From Wikipedia: “After Coltrane’s death, a congregation called the Yardbird Temple in San Francisco began worshipping him as God incarnate. The group was named after Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, whom they equated to John the Baptist. The congregation became affiliated with the African Orthodox Church; this involved changing Coltrane’s status from a god to a saint. The resultant St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, San Francisco, is the only African Orthodox church that incorporates Coltrane’s music and his lyrics as prayers in its liturgy. Rev. F. W. King, describing the African Orthodox Church of Saint John Coltrane, said “We are Coltrane-conscious… God dwells in the musical majesty of his sounds.” Coltrane is depicted as one of the 90 saints in the Dancing Saints icon of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco.”
She finally found an affordable place to live but it became a nightmare
From Curbed: “Tabatha Pope’s story begins in late August 2021, when she heard of an apartment available in a three-story house just outside downtown Houston. Pope, then 32, desperately needed a place to live. For the better part of nine months, she’d been staying at the Great Value Inn, a $35-a-night motel on the city’s West Side, with her boyfriend, Will, then 47. It was an acquaintance who told Pope about the available apartment and connected her to a man named Michael Brown, who, over the phone, offered to show her the house. It was on West Clay Street, at the intersection of the Fourth Ward and Montrose neighborhoods, an area that had gradually gentrified over the past 20 years and was considered fairly safe. Merritt brought Pope upstairs to show her the work needed on the second floor. When she started to open the door, however, an intense, rotten stench flooded the hallway. She told Pope not to worry about the smell: A refrigerator had stopped working, spoiling some meat, she explained.”
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What it’s like to receive a face transplant and an eye transplant at the same time
From Scientific American: “In June of 2021 Aaron James, then 44 years old, experienced a terrible accident while working as an electrical lineman. The military veteran and Arkansas resident lost much of the left side of his face—including his left eye—to severely disfiguring electrical burns that also destroyed his left arm. Two years later James received the first-ever partial-face and whole-eye transplant, performed by surgeons at NYU Langone Health in New York City. More than a year after that James had made a strong recovery with no evidence of tissue rejection, as reported by his medical team in a paper published last September in JAMA. He still lacks any vision in the transplanted eye, but the eye itself has maintained its shape and blood flow—and there is evidence of electrical activity in the retina in response to light.”
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.
The Medici family ruled over medieval Florence from their bedroom because of crippling gout
From Exurbe: “Florence’s Medici had a family curse: an agonizing hereditary medical condition causing torturous joint pain and severe mobility restrictions, so it was agony to stand, walk, or even hold a pen. Yes, Renaissance Florence, cradle of the Renaissance, was run by disabled people from a sickbed. The famous Cosimo had to have servants carry him through his own home, and used to shout every time they neared doorway. When asked, “Why do you shout before we go through a doorway?” He answered “Because if I shout after you slam my head into the stone lintel it doesn’t help.” We have a visitor’s account of visiting Palazzo Medici in the days of Cosimo the elder (1440s) and meeting Cosimo and both his sons lying side-by-side three in a bed “each as cranky as the last” using their sickroom as their office as they directed staff.”
Migratory birds help each other navigate — even helping birds from other species
From Nautilus: “Migratory songbirds talk to one another more than we thought as they wing through the night. Each fall, hundreds of millions of birds from dozens of species co-migrate, some of them making dangerous journeys across continents. Come spring, they return home. Scientists have long believed that these songbirds rely on instinct and experience alone to make the trek. But new research suggests they may help one another out—even across species—through their nocturnal calls. “They broadcast vocal pings into the sky, potentially sharing information about who they are and what lies ahead,” says ornithologist Benjamin Van Doren of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The analysis revealed that birds of different species were flying in close proximity and calling to one another in repeated patterns that suggested a kind of code. Flight proximity was closest between migrating songbirds species that made similar calls in pitch and rhythm, traveled at similar speeds, and had similar wing shapes.”
An artist who started out in quantum physics creates an invisible astronaut
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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