Meyer Lansky organized Jewish mobsters to fight the Nazis

From Daily KOS: “On Feb. 20, 1939, German-born Fritz Julius Kuhn. the leader of the pro-Nazi German American Bund and would-be Führer, was the final speaker at what was billed as a “Pro-American Rally” at Madison Square Garden. At one point, an unemployed Jewish plumber from Brooklyn, Isadore Greenbaum, rushed the stage, shouting “Down with Hitler!” He was tackled and beaten by Kuhn’s brown-shirted security detail and fined $25 for disturbing the peace. When he returned home, Greenbaum unexpectedly received a congratulatory telegram from a local judge, Nathan D. Perlman, and a lavish gift basket signed by Meyer Lansky, the nation’s most prominent Jewish mobster. The odd couple of the Jewish judge and organized crime boss who secretly teamed up to blunt the rise of fascism in the U.S. by organizing Jewish gangsters and boxers to intimidate and fight the German American Bund and another fascist group, the Silver Shirts.”

A mother debates whether to give her deaf child a cochlear implant

From Aeon: “Critics argued that Alexander Graham Bell – the founding father of what is still one of the major LSL programmes in the US – was not so much a benevolent supporter of deaf children, but a eugenicist and ‘oralist’ with grotesque views about deafness on a self-appointed mission to eradicate sign languages. There were traumatised adults distancing themselves from their parents entirely for forcing them, despite great difficulty, to listen, speak and lip-read. The wet-eyed social media phenomenon of babies with hearing aids and CIs being filmed hearing sound for the first time was disparagingly called ‘inspiration porn’ or ‘switch-on porn’ – the vulgar showboating of an arrogant hearing class determined to convert their perfectly deaf children into hearing ones.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

A fictional town that became a real place

From Everything Is Amazing: “Head just a little north, to where an unnamed dirt road meets NY 206. You’re standing in Agloe, Colchester: a place which, simultaneously and without contradiction, does and doesn’t exist. Go back a hundred years and you’ll find an epidemic of map-copying. Drawing up a map is an expensive business, so naturally there were folk who saw no harm in, let’s say, cutting a few corners: take a competitor’s map, change the colours a little, stick your own logo in one corner and hey, who’d know? To ward off this kind of skullduggery, cartographers injected a bit of fantasy into their work. An imaginary street here. A non-existent mountain there. Tiny changes, in places unpopulated enough to escape detection, but acting like a hidden signature, undeniable proof that this map came from that map-maker.”

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. And I appreciate it, believe me!

When Oregon decided to blow up a whale carcass with dynamite

From Oregon Live: “It all started on Nov. 9, 1970, when the 45-foot whale washed ashore a mile south of the Siuslaw River. George Thornton, then an ODOT engineer got the job to come up with a plan to remove the whale. Rendering plants said no thanks. Burying was iffy because the waves would likely have just uncovered the carcass. It was too big to burn. So the plan was hatched: Let’s blow it up, scatter it to the wind and let the crabs and seagulls clean up the mess. So Thornton and his crew packed 20 cases of dynamite around the leeward side of the whale, thinking most of it would blow into the water. At 3:45 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 12, the plunger was pushed. The whale blew up, all right, but the 1/4mile safety zone wasn’t quite large enough. Whale blubber and whale parts fell from the sky, smashing into cars and people. No one was hurt, but pretty much everyone was wearing whale bits and pieces.”

The strange pattern behind all large numbers

From Scientific American: “Open your favorite social media platform and note how many friends or followers you have. Specifically, note the first digit of this number. Let’s say we asked many people to do this. We might expect responses across the board—common intuition suggests that friend counts should be somewhat random, and therefore their leading digits should be, too, with 1 through 9 showing up equally. Strangely, this is not what we would find. Instead we would see a notable imbalance with nearly half of the friend counts beginning with 1 or 2 and a paltry 10 percent beginning with 8 or 9. This bizarre overrepresentation of 1 and 2 extends beyond friends and followers to countless corners of the numerical world: national populations, river lengths, mountain heights, death rates, and stock prices. This phenomenon is known as Benford’s law.”

Footage from inside the restored Notre Dame cathedral

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