From New York: “In early 2023, Alex took a job at Cloud 9, a strip-mall smoke shop off Atlanta’s I-85. He had recently graduated from college and wanted something laid-back; the shop, with its graffitied ceilings and cheesy blue-light displays, seemed like the ideal register job for a stoner with a music degree.It didn’t take long for him to realize that many of his customers weren’t there for rolling papers or vapes. They were coming instead for Galaxy Gas, the shop’s toddler-size, candy-flavored, Day-Glo–colored tanks of nitrous oxide. He didn’t know anything about nitrous when he started, but his manager walked him through the basics. Soon, he understood exactly what nitrous oxide was. How could he not? His customers were buying hundreds of dollars worth of tanks at a time, inhaling as much as they could in the parking lot of the store, then coming back for more, often with strange new limps and tremors.”
It’s an Andy Warhol lottery except you never know whether you won
From Now I Know: “In 2021, an group called MSCHF bought Andy Warhol’s sketch “Fairies” for $20,000. That October, they sold it at a huge profit of $250,000 — if you include the 999 fake copies they also sold that month. MSCHF is a Brooklyn, NY-based art collective known for its creative destruction. In April 2020, they purchased a painting of 88 dots by artist Damien Hirst for $30,000, then hand cut each of the dots out of the canvas. MSCHF sold each of the dots for $480, making a small profit, and then sold the spotless canvas (now titled “88 Holes”) for an additional $261,400. The Warhol “Fairies” effort was more of the same. The group purchased an authentic 1954 Warhol pen drawing, then used digital technology and a robotic arm to recreate the artist’s exact strokes, before using heat, light and humidity to artificially age the paper.” Then they destroyed any evidence of which of the 1,000 was the real Warhol.”
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In 1952 a luxury train was stuck in a snowstorm near Donner Pass for three days
From Scientific American: “High inside locomotive 6019, engineer Tom Sapunor notched the throttle forward and squinted at the track ahead—not that he could see much of it. The blizzard that had barreled into the Sierra Nevada mountain range three days earlier had blanketed most everything, its 90-mile-per-hour gusts sweeping the snow into 25-foot drifts. On a normal run, the Southern Pacific Railroad’s City of San Francisco train could whisk passengers from Chicago to San Francisco in 40 hours and 15 minutes. But this wasn’t a normal run, even by the standards of “the Hill,” the perilous trackage between Sparks, Nevada, and Roseville, California, whose high point stood 6,880 feet above sea level. Near Yuba Pass in California, a snowdrift broadsided the train. As the City’s three locomotives struggled to burrow though, a second mass of snow—this one around 12 feet tall—struck the train and literally stopped it in its tracks.”
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.
How the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism helped influence Christianity
From Medium: “January 6 is when the Western church celebrates Epiphany, the day in the Christian calendar that commemorates the visit of the Wise Men to the newly-born Jesus. In the Christmas narrative, Wise Men brought Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. The traditional nativity story usually has three Wise Men, often named Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar. Sadly, though, the Wise Men are not in fact named in the bible, and we do not even know how many there were. For all we know, it could have been a whole academy of Wise Men. Furthermore, they are not even described as Wise Men in modern translations of the bible, although they were almost certainly men and were probably wise, and they weren’t kings. So, if they are not Wise Men or kings, what are they? The bible describes them simply as “Magi from the East” who had come to find the King of the Jews as the result of seeing his star. So, who were the Magi?”
200 years ago the sun mysteriously turned blue and scientists say they finally know why
From Popular Mechanics: ““Desolate weather, it has rained again all night and all morning, it is as cold as in winter, there is already deep snow on the nearest hills.” These were the words of German composer Felix Mendelssohn as he traveled through the Alps in 1831. However, there was only one problem: it was summer. In the spring-summer of 1831, a volcano somewhere on Earth erupted, sending massive plumes of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, causing a global cooling, and forcing our planet to play host to some weird climatic conditions that year. A global cooling of one degree Celsius led to crop failures and famines around the world, but perhaps the strangest events were a variety of reports of a green, purple, and even blue-looking Sun in August. Now, a new study from scientists at the University of St. Andrews in the U.K. says they’ve solved the mystery: Zavaritskii volcano in the Kuril islands northwest of Japan is to blame.”
A spectacular sun halo filmed in Sweden
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