Category: Newsletters

An old school toilet is not a typical mode of transport on which to hit the high seas but that did not deter friends Alex Craig and Paul Graham from giving it a go. The duo crossed the stretch of ocean between Cape Jervis and Kangaroo Island on a homemade barge complete with an outhouse and a barbecue. The apparent brazen act of Aussie larrikinism was actually a solution to a problem. “Alex has a block over on Kangaroo Island and he needed a site toilet,” Mr Graham told 891 ABC Adelaide. “The portaloos were way too expensive so we just made one.” The journey, which took place in May 2025, took four hours to complete. “It was treacherous,” Mr Graham said. The journey typically takes 45-minutes aboard the SeaLink ferry from Cape Jervis to Penneshaw. “We were being adventurous,” Mr Graham said. “And a little bit of ‘we’re not paying for the ferry’ because to take the toilet over was more than $2,000, plus building it.” (via ABC News)

Switzerland adds solar panels to train tracks to create miles of power generation

The space between railroad tracks doesn’t usually do much of anything. But in a tiny village in Switzerland, Swiss inventors have spent the last year proving it can be used to generate clean electricity. In April 2025, Swiss startup Sun-Ways installed 48 solar panels along a 330-foot stretch of active railway in Buttes, Switzerland. It is the first removable solar power plant on a working rail line anywhere in the world. The patented panels were designed to sit between the rails and can be easily removed whenever crews need to do track maintenance. Now, just over a year into their three-year pilot project, the results are in: More than 11,000 trains have rolled directly over the panels at speeds up to 55 mph, and the installation has remained stable, safe, and productive. Since May 2025, the 330-foot-long installation has produced more than 16,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity despite a month-long pause for snow. (via Good Good Good)

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.

Continue reading “Australian duo sailed a raft with an outhouse to Kangaroo Island”

Harvard scientist Avi Loeb has been doing interviews all week because of his take on 3I/ATLAS, an interstellar object that has captured public fascination. The astronomy community generally agrees it’s a comet — potentially the oldest one ever seen. But Loeb has repeatedly pointed to what he contends are unexplained anomalies. Over the past eight years, has gained worldwide notoriety for advancing provocative notions, propelling him ever deeper into the pop-culture zeitgeist. Three weeks before this interview, he’d flown to a NASCAR event in California in which a race car, emblazoned with Loeb’s face, was dedicated to the interstellar object. Earlier in 2025, he landed on the front page of The New York Times. A recent Loeb appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience racked up a combined audience of 6.4 million and just last month, the Trump Administration appointed Loeb to lead a scientific advisory council on UFOs — or unidentified aerial phenomena, in government parlance. (via Popular Mechanics)

Jeremy Bentham coined almost as many words as Shakespeare and may have invented jogging

Have you ever wondered who coined the words ‘maximise’ and ‘minimise’? Like many prolific writers, Bentham sometimes had to create his own terms to describe concepts he explored. Ranging from the common ‘international’, to the rare ‘scribblatory’, Jeremy’s words infiltrate our language in their very own literary panopticon – you never know when a Bentham original slips in. Bentham appears to have been a regular jogger—or, as he put it, ‘circumgyrater’. According to the journalist George Wheatley, who stayed with the eighty-one year-old Bentham in March 1831, before both breakfast and dinner Bentham would take ‘a few turns in the garden, which … he calls circumgyrating’, which Wheatley described as a ‘trotting or taking up a kind of trotting step’. Bentham started studying Latin at the age of three, and by twelve years old, he was enrolled at Queen’s College in Oxford to follow in his father’s footsteps and study law. (via University College)

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.

Continue reading “Harvard astrophysicist believes we’ve been visited by aliens”

A few miles from where I live is a small graveyard with one tombstone more decorated than the rest. Offerings of trinkets and candles tell a story about a woman mourned by people who never knew her. No story from the life of this young woman, who died of tuberculosis at the age of nineteen, indicated that she would lead a notorious afterlife. Indeed, no story from the life of Mercy Lena Brown has survived at all, though round-ups of weird history or the dark side of Rhode Island sometimes call her “New England’s Last Vampire.” Illness spreading in her family after she died in 1892 gave root to a story that she was feeding off the life-force of her remaining relatives. This story convinced members of her community of Exeter, observed by the medical examiner, to exhume her body and cut out her heart and liver two months after her death. We do not know anything about Mercy as a human being. The only reconstruction of the nineteen years she lived comes from timelines and assumptions. (via Contingent)

Is there really cocaine in the Library of Congress? The answer is yes

The Library of Congress has more than 170 million items, and they’re definitely not all books. And no, I’m not just talking about old-timey letters and other historical documents. There’s also a lot of…stuff. What kind of stuff? A topographical map of the Grand Canyon made of chocolate, for one. The LoC also plays host to Carl Sagan’s old whiteboard, a 160-year-old wedding cake, and at least one packet of cocaine. Contrary to popular belief, the cocaine in question didn’t belong to Sigmund Freud — but it’s still his fault that it’s there. This story starts in the 1880s, when a young Freud was getting super into cocaine. He wasn’t the only one: The medical journal The Lancet basically couldn’t keep up with all the new research being published on cocaine (probably because researchers were also on cocaine). Freud sent a vial to his fiancée and wrote a monograph called “Über Coca” (On Coca, which, again, he very much was) hyping cocaine’s “promise.” Among many potential uses for cocaine, Freud briefly noted that it might make a good local anesthetic. (via Popular Science)

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.

Continue reading “They thought she was a vampire so they dug up her casket”

A devastating farm accident when he was just two and a half years old became the beginning of an extraordinary journey of resilience, determination and self-belief. After losing both his arms in a grain auger accident on his family’s Ohio farm in 1972, Detwiler refused to let his disability define him. He taught himself to perform everyday tasks using only his feet, eventually managing a 1,300-acre corn and soybean farm. Through his YouTube channel Harmless Farmer, he shared his daily life with millions, proving that limitations often exist only when people stop trying. Because the accident happened so early in life, he later said he had little memory of ever having arms. Through years of patience and practice, he learned to eat, write, brush his teeth, dress himself, cook meals and drive vehicles using only his feet. Those same skills later extended to farming, where he mastered operating tractors and combines, fuelling equipment, repairing machinery, welding and maintaining heavy farm equipment. (via Times of India)

This rare genetic condition could hold a clue to the prevention of cancer

Nestled in southern Ecuador’s network of Andes mountains is the town of Piñas, whose 8,000 inhabitants live in houses scattered across a valley. This remote town is home to an unusually high number of people living with Laron syndrome, a rare genetic condition that prevents the body from growing taller than 1.2m (3.9ft). María Luísa Romero and her twin sister, María del Cisne, both have the condition. Living with Laron syndrome can be challenging, the sisters say. But researchers believe it may provide an unexpected advantage – the incidence of diseases such as cancer and diabetes among Laron patients is lower than in the general population. They hope that studying this could lead to the development of treatments to prevent cancer. Those who have Laron syndrome, also known as growth hormone insensitivity, are unable to use the growth hormone that their body makes. The genetic mutation  is named after paediatrician Zvi Laron, who identified it while treating patients in Israel, 60 years ago. (via the BBC)

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.

Continue reading “He lost his arms at two but grew up to run a 1,300-acre farm”

The dream of discovering buried treasure came true for a California couple who found a real pot of gold while walking their dog. The largest such hoard ever found in the U.S. is comprised of 1,411 gold coins, minted between 1847 and 1894, worth an estimated $10 million in today’s market. The coins are now known as the Saddle Ridge Hoard, after a feature on the couple’s property. Both the location of the land and the couple’s identity are being kept secret. According to an interview given to the coin company that will market the hoard, the discovery was made on a path they had used for years. Spotting the side of a rusted can barely emerging from a hillside, they dug it out with a stick and carried it home. Subsequent trips to the site turned up several more treasure-filled cans. Most of the coins are $20 gold pieces, known as double eagles. All of those were made at the San Francisco mint, founded in 1854 to process the nuggets that prospectors were finding in the newly discovered California gold fields. (via National Geographic)

The famous Stanford prison experiment didn’t show what everyone thinks it did

It’s true that Zimbardo’s famous prison experiment is one of the two or three most famous experiments in the history of psychology. But it’s not true that it’s depicted in all introductory psychology textbooks. I’m the author of one such textbook. One of the questions I’m frequently asked about the book by professors who teach from it is, “Why don’t you include Zimbardo’s prison experiment like all other textbook authors do?” Here’s why. I read carefully the original report on the experiment by Zimbardo and his colleagues, and I also read a methodological critique of it by Ali Banuazizi and Siamak Movahedi After reading both, and thinking carefully about them, I decided that I could not in good conscience present the experiment with its usual interpretation. I decided to omit it completely (a decision I made also concerning many other research studies that in my mind were poorly conceived and improperly interpreted). In the years since then, I have found some new evidence that validates my original decision. (via Psychology Today)

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.

Continue reading “Who buried $10M in gold coins found by a California couple?”

As Chelsie Marie Anderson rode through the desert, leaning her head against the bus window, she kept thinking, This is how I’m going to die. Anderson stuck out among the other passengers: an American woman with bleached-blonde tips, huge brown eyes, and olive skin on a bus in rural Mexico. The next day, she arrived at a gated community in a small city, sore and exhausted. Waiting for her was a stranger with a similar story. Like Anderson, Nicole Burns was from the region of South Carolina known as “the Upstate,” and like Anderson, she was also fleeing the police. It was May 2020, and both women had become key cogs in a vast drug network that South Carolina’s attorney general — in the largest narcotics-conspiracy investigation in state history — would later prosecute in a 103-person indictment called “Prison Empire.” For years, Mexican cartels had worked with South Carolina Department of Corrections prisoners to distribute meth, heroin, and cocaine. To sell the product outside prison walls, the inmates turned to women like Anderson and Burns. (via The Cut)

Anthony Burgess said Clockwork Orange was inspired by real events but it was all a lie

In April 1944, Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess’s wife Lynne was working in London. Returning home from work after midnight, she was approached by four U.S. soldiers in civilian clothing, who grabbed her purse and tried to pry the golden wedding ring from her finger. One soldier “was prepared to break or even cut the finger,” according to Burgess. Lynne screamed for help, but none arrived; her yells were silenced by punches to her body and kicks were the last thing she recalled as she fainted to the ground. She happened to be pregnant at the time and lost the child. The attack inspired an early passage in A Clockwork Orange, in which a gang terrorizes a young couple in a cottage by physical assaulting the husband and raping the wife. This is the account you will read — or a slight variation thereof — if you open almost any non-fiction biography, newspaper article, book, or encyclopedia on Burgess and his famous novel. The only issue with the story is that none of it is true. (via The Memory Hole)

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.

Continue reading “How a suburban mom wound up working for a Mexican cartel”

A Montana police officer spotted the giant banana rolling through Billings and did what countless law enforcement officers have done before him: He pulled it over. For Steve Braithwaite, owner, builder and full-time driver of the 23-foot-long Big Banana Car, the stop was less of a surprise than a tradition. After 15 years, he has learned that driving a giant banana attracts attention. Especially from cops. Braithwaite figures he spent the better part of a decade as one of the most frequently pulled-over drivers in America. Not for speeding, but simply because he was driving a giant banana. Often officers wanted photographs. Other times they invented reasons to start a conversation. The whole thing began in a gas station in 2008. Braithwaite, a hot-rod enthusiast, had become bored attending car shows. Then he watched an episode of the show “Top Gear” featuring bizarre custom-built vehicles, including a street-legal garden shed and a drivable couch. For the next month, his brain worked overtime. (via Cowboy State Weekly)

Her work was cited by Stephen Hawking and she turned down a $1M job offer

At just 12 years old, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski began making a Zenith CH 601 XL single-engine aircraft from a kit. The project took nearly two years to complete, with Pasterski doing much of the work herself. By the age of 14, she was already flying the plane all alone — years before she was legally old enough to get behind the wheel of a car. During her time at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy she became a semifinalist for the US team at the International Physics Olympiad. She also interned at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and Blue Origin. Pasterski completed her physics degree in just three years, graduating in 2014 with a perfect 5.0 GPA. After MIT, she joined Harvard University for a PhD under theoretical physicist Andrew Strominger. NASA reportedly approached her with a job offer. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also wanted her to join Blue Origin, his private space company. Brown University is widely reported to have offered her an assistant professorship worth about $1.1 million. (via The Economic 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.

Continue reading “He’s been pulled over hundreds of times in his banana car”

If you like baseball and use social media, you’ve likely already encountered the Savannah Bananas. The team is something of a social-media darling, especially on TikTok – the Bananas’ more than 6m million followers on the app significantly outnumber those of every franchise in Major League Baseball (as well as every team in the NFL, NBA and NHL). The factors driving the Bananas’ online success are obvious. In-game clips of players swinging flaming baseball bats, pitching from atop stilts, and performing choreographed dance routines are tailor-made for social media. The Bananas competed in the Coastal Plains League (CPL), a competitive collegiate summer league. Outside of the standard CPL season, however, the Bananas began playing exhibition games which featured significant rule changes: fan-caught foul balls counted as outs, bunts were outlawed, stealing first base was permitted and ‘walks’ were replaced by ‘sprints,’ among other modifications. Games played under this new set of rules were appropriately christened “Banana Ball”. (via The Guardian)

In Sparta a competitive sport involved jumping and kicking oneself in the butt

The Bibasis, a dance of men and women, was of the gymnastic kind. The dance consisted in springing rapidly from the ground, and striking the feet behind; a feat of which the Spartan woman Lampito, in the Lysistrata of Aristophanes, prides herself. She derives her strength and her beauty essentially from this exercise. The text reads: μάλα γ’ οἰῶ, ναὶ τὼ σιώ· γυμνάδδομαί γα καὶ ποτὶ πυγὰν ἅλλομαι (It’s true, I think, by the Twin Gods. I do take exercise, and I jump-kick my butt.) The dance consisted in kicking one’s own buttocks, to music, as rapidly as possible. The number of successful strokes was counted, and the most skilful received prizes in competitions. We are told by a verse from an epigram, which has been preserved by Pollux, that a Laconian girl had won by dancing the Bibasis a thousand times, which was more than had ever been done before. (via Wikipedia)

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Continue reading “The hottest sport around is something called Banana Ball”

Qin Jianping had only intended to stop off in Haikou, capital of China’s Hainan province, for a few days. He drove to a seaside plaza to take an evening stroll along a seawall. He remembers slipping in the darkness, losing his balance, and suddenly falling over the edge into the sea. After plunging into the deep, dark, icy water, Qin quickly fought his way to the surface. He felt disoriented but could still hear the buskers playing for tourists taking a late-night stroll. In those first few minutes, he was confident someone would soon spot him and call for help. But then the waves began slowly dragging him further from shore. It would be another six days before he reached land again. To survive in open water, the 41-year-old entrepreneur says he clung to buoys, ate raw crabs, and attempted to keep warm using his own urine, all the while enduring an onslaught of jellyfish. On the day he was finally rescued by two fishermen, the Chinese authorities and his family had already begun to believe he was dead. (via Sixth Tone)

How many books is too many to have in your apartment? His landlord said 10,000 is

For a young Jewish scholar named Mendel Uminer, books are the wellspring of enlightenment. So when he scored a studio apartment a block away from Central Park on Manhattan’s Upper East Side a year ago, he brought his books with him — all 10,000 of them. What followed, at least for a little while, was a charmed existence in his 600-square-foot temple of knowledge. Towering stacks of Judaica lined the walls, heaps of film criticism and opera history filled the prewar bathroom, piles of plays and poems blocked a window, and Uminer slept on a floor mattress engulfed in dog-eared novels. Waking up around noon, he spent his afternoons on his sunlit chaise, devouring the works of Yiddish writers like Chaim Grade and critics like Edmund Wilson, nourishing his mind while the city churned outside. This past winter, he received a notice from building management. “You are maintaining the Premises in a severely overcluttered condition; permitting the over-accumulation of books in the Premises; creating a fire hazard by over-accumulating combustible books.” (via the NYT)

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.

Continue reading “A Chinese businessman survived six days in open water”

A convoy of police cars, lights flashing, tail the large yellow truck up to the back gates of London’s British Museum. It’s just before 3 a.m. on July 10, a date that has been kept under wraps for months. After the truck pulls into the museum’s loading bay, four men open its back doors to reveal a cage-like rectangular crate. Inside it is another crate, inside that crate is a metal shell, and inside that shell, folded back and forth on itself 28 times, is a precious and fragile artifact, nearly a thousand years old.The journey this truck has made over the previous 10 hours, by road and rail from northern France, was undertaken in great secrecy, due to the importance and value of the cargo within (reported to be insured for over a billion dollars). The Bayeux Tapestry is perhaps the most celebrated artwork to have survived from the Middle Ages. It is remarkable purely as an object: a narrative piece some 225 feet long. (via National Geographic)

She went from cleaning a space toilet to planning a Mars exploration mission

Cleaning a space toilet while on work experience was Claire Parfitt’s first introduction to a career away from Earth’s orbit. But she never imagined her time at the National Space Centre in Leicester, when she was 14, would one day see her lead a team exploring future Mars missions. Parfitt, originally from Nottingham, now works for the European Space Agency’s European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands. The 42-year-old joined the space industry after securing a physics degree and a PhD in spacecraft power systems engineering. She has since worked on missions such as the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover, which will explore the surface of Mars. She has also worked on the SMILE mission – officially known as the Solar wind, Magnetospheric, Ionic Link Explorer mission – which uses four science instruments to study how Earth responds to the solar wind from the Sun. (via the BBC)

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.

Continue reading “Inside the secret plan to move the famous Bayeux tapestry”

We now think of Dame Barbara Cartland in her hot-pink guise as a romantic novelist, but in the early 1930s she was a sparkier sort of woman. Her early novels and plays raised eyebrows due to their racy nature and she wrote some rather naughty gossip columns. She was also interested in technology. In the summer of 1931, she was involved in a series of experimental glider flights. Gliders had existed in some form for around 75 years but Cartland funded a project to develop long-distance gliders that could be towed into flight by aircraft. Previously, a glider had to be launched manually from a high place or more commonly, towed along a runway by a mechanical winch. The first major flight of the “Barbara Cartland” glider was on the 20th June 1931. A bag of letters was flown from near Maidstone to a destination near Reading. The journey took just over an hour. Its tow aircraft was flown by Flt Lt Ewen Wanless with Cartland as a passenger. This was possibly the first use of “glider mail”. (via Playing Pasts)

Northern Canada has an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island in a lake

Turns out that Canada is home to the only known location of the most recursive island in the world. Say hello to Yathkyed Lake, Nunavut. As the name suggests, a ‘recursive’ island or lake is like a nesting doll of nature. There is only one (discovered) island in a lake on an island in a lake on island in a lake and that is located in one of the most remote parts of Canada – Yathkyed Lake, which is north of the Manitoba border and right in the heart of Nunavut. Ironically, the lake is just south of the geographical centre of Canada, if you find the mid-point of the East-West and North-South extremities of the country. Unfortunately, knowing that the world’s most recursive lake exists in Canada is about as far as you can get. Notwithstanding the incredibly difficult terrain and lack of infrastructure, Yathkyed Lake appears to be owned by a Canadian mining company, so it’s not even open to the public. (via Curiocity)

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.

Continue reading “This famous romance writer was also an aviation pioneer”

As longtime Torment Nexus readers probably know, I have a minor obsession with the topic of artificial intelligence engines and consciousness — in part because such discussions inevitably reveal how little we know about human consciousness, let alone the machine kind. What is consciousness? Where does it reside? How does it emerge? How do we know that Atlantic writer Ted Chiang is conscious, let alone anyone else? And so on. If this isn’t your jam, I completely understand, and if you stop reading and move on, I will not be offended at all (but come back later!) I know that some people feel AI consciousness is a dead end, and that large-language models like Claude and Gemini and ChatGPT are just “stochastic parrots” or souped-up autocomplete tools that stole all their intelligence from others, and that talking about them being conscious or becoming conscious is like wondering if your toaster misses you when you are at work — and that those who discuss it, like Richard Dawkins did, have lost their minds or are the victims of “AI derangement syndrome.” I get that. I am not one of those people.

I’m not saying I believe that AI engines like Claude or ChatGPT are conscious or even that I think they will become conscious! But at the same time, I’m not saying they aren’t or won’t. David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University and a prominent researcher in the field of AI consciousness,  told New York magazine recently that the odds have gotten significantly higher that an AI could be conscious — in 2023 he said the probability was around 10 per cent. “I don’t know if I’d say that these systems are conscious yet,” Chalmers said, but “people who are confident that they’re not conscious maybe shouldn’t be. We just don’t understand consciousness well enough, and we don’t understand these systems well enough.” Chalmers and Yoshua Bengio — who worked with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun on the development of neural networks — have written a paper that concludes that based on various criteria current AI engines are not conscious but future ones could be.

In the world of consciousness research, as I understand it, there are a (large) number of different models of how consciousness might work in human beings — or anywhere else, for that matter — and how we might find evidence of it working, or at least see the signs of it in operation. One of the most popular is called Global Workspace Theory or GWT, and it was developed by cognitive neuroscientist Bernard Baars in the 1980s. In a nutshell (and I am paraphrasing and condensing significantly here) this theory of consciousness suggests that the human brain operates a little like a theater where a play is being performed. Backstage, in the dark, there is a huge amount of unconscious work happening — things like regulating your breathing, recognizing visual input, retrieving memories, and so on. The stage is a kind of global workspace, where if a piece of data is important enough, it is shoved into the spotlight so that the rest of the brain can have access to it, and this is the foundation of consciousness.

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.

Continue reading “Anthropic discovers that Claude has a “secret thinking area””

The judge, Norbert Hofer, was a specialist. At the Innsbruck Regional Court, in western Austria, he oversaw a jurisdiction designated for mountain, avalanche, climbing, cable-car, and ski accidents. Cases handled by this department rarely draw much public attention, but the trial of Thomas Plamberger, in February, was different. He was charged with homicide by gross negligence in the death of his girlfriend, Kerstin Gurtner, during an attempt to climb Grossglockner, Austria’s tallest mountain. Hofer was an alpinist himself and a mountain-rescue volunteer. He led groups of young people on summer hikes. The case against Plamberger was nearly unprecedented. Hundreds of unfortunates — hikers, climbers, skiers, snowboarders — die in the Austrian Alps each year, but these fatalities rarely result in criminal charges. Gurtner, thirty-three, had frozen to death a few dozen yards from the Grossglockner summit after Plamberger, then thirty-six, parted ways with her at around 2 a.m. on a winter night. (via the New Yorker)

In Italy they store their cheese in a bank vault because people keep stealing it

Northern Italy. In the dead of night, a group of thieves creeps toward a locked vault. Were they looking for jewels or priceless artwork? Gold bullion? No — Parmesan. And they almost managed it. Around 400 wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano were loaded onto their getaway vehicle before police apprehended the thieves. Credito Emiliano SpA is a local bank in the Emilia-Romagna region, the only place where Parmigiano Reggiano can be produced. Local Parmesan-makers, who have been subjected to multiple organized large-scale thefts over the years, have turned to the bank to store and protect their cheese. Such is the cheese’s worth that the bank also permits the wheels of cheese to be used by producers as collateral against loans. The cheese is in a purpose-built, climate-controlled storage facility that can hold 300,000 wheels (which are worth $950–$1,900 each) known as the “Fort Knox of cheese.” (via Longreads)

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.

Continue reading “Did a climber leave his girlfriend to die on the mountain?”