Mathew Ingram

January 22, 2025January 31, 2025

She invented the rape kit but died in obscurity

From The Atlantic: “The sexual-assault-evidence collection box, colloquially known as the “rape kit,” is a simple yet potent tool: a small case, perhaps made of cardboard, containing items such as sterile nail clippers, cotton swabs, slides for holding bodily fluids, paper bags, and a tiny plastic comb. Designed to gather and preserve biological evidence found on the body of a person reporting a sexual assault, it introduced standardized forensics into the investigation of rape where there had previously been no common protocol. The kit was trademarked under the name “Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit,” after Sergeant Louis Vitullo. The Chicago police officer had a well-publicized role in the 1967 conviction of serial killer Richard Speck. But thanks to a new book we know about the collection box’s real inventor—a woman named Martha “Marty” Goddard.”

Italian towns used to have the equivalent of skyscrapers built by rich families

From Exurbe: “This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wars. We don’t see many such towers today… or think we don’t, but actually their remnants are all over Italy. Often when in Florence one sees buildings where one section is rough stone standing out amid stucco neighbors. These are actually the bottom nubs of Medieval stone towers. The town of San Gimigniano is famous for having several still intact. Wealthy families built these as mini-fortresses within the city, where they could defend against riots, enemy families and invasion. Signs of wealth and prestige, these all-stone buildings were also fireproof, leading to a terrible but effective tactic: take your family, treasures & goods up into your tower then set fire to enemies’ homes and let the city burn around you while you sit safe above.”

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January 21, 2025January 21, 2025

This is who we are

Stalin biographer and world historian Stephen Kotkin’s take on the notion that Trump is “not who we are.”

January 21, 2025January 31, 2025

Glenn Miller’s disappearance is still unsolved 80 years later

From NPR: “It was Christmas Day, 1944, when people heard the news: Glenn Miller, one of music’s biggest stars, had vanished. He had boarded a military plane from Britain, bound for Paris, where he was scheduled to perform for American troops during World War II. But neither crew nor passengers made it across the English Channel. There is no wreckage of Glenn Miller’s plane, and no definitive answers. He disappeared without a trace. Miller wasn’t even supposed to be on board the small prop plane, but, anxious to get going after multiple weather delays, he’d hitched a ride without authorization. It took days for anyone to realize he’d gone missing. The rest of his band eventually arrived in France. And on Christmas Day, as news of Miller’s disappearance hit the papers, they played their show — without the man who had brought them together in the first place.”

Sir Isaac Newton listed all of his sins in 1662 and there are some pretty big ones

From Open Culture: “In 1936, a document of Newton’s dating from around 1662 was sold at a Sotheby’s auction and eventually wound up at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. Newton rattles off a laundry list of sins he committed during his relatively short life – he was around 20 when he wrote this, still a student at Cambridge. Some of the sins are rather opaque. For example, it’s unclear “Making a feather while on Thy day” means exactly (which is followed by “and denying I made it”). But others like “Peevishness with my mother” are immediately relatable, as is “Punching my sister” or “Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese.” And then there are some darker ones, like “Wishing death and hoping it to some,” and “Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them.”

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January 20, 2025January 31, 2025

More people are growing to adulthood with an extra artery

From Science Focus: “More and more adults have an extra artery in their arms as humans continue to evolve at a rapid rate, a study has found. Scientists in Australia believe that humans are undergoing a micro-evolution in which evolutionary changes can be observed over a short period of time. The artery forms while a baby is in the womb and is the main vessel that supplies blood to the forearm and hand, but it usually disappears during gestation and is replaced by the radial and ulnar arteries. However, some people retain all three. The investigation by Dr Teghan Lucas of Flinders University showed a significant increase in the prevalence of the artery. The team analysed records in anatomical literature and dissected cadavers from individuals born in 20th Century. “Since the 18^th Century, anatomists have been studying the prevalence of this artery in adults and our study shows it’s clearly increasing,” said Dr Lucas.

Two men in a hot-air balloon in 1832 hold the record for highest altitude without oxygen

From Everything is Amazing: “It’s just before two on an afternoon in early September, and professional aeronaut Henry Tracey Coxwell has just discovered something that’s turned his blood cold. The balloon he’s riding in with meteorologist James Glaisher has developed a serious fault. As it rose above the countryside around Wolverhampton, it’s developed a slow but inexorable spin – and Henry’s just discovered this has tangled up the release-valve line, the duo’s only way of venting enough gas from the balloon to trigger a descent. Around them, the sky is turning a deeper blue. The temperature has fallen below freezing, and every surface is becoming slippery with ice. They’re past 8,000 metres, the altitude which mountaineers call ‘The Death Zone’, because of the catastrophic effect it can have upon the unprotected human body.”

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January 17, 2025January 21, 2025

It’s a “smart cow” problem

January 17, 2025January 31, 2025

Did Meriwether Clark commit suicide or was he murdered?

From Scientific American: “Captain Meriwether Lewis — William Clark’s expedition partner on the Corps of Discovery’s historic trek to the Pacific, Thomas Jefferson’s confidante, governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory and all-around American hero — was only 35 when he died of gunshot wounds sustained along a perilous Tennessee trail called Natchez Trace. A broken column, symbol of a life cut short, marks his grave. But exactly what transpired at a remote inn 200 years ago this Saturday? Most historians agree that he committed suicide; others are convinced he was murdered. Even now, precious little is known about the events of October 10, 1809, after Lewis – armed with several pistols, a rifle and a tomahawk – stopped at a log cabin lodging house known as Grinder’s Stand. He and Clark had finished their expedition three years earlier.”

This town in Manitoba is the only place that has a prison for polar bears

From Now I Know: “Churchill is home to about 800 to 1,000 people, and, for about six to eight weeks in the late fall, also to a similar number of polar bears. Including the handful that are locked up in Churchill’s polar bear prison. Polar bears subsist on a high-fat, high-protein diet consisting mainly of ringed seals. Each year, hundreds of polar bears make their way to the Churchill area in search of food – the Bay is home to many ringed seals – and when seals are hard to find, the bears go searching for food elsewhere. Often, this means there’s a polar bear or two walking around town. In response, Manitoba has a group of “conservation officers” who are charged with keeping bears (not people) in check and, similarly, to protect the bear population. Call 675-BEAR and the six officers (or some subset of them) will be on-scene as soon as possible.”

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January 16, 2025January 21, 2025

Always wanted to live in a church in New Orleans?

As a lapsed Catholic, I no longer believe in the religious part of what happens inside Catholic churches, but I still really admire their architecture, so I am a sucker for a renovated church that has been turned into a single-family home, and this one in New Orleans is right up my alley. It’s only $1.25 million, so definitely affordable 🙂 It’s got five bedrooms and five bathrooms, and offers about 5,000 square feet of living space on a 5,800-square-foot lot. It was built in 1917.

January 16, 2025January 31, 2025

Waiters in France went on strike for the right to grow mustaches

From Atlas Obscura: “It’s April 1907. You’re an American in Paris, searching for a taste of real culture. You settle down in a quaint café, but before you can choose a police officer approaches and asks you—not exactly politely—to leave. You stagger off, confused and hungry. Around the city at that time, high-end waiters were on strike to demand better pay, more time off—and the right to grow mustaches. The bristly adornments had been virtually ubiquitous among French men for decades, though many waiters, domestic servants, and priests were not allowed to have them—“sentenced to forced shaving,” as the newspaper La Lanterne put it. Indignant waiters walked out of their fancy restaurants en masse, along with roughly 25,000 francs a day in revenue.”

The deepest hotel in the world is 1,400 feet underground in a former slate mine

From Architectural Digest: “Hard hats, flashlights, and hiking boots aren’t the type of toiletries one is used to receiving at their overnight accommodations, but visiting the world’s deepest hotel isn’t your usual retreat. Known as the Deep Sleep, the property is located in Snowdonia, Wales, at the base of an abandoned slate mine. The vacation experience is among the most evident tangible examples of the old maxim, the journey is more important than the destination. When guests arrive, they’re given all the equipment necessary to travel to their cabins, which are roughly 1,400-feet underground. The trip is operated by the mine exploration company Go Below Underground Adventure. A guide leads them through the massive pit, which goes for miles in a series of maze-like tunnels created by miners over 200 years. To get to the bottom, visitors climb through caverns, journey through tunnels, and even zip line at 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.

January 16, 2025January 30, 2025

The TikTok saga has gotten even stupider if that’s possible

This week could see the end of the TikTok saga, and if it does — regardless of what the ending is — I for one will be grateful if that happens. As faithful readers of The Torment Nexus (like you) will no doubt remember, I wrote in September that the crusade against TikTok was a “ridiculous waste of time” and I stand by that position. If anything, in fact, I feel it even more strongly now, given some of the rhetoric that we’ve seen published about the looming ban — including some of the commentary from the Supreme Court, who are supposed to be omniscient and wise in all things, but are really just people with flawed opinions and political concerns like everyone else (and some of those political concerns are more obvious than others, as we’ve recently learned about Justice Alito).

The Supremes ruled this week on TikTok’s appeal of the law that was passed last April, which requires owner Bytedance to either sell the app to a non-Chinese owner or face a ban in the US. According to some reports based on the questions and commentary from the court, the justices appeared to be leaning towards rejecting the appeal on national security grounds, and and on Friday they confirmed that by upholding the law. Anonymous sources also told Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal that China was considering selling the app to Elon Musk, which would definitely be the fastest way to destroy TikTok . Bytedance said that if it loses its court challenge, it is planning to shut the app down completely rather than allow existing users to keep using it, which feels like a PR exercise. And Trump is trying to come up with ways to save it.

Setting aside all of this sturm und drang, let’s talk about what’s at the root of it: Are people seriously arguing that an app where people watch short video clips of girls dancing or cats riding Roomba vacuums is somehow a threat to the national security of the United States? Yes, they sure are. And is this argument just as ridiculous as it was the last time I wrote about it? Yes, it sure is.

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January 15, 2025January 25, 2025

That time I helped write a story for the infamous Weekly World News tabloid

If you are of a certain age (I won’t say how old exactly), you might remember a tabloid newspaper called The Weekly World News — a black-and-white paper featuring huge headlines with multiple exclamation marks about Elvis living on the moon, or a mutant child known only as “Bat-Boy.” It was usually sold in a rack by the cashier in the grocery store, along with its sister paper the National Enquirer, The Sun, and other rags, and before the Internet came along it was the source of an almost infinite number of hilarious and bizarre urban legends and stories, most of which were clearly fake. It also featured a column by a right-wing lunatic known as “Ed Anger,” who hated foreigners, yoga, speed limits and pineapple on pizza and was a big fan of the electric chair and beer.

I loved reading the Weekly World News, and after I started down the path to becoming a journalist, I often joked about ending my career — as some British tabloid veterans apparently did — living in Boca Raton, Florida where the paper was based, and inventing ridiculous stories about aliens, complete with photos and artists renderings. It sounded like a ton of fun. And then, after I had graduated from journalism school and was working at my first job as a reporter for a weekly newsmagazine in Alberta, I wound up helping the editors of the Weekly World News publish a story — and this one was 100-percent real, even though it sounded like something made up.

January 15, 2025January 31, 2025

Wallace Tillinghast and the New England airship hoax of 1909

From Creative Histories: “The New York Times stated that a “mysterious craft made its appearance over the city about 6:45 o’clock tonight, sailed about in circles and was seen by more than 1500 people…during much of the time the airship was near the city the aviator was sweeping the earth and skies with a powerful searchlight.” What would become known to history as The Great New England Airship Hoax of 1909 began on that cold December night in the relatively small city of Worcester, Massachusetts. Before it ended, hundreds of thousands of people – including many celebrities such as famed novelist H.P. Lovecraft – all over the northeastern United States would claim to have seen the strange lights and large flying craft, which were dubbed “airships” at the time, flying over their heads in the nighttime sky from Maine all the way to New Jersey.”

It’s one of the most valuable machines in the world and it depends on this woman

From the Wall Street Journal: “When she reports for her shift at a chip plant, Hall slips into a bunny suit. She enters a room where the pristine air is 100 times cleaner than a hospital operating room’s. Then she makes her way over to an unfathomably complex machine. The piece of equipment that the entire world has come to rely on—and she is specially trained to handle—is called an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine. It’s the machine that produces the most advanced microchips on the planet. Even today, there are only a few hundred of these EUV machines in existence—and they are ludicrously expensive. The one that Hall maintains cost $170 million, while the latest models sell for roughly $370 million. It’s a process that involves vaporizing droplets of molten tin and producing light that doesn’t occur naturally on Earth.”

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January 14, 2025January 16, 2025

Climate change

January 14, 2025January 31, 2025

They killed dozens of people but their identities remain a mystery

From Wikipedia: “The Brabant killers are a group of unidentified criminals responsible for a series of violent attacks that occurred in Belgium between 1982 and 1985. A total of 28 people died and 22 were injured. The actions of the gang, believed to consist of a core of three men, made it Belgium’s most notorious unsolved crime spree. The active participants were known as The Giant (a tall man who may have been the leader); the Killer (Le Tueur; the main shooter) and the Old Man (Le Vieux; a middle aged man who drove). The gang abruptly ceased their activities in 1985. The ensuing chaotic investigation failed to catch them or even make serious inroads into solving the case. This led to a parliamentary inquiry and public discussion, both of which revolved around the possibility that the gang members were Belgian or foreign state security elements. The case was officially closed on 28 June 2024.”

For over 500 years Oxford graduates had to swear an oath against one specific person

From The Bodleian Library: “In 1827, Oxford University undertook a major review of its statutes. The statutes were, and still are, the written set of rules and regulations which governed everything that went on in the University. A product of many centuries, some of these were over already 500 years old by 1827. In going through the statutes as part of this review, the University found something rather odd in the section relating to Bachelors of Arts and the oaths they had to swear in order to become a Master of Arts. As well as being required to swear that they would observe the University’s statutes, privileges, liberties and customs, as you might expect; and not to lecture elsewhere, or resume their bachelor studies after getting their MA, the Bachelors of Arts also had to swear that they would never agree to the reconciliation of Henry Symeonis.”

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.

January 13, 2025January 16, 2025

An apology

January 13, 2025January 31, 2025

The hot new party drug is blueberry-flavored nitrous oxide

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.”

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.