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.
From a Rolling Stone article in 1984, about the strange events surrounding the death of Jerry Lee Lewis’s fifth wife: “The killer was in his bedroom, behind the door of iron bars, as Sonny Daniels, the first ambulance man, moved down the long hall to the guest bedroom to check the report: “Unconscious party at the Jerry Lee Lewis residence.” Sonny probed with his big, blunt fingers at a slender wrist: it was cold. Then he moved the covers back, his thick hand on the woman’s neck where the carotid pulse should be: The neck retained its body warmth, but no pulse. The Killer was there within seconds. If he’d been sleeping on the big canopied bed, he must have been sleeping in his bathrobe.”
Everyone hates daylight saving time – so why do we still have it?
Pushing back the clock in winter is meant to give schoolchildren more morning sunlight on the way to school and to ensure more daylight during working hours for construction workers and other outdoor laborers. Whether the benefits in safety and energy savings outweigh the costs of shifted sleep cycles, drowsy commuters and confusion from misaligned clocks is a long-running source of disagreement. But 59 percent of people across the U.S., according to a poll from March, support ditching the clock change in favor of permanent daylight saving time.
No one expected survivors, but then hoofprints appeared in the sand
The shifting, amphibious nature of Cedar Island was never more apparent than on the morning of September 6, 2019. Under the whirling violence of Hurricane Dorian, maps lost all meaning. The Pamlico and Core Sounds joined to become a single, angry body of water, shrinking Cedar Island to a fraction of its acreage. It was no longer separated from the mainland by the thin blue line of the Thorofare, but by nearly six miles of ocean. Most of the 250 or so people on the island were safe, but the wild horses were in much deeper trouble – and so were the cattle. Few cows in America live longer than six years; a Cedar Island cow stands a good chance of living into its teens, and might even see its 30th birthday.
The Met’s deal to repatriate ancient Greek art is not what it seems
Repatriation, they said: A small county will receive the artifacts that left its soil, but not before they are taken out of the plutocrat’s living room and exhibited at the major museum down the road from his townhouse, and in an especially dedicated gallery bearing his name. But this is not the whole story. The antiquities from Leonard Stern’s collection theoretically become the property of the Greek state, but ownership is transferred to a nonprofit corporation, based in Delaware and created especially for the purposes of this deal. The directors of the corporation are the president of a private museum and members of the owner’s family, as well as Stern’s son and the president of his foundation.
What humans can learn from the language of the honeybee
The waggle dance of the western honeybee (Apis mellifera), in which bees waggle their abdomen from side to side while repeatedly walking in an intricate figure-of-eight pattern, has been observed since antiquity, but the person who finally unlocked the secret of its meaning was an iconoclastic Austrian researcher named Karl von Frisch. The breakthrough initially earned Frisch a great deal of scorn from other mid-20th-century scientists, but also eventually won him the Nobel Prize. His breakthrough started with a hunch in 1912: that the bees’ waggle dance was a form of language. In pursuing this hypothesis, he was contesting two core assumptions of Western science and philosophy.
When Charles Barkley tried to eat his way out of the 76ers
For a 48-hour period in 1984, Charles Barkley engaged in an eating binge in hopes of dissuading the Philadelphia 76ers from selecting him in the draft. He began with two Denny’s Grand Slam breakfasts – six pancakes and bacon totaling around 1,660 calories, and a vanilla milkshake to wash it down. The lunch offerings, which have varied in the decades’ worth of repeat tellings, included either Kentucky Fried Chicken, mashed potatoes, and coleslaw; half of the menu at Red Lobster; two McDonald’s fish fillets, a large fries, and a Diet Coke; or two Texas-sized barbecue sandwiches. The dinner menu at a steakhouse included a T-bone, baked potato, and, of course, three desserts.
