Month: October 2026

From a building nearby, York Factory, once a hub of Canada’s fur trade but now a historic site, a groundskeeper noticed what he thought was a wolf on the river’s edge. A Norwegian musher and adventurer, 29-year-old Steffen Skjottelvik, was due to arrive that day. They were sure he would have stories, especially from the coast, which people rarely traversed on foot. They would feed him burgers and offer him a bed. Steffen was crossing Canada in stages, trying to reach Alaska over a multiyear trek. A number of mushers found his journey through Facebook and were enamored by both the ambition and the charm of it. Steffen was dog-sledding in an old-fashioned way: human and dogs in the wilderness, not racing to a finish line but simply living on the trail. Upon reaching York Factory, he would have traveled nearly two years, crossing over 700 miles by foot, dog sled and canoe. But Steffen didn’t arrive. (via the New York Times)

The founders of Tears For Fears started a band so they could afford Primal Scream Therapy

What band’s saga is as richly absurd as that of Tears For Fears? Many bands’ histories are sadder — INXS, Joy Division, Nirvana, the Go-Betweens, the Band — and many are darker — the Stones, Zeppelin. Some unlucky bands carry with them a history that is both sad and dark — the Sex Pistols (murder-suicide), the Gits (femicide), The Beach Boys (ephebophilia, exploitation of the mentally ill), the Mamas and the Papas (incest). But no band’s story, I maintain, can be enjoyed so fully for its sheer zaniness, without making you hate any of the protagonists, as that of Tears For Fears. A normal band forms because the members love music and/or want to get laid. But by the time they quit Neon and Graduate to strike out on their own, they had another, overriding reason for being in a band: they wanted to make enough money to get Primal Scream therapy, in its pure and undiluted form, from Dr. Arthur Janov. (via Saccades and Fixations)

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.

Continue reading “He went on an epic adventure but only his sled dogs made it back”

February 18, 1745, is the birthday of the great Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, credited with what many consider to be the most important invention in the history of electricity: the voltaic pile, or battery. The ability to convert chemical energy into continuous electricity was a definite game changer, and Volta deserves a lot of credit for his groundbreaking invention — but it was inspired by one of nature’s most shockingly strange and fascinating creations: the electric eel. The electrophorus electricus is the most well-known species of electric eel, which is in fact a type of knife fish and lives in fresh water, most notably in the murky pools and calmer portions running down the Amazon River. They get 80% of their oxygen from above water, rising to the surface to gulp a mouthful of air 4 or 5 times an hour. They average between 6-8 feet in length and can weigh as much as 50 pounds, and can produce over 600 volts of electricity, or about 5 times the voltage coming out of a wall socket. (via Spark Museum)

Scientists have untangled the mystery of Australia’s phantom lighthouse

There are two lighthouses on Lady Elliot Island, at the southernmost tip of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The first was built in 1873, but was decommissioned in 1995 when the second took over the job of warning ships off the reef. Visitors to the island, however, regularly report seeing signs of a third lighthouse. At night the beams of a non-existent phantom lighthouse are seen far off, shining on the horizon. This “phantom lighthouse illusion” is so well known it even gets a mention in the island’s guide for tourists. It’s not unique to Lady Elliot Island, either: the earliest known report of this phenomenon was published in 1937, and it documented the illusion off the coast of Brittany in France. One of us travelled to the island to find out, then we recreated the illusion in a VR environment to make sure we understood what was happening. Like many illusions, this one seems to happen when our brains add our expectations to evidence from our senses and arrive at the wrong result. (via The Conversation)

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.

Continue reading “The inventor of the battery was inspired by this electric fish”

I know my headline probably seems a little over the top, but if you have been reading anything about what technologist Zvi Mowshowitz calls “The Hackening,” you may be prepared to cut me a little slack — especially since I am far from the only one putting it in those kinds of terms. “Read this website while you still can,” was the headline on a piece in The Atlantic that noted government, hospital, and school websites across Europe and in the US had gone dark, as well as the websites of the Finnish national health agency, the Port of Rotterdam, and the Paris police force. AI is “changing everything about hacking [and] no one knows what happens next,” 404 Media wrote. The latter piece quotes Matthew Green, a Johns Hopkins professor and one of the most respected cryptographers in the world, as saying that “we’re in the part of the movie where you need to throw whatever you can in the path of the zombies and hope it slows them down,” and “so many people discovering that the whole Internet is dry tinder and the only thing keeping it from burning is the fact that teenagers haven’t found the matches yet.”

Some employees of AI companies are going full “prepper,” 404 Media notes, recommending that people pull their money out of their bank accounts, disconnect from the internet, buy long-dated or shelf-stable food, hoard water, and purchase hand-crank emergency radios in case the internet and/or the power grid goes down. And that was before the recent PHP exploit, which opened a potential back door to about 85 percent of the websites on the internet (Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said the vulnerability was exploited millions of times within hours of the news). Mowshowitz lists a number of additional security risks that came quickly on the heels of the PHP issue , including a GitLab flaw that affects 12 years worth of releases. Some of the vulnerabilities seemed so ridiculous as to almost be funny: it was revealed that an Indian entity named eMudhra, which provides website security certificates, used a private key — something that would ideally be many characters long — that was simply the number 4.

As 404 Media details, there have also been reports about vulnerabilities in Node.js (a Javascript-based language that is an alternative to PHP), as well as the media-server software Plex (which I use), a cloud provider called Railway and a coding platform known as OpenCode. In a recent piece entitled “The Internet Breaks,” Noah Smith quotes Jeremie Harris, founder of Gladstone AI, as saying that there’s a decent chance that the internet “ceases to exist as such, at least for a time.” In the same piece, he notes that Jason D. Clinton, the deputy head of cybersecurity at Anthropic, warned in August that humans might need to temporarily abandon the internet by ensuring that their computers were “air-gapped,” which is programmer and cybersecurity lingo for turning off your WIFi or removing your Ethernet cable to ensure that hackers and malware can’t get into it.

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

Continue reading “Is the internet as we know it dying or is it already dead?”

A few hours after driving down Washington Boulevard, I received an email from reader Chris Dwyer. “This summer, I was with my family on the median of Washington Boulevard during a street festival,” he wrote. “Sure enough, there was a vault about 10’x15′ and 8-10′ deep with a toilet in the corner. It had clearly been a long time since it was used, but the water piping was clearly visible. A few feet away there is a 4’x8′ rusted metal access hatch that covers a full concrete stairway.” Dwyer sent some photos that show the metal hatch and a concrete rectangle in the grassy median. The rectangle has two banks of glass block (most of them broken out and some patched with cement) that were clearly a vault light, meant to serve as a light source for the bathroom below. It seemed unlikely that it was ever meant as a public comfort station since the hatch door is extremely heavy and it’s a poor way to design an entrance into a public toilet. (via OnMilwaukee)

A 33-year-old woman made history by swimming the length of the California coast

Nearly four months ago, Catherine Breed, a 33-year-old from the San Francisco Bay Area, set out to become the first person to swim the entire coastline of California – from its northern-most tip to the border with Mexico. She and her support team prepared for encounters with sharks and storms. They hadn’t anticipated completing the marathon swim during a year of historic super El Niño weather. But after dodging hurricanes, wildlife and 8ft waves in an unusually volatile Pacific Ocean, Breed finally celebrated the end of her journey on a beach in San Diego on Monday. Breed joins a group of elite ultra-endurance swimmers who continue to set new records for long-distance swims, including swimming the entire coastlines of Ireland and Iceland and one side of New Zealand’s North Island – all journeys of close to 1,000 miles (1,600km). (via The Guardian)

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.

Continue reading “Why are there bunkers with toilets under boulevards in Milwaukee?”

Halfway up a steep street in Margate, in a residential area a short walk from the town centre, is a nondescript building. Walk in, pay a small fee, and head down. You’ll find yourself in a labyrinthine passage, dimly lit. It covers over 2,000 square feet. And around you – all around you, covering every inch of wall and ceiling – are shells. Pressed into strange patterns – swirls and stars, lines and geometrics. Some look like plants, others hearts. More than four and a half million of them. This is Margate’s Shell Grotto. Ever since it was discovered nearly 200 years ago, it has been the centre of mystery and intrigue. Because nobody has been able to say for certain who made it, when, or why. Before the 1830s, there’s no mention of the Shell Grotto anywhere. It simply doesn’t exist in the record. A man named James Newlove bought a cottage in the town, and set about improving his land when his spade suddenly broke through to- nothing. James realised he was standing on a cavern, hidden beneath his garden. (via Building of the Week)

Her roommate made a 30-part TikTok video criticizing her that went viral

In late May, a 30-year-old TikToker named EK went viral for her 30-part series about the drama brewing at her sublet in Bushwick. The videos — which EK often filmed on the apartment fire escape, speaking into tiny microphones — detailed a twisty saga between herself, a full-time artist, and a woman she called her “horrible roommate.” In EK’s telling, the roommate had gone back and forth as to whether or not to re-sign the lease together before she ultimately decided to move out at the last minute. That left EK, who wanted to stay, searching for a way to keep the apartment. EK’s “fuck-ass roommate situation” series quickly went viral, and she set up a GoFundMe with a $5,000 goal for rent. Another person who found the situation stressful? EK’s now ex-roommate Marlyn Rodriguez, a 20-something hospitality worker, aspiring actress, and TikToker herself who unwittingly became the subject of online rage after EK’s saga blew up. She tells The Cut about what happened from her perspective. (via The Cut)

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.

Continue reading “Underground passages in the UK are lined with millions of seashells”

Ukraine’s unprecedented drone rescue of a wounded soldier from the battlefield has shown once again how battlefield necessity can spur innovation. The operation was revealed just days after separate Ukrainian drones designed for casualty evacuation were deployed for frontline testing — taking a step beyond the US military’s decades of experimentation with similar concepts. The drone evacuation of the injured soldier took place at an undisclosed time and place on the frontline where the presence of Russian drones and landmines made it impractical to send in a wheeled ground robot, according to The Kyiv Independent. On October 19, Ukraine’s Army shared a video of the drone evacuation, showing the wounded soldier securing himself in a harness suspended beneath a heavy hexacopter drone with six rotors before being flown to safety. (via Ars Technica)

A Utah court rules that woman involved in car accident can sue herself

You might not consider Utah the most progressive state, but it has become the first to grant its citizens a controversial right that many have long been denied, proving that the law does evolve. Utah has now become the first state to officially allow its citizens to sue themselves. a unanimous panel of the Court of Appeals ruled on February 15 that Utah law allows a decedent’s heir and the personal representative of his estate to sue the driver who allegedly caused the accident that killed him. That wouldn’t be unusual except that in Bagley v. Bagley, those are all the same people. The two plaintiffs in this case — the decedent’s heir and the personal representative of his estate — brought a wrongful-death claim and a survival action against the driver alleged to have caused the accident. Bagley finds herself on both sides of this dispute because not only is she her husband’s heir and the personal representative of his estate, she is also the defendant driver whose negligence allegedly caused the accident. (via Lowering The Bar)

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.

Continue reading “Ukraine used a drone to rescue a wounded soldier from the front”

On Sept. 30, 1996, Marc Roode was at home in Fairbury watching his Dallas Cowboys battle the Philadelphia Eagles on Monday Night Football when he noticed some strange, decidedly non-pigskin-related commotion on the Veterans Stadium sideline.  The Phillie Phanatic — the taxonomically cryptic mascot of the city’s baseball team — was firing into the stands what looked like hot dogs out of some contraption rigged to a four-wheeler. As marketing director for the parent company of Fairbury Brand Meats, Roode immediately saw how such a device could help promote his golden child: the famous bright red hot dog. He got in touch with the improbably named Buckeye Epstein, a sports marketer in Texas who had bought the rights to the launcher after it had debuted at the Phillies’ opening day game that April. Epstein sold Roode a launcher, which arrived in Nebraska the following spring. (via Flat Water Free Press)

He was walking down the street past a telephone booth and it rang. It was for him

In 1992, Jason Pegler was walking home from work in Dover when he walked past a public telephone box. As he did so, the phone started ringing. His curiosity piqued, he decided to answer it. To his absolute astonishment, the call was for him. On the other end of the line was his colleague, Sue Hamilton. She apologised for disturbing him and asked for help with the office fax machine, which she couldn’t get to work. Jason was dumbfounded. ‘Sue, how could you possibly know I was beside this particular phone box?’, he asked. Sue didn’t understand the question. ‘‘Isn’t this your home number?’ she asked. Jason explained that he had heard a public phone ringing as he walked past and decided to pick it up. When Sue checked the number she’d dialled, she finally worked out what had happened. She had mistaken his AA *staff* number for his home telephone number! That staff number was also the number of the public phone box in Dover that Jason was passing just at the moment she called. (via Iain Cameron)

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.

Continue reading “The story behind the birth of the world’s first hot-dog cannon”

In 1983, as the residents of Calcata, a small town 30 miles north of Rome, prepared for their annual procession honoring a holy relic, a shocking announcement from the parish priest put a damper on festivities. “This year, the holy relic will not be exposed to the devotion of the faithful. It has vanished. Sacrilegious thieves have taken it from my home.” Not since the Middle Ages, when lopped-off body parts of divine do-gooders were bought, sold, and traded, has relic theft been big news. But the mysterious disappearance of Calcata’s beloved curio is different. This wasn’t just the residuum of any holy human—nor was it just any body part. It was the foreskin of Jesus Christ, the snipped-off tip of the savior’s penis, the only piece of his body he supposedly left on earth. Some suspect the village priest sold it for a heavenly sum; others say it was stolen by thieves; some even suggest Satanists or neo-Nazis are responsible. But the most likely culprit is an unlikely one: the Vatican. (via Slate)

He has hiked through 20 countries around the world in search of rare cheeses

Trevor Warmedahl was working as a commercial cheesemaker in Seattle when he realised he was using milk that came from animals he never saw. So, he quit his job and set off on what has become a global odyssey to discover places that still make cheese the old-fashioned way. In 2019 he arrived in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and lived alone in a yurt with a dog as his companion. He soon discovered that dairy was sacred there: the women flicked milk into the air before cheesemaking, a gesture of respect called a milk libation. He visited homes where whey bubbled over central hearths and fresh, unripened byaslag cheese covered tables. After hiking to shrines, he noticed people offered dairy products as a symbol of purity. As summer unfolded and city-dwellers migrated to the Mongolian steppe to farm, Warmedahl itched to join. He jumped on a Soviet-era coal-powered sleeper train for a rickety overnight ride across the Gobi Desert. On the journey back to Ulaanbaatar, he met a local who invited him to stay with her herder family on the Zavkhan grassland. (via the BBC)

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.

Continue reading “Did the Vatican steal the foreskin of Jesus as part of a secret plot?”