From Psychology Today: “Claire Sylvia was an accomplished dancer when, at the age of 45, she was diagnosed with a rare incurable condition known as primary pulmonary hypertension. The only effective treatment for severe PPH is a heart-lung transplant. Claire’s transplant was unique not just because she was the first person in New England to undergo such an operation, but also because of the changes that occurred following her surgery. She developed a new taste for foods she did not like before receiving her new organs. Once she was allowed to drive, she headed to Kentucky Fried Chicken to satisfy her craving for chicken nuggets, which made no sense to her because she never ate fast food before her transplant. She also noticed that she no longer felt lonely, and felt more independent. She was more confident, assertive.”
The New York real estate queen and the secret she couldn’t keep hidden
From the New York Times: “Alice Mason was throwing one of her black-tie dinner parties. For years, she’d been hosting events that New York City’s social pages fawned over, but she didn’t expect that this one would disrupt a secret she’d kept for much of her life.A Manhattan real estate agent to the elite, Alice typically held six dinner parties a year, almost always with 56 attendees — half women, half men. Her guests, as one socialite put it, were “the A-list of A-lists”: Barbara Walters, Bill Clinton, Gloria Vanderbilt, Alan Greenspan, Norman Mailer, Estée Lauder, Mary Tyler Moore, Jimmy Carter. This party, circa 1990, was for her only child, Dominique Richard, who had just become engaged. A guest’s plus-one would cause a permanent rift between them.”
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The inspiring scientists who saved the world’s first seed bank
From The Guardian: “Kameraz, 36, was a potato specialist, one of about 50 botanists who worked at the Plant Institute, the world’s first seed bank in Leningrad. The institute’s potato collection contained 6,000 varieties, including many rare cultivars – the largest, most diverse potato collection yet gathered in history. Hundreds of delicate South American specimens were planted in sheds in the fields on the outskirts of the city, in the path of the advancing German army. After the enemy planes fired on the trucks carrying potatoes near the Pulkovo Heights, the military drivers had refused to take them. So, Kameraz had decided to stage today’s reckless final rescue attempt alone.”
The unlikely history behind the creation of Grape-Nuts ice cream
From Atlas Obscura: “Making a breakfast cereal was not the original intention of Charles William Post, the founder of the Postum Cereal Company. After a stint at the Kellogg sanitarium in Battle Creek, Post started his own local company to sell health drinks, namely the caffeine-free coffee substitute called Postum. Grape-Nuts were actually intended to become a beverage, as well. But Post decided that Grape-Nuts would instead be marketed as the most super of all superfoods. Advertisements called Grape-Nuts “brain food,” and claimed that they could ease the symptoms of everything from an inflamed appendix to tuberculosis. As early as 1916, the Postum company included a recipe for Grape-Nuts ice cream in one of these publications.”
The tragic story behind the woman known as the Hottentot Venus
From the BBC: “Sarah Baartman died on 29 December 1815, but her exhibition continued. Her brain, skeleton and sexual organs remained on display in a Paris museum until 1974. Brought to Europe seemingly on false pretences by a British doctor, stage-named the “Hottentot Venus”, she was paraded around “freak shows” in London and Paris. It is thought she was born in South Africa’s Eastern Cape in 1789, her mother died when she was two. She entered domestic service in Cape Town after a Dutch colonist murdered her partner, with whom she had had a baby who died. In October 1810, although illiterate, Baartman allegedly signed a contract with English ship surgeon William Dunlop and mixed-race entrepreneur Hendrik Cesars, in whose household she worked, saying she would travel to England to take part in shows.”
A time-lapse video of an orb weaver spider spinning her web
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