Author: Mathew Ingram

Hi there. My name is Mathew Ingram, and until recently I was the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review in New York. I live in Canada. I post things I've written for work here, but also a daily newsletter called When The Going Gets Weird, which you can find here, and one about technology and culture called The Torment Nexus.
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Pizza-parlor owner got shot and invented the bulletproof vest

Wearing a green hat, spectacles and ear protectors, a man loads .44 Magnum bullets into the chamber of a gun. He hands his car keys to another man and twirls the gun cylinder while invoking Matt Dillon, the fictional marshal of Dodge City in Gunsmoke. He proceeds to turn the gun on himself and, after a tense pause relieved only by birdsong, fires into his chest. The bullet had been stopped by body armour. Davis was the inventor of the modern-day bulletproof vest and shot himself point blank 192 times to prove that it worked. The ex-Marine, bankrupt pizzeria owner and born showman also mythologised his work by producing his own low-budget movies popular with police across America. At its zenith Davis’s company, Second Chance, was worth more than $50m with products being worn by police, soldiers and even the president. (via The Guardian)

An amateur cryptographer claims he has solved the Black Dahlia and Zodiac killer cases

When police questioned Marvin Margolis following the murder of Elizabeth Short, also known as the Black Dahlia, he lied about how well he had known her. The 22-year-old Short had been found mutilated in a weedy lot in South Los Angeles, cut in half with what detectives thought was surgical skill. A generation later and hundreds of miles north, a killer who called himself the Zodiac terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area with five seemingly random murders from 1968 to 1969, taunting police and media for years with letters and cryptograms. A letter he sent in April 1970 to the San Francisco Chronicle said “My name is —” followed by a 13-character string of letters and symbols. It came to be called the Z13 cipher, and its brevity has stymied generations of PhDs. Alex Baber, a 50-year-old West Virginia man who dropped out of high school and taught himself codebreaking, now says he has cracked the Zodiac killer’s identity. (via the LA Times)

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.

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Two ships were named after Ed Fitzgerald and they both sank

You probably never knew there were TWO Fitzgeralds, did you? No one did. See, that was the problem. If they had known about the first one, things might have been different. The first Fitzgerald survived thirteen years on the Great Lakes, the second one, seventeen years. One was made of wood, the other of steel. One was powered by wind. The other ran on oil-fired engines. But none of that mattered to the waters of the Great Lakes. Both boats were lost . . . just four days short of 92 years apart. One was lost on November 14, 1883. The other on November 10, 1975. Both went down near shoals. One was lost at Long Point, the other near Whitefish Point. Not a single member of the crew on either boat survived. Any sailor will tell you, you never name a boat after one that was lost. They shouldn’t have called the second one the Edmund Fitzgerald. That was bad luck. You don’t build another Titanic, if you know what I mean. (via Great Lakes People)

The secret of US hydrogen bomb research was leaked on a TV show by a senator

In September 1949, the United States detected radioactive residues which indicated that the Soviet Union had detonated their first atomic bomb. What should the US response be to the loss of its nuclear monopoly? This question raged in the weeks afterwards. This “H-bomb debate,” as it was called, was originally completely within the secret sphere. The fact that it was taking place was not known to the broader public. Eventually, on November 1949, it would leak to the public. The way in which that happened is one of the most bizarre and absurd situations in American nuclear secrecy. On November 1, 1949, at 8:00pm Eastern Time, a television show called “Court of Current Issues” aired on the WABD-TV and Dumont Television Network. The show was essentially a debate program, framed as a courtroom in which various experts would argue as if they were prosecuting the “current issue” as a court case. This episode’s subject was: “Is there too much secrecy in our atomic program?” (via Restricted Data)

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.

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An heir to the Hermès empire was swindled out of $15B

In September 2022 the board of the Isocrates foundation gathered in Florence for its annual meeting. Its founder, Nicolas Puech, was the largest individual shareholder in Hermès. From 2004 he owned nearly 6% of the company, a stake that would now be worth €13bn ($15bn). Puech, who is part of the Hermès family, has no children. The entirety of his vast fortune was destined for the Isocrates foundation, which he had set up in 2011 on the advice of his Swiss banker of 24 years, Eric Freymond. What followed came as a shock to everyone involved. Freymond returned home to find a letter dismissing him from the board. By October Puech had revoked the powers he had granted Freymond to manage his money. He later filed a criminal complaint in Geneva, accusing Freymond of “massive fraud”. Puech had realised that his Hermès shares were nowhere to be found. Worse still, they had been missing for more than a decade. Hermès itself had no idea where they were. (via The Economist)

She grew up on a farm in Virginia and changed the world by inventing GPS

Gladys West knew from a young age that she didn’t want to be a farmer. But the mathematician, born in 1930 in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, still had to help harvest crops on her family’s small farm. The hard work started before daybreak and lasted well into the blistering heat of the afternoon. She hated the dirt but, while she worked, she kept her mind on the building behind the trees at the end of the farm. It was her school, and even then she knew it would be her ticket to freedom. “I was gonna get an education and I was going to get out of there. I wasn’t going to be stuck there all my life,” West, 89, says firmly, via an interview on Zoom in her home in Virginia. What she could not have guessed was that this focus would shatter the perceptions of black women of the time and even lead to the invention of one of our most widely used inventions – GPS, the global positioning system. (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.

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Why blogging is better than social media

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post for The Torment Nexus called “The social web is dying. Is that a good thing? in which I looked at the decline of what we used to call social networking back in the day, or “micro-blogging” even further back (yes, I am dating myself, but just wait until I get going!). Evidence has been growing steadily that social media as we have known it in the past — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, even TikTok — is not growing at anything like the pace it did before, and in some cases is already shrinking. The Financial Times recently reported that a study it commissioned – an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries — found social media use peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline. Adults aged 16 and older spent an average of two hours and 20 minutes per day on social platforms at the end of 2024, down by almost 10 per cent since 2022. The share of people who report using social platforms to stay in touch with their friends, express themselves or meet new people has fallen by more than a quarter since 2014. Instead, it has become television.

Why has this happened? Plenty of people have theories, and some of them may even be right. One of the obvious culprits is the corporatization of social media, in which giant tech corporations fueled solely by the profit motive took over, something that the decline and fall of Twitter more or less sums up, at least for me. When it launched in 2007, it was just a somewhat ridiculous toy designed by a handful of people who had no real idea what they were doing — which was part of the fun! Random people shared random thoughts, and it was a great tool for meeting new people from all walks of life. I not only got a job using it, but made some great friends. As it grew, the folks who ran it remained committed to their core beliefs, and among other things helped fuel popular uprisings known collectively as the Arab Spring (most of which failed, but that’s a separate story). As social media grew and became more valuable, corporate raiders with no principles whatsoever took over, and the end result was what my friend Cory Doctorow has colorfully termed “enshittification.”

There are other problems, however — ones that corporations and/or billionaires are not entirely responsible for. Could it be that the dream of social networking, where millions of people could share their innermost thoughts with millions of other people instantaneously, wasn’t actually something worth striving for, and in fact wasn’t beneficial in any way, either for those individuals or for society? In my previous post, I wrote: “It’s entirely possible that social media in the early 2000s worked in part because there were weren’t a lot of people using it, and the real problems started when everybody showed up. Not just because that brought people with widely diverging and in come cases horrible opinions and the urge to share them, but because those massive numbers of people attracted the Facebooks of the world, who then proceeded to enshittify everything.”

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.

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The former hustler who is Willie Nelson’s drummer and enforcer

For almost fifty years, Paul English has spent his nights literally watching Willie Nelson’s back, as his drummer. The rest of the time he has functioned as Willie’s more figurative back—a job that runs 24/7. From the drummer’s chair, English sees everything, just like the catcher on a baseball team. His oversight goes far beyond maintaining the odd, minimalist beats that guide Willie’s music. For him, the drummer’s chair is the perfect perspective for running the most storied touring organization in country music. More important than being Willie’s drummer is Paul English’s combined role as the road boss of Willie’s traveling company, tour accountant, protector, collector, and enforcer, roles embellished by his proud past as a hoodlum, pimp, and police character. There’s an understanding shared by one and all: Mess with Willie Nelson and the next thing you’ll see is the wrong end of a gun held by the Devil himself. (via the Oxford American)

This Japanese shrine has been rebuilt every 20 years for over 1,300 years

Deep in the forests of the Japanese Alps, Shinto priests keep watch as woodsmen dressed in ceremonial white chop their axes into two ancient cypress trees, timing their swings so that they strike from three directions. An hour later, the head woodcutter shouts, “A tree is falling!” as one of the 300-year-old trees crashes down, the forest echoing with a deep crack. A moment after, the other cypress topples over. The ritualistic harvesting of this sacred timber is part of a remarkable process that has happened every two decades for the last 1,300 years at Ise Jingu, Japan’s most revered Shinto shrine. Each generation, the Ise complex is knocked down and rebuilt from scratch, a massive, $390 million construction job that takes about nine years. It requires the country’s finest carpenters, woodcutters, builders and artisans to pour their hearts into the smallest details of structures that are doomed from the moment the work begins.(via AP)

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.

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Why is a cow buried on the campus of the U of Illinois?

Why is there a cow buried on the campus of the University of Illinois, complete with a memorial plaque? Because she was the greatest milking cow of all time, that’s why, and set new records for production that have yet to be broken. Illini Nellie (1927–1940) was a Brown Swiss, and became legen-dairy (sorry) in the 1930s, setting records for milk and milk-fat production for over 12 years in a row. According to the plaque, she produced so much milk that 23.5 families could have consumed a quart of it every day for 10.5 years. Nellie joined University regent John Milton Gregory — whose final resting place is near a shaded path between the Henry Administration Building and Altgeld Hall — as the only Illini to be buried on campus. Her grave, complete with a biographical marker, is at the University’s Lincoln Avenue Dairy. (via the UIAA)

The hunt continues for a stolen Jackson Pollock painting that could be worth $20 million

Merry White crumpled to the gallery floor. She had been walking around the East Building at the National Gallery of Art in 1984 when she’d suddenly found herself standing in front of a painting by Jackson Pollock. She recognized the work — a 1951 painting in black enamel on canvas, splashy but not abstract — and was suddenly so overwhelmed that she felt her legs about to give way. White knew “Number 7, 1951” intimately because her father, Reginald Isaacs, had acquired the painting directly from Pollock. It used to hang over her bed when she was a child. In 1973, thieves broke into her parents’ apartment in Cambridge and stole “Number 7, 1951,” along with two other paintings by Pollock. One of those works, a combination of paint and collaged ink drawings, is still missing. Eric Gleason of Olney Gleason, which represents Pollock’s estate, said the missing artwork could be valued at up to $20 million. (via the Washington Post)

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.

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Lawyer representing Elon Musk is an actual working clown

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are engaged in a courtroom clash of the titans over the origins of OpenAI, now one of the most important artificial intelligence companies in the world. In San Francisco federal court, they are suing each other in a dizzying series of claims and counterclaims. In Altman’s corner, there’s an arsenal of elite firms — including Morrison & Foerster and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz — with a long track record representing Silicon Valley royalty. Musk has turned to a pair of boutique litigation shops. And at one firm, one of Musk’s lawyers is a clown. Jaymie Parkkinen has been in the trenches of the litigation, signing his name to some of the most contentious discovery disputes. In a July hearing, he singlehandedly faced down three lawyers representing OpenAI and Microsoft in the lawsuit. Outside of his work, he juggles clown performances and operates his own “Clown Cardio” business. (via Business Insider)

Study says living things emit a visible glow that fades in death

An extraordinary experiment on mice and leaves from two different plant species has uncovered direct physical evidence of an eerie ‘biophoton’ phenomenon ceasing on death, suggesting all living things – including humans – could literally glow with health, until we don’t. The findings might seem a little fringe at first glance. It’s hard not to associate scientific investigations into biological electromagnetic emissions with debunked and paranormal claims of auras and discharges surrounding living organisms. Visible wavelengths of light emitted by biological processes ought to be so faint that they’re easily swamped by ambient electromagnetic waves in the environment. Still, University of Calgary physicist Vahid Salari and his team have claimed to observe just that – an ultraweak photon emission produced by several living animals in strong contrast with their non-living bodies, as well as in a handful of plant leaves. (via Science Alert)

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.

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