From the BBC: “Des Destinées de l’Ame (Destinies of the Soul) has been housed at Houghton Library since the 1930s. In 2014, scientists determined that the material it was bound with was in fact human skin. But the university has now announced it has removed the binding “due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history”. Des Destinées de l’Ame is a meditation on the soul and life after death, written by Arsène Houssaye in the mid-1880s. He is said to have given it to his friend, Dr Ludovic Bouland, a doctor, who then reportedly bound the book with skin from the body of an unclaimed female patient who had died of natural causes. Harvard said it was looking at ways to ensure “the human remains will be given a respectful disposition that seeks to restore dignity to the woman whose skin was used”.
Plastic manufacturing companies deceived the public about recycling
From The Guardian: “Plastic producers have known for more than 30 years that recycling is not an economically or technically feasible plastic waste management solution. That has not stopped them from promoting it, according to a new report. “The companies lied,” said Richard Wiles, president of fossil-fuel accountability advocacy group the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), which published the report. Plastic, which is made from oil and gas, is notoriously difficult to recycle. Doing so requires meticulous sorting, since most of the thousands of chemically distinct varieties of plastic cannot be recycled together. That renders an already pricey process even more expensive. The industry has known for decades about these existential challenges, but obscured that information in its marketing campaigns, the report shows.”
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From Atlas Obscura: “It was the spring of 1938, and a woman sailing on the Bay of Bengal was dreaming of snow. Maybe it was the burn blisters on her skin or the escape from the Indian Imperial Police that had made the adventurer Aina Cederblom sentimental. After two and a half years of sailing solo through Asia, she was ready to head home to Sweden—at least that was the 39-year-old’s plan. Fate had other ideas. During the early 20th century, Aina Cederblom kept popping up in unexpected corners of the world, from Greenland to India to the Philippines. By the 1930s, Cederblom and her solo sailing adventures were well-known throughout Europe. Newspapers reported about how she went missing in Greenland’s glacier-filled waters, hid from the police in Tibet, and was shot at in the Black Sea. Yet, the memory of her achievements has almost disappeared.”
The longest bus route in the world used to run from London to Calcutta and took 50 days
From Vintages: “The bus service from London, England to Calcutta, India is considered to be the longest bus route in the world. The service, which was started in 1957, was routed to India via Belgium, Yugoslavia and West Pakistan – a route known as the Hippie Route. According to reports, it took about 50 days for the bus to reach Calcutta from London. The voyage was 32, 669 km long and was in service until 1976. The cost of the trip was £85 and this included food, travel and accommodation. The trip was equipped with reading facilities, separate sleeping bunks for everyone, and fan-operated heaters. There was a kitchen with all equipment and amenities. There was a forward observation lounge on the upper deck of the bus, and it took time to spend at major tourist destinations along the way, including the Taj Mahal on the banks of the Ganges. Shopping was also allowed in Tehran, Salzburg, Kabul, Istanbul and Vienna.”
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From Quanta: “Electroconvulsive therapy has a public relations problem. The treatment, which sends electric currents through the brain to induce a brief seizure, has barbaric, inhumane connotations — for example, it was portrayed as a sadistic punishment in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But for patients with depression that does not improve with medications, electroconvulsive therapy can be highly effective. Studies have found that some 50% to 70% of patients with major depressive disorder see their symptoms improve after a course of ECT. In comparison, medications aimed at altering brain chemistry help only 10% to 40% of depression patients. Still, even after many decades of use, scientists don’t know how ECT alters the brain’s underlying biology.”
How birdwatching’s biggest record threw its online community into chaos
From The Guardian: “In late 2023, 70-year-old birder Peter Kaestner was within striking distance of a goal that had never been accomplished: seeing more than 10,000 different species of birds in the wild. Such a record had previously been unthinkable, but with new technology facilitating rare bird sightings, improved DNA testing identifying a growing number of bird species, and public listing platforms making it easier to keep track of and share findings, more super-birders are inching towards the five digits. Just as Kaestner approached the finish line for his record 10,000 birds, though, a previously unknown competitor by the name Jason Mann flew in out of nowhere to snatch the record out from under him. The mystery birder seemed to have uploaded a backlog of thousands of species he had seen over several decades, listing more than 9,000 birds.”
This ancient Japanese tradition of female freediving is dying out
From Nautilus: “On the last day of fishing season, Ayami Nakata starts her morning by lighting a small fire in her hut beside the harbor. The temperature outside hovers around freezing and she changes into a wetsuit. For an hour and a half, Nakata takes minute-long plunges into the frigid water, free-diving 20 feet down to the rocky seabed and kelpy shore, and picking up any abalone, sea cucumbers, and turban shells. Nakata, 44 years old and a mother of five, is an ama diver: a freediving fisherwoman harvesting shellfish and seaweed according to an ancient Japanese technique. She’s been diving for seven years, but her profession is slowly dying: Climate change has depleted the shellfish along Japan’s coasts, and younger generations have lost interest in the craft, abandoning coastal villages to pursue careers in big cities. Women like Nakata are left to question whether they’ll be the last to embody this way of life.”
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When the Eiffel Tower was first built many Parisians hated it
From JSTOR Daily: When construction of the now-iconic Eiffel Tower began in 1887, many Parisians were less than enamored by the project-in-progress. In fact, some were outright hostile towards it. But perhaps the Eiffel Tower’s greatest rejection came from the people who held the most authority on what worked aesthetically for the city and what didn’t: Parisian artists and writers. To them, the Eiffel Tower, spindly and bare like a skeleton, posed an unforgivable threat to the city’s sacred reputation as a lush, beatific urban ideal for nurturing creative minds. Unlike the Lost Generation of the 1920s, their spiritual descendants, the late-nineteenth-century intellectuals didn’t feel “inspired” by the looming presence over their city. The unusual structure hadn’t yet achieved its modern status, which William Thompson describes as “the acknowledged foremost universal symbol of Paris and France.”
Driving with Mr. Gil: A retiree teaches Afghan women the rules of the road
From The New York Times: Bibifatima Akhundzada wove a white Chevy Spark through downtown Modesto, Calif., on a recent morning, practicing turns, braking and navigating intersections. “Go, go, go,” said her driving instructor, as she slowed down through an open intersection. “Don’t stop. Don’t stop.” Her teacher was Gil Howard, an 82-year-old retired professor who happened upon a second career as a driving instructor. And no ordinary instructor. In Modesto, he is the go-to teacher for women from Afghanistan, where driving is off limits for virtually all of them. In recent years, Mr. Howard has taught some 400 women in the 5,000-strong Afghan community in this part of California’s Central Valley. According to local lore, thanks to “Mr. Gil,” as he is known in Modesto, more Afghan women likely drive in and around the city of about 220,000 than in all Afghanistan.
This kind of elevator has no doors and never stops moving
From Why Is This Interesting: “A cyclic elevator runs on a continuous loop, with two columns of small, doorless, closet-sized chambers in constant motion, one going up and one going down. A rider steps into a moving chamber to ride the elevator, and steps carefully off when the desired floor is reached. It doesn’t require much more dexterity than riding an escalator, but the consequences of failure are gruesome to imagine. Cyclic elevators are commonly called “paternosters,” a name that reflects their resemblance to a string of rosary beads. When praying a rosary, one recites the “Our Father” prayer, or “Paternoster” in Latin. The development of the paternoster elevator roughly coincided with the conventional elevator in the second half of the 19th century. Paternosters never became as ubiquitous as conventional elevators, and as the public became more familiar with conventional elevators, many paternosters succumbed to disrepair, disuse, or were converted into normal elevators.”
He built a fantasy castle in his backyard without plans because he felt like it
Apparently there's a dude who lives like half an hour away from me who built a massive fantasy castle in his backyard without any plans just because he felt like it pic.twitter.com/WnhUOhOB3X
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me.
Last week, Donald Trump looked to be in dire straits, both legally and financially. He owed four hundred and fifty million dollars in legal penalties after a New York judge found that he fraudulently inflated the value of his assets in order to get bank loans, on top of the eighty-three million dollars he owed after losing a defamation case brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll, who has accused Trump of sexual assault. (He also faces several smaller judgments for defying a subpoena, disparaging a law clerk, and contempt of court.) Despite Trump’s repeated claims to be a billionaire, his legal team told the court that he didn’t have enough cash on hand to resolve the first judgment, and that he had been unable to find anyone to lend him the money or finance a bond until he could pay. In the end, the court allowed him to post a smaller bond, but only gave him ten days to come up with the full amount. If he does not, then Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, will be able to start seizing his assets.
This week, though, Trump appeared to be handed a lifeline: Trump Media and Technology Group—the social media company through which he owns Truth Social, a Trumpian clone of X—merged with Digital World Acquisition Corporation, a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. (A SPAC is an investment vehicle created for the purpose of buying other companies and taking them public.) The combined entity, now known as Trump Media and Technology Group, went public on Tuesday and quickly hit a market value of around eight billion dollars. Since Trump owns about 60 percent of the shares, his net worth has suddenly risen by more than four billion dollars.
So, is Trump on easy street now, with such vast resources that he no longer needs to worry about his legal penalties? Not exactly. Both he and Trump Media must clear a number of roadblocks before that happens. Success is by no means assured. And either way, business appears to be tied up here, to an unusual extent, with politics.
Note: This was originally published as the daily email newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
From The Atlantic: “One night last winter, over drinks in downtown Los Angeles, the biologist David Gruber told me that human beings might someday talk to sperm whales. In 2020, Gruber founded Project CETI with some of the world’s leading artificial-intelligence researchers, and they have so far raised $33 million for a high-tech effort to learn the whales’ language. Gruber said that they hope to record billions of the animals’ clicking sounds with floating hydrophones, and then to decipher the sounds’ meaning using neural networks. Sperm whales are the planet’s largest-brained animals, and their nested social structures are immense. About 10 whales swim together full-time as a unit. They will sometimes meet up with others in groups of hundreds. All of the whales in these larger groups belong to clans that can contain as many as 10,000 animals, or perhaps more.”
I thought my father was killed by a teenage gang but the truth was very different
From The Guardian: “I was 12, only a year from being a teenager, and the holidays stretched out before us. Such an atmosphere called for celebration. For us, a real treat meant a takeaway – we usually couldn’t afford them. My dad, Mike, was going to drive to the town centre: there was a chip shop Emily was keen on and it was her special day. A little later, Jackie was in the living room watching TV when the phone rang. It was Mike. He said the queue at the chip shop in town was too long so he’d driven back to our council estate and was calling from the public phone box at the local shops. There was a loud knock at the front door. “There’s been an accident, Mrs King. Your husband has collapsed.” Then later, the newspaper reported that police had arrested a gang, first four, then a fifth young man, on suspicion of murder.”
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From Slate: “When Bobby Fischer was still a brash wunderkind, Lane was a bona fide grown-up media star. In 1961 alone, she was interviewed on the Today show, was profiled in the New York Times Magazine, and appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. She was touted as a great American hope against the scary Russians. Lane marketed herself and, in the process, elevated chess’s profile in America. Disgusted by the game’s latent sexism, she criticized its leadership and advocated for equal pay. Then, as quickly as she’d arrived, she all but disappeared from the game. There were many similarities between the fictional Beth Harmon (played in the adaptation by Anya Taylor-Joy) and the real-life Lane. Both were tempestuous, driven, talented, and unafraid to take on men, the chess establishment, or the Soviets. And both endured turbulent childhoods.”
An Ohio man who hid his identity for 30 years is accused of genocide in Rwanda
From CantonRep: “The U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday arrested a Stark County man, accusing him of rape and genocide in Rwanda in 1994, an event that left about 800,000 dead. Eric Tabaro Nshimiye faces various federal charges that include obstruction of justice and offering false testimony in the 2019 Boston trial of his former classmate and now-convicted Rwandan genocide perpetrator Jean Leonard Teganya. Neighbors who live on his street expressed shock, describing a man who invited his neighbors to his house for graduation parties for his sons and served them African food. Children played soccer in the Nshimiyes’ yard and he was known to mow the grass of his elderly next-door neighbor. Nshimiye said he was a victim during the genocide, but prosecutors say he was among the notorious perpetrators of crimes during the Rwanda genocide.”
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From The Guardian: “I think I was about 10 years old when I discovered my mother was a sex worker. I arrived home one afternoon from school and caught her at work. Hearing sounds I vaguely associated with sex, I let myself in, thenquietly straight back out again. I wasn’t actually sure what I knew for quite a while. Eventually, I put it together: an unusually high level of phone calls, whispered conversations in the hall and a too-young viewing of the film Pretty Baby meant I realised what her new business was. She certainly wasn’t a secretary any more, as I had always believed her to be. She was in her mid-40s, and maybe she had long ago found other ways to support us. I am unsure of much of my personal history – where one lie ends, and another begins.”
Note: I neglected to include a link to yesterday’s top story about Havana Syndrome, so if you still want to read it, you can find it here.
How Frank Oppenheimer differed from his more famous brother Robert
From Knowable magazine: “During the post-World War II years, the emotionally close ties between the brothers (Robert — the “father of the atom bomb” — and his younger brother, Frank — the “uncle” of the bomb, as he mischievously called himself) were strained and for a time even fractured. Both hoped that the nascent nuclear technology would remain under global, and peaceful, control. Both hoped that the sheer horror of the weapons they helped to build could lead to a warless world. They were on the same side, but not on the same page when it came to tactics. Robert — whose fame surged after the war — believed decisions should be left to experts who understood the issues and had the power to make things happen — that is, people like himself. Frank believed just as fiercely that everyday people had to be involved. It took everyone to win the war, he argued, and it would take everyone to win the peace. In the end, both lost.”
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From Scientific American: “In late 2016 U.S. diplomats and family members based in Cuba began reporting a wide swath of neurological symptoms, including dizziness, headaches, deafness and difficulty concentrating, following exposure to ear-splitting noises around their homes. This “Havana syndrome” outbreak disrupted U.S. relations with Cuba, spawned congressional hearings on the “attacks” and left some people with years of disabling symptoms, leading to years of debate among scientists about possible causes, which ranged from pesticides to group psychology to noise from crickets. Now two medical studies conducted by the National Institutes of Health might finally have an answer. The researchers compared more than 80 of these affected individuals with healthy people. The results, detailed in the Journal of the American Medical Association, show no clinical signs of any brain or medical illness.”
Trailblazing French artist Rosa Bonheur is finally getting the attention she deserves
From The Smithsonian: “The richest and most famous female artist of 19th-century France, Marie-Rosalie Bonheur lived and worked here at her small Château de By, above the Seine River town of Thomery, for almost 40 years. There were other female painters in her day, but none like Bonheur. Shattering female convention, she painted animals in lifelike, exacting detail, as big and wild as she wanted, studying them in their natural, mud-and-odor-filled settings. That she was a woman with a gift for self-promotion contributed to her celebrity—and her notoriety. So did her personal life. She was an eccentric and a pioneer who wore men’s clothes, never married and championed gender equality, not as a feminist for all women but for herself and her art. Her paintings brought her fame and fortune and she was sought after by royals, statesmen and celebrities.”
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From The Guardian: “Christopher Knight was 20 years old when he walked away from society, not to be seen again for more than a quarter of a century. He had been working for less than a year near Boston, Massachusetts, when abruptly, without giving notice to his boss, he quit his job. He never even returned his tools. He cashed his final pay cheque and left town. Knight did not tell anyone where he was going. He drove north to Maine, where he had grown up, then parked the car and tossed the keys on the console. He had a tent and a backpack but no compass, no map. Without knowing where he was going, he stepped into the trees and walked away. His departure from the outside world was a confounding mix of incredible commitment and complete lack of forethought. It was as if he went camping for the weekend and then didn’t come home for 25 years.”
China’s emerging psychedelic scene looks a lot like the scene in Silicon Valley
From Vox: “Professor of Chinese Studies Fan Pen Li Chen writes that the history of Chinese psychedelic use is a conspicuous blank in contemporary English language accounts. In modern times, too, China has rarely been included in talks of the psychedelic renaissance. Gearin notes that ayahuasca’s introduction into modern China is similarly tough to pin down, though accounts of Indigenous ayahuasca shamans begin in the early 21st century. Gearin spent years embedded with ayahuasca users across mainland China. He chronicled the experiences of people like “Ting Ting,” a Chinese woman in her early 30s who manages a large technology firm and hopes that drinking ayahuasca will help advance her career, and “Wang,” a 34-year-old executive manager at a fast-food franchise who drinks ayahuasca to become more successful at his job.”
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Over the past decade or so, as social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have become significant forums for public speech, governments in the US and elsewhere have made informal recommendations to them about their handling of issues such as hate speech, terrorist content, and disinformation. In legal parlance, this kind of contact is known as “jawboning,” a word that generally connotes an act of persuasion. But some critics, especially on the right, argue that it actually amounts to government censorship.
In 2022, the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration, alleging that officials violated the First Amendment by “coercing” or “significantly encouraging” social media companies to block content related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the efficacy of vaccines, and the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. Last July (as I wrote at the time for CJR), a federal judge in Louisiana handed down an injunction that forbade government agents from engaging in behavior of this type. He also described the discussions between the administration and the platforms as the “most massive attack against free speech” in US history. The Biden administration appealed. In September, a judge of the Fifth Circuit appeals court upheld the injunction.
That judge also struck down some parts of the injunction, ruling that it was overly broad. The Biden administration was still not happy with the outcome, however. Elizabeth Prelogar, the solicitor general, asked the Supreme Court to block the order in its entirety, arguing that one of the cornerstones of presidential power is the ability to “seek to persuade Americans—and American companies—to act in ways that the president believes would advance the public interest.”Allowing the injunction to stand, Prelogar wrote, would result in “grave and irreparable harms.” She called on the Supreme Court to rule, once and for all, on whether the administration’s discussions with the platforms were lawful or not.
Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
From JSTOR Daily: “It takes a lot to be branded the most dangerous woman in the world. This was life for Mary Ann Duignan, a.k.a. May Churchill Sharpe, a.k.a. “Chicago May,” who made her way from Europe to America and back again as one the most notorious criminals of the early 1900s. Duignan was born in Ireland in 1871. But life across the ocean was calling her, and she answered by leaving home in 1890. May left home in the middle of the night, taking her family’s life savings with her, and unlike other European emigrants, she made that transatlantic trip in luxury, using her stolen gains to travel first-class. May, like many women in the city, turned to sex work to make ends meet, but she preferred to call herself a ‘badger,’ the term for a con-woman who entices her victim with sex, then robs him before she has to complete her part of the bargain.”
A second man is charged in the theft of Judy Garland’s famous red slippers
From the New York Times: “A second man has been charged in connection with the 2005 theft of a pair of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz,” according to the authorities, who said that he had threatened to release a sex tape of a woman if she told the authorities about the theft. The man, Jerry Hal Saliterman, 76, of Hennepin County, Minn., was charged on Friday with one count of theft of major artwork and one count of witness tampering. The famed red-sequined pumps were stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minn., in 2005. Their whereabouts were a mystery for years until 2018, when the F.B.I. announced that they had been recovered. According to the indictment, Saliterman received the slippers, which he knew were stolen, and tried to intimidate an unidentified woman by threatening to reveal a sex tape of her to her family if “she did not keep her mouth shut.”
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From The Guardian: “Laurie Anderson, the American avant garde artist, musician and thinker says she has grown hopelessly hooked on an AI text generator that emulates the vocabulary and style of her own longtime partner and collaborator, Velvet Underground co-founder Lou Reed, who died in 2013. She fed a vast cache of Reed’s writing, songs and interviews into the machine. A decade after his death, the resulting algorithm lets Anderson type in prompts before an AI Reed begins “riffing” written responses back to her, in prose and verse. “I’m totally 100%, sadly addicted to this,” she laughs. “I still am, after all this time. I kind of literally just can’t stop doing it, and my friends just can’t stand it.” The results, Anderson says, can be hit and miss. “Three-quarters of it is just completely idiotic and stupid. And then maybe 15% is like, ‘Oh?’. And then the rest is pretty interesting. And that’s a pretty good ratio for writing, I think.”
She can tell whether someone has Parkinson’s based on the way they smell
From the BBC: “A Scottish woman who found she could detect Parkinson’s through smell has inspired scientists to develop a swab test that could be used to diagnose it. Researchers in Manchester have created a new method which they say can detect the disease in three minutes. Their work was inspired by Joy Milne, a retired nurse from Perth. Joy, 72, knew her husband Les had Parkinson’s more than 12 years before he was diagnosed when she identified a change in the way he smelled. “He had this musty rather unpleasant smell especially round his shoulders and the back of his neck and his skin had definitely changed,” she said. She only linked the odour to the disease after Les was diagnosed and they met people at a Parkinson’s UK support group who had the same distinctive smell. Now a team in the University of Manchester, working with Joy, has developed a simple skin-swab test which they claim is 95% accurate under laboratory conditions when it comes to telling whether people have Parkinson’s.”
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From Theo Padnos: “The thing about life in an electricity-less cell underground is that you soon lose your orientation in time and space. Sometimes you wake up in the early evening believing it to be dawn. Winter couldn’t possibly have come yet, you tell yourself, and then one day, some chance glimpse of the out-of-doors reveals the snow to be sifting down over a courtyard. One’s captors do everything in their power to deepen this disorientation. Whenever you most need to see, that’s when they put you in a blindfold. You’re not meant to know the date, who’s winning the war, where you are, anyone’s actual names. During my time in Syria, I sustained a series of head injuries. Under such circumstances, the more one stares at the walls, the more the room spins. Which way is the floor? Off which walls is the gunfire ricocheting? You can guess, but really you have no idea.”
Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic work, but not in the way scientists originally thought they did
From The Atlantic: “When scientists first created the class of drugs that includes Ozempic, they told a tidy story about how the medications would work: The gut releases a hormone called GLP-1 that signals you’re full, so a drug that mimics GLP-1 could do the exact same thing, helping people eat less and lose weight. The rest, as they say, is history. The GLP-1 revolution birthed semaglutide, which became Ozempic and Wegovy, and tirzepatide, which became Mounjaro and Zepbound—drugs that are rapidly changing the face of obesity medicine. They work as intended: as modulators of appetite. But at the same time that they have become massive successes, the science that underpinned their development has fallen apart. The fact that they worked was serendipity, Randy Seeley, an obesity researcher at the University of Michigan, told me.”
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From the NYT: “Like a lot of explosive financial scandals, the story of Michael Quinn and Brendan Cahill could fairly be described as a simple proposition that spun completely out of control. The two had been working in Nigeria since the 1970s, doing small-time deals in the energy and defense sectors, like fixing tanks and siting oil wells. But in the mid-2000s, they spied a bigger opportunity. They knew that Nigeria’s refineries were burning off most of the gas during oil drilling, so they proposed a plant that would take in that gas and use it to power the grid. Then the government changed its mind, so they went to arbitration. Quinn and Cahill hadn’t laid a single pipe for the gas-leaning facility, but this was immaterial. When the arbitration finished, the government of Nigeria was defeated and the decision was in P.&I.D.’s favor. The damages were $6.6 billion.”
The founder of Alcoholics Anonymous tried LSD and ignited a controversy still raging today
From Inverse: “It’s August 29, 1956. A philosopher, a psychiatrist, and his research assistant watch as the most famous recovering alcoholic puts a dose of LSD in his mouth and swallows. The man is Bill Wilson and he’s the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, the largest abstinence-only addiction recovery program in the world. By the time the man millions affectionately call “Bill W.” dropped acid, he’d been sober for more than two decades. His experience would fundamentally transform his outlook on recovery, horrify A.A. leadership, and disappoint hundreds of thousands. All this because Wilson believed other recovering alcoholics could benefit from taking LSD as a way to facilitate the “spiritual experience” he believed was necessary to successful recovery. “
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From The Economist: “The wake-up call in cell number nine of the ik-6 prison colony in the Siberian town of Omsk comes at 5am in the form of the Russian national anthem blasting from a loudspeaker. Vladimir Kara-Murza, a journalist and politician, knew as soon as he heard the opening chord that he had only five minutes to get up before prison guards would take away his pillow and mattress. By 5.20am his metal bed frame, attached to the wall, would be locked up so that he could not use it for the rest of the day. Kara-Murza’s cell, painted in bright blue, was five metres long and two metres wide. In the middle, a table and a bench were screwed to the floor. The only objects he was allowed to keep were a mug, a tooth brush, a towel and a pair of slippers. The light was never turned off. Later in the morning a mug of tea and a bowl of gluey porridge made from an unidentifiable grain would be pushed through a small hatch.”
He conned 18th-century London society by inventing his own language
From The Atlantic: “A Modest Proposal makes a passing reference to “the famous Psalmanazar, a native of the island Formosa.” This blond, blue-eyed “savage” claimed people ate children in his homeland. “When any young person happened to be put to death,” Jonathan Swift recounted, “the executioner sold the carcass to persons of quality as a prime dainty.” George Psalmanazar claimed to be a kidnapping victim who was snatched from Formosa (now known as Taiwan) by a Jesuit named Father de Rode of Avignon. In eighteenth-century England, Psalmanazar gained the same level of fame or infamy as a modern-day reality-television-star train wreck. Nobles and rich merchants invited him to their dinner tables, where he spoke gibberish while inhaling mouthfuls of bloody food. (According to imaginary custom, Formosans ate their meat raw.)”
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