From Wired: “The flood of text messages started arriving early this year. They carried a similar thrust: The United States Postal Service is trying to deliver a parcel but needs more details, including your credit card number. Like thousands of others, security researcher Grant Smith got a USPS package message. A couple of days earlier, he says, his wife called him and said she’d inadvertently entered her credit card details. Smith began a mission: Hunt down the scammers. Over the course of a few weeks, Smith tracked down the Chinese-language group behind the mass-smishing campaign, hacked into their systems, collected evidence of their activities, and started a months-long process of gathering victim data and handing it to USPS investigators and a US bank.”
This athlete’s favorite part of the Olympics was the free health care
From The 19th: Ariana Ramsey, a member of the history-making U.S. women’s rugby team, is going viral on TikTok, not for her skills on the pitch, but her newfound obsession with free health care in the Olympic Village. For nearly a week, Ramsey has been documenting her experience taking advantage of the free health services available to athletes. The Olympic and Paralympic Village accommodates about 22,250 athletes who have access to a medical clinic at all times. According to Sports Illustrated, the Olympic Village has offered health care to athletes since the 1932 Los Angeles Games. She first got a pap smear, then booked dental and optometry appointments. She has since deemed herself a universal health care advocate, saying free health care in America will be her “new fight for action.”
(Editor’s note: If you like this newsletter, please share it with someone else. And if you really like it, perhaps you could subscribe, or contribute something via my Patreon. Thanks for being a reader!)
He wanted a cheap warehouse but wound up buying most of Pine Bluff, Arkansas
From Max Read: “Fenley’s story begins in 2019. After separating from his wife, with whom he has three kids, Fenley had moved in with his father, a sculptor, and uncle in Los Angeles. Two weeks after his arrival, his uncle received an eviction notice, and Fenley and his father began to look for somewhere new. So Fenley hopped on the commercial real-estate listing site Loopnet and searched for properties over 65,000 square feet and sorted by price. At the top of the list was the former home of the steel company Varco Pruden – a 17-acre property in Pine Bluff that had been vacant and decaying for 15 years. The property was listed at $375,000; Fenley initially assumed the price was a typo.”
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
How scientists figured out what makes plants and animals glow in the dark
From Knowable: “Petunias have never done much for me. If you had told me that one day, I’d fork over more than $50 for a single petunia plant, my eyes would have rolled out of my head. But this plant was special. This petunia glowed in the dark. My plant was one of 50,000 shipped around the United States in April by the Idaho-based biotech start-up Light Bio. Called the “Firefly” petunia, it contains genes from bioluminescent mushrooms that make it constantly glow. Bioluminescent fungi have long grabbed people’s attention. In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle noted that fungi could be “fiery and glittering” in the dark. A few centuries later, Pliny the Elder, in his encyclopedic Natural History, mentions the “brilliant light” emitted by a mushroom. But until recently, no one knew exactly what fungi were using as the fuel or catalyst, or even whether all glowing fungi light up in the same way.”
Shrek was such a nightmare to make that DreamWorks used it to punish employees
From Comic Book Resources: “Jeffrey Katzenberg, David Geffen and Spielberg formed DreamWorks Pictures. Katzenberg acquired the rights to the book and the film went into active production in the fall of 1995. In 1996, though, things were looking quite dire for the film. When DreamWorks Animation launched, their first big film was a traditional animation film called The Prince of Egypt. Shrek, on the other hand, was done with computer graphics and computer graphics was a much different field back then. Another problem with Shrek was that Katzenberg wanted the film to be “edgy,” but no one was quite sure what that meant. Things got so bad on the production of Shrek that it began to become a punishment used for DreamWorks for animators who had problems on The Prince of Egypt. It was known as The Gulag.”
Jamestown DNA tests help to solve a 400-year-old mystery
From Phys.org: “Founded in AD 1607, Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in the New World. Excavations at the site discovered human remains in the 1608–1616 church. The skeletons’ ages at death and DNA, in comparison with their burial treatment and historical records from the time, indicate that the men were Sir Ferdinando Wenman and Captain William West. Both of these men were members of the prominent West family that included Jamestown colony’s first governor: Thomas West, Third Baron De La Warr. Importantly, this study unexpectedly revealed that these two men were related through the maternal line. This surprising finding prompted additional documentary research and the discovery of a court case over Captain West’s holdings after he died. His aunt and Will benefactor strongly inferred that William was the son of Thomas’ aunt Elizabeth, her sister.”
He feeds stray cats via drone
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