s airmail service. This was the early days of air travel, and the department needed a way for pilots to get from point A to point B safely and reliably, especially during nighttime flights or in bad weather. The solution? The department installed a system of 50-foot lighted beacon towers across the country, spaced several miles apart from each other. Eventually, the Post Office Department turned airmail delivery over to private contractors. In 1927, the Department of Commerce took over responsibility for the airways, and they continued to build additional flyways and expand existing ones. And it was around then that they installed the 70-foot-long concrete directional arrows at the beacons. It was an easy enough system: The beacon towers were each assigned a number. The arrows would point to the beacon with the next highest number. (via Saving Places)
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When I saw the post above, my response was “that’s the kind of bookstore I would like to own” — just tons of books and never any customers to bother you. It got me thinking about an old bookstore I used to go to in a small town, the kind of town with only one stop sign. The store was in an old log cabin from probably the turn of the century or so — no straight walls or 90-degree corners to be seen. The shelves were filled with books, but there were also piles of books on the floor, and the sorting method on the shelves might have made sense to someone, but not me — it didn’t appear to be alphabetical or by topic.
When I spoke to the older lady who ran the store, she appeared to be almost completely uninterested in selling any books. She was happy to talk about them until the cows came home — favourite authors, new books and old books, anything related to books. Or the weather for that matter. But she never mentioned how much a book cost, and when you asked to buy one it seemed like she just made up a price on the spot. And she seemed almost sad to let it go (maybe I am making this up but it seemed that way to me).
There was an overstuffed arm chair in the corner that looked very lived-in, with a small table that had a vase of flowers and a teapot and a cup and saucer, and a pile of books. Of course, there were cats who came and went — I have no idea whether she owned them or not, they paid no attention to her. And as I left the last time (she closed it not long afterwards and someone sells weed out of there now) I thought what a perfect life that would be. I honestly can’t even remember whether she had a cash register or not.
The bookstore below feels similar, although they do sell books somewhat more enthusiastically. It’s the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris, right across the Seine from Notre Dame cathedral. It was opened in 1951 by George Whitman, and named after a bookstore of the same name that was founded in 1919 and closed in 1941. In addition to selling books, it houses aspiring writers in exchange for helping out around the bookstore — more than 30,000 people have slept in the beds found tucked between bookshelves. The shop’s motto, “Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers Lest They Be Angels in Disguise”, is written above the entrance to the reading library.
My city’s ‘Casual Fridays’ workplace default is not a coincidence, nor an act of free will by our bosses. It is the result of an extremely successful lobbying campaign. Specifically: A coordinated 1960s–90s effort by the Hawaiian Fashion Guild to convince mainland corporations that allowing employees to dress more casually on Fridays would boost morale, increase productivity, and, critically, increase the purchase of aloha shirts. This effort was branded “Operation Liberation,” which sounds like something from a declassified CIA memo. In the postwar period, Hawaii’s economy was struggling. Industries beyond tourism were in dire need of mainland demand. So the Guild began sending two aloha shirts to every member of the Hawaiian Senate and House, encouraging them to wear them to work on Fridays. The idea was to normalize the shirt locally, then export the concept to the continental U.S. It worked at every level. (via Why Is This Interesting)
When smallpox was eradicated Larry Brilliant sent a doctor a single Land Rover tire
Years ago, at the World Health Organization, I was working on the campaign to eradicate smallpox. One of our most vocal critics was a senior leader at WHO named Dr. Ignatovitch. He called the effort a waste of time and resources, saying: “If smallpox is ever eradicated, I’ll eat a Land Rover tire.” In 1975, a search of Bangladesh found one last case of smallpox in a young girl named Rahima Banu, in a village on Bola Island. I was sent from New Delhi to confirm she was indeed the last case of variola major in nature. In 1980, the world officially declared the disease eradicated—the first (and so far only) time that’s ever happened. And yes—one of the happiest days of my life was when we sent Dr. Ignatovitch a Land Rover tire. It was cleaned, boxed, and shipped with a note that read: “Dear Dr. Ignatovitch, In keeping with your promise, here is your tire. Would you like ketchup or mustard to go with that?” (via the Steve Jobs Archive)
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Among the many mysteries surrounding Jeffrey Epstein is how, exactly, a website famous for pornography and white nationalism got the scoop on his death. At 8:16 a.m. on August 10, 2019, an anonymous 4Chan user posted, “don’t ask me how I know, but Epstein died an hour ago from hanging, cardiac arrest. Screencap this.” It was the first public indication that Epstein, awaiting trial for sex-trafficking charges in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, died while in the custody of the Department of Justice. It beat ABC journalist Aaron Katersky’s post about Epstein’s death on Twitter, now known as X, by 38 minutes. The Epstein files show that the Justice Department tried to identify the 4Chan user behind the posts — but couldn’t figure it out. They subpoenaed 4Chan for the user’s IP addresses four days after the posts were made as part of the FBI’s investigation. From there, the trail went cold. (via Business Insider)
He just wanted to control his own robot vacuum but wound up controlling thousands of them
A software engineer accidentally uncovered a major smart-home security flaw after trying to control his robot vacuum with a PlayStation 5 controller, only to discover he could access thousands of devices around the world. Sammy Azdoufal was experimenting with his new DJI Romo robot vacuum and building a custom app so he could steer it using a PS5 controller. But while testing the setup, he realized the same credentials used to control his own device also opened the door to thousands of others. Instead of just moving his vacuum around the living room, Azdoufal suddenly had visibility into nearly 7,000 robot vacuums across 24 countries. The unexpected access didn’t just allow remote control; The backend flaw meant he could view live camera feeds, listen through microphones, and retrieve detailed home maps and device data from the vacuums. (via Dexerto)
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I came across a maxim many years ago in a blog post written by Chris Dixon, a startup guy who is now a partner with Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley VC outfit. In 2010 Dixon wrote: “The next big thing will start out looking like a toy,” a phrase inspired by Harvard professor Clay Christensen. Dixon’s post made a big impression on me at the time. I had just started writing for GigaOm in San Francisco, covering the intersection of media and technology, and it really fit a lot of what was happening. For example, I (and many others) had initially dismissed Twitter as a toy, a goofy app with no real purpose. My then-boss Om Malik was one of the first to write about it in 2006, and said it seemed annoying and not very useful for much. But somehow this goofy and annoying toy became a central player in things like the Arab Spring (which was quickly followed by the Arab Winter) and turned into a billion-dollar colossus that played a pivotal role in the rise of everyone from Donald Trump to Snoop Dog. Lesson learned!
A more recent example of this phenomenon with a much darker outcome is artificial intelligence, or at least the version we all know now as ChatGPT and other similar products (the GPT stands for “generative pre-trained transformer”). Large-language models. Since it feels like only yesterday that OpenAI released ChatGPT, it’s easy to remember how goofy and useless it seemed at the time. Sure, you could ask it to answer to something you could easily have Googled, and it would respond in an artificially human sort of way. How cute! Then came the image and video versions, where you could make your picture look like The Flintstones, or generate a creepy-looking video of someone with too many fingers, or Will Smith’s face melting while he tried to eat spaghetti. Remember those? So fun. But then slowly it started happening: the toy started to become more useful, and in the process it started to become a lot more frightening (to me anyway).
At the same time AI engines like Claude from Anthropic and Gemini from Google were helping to solve math problems or discovering new pharmaceuticals, these tools – or similar ones – were also being used by the ICE division of Homeland Security to surveil a huge proportion of the population, in what I and others have described as a modern Panopticon. Not that long ago, taking photos from license-plate readers and combining them with facial recognition from visual ID systems, and then combining that with images from Ring doorbells or traffic cameras, and adding data from social media or shopping apps or what have you would have been a Sisyphean task for human beings – technically feasible but hugely time intensive. This provided what some like to call “privacy through obscurity.” But the kinds of searches and indexing and comparisons and matching of databases that I’ve just described is literally child’s play for an AI engine.
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Novartis has settled a lawsuit by the estate of Henrietta Lacks that alleged the pharmaceutical giant unjustly profited off her cells, which were taken from her tumor without her knowledge in 1951 and reproduced in labs to enable major medical advancements, including the polio vaccine. It’s the second settlement in lawsuits filed by the estate that accused biomedical businesses of reaping rewards from a racist medical system that took advantage of Black patients like Lacks. The settlement ends litigation between Novartis and the estate of Lacks, a mother who died of cervical cancer at age 31. Doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital took Lacks’ cervical cells in 1951 without her knowledge, and the tissue taken from her tumor before she died became the first human cells to continuously grow and reproduce in lab dishes. HeLa cells became a cornerstone of modern medicine, enabling countless scientific and medical innovations, including the development of genetic mapping and even COVID-19 vaccines. (via AP News)
Why did British barrister Charles Foster decide to live like an animal?
have become The Man Who Eats Worms,” Charles Foster shrugs, sorrowfully. “It’s not really a very interesting subject. It doesn’t tell you anything about how badgers experience the world.” This combination of self-deprecation and a quest for deeper purpose is what defines Foster, the 53-year-old barrister and Oxford medical tutor who decided to shed his professional human trappings and live like an animal. It also defines the book he has written about his experiences, called Being a Beast . Eating earthworms, licking slugs and scuffling around on all fours, he and his then eight-year-old son (or cub) Tom lived nocturnally for six weeks as badgers in a Welsh wood; his farmer friend dug out a sett for them in the hillside. In the East Lyn river, Foster thrashed around as an otter, catching the occasional unlucky fish in his mouth, and failing to notice a leech attached to his lip for an hour as his face numbed from the cold. (via New Statesman)
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A couple of months ago, a man arrived for his 50th dinner at Nisei, the one-Michelin-starred Japanese fine-dining restaurant in Russian Hill. As he sauntered up Polk Street in his signature white tennis shoes, jeans, blazer, and backpack, the entire Nisei staff was waiting outside to greet him with a round of applause. It was as if royalty had arrived. Except by all accounts, it was just a guy named Michael Grepo. Grepo, 67, is a single, former federal employee who, for the past 38 years, has been living in a rent-controlled in-law apartment in Miraloma Park. It’s the same neighborhood where he grew up in a Filipino family. He pays $1,000 a month, utilities included. He doesn’t own a car. He takes Muni to dinner. When he’s not eating out, he makes himself monastic bowls of tofu and steamed kale. But since his retirement in 2018, he has become a regular at the kind of restaurants that don’t normally have regulars. (via the SF Standard)
The European witch trials were a result of competition between Catholics and Protestants
Between 900 and 1400, Christian authorities were unwilling to so much as admit that witches existed, let alone try someone for the crime of being one. This was not for lack of demand. Belief in witches was common in medieval Europe and in 1258 Pope Alexander IV had to issue a canon to prevent prosecutions for witchcraft. By 1550, Christian authorities had reversed their position entirely. Witches now existed in droves and, to protect citizens against the perilous threat witchcraft posed to their safety and well-being, had to be prosecuted and punished wherever they were found. In the wake of this reversal, a literal witch-hunt ensued across Christendom. The great age of European witch trials would not end for another 150 years. By the time it did, no fewer than 80,000 people had been tried for witchcraft, half of them executed. We argue that this reflected non-price competition between Catholic and Protestant churches for religious market share in confessionally contested parts of Christendom. (via Peter Leeson)
He thought they were homework but they were famous unsolved problems
In 1939, George Dantzig rushed off to his graduate statistics class at UC Berkeley. As he sat down among the other graduate students in class, his eye was caught by a set of math problems written up on the blackboard. Assuming them to be the day’s assigned homework, he copied them down and turned them in to his professor, and apologized for taking so long to do the homework. Early Sunday morning about six weeks later, Dantzig and his wife were awakened by someone banging on their front door. They were surprised to find an out-of-breath Neyman with an excited look on his face, clutching a couple of rumpled papers. He had just written an introduction to one of the papers and wanted to send it out for publication. As it turned out, the problems Dantzig had mistaken for homework were really two famous unsolved statistics problems that were now, at the suggestion of Neyman, taken up as his doctoral dissertation. (From UMD)
Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called The Torment Nexus.
The Tully Monster was an ancient marine animal whose fossils have only been found in Illinois
Tullimonstrum, colloquially known as the Tully monster or sometimes Tully’smonster, is an extinct genus of soft-bodied bilaterian marine animal that lived in shallow tropical coastal waters of muddy estuaries during the Pennsylvanian, about 310 million years ago. Examples of Tullimonstrum have been found only in sediments deposited far from the palaeocoast (formally termed the Essex biota), in the Mazon Creek fossil beds of Illinois. This creature had a mostly cigar-shaped body, with a triangular tail fin, two long stalked eyes, and a proboscis tipped with a mouth-like appendage. Amateur collector Francis Tully found the first of these fossils in 1955 in a fossil bed known as the Mazon Creek formation. He took the strange creature to the Field Museum of Natural History, but paleontologists were stumped as to which phylum Tullimonstrum belonged to. (via Wikipedia)
Scientists say that the giraffe’s long neck evolved for sexual combat
If you’re a fan of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, you’ll recall “How The Elephant Got His Trunk,” “How The Leopard Got His Spots,” and the like. You probably also remember from basic biology the regnant evolutionary account of “How The Giraffe Got His Long Neck.” It lent itself to contrasting Lamarckian selection — in which early giraffes stretched their necks to reach higher leaves, thereby bequeathing their long neckedness to subsequent generations — with Darwinian natural selection, in which evolution favored those individual giraffes whose genetic background endowed them with longer necks, thus selecting for this trait. Although Lamarck remains in disfavor, research recently published in the journal Science strongly suggests that a different and far sexier variant of natural selection — appropriately termed sexual selection — has been operating. Time to revise the textbooks. But not completely. (via Nautilus)
He built a chessboard with a taser built in that shocks you if you make the wrong move
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest and Why Is This Interesting by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com
Svetlana, who was then eighty-one years old, lived in a senior citizens’ center in Spring Green, Wisconsin. When we met, she was dressed in baggy gray sweatpants and sunglasses. She was short and compact, and her once red hair had turned white and had started to thin. Scoliosis had given her a hunch, and she used a cane. She showed me her one-bedroom apartment, and the little desk by a window where her typewriter stood. Her bookshelf included the Russian-English dictionary that her father had used. Svetlana was welcoming, and spoke with the energy of someone who hadn’t told her story in a long time. After a few hours, she wanted to take a walk. We headed down a quiet street, to a garage sale, where a man in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt was selling a small cast-iron bookshelf. He asked Svetlana if she wanted to buy it. She couldn’t, she said. She had only twenty-five dollars until her welfare check came. (via the New Yorker)
She discovered 35 forgotten Rembrandt etchings while cleaning out an old desk
Charlotte Meyer is a Dutch woman who made a life-changing discovery in 2020, when she decided to sort through a drawer of heirlooms that had long gone untouched. Years before, when Meyer’s grandfather died, he left her a folder of prints that had been in the family for roughly a century. When Meyer finally opened the folder, she found 35 etchings created by the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn, whose 17th-century paintings and prints are renowned as some of the greatest visual art to come out of the Western world. Meyer’s grandfather collected the etchings between 1900 and 1920. They were small, with some measuring only a few centimeters in length. At first, Meyer wasn’t sure if the artworks were truly by Rembrandt. She felt sheepish calling experts at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, but when the experts arrived at Meyer’s home and went through the etchings, the full weight of the find sank in. (via the Smithsonian)
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Sean Penn always knew that rescuing Jacob Ostreicher from his years of Bolivian imprisonment would be difficult. Ostreicher, a then-52-year-old Hasidic businessman who had moved to the country from Brooklyn to manage a rice farm, got stuck there for two and a half years after he was accused of money laundering and criminal organization. His detainment in one of Bolivia’s most brutal prisons had attracted international attention — ABC News’ Nightline had run a segment about his incarceration; it was covered by the New York Times, the BBC, the Associated Press, and the Bolivian and Jewish press. It seemed like he would never get back to the States. Until suddenly, in December 2013, he returned. The Bolivian justice minister claimed Ostreicher had slipped away while out of prison on house arrest. Chaya Gitty Weinberger, Ostreicher’s daughter, told the Times that her father had been “dropped off in Pacific waters,” then released — but only after her uncle had negotiated a ransom. A State Department spokesperson would only confirm to news organizations that Ostreicher was in the United States. What really happened remained a mystery. (via NY mag)
This Nobel Prize winner’s invention can generate pure drinking water from the air
A Nobel laureate’s environmentally friendly invention that provides clean water if central supplies are knocked out by a hurricane or drought could be a life saver for vulnerable islands, its founder says. The invention, by the chemist Prof Omar Yaghi, uses a type of science called reticular chemistry to create molecularly engineered materials, which can extract moisture from the air and harvest water even in arid and desert conditions. Atoco, a company that Yaghi founded, said its units, comparable in size to a 20ft shipping container and powered entirely by ultra-low-grade thermal energy, could be placed in local communities to generate up to 1,000 litres of clean water every day, even if centralised electricity and water sources were interrupted by drought or storm damage. Yaghi, who won the 2025 Nobel prize in chemistry, said the invention would change the world and benefit islands in the Caribbean. (via The Guardian)
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Ralph Neves was understandably disoriented when he woke up in the morgue. The slab was cold and the tag around his toe pressing into the skin. His heart, declared stopped an hour before, was racing so hard it was nearly beating out of his chest. The last thing Neves remembered, he was riding a horse at Bay Meadows on May 8, 1936. He looked down and saw one bare foot, one still in his riding boot and blood all over his pants. But he could deal with that later. Bing Crosby had promised the winningest jockey of the season a $500 gold watch. And 19-year-old Ralph wanted that watch, whatever the cost. He hobbled out of the morgue, a retinue of shocked doctors and nurses on his heels. He spotted a train station nearby and made a break for it. Parked there was a taxi driver; Neves hopped in, and told the driver to get him back to the racetrack. (via SFGate)
Mystery surrounds a metal “book” found in a Jordanian cave which could be centuries old
An exhaustive scientific analysis conducted on the — a collection of metal books that were reportedly found in a cave in Jordan and made public in March 2011, generating since then an intense debate between supporters of their ancient origin and those who consider them a forgery — has succeeded in offering the most detailed assessment to date of their origin, without being able to definitively resolve the controversy but opening a crucial door to their possible antiquity. The study, led by the Ion Beam Centre at the University of Surrey and published in a scientific journal, concludes that the tests conducted do not allow the objects to be conclusively dated beyond 200 years, but they also cannot demonstrate that they are a modern fabrication, leaving their provenance in a zone of scientific uncertainty that requires further investigation. (via La Brujula Verde)
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The term “prediction market” sounds so scientific, doesn’t it? Like “derivatives,” the financial instrument they resemble. On platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, people place a bet on the likelihood of certain outcomes, whether political or sporting or anything else (want to bet on whether Jesus will return this year?). But the term “bet” in the previous sentence reveals what prediction markets actually are: Betting. In other words, gambling. Is that bad? After all, the stock market is a form of betting, and millions of people trade stocks. The same goes for other markets — currencies, commodities, etc. Derivatives like “puts” and “calls” let you bet on whether a certain stock will rise or fall without having to actually buy or sell it; instead, what you buy is the option to buy or sell it at some future date. You can also hedge bets by selling a stock “short,” meaning you borrow shares and then sell them, assuming that the price is going to fall.
Sounds like gambling, doesn’t it? However, it is also regulated, and in the past, traders needed to pass a variety of tests to engage in it, and investors had to pass certain requirements before they would be taken on as clients. The investment industry was in many ways a kind of priesthood. Over time, the barriers to trading stocks and pretty much anything else have been steadily lowered — thanks in part to regulation, and in part to the internet. Now, anyone can open an e-trading account and trade stocks with the click of a button on a mobile app. Firms like Robinhood have become huge by offering this ability to anyone, no matter how ignorant they might be about the stock market, and the result has been a kind of viral storm around certain “meme” stocks, with GameStop being the poster child. In 2021 it soared in value based largely on vibes.
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Oliver Karafa and Yun Lu “Lucy” Li were a perfect match. Karafa was the consummate pretty boy: his brown hair always coiffed just so, his tennis shoes pristine. With no post-secondary education and little job experience, he told whomever would listen that he was going to be a millionaire before he was 30. His wife, Li, had the looks and dimensions of a Kardashian: arched brows, high cheekbones, Barbie waistline. Her chosen path to fame was TikTok. She was part of a set of fraternal triplets who posed in lingerie and spoke little. Karafa and Li came from well-off families, and they wanted to expand on what their parents had achieved. Whereas that success had required sacrifice, however, Karafa and Li were looking for shortcuts. When Karafa’s and Li’s ambitions were threatened, they would go to horrific lengths to protect them. (via Toronto Life)
This Malaysian businessman stole $4.5 billion from a state company and then disappeared
Taek Jho Low is a Malaysian businessman and fugitive who has been wanted by Interpol since 2016 for his key role in the 1MDB scandal. Low is alleged to have stolen over US$4.5 billion from the state-owned company. He has maintained his innocence and contends that Malaysian authorities are engaging in a campaign of harassment and political persecution due to his prior support of former prime minister Najib Razak. Low allegedly purchased a US$325,000 white Ferrari as a wedding gift for Kim Kardashian in 2011. The Department of Justice (DoJ) was reported to have sought restitution from other famous celebrities who had received gifts from Low, among them Leonardo DiCaprio, who has since returned the Picasso and Basquiat paintings he was given; and Miranda Kerr who returned diamond jewellery with a value of US$8 million. (via Wikipedia)
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When World War II came to America, baseball was one of the early victims. Many Major League players were in their early 20s and, therefore, subject to the draft. the owner of the Cubs, Philip K. Wrigley (of chewing gum fame) started the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1943. While many know about the AAGPBL due to the 1992 movie A League of Their Own, few realize that women played professional, minor league baseball until 1931. That year, a young woman named Jackie Mitchell ended women’s hopes of breaking into the big leagues. How? By striking out Babe Ruth. And, for good measure, she struck out Lou Gehrig too. Ruth, then 36 years old and on the downside of his career, led the league in home runs with 46 – but it was a tie. The other guy to also hit 46 homers was Gehrig, a 28 year old first baseman, and Ruth’s teammate on the New York Yankees. (via Now I Know)
The name of the Chicxulub meteor crater was chosen because it’s hard to pronounce
The Chicxulub crater is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is offshore, but the crater is named after the onshore community of Chicxulub Pueblo. It was formed slightly over 66 million years ago when an asteroid, about ten kilometers in diameter, struck Earth. The crater is estimated to be 200 kilometers in diameter and is buried to a depth of about 1 kilometer beneath younger sedimentary rocks. It is one of the largest impact structures on Earth. The crater was discovered by Antonio Camargo and Glen Penfield, geophysicists who had been looking for petroleum in the Yucatán Peninsula during the late 1970s. Hildebrand, Penfield, Boynton, Camargo, and others published their paper identifying the crater in 1991. Penfield recalled that part of the motivation for the name Chicxulub was “to give the academics and NASA naysayers a challenging time pronouncing it” after years of dismissing its existence. (via Wikipedia)
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More than halfway through the crime novel he wrote, Robert Fuller describes the frustration of a detective locked in a mystery. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Now what?” he said aloud. It has been a week since someone made their way into Fuller’s assisted living apartment in Potomac, Maryland, police say, and fatally shot the 87-year-old millionaire in the head. Authorities released surveillance video Friday of a suspect walking on the facility’s grounds the morning of Feb. 14 around the time Fuller was killed. The video shows the back of a slender person wearing dark pants with long dark hair flowing over a yellowish checkered shirt. Investigators hope someone will recognize the shirt or the person’s gait, produced as if they’re favoring one foot. Detectives don’t know if the person depicted is a man or woman, was acting alone or what their motive was. (via MSN)
A colonel in the Mexican revolution was born female but lived as man for 70 years
Amelio Robles Ávila was a colonel during the Mexican Revolution. Assigned female at birth, Robles lived openly as a man from age 24 until his death at age 95. From a young age, Robles showed an interest in activities that were considered masculine, learning to tame horses and handling weapons, and becoming an excellent marksman and rider. Robles gained the respect of peers and superiors as a capable military leader, and was eventually given his own command. According to historians, Robles adopted a male identity not as a survival strategy but because of a strong desire to be a man. Robles’s male identity was accepted by family, society, and the Mexican government. According to a former neighbor, if anyone called Robles a woman or Doña (an honorific for women, similar to English Lady), he would threaten them with a pistol. (via Wikipedia)
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