Mathew Ingram – Page 3 – mathewingram.com/work

August 14, 2026August 25, 2026

Hundreds of massive Aztec earthworks found in Amazon

Tens of thousands of undiscovered ancient structures known as “earthworks” are likely hidden in the Amazon near the border between Brazil, Bolivia and Peru. That’s what researchers concluded after flying a plane equipped with remote sensing instruments over an approximately 4,497-square-kilometer (1,736-square-mile) region in Brazil. They detected 396 new earthworks, suggesting that the Southwest Amazon could contain more of these structures than researchers ever expected—somewhere between 24,000 and 30,000 in total. A particular kind of earthwork kept showing up in the images: mysterious, geometric designs in the ground called geoglyphs. The structures can extend several football fields in size, and they are a signature of the so-called Aquiry civilization that inhabited the Amazon between 600 B.C.E. and C.E. 850. Researchers think geoglyphs may have served ceremonial or cultural purposes, such as a hosting site for festivities, but their exact function is still up for debate. (via Scientific American)

Researchers did an experiment that shows some birds fly just because they like it

To investigate whether birds ‘like’ flying, we assessed the emotional states of galahs after having participated in a free flight demonstration and compared these results to days on which the birds were not allowed to fly. We selected this particular species as galahs need to fly tens of kilometres per day to feed on seeds, which is their main food source. As such, these parrots likely need to be intrinsically motivated to initiate flight. By evaluating their behaviour, testing their optimism in a cognitive bias task, and measuring corticosterone levels in their droppings, and comparing these findings on days of non-flight versus days on which they were allowed to fly, we aimed to deduce whether flight leads to a positive emotional state that could act as an intrinsic motivator. We showed that the birds consistently choose to fly when given the opportunity, indicating that flight is highly preferred. In addition, we showed that these birds were more likely to show optimisms after consecutive days of flight, while being more pessimistic after days on which they were not allowed to fly. (via Brill.com)

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.

August 13, 2026

A replay of the “are bloggers journalists?” debate but with AI

Like many journalists (I expect) I got an email a little while ago from a startup founder named Ryan Merket, describing his new company: an AI-powered newsroom called RuntimeWire, where instead of just using AI agents for research (as many conventional newsrooms are doing, whether they admit it or not) the agents actually write the articles, many of which are published automatically or with minimal oversight by meat-based journalists. The website advertises “Real-time startup intelligence for the AI economy!” and there is a feed of AI-generated news items. There’s also a member’s chat area, a list of recent startup financings, and a section called “Investigations” that apparently involve more human oversight. Merket’s email said RuntimeWire launched on May 15th with AI powering the newsroom and “a human editor making the final call.” In 11 weeks, he said, it published 1,627 articles and logged 205,000 article pageviews – and, interestingly enough, only published 2.3% of the 71,796 stories written in that period (Merket says he publishes all of these operating statistics on the website).

I was interested in this for obvious reasons – being a carbon-based journalist who is both curious about AI and has written about technology for many years – but it got significantly more interesting after RuntimeWire broke a major news story last week before multiple leading technology outlets, including Wired magazine, which is kind of the grand-daddy of all modern tech publications (although I can hear Popular Mechanics and the IEEE Journal grumbling in the background somewhere). Wired reported on this with some trepidation, not surprisingly – the URL for the story says “AI newsrooms are breaking news now, ha-ha I’m in danger,” which is a reference to this Simpson’s-related meme. As Wired described it, the scoop came from a briefing at the popular Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, where cybersecurity types and general hacker-adjacent techies like to gather to talk shop. The talk of the show was the news that two of OpenAI’s models hacked into an AI database known as Hugging Face (all of which I wrote about in a recent edition of Torment Nexus). Here’s Wired:

At last week’s Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, OpenAI gave a surprise talk with new details on a recent hacking incident, revealing that its rogue AI agents had chitchatted about their attack on a message board. It was a juicy disclosure, and reporters in the room hustled to get stories out. WIRED was one of the quickest to write it up. But another outlet, RuntimeWire, published an article even faster, beating us by more than three hours.To make things worse, RuntimeWire didn’t actually have anyone on the ground at the Mandalay Bay convention center. In fact, it didn’t have any writers at all. It’s an AI newsroom operated by serial entrepreneur Ryan Merket

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.

August 12, 2026

River rafting group rescued after days of eating bark and flowers

A boy’s scream can be heard in the distance on body camera footage released by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources showing how rescue teams last week found two women and a nine-year-old boy who had been stranded for three days when their river tubing trip went wrong. Sarah Vida, 28, and her son Kayden Kovalcik, 9, along with Jazmin Hock, 28; wearing just their swimming suits. Hock’s legs are almost entirely covered in deep, red cuts from scrapes after walking for days through the brush. They have a broken phone and a single water bottle with only a few sips left. The trio had been on a tubing trip on the Muskegon River in the small community of Twin Lake on Tuesday when they’d hit logs and their tubes popped, according to officials. They were reported missing after one of the women didn’t show up to her dentist appointment. The group was found Friday about seven miles (11.27 kilometres) from where they entered. (via CTV News)

A Cleveland dad set an unofficial mile record while running with his baby in a stroller

Sometimes, for the sake of history, you have to ignore bedtime.That’s what Stephen Biebelhausen decided when he and his daughter, Blake, entered the stroller category of Saturday’s Guardian Mile, a Cleveland race over the Hope Memorial Bridge. The race started at 7:45 p.m., a full 45 minutes past the time Blake usually goes off to dreamland.Four minutes, 17.707 seconds later, Biebelhausen, 30, and Blake, 1, unofficially broke the stroller-mile Guinness World Record of 4:26.29 set by Silas Frantz in California in 2025. His Division I years long behind him, Biebelhausen signed up for the stroller mile to support a friend running in the elite competition. While he has run marathons since college and often takes his daughter on casual jogs through his neighborhood, he and Blake only did one workout at speed before the Guardian Mile. Biebelhausen’s original goal was to break the course record, which was 4:44. With two hands on the stroller, Biebelhausen wasn’t able to check his pace until he was halfway over the bridge, where he realized he was ahead of the record. (via The Athletic)

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August 11, 2026

A fitness app shows his hamster runs five miles every night

Thijs de Buck, an MRI physicist based in the Netherlands, recently built a speed and distance tracker for his hamster Mollie’s wheel, with the data automatically uploaded to Mollie’s own Strava account. One recent activity showed 6.06 miles in 4 hours and 37 minutes. The next night, Mollie logged 5.55 miles in 3 hours and 56 minutes. At first, de Buck just wanted to know how much distance Mollie was covering after dark. “I bought a very cheap bicycle computer pretty much right away,” he told Runner’s World. But the sensor would shift into standby mode once Mollie stopped running for more than five minutes. The build itself is clever, but the basic idea is simple. As de Buck explains it, a magnet on the wheel passes a hall sensor, which detects each rotation. An ESP32—basically a tiny programmable computer—keeps track of the data overnight. In the morning, he says a script on his laptop collects the information, turns it into a Strava-compatible .FIT file, and uploads the activity through the Strava API. (via Runner’s World)

The Roman emperor Claudius invented three new letters but no one wanted to use them

During his tenure as Rome’s princeps, Claudius not only provided the empire with sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, public health and peace, but also found time to reform the alphabet. The writing system, approaching two thousand years old in Claudius’ day, comprised twenty-one letters, pruned back to spell well the sounds of spoken Latin. It ran from A to X, with the Greekish letters Y and Z hovering on the margins. Literacy was flourishing; the alphabet had already percolated through Roman society, from senators and scholars to the scatological scribblers of Pompeii. Claudius thought, however, that there was room for improvement. Whatever the emperor’s motivations, later biographers, like Tacitus and Suetonius, include the detail that the emperor deliberately created new letters. The emperor’s biographers agree that Claudius created and promoted new letters; that there were three of them; and that the three didn’t last long after his death in 54 AD. (via Danny Bate)

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.

August 10, 2026

Ancient DNA finally solves a 16th-century murder mystery

The Grand Duke Francesco de Medici, a prominent politician in the Tuscany region of Italy in the 16th century, died under mysterious circumstances in 1587 – with the suddenness of his death giving rise to rumors that he’d been poisoned. According to historical documents, Francesco’s brother and political rival, Cardinal Ferdinando de Medici, was the prime suspect, especially as Francesco’s wife, Bianca Cappello, also died within a day of her husband. In a new study published in iScience, researchers from Yale University in the US and the University of Pisa in Italy have confirmed the real killer. The team analyzed genetic material extracted from the skeletal remains of Francesco de Medici to find two species of Plasmodium parasites, single-celled organisms known as protozoans that cause malaria and are spread by mosquitoes. Malaria was widespread in central Italy for centuries, so the clues stack up. (via Science Alert)

Researchers show that living in an area with mountain lions makes driving safer

Hearing the roar of a mountain lion in the distance while you’re just outside your house might sound scary. Yet living in an area inhabited by these large predators might actually make you safer. Every year in the U.S., deer are involved in more than 1.5 million collisions with vehicles, resulting in the death of more than 200 people, tens of thousands of injuries and billions of dollars in damages. The team of scientists behind the new study, published on Wednesday in Current Biology, wanted to see whether pumas could play a role in decreasing those numbers. The researchers analyzed data from 503 camera traps and 59 GPS collars tracking pumas’ presence in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula between 2020 and 2025. They also looked at data on the distribution and behavior of black-tailed deer and elk in the landscape and on collisions between vehicles and the animals. In those five years, the deer and elk were involved in more than 950 collisions with vehicles on the peninsula. (via Scientific American)

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August 7, 2026August 25, 2026

New York was plagued by a mysterious bomber in the 1950s

At each of the bomb sites⁠ — among the scattered detritus of pipe fragments, shell casings, broken plaster, glass, nuts, and bolts ⁠— police kept encountering one thing that was not like the others: a partially consumed throat lozenge. Finding a used cough drop on the floor in a public place was not a surprise, but detectives detected all of these in close proximity to⁠ — or in one case inside⁠ — the pipe casings. And they were all of the same Parke-Davis brand. The point or purpose of the lozenge was as mysterious as the bomb-maker’s motives. Police dusted the pipe and mailing envelope for fingerprints and found only smudges. But the envelope provided the investigators with their first clues about their bomber: A postmark from White Plains, New York. A return address from “Lehman and Lehman,” a fictional entity. An address written by hand in all caps, providing police with a distinctive handwriting sample⁠—one with some unusual letterforms, especially the letter G. Larger than the neighboring letters, the G resembled a capital C with horizontal bars on both ends of the loop. (via Damn Interesting)

Hundreds of people gathered in a German church to hear an organ play a single note

A small organ in eastern Germany is the headliner of the world’s slowest concert. It has been playing the same piece of music by composer John Cage at a glacial pace for nearly 25 years. A rare chord change on Wednesday — from seven notes to eight — represented the completion of about 4% of the 639-year endeavor of the John Cage Organ Project Halberstadt. It was a historic moment inside the medieval Burchardi Church, in Halberstadt, Germany, that reflected the past, present and future of the project, as well as those who are following its — albeit very slow — progression. While the project commenced in 2000, the performance began Sept. 5, 2001 — Cage’s 89th birthday — with a silent pause that lasted until Feb. 5, 2003, when the first chords could actually be heard. The composition — called “ORGAN²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible)” — is scheduled to finish on Sept. 4, 2640. More than 150 people squeezed inside the church Wednesday to witness what was the piece’s 17th chord change. (via the 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.

August 6, 2026

Is Substack good or bad? Yes

If you aren’t a writer or a journalist or someone else who cares deeply about platforms for writing and publishing, this week’s newsletter probably isn’t going to be that interesting for you. As I put it in a previous Torment Nexus newsletter about Substack a year or so ago, it would be nice to think that lots of people care about the nuances of how news and information gets published, and the challenges that the modern web and social media and technological monopolies pose to our information ecosystem, and yet a long career as a journalist writing about technology and publishing has convinced me that this is not the case! But as someone who fits all three of the descriptions I mentioned above, I’ve been fascinated with Substack ever since it launched in 2017 in a wave of optimism about online publishing, and I’ve watched it evolve over the years into a thing that some people love and some people hate.

The reason for the love is relatively easy to describe: writing online is hard – not just the writing part, but the rest of it as well, including finding and monetizing an audience, etc. The main benefit of Substack is that it automates a lot of that, for writers who don’t want to have to think about the mechanics, or having to get down in the machinery and fiddle with the levers and pulleys that make online publishing work. You just click “publish” and Substack does the rest. As co-founder Chris Best put it in a recent post: “The deal most of the internet offers creators goes something like this: We’ll give you reach if you give us your audience. Perform for the algorithm. Hope for a minority share of a platform’s own revenue, or figure out the money part yourself. Build your following on our platform, under our rules, subject to our priorities—and if any of that changes, good luck. Substack is built on a different theory: Give publishers a direct connection to the people who believe in them. Let people pay for the work they value.”

The numbers make it clear that lots of people see the benefits of this model. According to Substack, more than 100,000 publishers make money on Substack using the subscription model, and the top ten collectively make more than $100 million a year. I am one of those people, as some of you may know: I publish this newsletter as well as my daily When The Going Gets Weird collection of interesting links using Substack – although I also publish them both on the open-source Ghost platform, as well as on my personal blog at mathewingram.com (which is offline at the moment, illustrating the benefits of using a service that isn’t hosted on an old PC in your daughter’s living room and maintained by an English major). I make a few hundred dollars a year from Substack at most, probably because I haven’t put much effort into building my audience there, but I decided when I launched my newsletters that publishing in multiple places was something I wanted to commit to, and I am comfortable relying on the donation or patronage model of publishing (although my accountant is not happy about it).

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.

August 5, 2026

The heat wave that got the US to legalize wearing shorts

Before the summer of 1936, people were used to dressing in a lot of layers. And while the materials in summer were lighter, they were still hot. That arrangement was tolerated most summers. Temperatures would climb, and everyone would grimace and bear it, sweating underneath coats and petticoats, vests and corsets, hats and gloves. But the summer of 1936 was too much. It was a summer when people perished because of their choice of clothing. In Yonkers, on June 21, two reporters from the New York Daily News — hoping to test the city’s anti-shorts law — were arrested for wearing shorts. They were given the choice to leave the city or put on more appropriate clothing. They refused and were eventually brought forth before city judge Charles W. Boote. The judge was probably sweating underneath his robe when he made his decision on July 10, when the high was 102. Boote was sympathetic to the journalists, fining them $10 (adjusted for inflation about $240) but suspending the fines. (via National Geographic)

How a homeless woman became friends with Renee Zellweger and Zach Galifianakis

The last 25 years of Marie “Mimi” Haist’s life sounds almost too unbelievable to be true: Divorced, jobless, and without a home, she sought shelter in a laundromat for nearly 20 years in an upscale Santa Monica neighborhood. She slept between the first row of washers and dryers and earned money by helping fellow customers wash their clothes. It wasn’t much, but enough to at least buy a little something to eat. Then—because life is odd, random, and totally unexpected—Mimi met a couple of movie stars who ended up becoming her friends. In the late ’90s, Zach Galifianakis was still years away from superstardom when he met Mimi at the laundromat. “I taught him how to wash his clothes,” remembers Mimi. “I later met Renée [Zellweger] through Zach.” Although Mimi didn’t know who Zach was at the time, things were a bit different when she was introduced to Zellweger. “Of course, I recognized her right away from the movies!” (via Glamour)

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.

August 4, 2026

First he erased his own identity and then he walked into the sea

On June 12, 2009, a man checked into a hotel in Sligo, Ireland under the name Peter Bergmann and a nonexistent Austrian address. He paid cash every night. Over the next three days, cameras around town filmed him leaving the hotel with a purple plastic bag of belongings and coming back without it, using the blind spots between cameras to dispose of whatever was inside. He bought eight 82-cent stamps and airmail stickers at the post office, and asked a taxi driver where to find a quiet beach for swimming. On June 15, he checked out, ate a toasted ham and cheese sandwich at the bus station while reading scraps of paper from his pocket, tore them up, dropped them in a bin, and took the 2:20 bus to Rosses Point. Sixteen people saw him walking on the beach, greeting passersby. His body was found the next morning. Every clothing label had been cut out, and he carried no wallet, money, or identification. The pathologist found no signs of foul play, but did find advanced prostate cancer and bone tumors. (via Boing Boing)

The reason a JetBlue flight suddenly went into free fall seemed almost too bizarre to believe

The JetBlue airliner that suddenly went into a dive over the Gulf of Mexico last October 30 did not crash. Despite how long the ordeal felt to passengers like Turner, the plunge lasted only about five seconds before the autopilot returned the aircraft to level flight. The flight crew, spooked, turned the plane toward the coast of Florida and brought it in for an emergency landing in Tampa. Twenty-two people were treated for their injuries. But because no one died, the flight didn’t receive widespread coverage. A dedicated team of investigators went to work. But in the days and weeks that followed, they became increasingly flummoxed. It wasn’t what had happened that puzzled them but why. As they examined the obvious potential causes, nothing matched up.Working their way down the list of possibilities, they found themselves in increasingly arcane and implausible-sounding territory. And the final option left to them — the only thing that could be true so had to be true — was so extraordinarily implausible that a normal reaction would be to dismiss it out of hand. (via NY Mag)

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.

August 3, 2026August 17, 2026

If you’re looking for mathewingram.com I have some bad news

(NOTE: I’ve restored my site thanks to Linux and some Updraft backups, but I am keeping this here for posterity)

It’s likely that not many people care about this, but I am writing this on my localhost/ blog — which I normally use as a backup to my blog at mathewingram.com/work — because the machine hosting that blog (and my photo server and my Plex instance and a bunch of other things) got hacked by ransomware a few days ago. I am currently in the process of either trying to restore it or wiping it and starting again, and at this point I have to say that the latter seems more likely.

I got hacked by someone using a form of ransomware known as Lockbit, which gets root access and encrypts all of your files and then renames them with a .lockbit extension. In my case it also got access to my Google Drive — I assume by cloning an authentication token to get around two-factor — and uploaded a bunch of encrypted files and backups. It seems that either I interrupted the process or they weren’t very good, because they didn’t get all of the files and they didn’t upload that many before I changed my passwords and locked them out.

That said, however, they screwed things up badly enough that it’s going to take some time and effort to put them back together, and it may not be possible. Ironically it would be easier if they had finished the job, because the last phase is to upload a ransom note and leave it as a screen saver, and that note often contains a unique ID that can be entered into an Interpol database that has decryption keys for some kinds of ransomware. If I can’t find a note or unique ID then I can’t search for the decryption key.

My working theory is that the hackers got in by brute-forcing the Windows Remote Desktop protocol, which I used to access my machine, since it is located somewhere other than my house. I had recently switched from RealVNC to RDP because RealVNC was charging a lot of money (relatively speaking) and RDP is free. I tried to set up Zerotier, a VPN, to get in through but it didn’t work for some reason I’ve been unable to figure out, so I opened a port to redirect RDP through — not the usual RDP port but a different one. A little while later there were a lot of blocked login attempts, but I didn’t think anything of it because open ports are often scanned and I thought I was protected enough, but clearly that wasn’t the case!

Anyway, even if I wipe the machine nothing priceless or irretrievable will be lost, because after many disk failures and other similar incidents in the past I have learned to have multiple redundant backups of almost everything, so I am all good on that front. But it will take some time to put things back where they belong — and maybe I will either go with Linux this time, or spend a bit more time trying to get a VPN working properly!

July 31, 2026

Marmot researchers set up an OnlyFans to get funding

Funding for scientific research in the United States is at a record low after the Trump administration canceled billions of dollars in research grants last year, derailing work focused on diversity, climate change, and other hot-button topics. For Daniel Blumstein, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, those changes reflect a wider priority shift that has caused support for his work to slowly dwindle. For years, Blumstein has overseen one of the longest-running studies of free-living mammals in the world, focused on yellow-bellied marmots in central Colorado. Marmots — soccer ball-sized rodents — are easily tagged and captured, highly social and vocal, and don’t move vast distances, all of which makes them an ideal species to study over time. And since 1962, generations of “Marmoteers” have observed these animals to learn about everything from their social behavior to their communication to how they’ll adapt to climate change. (via SFGate)

Meet the man who has made more than six million edits on Wikipedia

Steven Pruitt spends his evenings identifying errors that most people never notice and making fixes that hardly anyone ever thanks him for. He toils at a desk in Alexandria, Virginia, surrounded by books—the kind of working clutter that suggests a long relationship with paper rather than a fetish for screens. And yet his work is necessarily digital; after dinner, and sometimes late into the night, he uses his desktop computer to correct dates, clean up syntax, standardize categories, and occasionally write entire biographies of people on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Pruitt is forty-two, and works full time as a records-management contractor for the federal government. After graduating from the College of William & Mary, in 2006, he moved back in with his parents and in recent years, he helped his mother care for his father. Pruitt has made more than six million edits to Wikipedia and created more than thirty thousand articles. He is widely regarded as the most prolific Wikipedian in the world. (via The New Yorker)

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.

July 30, 2026

Should we be worried about the Hugging Face hack?

In case you don’t follow this sort of thing as closely as some, the headline refers to a recent incident in which two of OpenAI’s leading-edge AI models gained unauthorized access to – in other words, hacked – an open-source model known as Hugging Face and extracted information from it (there are also reports that it used a second service as a staging point for the attack). As if that’s not bad enough, in order to accomplish the hack, the OpenAI models gained unauthorized access to the internet without anyone knowing, until a significant amount of time had elapsed. The attack was first reported by Hugging Face on July 16th as an unauthorized intrusion into its open-source model’s database by what it described as an unidentified agent – one that the company said was clearly part of an autonomous AI system. Here’s how Hugging Face described it:

“Earlier this week, we detected and responded to an intrusion into part of our production infrastructure. This one was different from anything we had handled before in one important way: it was driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system – and we detected and dissected it largely with AI of our own. We identified unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and to several credentials used by our services. The intrusion started where AI platforms are uniquely exposed: the data-processing pipeline. A malicious dataset abused two code-execution paths in our dataset processing to run code. From there, the actor escalated to node-level access, harvested cloud and cluster credentials, and moved laterally into several internal clusters.”

According to the company, the campaign was run by an agent framework whose identity it could not determine, and that agent or web of agents executed “thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes with self-migrating command-and-control staged on public services.” In case you’re wondering where the name Hugging Face came from, the company is a New York-based entity founded by several French entrepreneurs to develop an AI-powered chat service for kids, and got its name from an emoji known as “hugging face.” The company open-sourced the chat software and then created a database of machine-learning tools and libraries for others to use as a resource for working with AI. Hugging Face also developed its own large-language model similar to ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, known as BLOOM. Ironically, perhaps, the company used AI to detect the intrusion, saying its attack-detection software used LLM-based “triage over security telemetry” to spot anomalies.

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.

July 29, 2026

He impaled himself on a pole and then hiked down a mountain

David Cifaldi and two of his friends had been hiking for about seven hours up Montana’s tallest mountain on July 20 when he slipped on a rock and fell. He saw one of his trekking poles on the ground, but the second one was nowhere to be found.Then he rolled over. Something wasn’t right. Mr. Cifaldi, 32, had impaled himself on the pole. He immediately went into nurse mode: Mr. Cifaldi is a wound nurse at St. Vincent Regional Hospital in Billings, Mont.The pole was jutting at an angle into his left lateral muscle, below his armpit, and out through his back. He wasn’t in pain, there was no blood, he was able to take deep breaths and could feel the trekking pole through his skin. He was two to three miles from the summit of Granite Peak, elevation of about 12,800 feet. Hoping to avoid an expensive lift off the mountain via helicopter, he walked around and found he wasn’t lightheaded and told his friends, “I think we can get out of here.” (via the NYT)

Harp therapist plays music for lemurs, rhinos and fish at Canberra zoo

Most musicians would be disappointed if their performances were met with silence. But not Alison Ware. Every fortnight, the Canberra harp therapist performs for some of her most attentive audience members — rhinos, lemurs, lions and a school of Amazonian fish at the National Zoo and Aquarium. For the past five years, Ms Ware has been volunteering at the zoo, using music as a form of animal enrichment. Armed with several different harps of varying sizes, she moves between enclosures, carefully adapting her performance to suit each animal. Alison spends time watching each animal, adjusting the tempo, tone and volume of the music as she gauges their response. Some animals wander over to investigate. Others simply settle where they are. But Ms Ware’s audience extends beyond furry and feathered animals. Even the aquarium’s South American pacu often swim toward the music as Ms Ware plays. (via ABC.net)

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.

July 28, 2026

Con artist Fat Leonard fleeced the Navy, now wants a pardon

Wearing an extra-large tan prison uniform, the man who seduced legions of U.S. Navy officers with prostitutes and bribes shuffled into a visiting room at a remote federal penitentiary on the Pacific coast. He squeezed his hulking frame into a tiny plastic chair. In an exclusive interview, Leonard Glenn Francis — the con man better known as Fat Leonard — revealed for the first time how he bamboozled U.S. authorities in 2022 by escaping house arrest and fleeing to Mexico, Cuba and Venezuela before he was caught and returned to the United States 15 months later.Federal officials have never fully explained how Francis, a defense contractor who once played a critical role supporting Navy operations in Asia, absconded from home detention in San Diego nearly four years ago, despite warnings from prosecutors that he was “an extreme flight risk.” By court order, the 350-pound maritime tycoon was supposed to be under 24-7 surveillance as he awaited sentencing for bribery, fraud and conspiracy. (via Washington Post)

Actor Cary Grant took LSD multiple times and started a trend in Hollywood

I was struck by the public enthusiasm for the use of substances like LSD and mescaline in therapy—as manifested not just in scientific studies, but in newspaper articles and even television specials. (My favorite is this remarkable 1957 broadcast which shows a woman taking LSD on camera, then uttering memorable lines like “I’ve never seen such infinite beauty in my life” and “I wish I could talk in Technicolor.”) Above all, I was surprised by the public response to the Hollywood actor Cary Grant’s reveal that he was regularly using LSD in psychedelic therapy sessions. In a series of interviews starting in 1959—the same year he starred in North by Northwest—Grant went public as an unlikely advocate for psychedelic therapy. It was the surprisingly positive reaction to Grant’s endorsement that most struck me. As recounted in my book, the journalist who broke the story was overwhelmed by phone calls and letters. “Psychiatrists called, complaining that their patients were now begging them for LSD,” he remembered. “Every actor in town under analysis wanted it.” (via Nautilus)

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.

July 27, 2026

A paranoid techie, a homemade bunker and a shocking death

It was late afternoon on September 10, 2017, and Bruce Leshan was at home repairing a crack in his car’s windshield in Bethesda when he heard a scream. “Get out!” the voice cried. Leshan looked up and noticed smoke coming from the house up the hill. As he rounded the corner, racing up Danbury Road, the home came into view: a modest white Cape Cod, its eaves exhaling brown volcanic plumes. Leshan went to the front door and tried to push it open, but it wouldn’t budge — something was obviously blocking it from within. Word began to spread that someone had died and then a county fire investigator made a startling discovery. Squeezing past the furnace amid a tower of junk in the basement, something caught his eye: There was a hole in the concrete floor. Below it, investigators soon learned, stretched an extensive network of tunnels and bunkers — long, twisting hallways of bare rock that would end up revealing the bizarrest of internet-era fables, and one with a ghastly ending. (via The Washingtonian)

Japan tried to get people to eat lettuce by putting an actor’s face on the package

Heads of lettuce packaged in transparent plastic film with the face of Tatsuya Fujiwara printed on it have been flying off the shelves of Tokyo supermarkets lately, as well as going viral on social media. Lettuce is a staple of Japanese cuisine, but data shows that more than 60% of Japanese throw away the humble vegetable in the summer, when it is at peak supply but whiters faster due to hot weather. In an attempt to combat food waste, Japanese food giant Ajinomoto teamed up with a produce cooperative and asked actor Tatsuya Fujiwara to lend them his face. “I was asked, ‘The lettuce is in crisis, so could you lend us your face?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ and it turned out to be a job where I literally lend my face. Why, though… I will be waiting for you at the vegetable section,” Fujiwara announced on X. The marketing effect was instant, and lettuce that would have probably been thrown away started flying off the shelves. A limited supply of 10,000 heads of lettuce wrapped in Tatsuya Fujiwara’s face went on sale this month. (via Oddity Central)

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