From Esquire: “Heidi Guilford rode shotgun in her boyfriend’s white Dodge Charger. Her stepsister and a couple friends sat in the back, with the windows rolled down for the smokers. It was a cool night in June—sweatshirt weather—an unremarkable Sunday on an island off the coast of Maine. Roger seemed upset, bordering on frantic, going on about Dorian and Briannah Ames, a married couple who lived down on Roberts Cemetery Road, about a half mile out of town. He said the Ameses had been harassing him, that he was sick of it, and that nothing was being done about it.It all happened so fast. Less than twenty minutes after leaving the parking lot, Roger was bleeding to death in the back seat of Isles’s car. The group of friends, stunned, believed they had just witnessed a homicide—one lobsterman killing another with an ax in a bloody brawl. But did they? A man died—was killed, in what the state itself said was a homicide—and yet to this day, no one has been charged with a single crime related to his death.”
Lincoln shared a bed with a man for four years and fell into a deep depression when he died
From People: “Abraham Lincoln was, by most accounts, the greatest president the United States has ever had. He led the country through the Civil War and played a pivotal role in the emancipation of enslaved Black Americans. But through his professional and political triumphs, he is said to have suffered from crippling, lifelong depression. It’s a side of the great American president that history books don’t typically dwell on, and the new documentary Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln takes a look at another aspect of Lincoln’s life that often has gone overlooked: his sexuality. The documentary covers Lincoln’s relationships with several men over the years, most notably Joshua Speed, the co-owner of a general store with whom the future U.S. president shared a bed — for four years. The film features interviews with more than a dozen scholars and historians and offers letters and never-before-seen photos, while laying out the thesis that Lincoln was probably gay or at least bisexual.”
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A little-known 17th-century female scientist changed our understanding of insects
From The Guardian: “As a 52-year-old divorcee, Maria Sibylla Merian embarked on a self-funded voyage to Suriname in 1699, driven by relentless curiosity about the lives of insects. Born in Frankfurt, Merian learned to paint in her artist stepfather’s workshop, and became fascinated by silkworms, moths and butterflies. She married one of her stepfather’s apprentices and had two daughters. Ensconced in a comfortable life in Nuremberg, she bred and sketched caterpillars, publishing celebrated books about the plants and insects around her. At this time, many people still believed that insects spontaneously generated in the dirt. While Merian was not the first to show the transformation from egg, through larva and pupa, to adult insect, her artistic talents helped to bring this message to a wider audience. She and her daughters self-published the Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname, more than half-a-metre tall and illustrated with 60 richly coloured plates. Only a handful of copies remain in circulation.”
How a bad batch of heroin changed the medical understanding of Parkinson’s disease
From IOS Press: “In the summer of 1982, hospital emergency rooms in the San Francisco Bay Area were suddenly confronted with mysteriously “frozen” patients – young men and women who, though conscious, could neither move nor speak. Doctors were baffled, until neurologist William Langston, recognizing the symptoms of advanced Parkinson’s disease, administered L-dopa – the only known treatment – and “unfroze” his patient. Dr. Langston determined that this patient and five others had all used the same tainted batch of synthetic heroin, inadvertently laced with a toxin that had destroyed an area of their brains essential to normal movement. This same area, the substantia nigra, slowly deteriorates in Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Langston struggled to salvage the lives of his frozen patients, and the solution he found lay in fetal-tissue transplants. The astonishing recovery of two of his patients garnered worldwide press coverage, helped overturn federal restrictions on fetal-tissue research, and offered hope to millions suffering from Parkinson’s and other degenerative brain disorders.”
Scientists say pressure from earthquakes helps to create gold nuggets
From Scientific American: “Solid gold bars stacked in bank vaults, layers of plating on this summer’s Olympic medals or even your own pieces of golden jewelry could owe their existence to earthquakes. The stress and strain produced by moving tectonic plates during these temblors may trigger a chemical reaction that causes minuscule particles of gold to coalesce into larger nuggets, a new study proposes. It is estimated that around 75 percent of all mined gold comes from deposits nestled in cracks inside of hunks of quartz. Geochemists have known that dissolved gold existed in fluids in the middle to lower levels of the planet’s crust and that the fluids could seep into quartz cracks. But the amount of fluid involved seemed to limit the gold that could dissolve and thus the size of the gold chunks that formed. Larger nuggets of the mineral were hard to explain.”
Scuba diver gets footage of a rare Giant Oarfish
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters 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, 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 at mathew @ mathewingram dot com