From WTOL-11: “A Michigan resident died from rabies after receiving a transplanted organ in Lucas County earlier this year, according to the Toledo-Lucas County Health Department. Dr. Carl Schmidt, a deputy coroner, said the recipient, who had undergone a kidney transplant in December, contracted the viral disease through the donated organ. The University of Toledo Medical Center released a statement Wednesday afternoon, saying “A patient receiving care at The University of Toledo Medical Center died in January 2025 of rabies. That patient underwent a deceased donor organ transplant in late 2024 at UTMC. Person-to-person transmission of rabies is extremely rare, though it has been documented in a very small number of cases involving organ transplantation.” A media representative for OPTN told WTOL 11 that this is the third time that rabies has been transmitted through transplanted organs.
He pretended to go to jail as a prank and then got arrested and sent to prison for real
From NY Mag: “Last October, William Banks posted on Instagram that he was looking for a subletter: $1,025 a month for eight months in a prewar building in Crown Heights with three roommates. “I’m leaving New York for a little while because unfortunately I have to go to jail in Connecticut,” Banks told everyone. Banks had been arrested at the end of 2023 in Westport for stealing five Israeli lawn flags. Banks, 28, a comedian by trade, focuses on extended and absurd bits that play out on social media and refuse to wink at the camera. In real life, Banks agreed to a plan in Connecticut that would result in the charge getting wiped from his record if he agreed to 200 hours of community service and two years of probation as well as taking a psychiatric evaluation and a hate-crime class. But for their show on social media, the gang rented a disused jail outside Miami for a five-hour shoot, hiring a friend from Detroit to play Banks’s cellmate.”
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During this medieval festival people men and women would kidnap each other
From JSTOR Daily: “Mark your calendars for the second week after Easter: the first two days mark Hocktide, the medieval English festival of kidnapping and extortion. On Monday, the women of a parish caught local men, tie them up, demanding a ransom for their release. Roles reversed the next day, with the men hunting down the women. Sometimes people stretched ropes across the highways, collecting money from anyone trying to pass. It was all in good fun—and religiously sanctioned, as the money was used to fund the local church. In fact, Hocktide was highly lucrative, sometimes providing up to 20 percent of the church’s yearly revenue. The women generally raised two to three times as much money as the men. People often assume that holidays like this were survivals from some ancient pagan past, but in fact, Hocktide, like many similar celebrations, emerged in the fifteenth century, a new invention.”
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.
China has a secret 3,000-mile-long network of tunnels for storing and moving warheads
From Wikipedia: “The Underground Great Wall of China is the informal name for the 3,000 mile system of tunnels used by China to store and transport the country’s intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Due to the great secrecy surrounding the tunnels, little information about them is publicly available. The tunnels allow for mobile ICBMs to be shuttled around to different silos by truck and rail, and possibly stored in reinforced underground bunkers. A report written by a Georgetown University team led by Phillip Karber conducted a three-year study mapping out China’s complex tunnel system. The report determined that the size of the Chinese nuclear arsenal is understated and as many as 3,000 nuclear warheads may be stored in the tunnel network.”
Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit was made by a company that normally makes bras
From The Smithsonian: “When Neil Armstrong took his “one giant leap” onto the Moon, he was clad in this custom-made spacesuit, model A7L, serial number 056. Its cost was estimated at the time as $100,000. Cocooned within 21 layers of synthetics, neoprene rubber and metalized polyester films, Armstrong was protected from the airless Moon’s extremes of heat and cold (plus 240 Fahrenheit degrees in sunlight to minus 280 in shadow), deadly solar ultraviolet radiation and even the potential hazard of micrometeorites hurtling through the void at 10 miles per second. Each suit was hand-built by seamstresses. For the suit’s creator, the International Latex Corporation in Delaware, the toughest challenge was to contain the pressure necessary to support life (about 3.75 pounds per square inch), while maintaining enough flexibility to afford freedom of motion. A division of the company that manufactured Playtex bras and girdles, ILC had engineers who understood a thing or two about rubber garments.”
What it’s like to take a walk in Antarctica
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