The inside story of the theft of a gold toilet from Blenheim Palace

From the BBC: “In the early hours of 14 September 2019, Eleanor Paice jolted awake to the sound of smashing glass. Living in a staff flat above Blenheim Palace, the guest services supervisor was used to strange noises. But when fire alarms began to blare, she knew something was wrong. She quickly began evacuating to the great courtyard. But unbeknown to her, she was running straight into the final moments of an audacious heist. Five men had smashed their way into the palace, ripped out a £4.8m solid gold toilet and fled in a stolen Volkswagen Golf. The working loo, entitled America, had been on display for just two days at the 18th Century stately home, plumbed in as part of an exhibition by the Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan. It was a crime that intrigued art lovers, delighted the press and coined countless potty-themed puns. The BBC gained exclusive behind-the-scenes access to staff at Blenheim Palace.”

A Nobel Prize-winning expert in decision making explains his final decision

From the WSJ: “In mid-March 2024, Daniel Kahneman flew from New York to Paris with his partner to unite with his daughter and her family. They spent days walking around the city, going to museums and the ballet, and savoring soufflés and chocolate mousse. Around March 22, Kahneman, who had turned 90 that month, also started emailing a personal message to several dozen of the people he was closest to: This is a goodbye letter I am sending friends to tell them that I am on my way to Switzerland, where my life will end on March 27. Kahneman was one of the world’s most influential thinkers—a psychologist at Princeton University and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. He had spent his long career studying the imperfections and inconsistencies of human decision-making. By most accounts—although not his own—Kahneman was still in reasonably good physical and mental health when he chose to die.”

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In the 1840s the Leviathan of Parsonstown became the largest telescope in the world

From JSTOR Daily: “In 1845, near Birr Castle in Ireland, workers put the finishing touches on a gigantic telescope. Two massive walls rose around a fifty-five-foot wooden tube supported by wires. At the bottom of the tube, a six-foot-wide mirror awaited “first light.” This was the Leviathan of Parsonstown, the largest telescope in the world. Less than two months later, the team behind the Leviathan made a spectacular discovery. They were at the cutting edge of astronomical research into nebulae. French astronomer Charles Messier had catalogued more than one hundred of these fuzzy splotches in the late seventeenth century, and then the Herschel family used large reflecting telescopes to find even more. Questions swirled around the nebulae–were they dense collections of distant stars, or large clouds of gas? William Parsons, third Earl of Rosse, built the Leviathan in part to help resolve these kinds of astronomical questions.”

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.

John Steinbeck had to ask for an extension on Of Mice and Men because his dog ate it

From The Marginalian: “One of the comical tragedies of creative work befell John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968), a great proponent of the satisfactions of writing by hand, as he was in the midst of writing his novella Of Mice and Men in the spring of 1936. The incident involved his beloved dog — an Irish setter named Toby. In a May 27 letter to his editor, Elizabeth Otis, 34-year-old Steinbeck relays what is both the then-equivalent of a tragic computer crash and a comical addition to the dog-ate-my-homework canon of excuses. “Minor tragedy stalked. I don’t know whether I told you. My setter pup, left alone one night, made confetti of about half of my [manuscript] book. Two months work to do over again. It sets me back. There was no other draft.” Of Mice and Men was published in 1937 and became his first major critical success.

A former enslaved person pretended to be a man to serve in the Army in the 1800s

From History.net: “During a tour of duty with Company A of the 38th Infantry, one of the all-black Army regiments established after the Civil War, one private — different from all the rest — marched with the unit more than 500 miles from Fort Harker, Kansas, to Fort Union, New Mexico Territory. The U.S. Army, though tough duty, was an attractive destination for newly freed slaves, who had few postwar employment opportunities. In the Army they could get a paycheck, regular meals, a bed and medical care. Physical exams were cursory; recruits who could march and shoot often were simply declared fit for duty. Private William Cathey successfully made the long march while keeping an extraordinary secret, one that, had it been known, would have resulted in court-martial. His fellow soldiers would have been shocked to learn that beneath the private’s bulky Zouave uniform was the body of Cathay Williams, a female ex-slave.”

What happens when you mix skiing and horseback riding

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