From The Guardian: “A man who had gone into cardiac arrest and been declared brain dead woke up as surgeons in his home state of Kentucky were in the middle of harvesting his organs for donation, his family has told media outlets. As reported Thursday by both National Public Radio and the Kentucky news station WKYT, the case of Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II is under investigation by state and federal government officials. Officials within the US’s organ-procurement system insist there are safeguards in place to prevent such episodes. Hoover’s sister, Donna Rhorer, recounted how Hoover was taken to Baptist health hospital because of a drug overdose. Doctors soon told Rhorer and her relatives that Hoover lacked any reflexes or brain activity, and they ultimately decided to remove him from life support.”
The secretive dynasty that controls the Boar’s Head meat company
From the New York Times: “In May 2022, the chief financial officer of Boar’s Head, the processed meat company, was asked a simple question under oath.“Who is the C.E.O. of Boar’s Head?”“I’m not sure,” he replied.“Who do you believe to be the C.E.O. of Boar’s Head?” the lawyer persisted.The executive, Steve Kourelakos, who had worked at the company for more than two decades and was being deposed in a lawsuit between owners, repeated his answer: “I’m not sure.”It is odd, to say the least, when a top executive of a company claims not to know who his boss is. And Boar’s Head is no fly-by-night enterprise. The company is one of the country’s most recognizable deli-meat brands; it generates what employees and others estimate as roughly $3 billion in annual revenue and employs thousands of people.”
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Kurt Vonnegut’s long-lost board game is finally available for sale
From Open Culture: “Kurt Vonnegut’s life was not without its ironies. Fighting in World War II, that descendant of a long line of German immigrants in the United States found himself imprisoned in Dresden just when it was devastated by Allied firebombing. To understand the relevance of this experience to his literary work, one need only know that his captors made him live in a slaughterhouse. It’s not surprising that anti-war sentiments would surface again and again in the books he wrote after coming home. But one would hardly expect him to have spent his time away from the writing desk on a military-themed board game. Vonnegut never did manage to sell the game, which has only just come available for purchase at Barnes & Noble.”
Rice farmers get paid to flood their fields for migrating birds to rest in
From High Country News: “Every July, the western sandpiper, a dun-colored, long-beaked bird, leaves the shores of Alaska and migrates south. It may fly as far as the coast of Peru, where it spends several months before making the return trip. Western sandpipers travel along the Pacific Flyway, a strip of land that stretches along the Western coast of the Americas. The wetlands of California’s Central Valley offer sandpipers and hundreds of other species a crucial place to rest and feed along the way. In September, at the peak of the migration season, tens of millions of birds stop there. But intensive farming and development have destroyed 95% of the Central Valley’s wetlands, and as the wetlands have disappeared, the number of migrating birds has plummeted.”
Many animals mourn for their dead loved ones just as human beings do
From Popular Science: “Alecia Carter, an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University College London, has spent years studying baboons at the same field site in Namibia. Repeatedly, she and her colleagues there have witnessed instances of mother baboons carrying the corpses of their deceased infants. Initially, she didn’t find the behavior surprising. “It just made sense,” she says–that is, until she observed an orphaned, deceased infant being carried by other members of the group. “I didn’t really understand what would motivate an individual who hadn’t bonded to that infant to carry that infant.” So, she began to take a closer look. In her research, she’s discovered just how common this infant corpse-carrying behavior is among primates.”
Pigeon shows off its aerobatic skills during a landing
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
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