From NPR: “The strange journey of Einstein’s brain began on the evening of April 17, 1955, when the seventy-six-year-old physicist was admitted to Princeton Hospital complaining of chest pains. He died early the next morning of a burst aortic aneurysm. As in the cases of Carl Gauss and Walt Whitman, the issue of permission to perform an autopsy is clouded by subsequent testimony. Thomas Harvey, the pathologist on call that evening, would later say, “I just knew we had permission to do an autopsy, and I assumed that we were going to study the brain.” As reporters soon discovered, Harvey did not have permission. And not only did Harvey take the brain, he also removed the physicist’s eyeballs and gave them to Henry Abrams, Einstein’s eye doctor.”
A former mobster came out of retirement to steal Dorothy’s ruby red slippers
From Josh Funk for AP News: “An aging reformed mobster admitted stealing a pair of the ruby red slippers that Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz, saying he gave into the temptation of one last score after an old mob associate led him to believe the famous shoes must be adorned with real jewels to justify their $1 million insured value. Terry Jon Martin’s defense attorney finally revealed the 76-year-old’s motive for the 2005 theft from the Judy Garland Museum in the late actor’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, in a new memo filed ahead of his Jan. 29 sentencing in Duluth, Minnesota. The FBI recovered the shoes in 2018 when someone else tried to claim an insurance reward on them, but Martin wasn’t charged with stealing them until last year.”
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From Thomas Lake for CNN: “Johnny Gosch left home for the last time on a warm Sunday in late summer, in the pale morning light before sunrise. Just before 6 a.m., a neighbor heard a wagon rattling through the yard and figured it was Johnny taking his usual shortcut on his way to pick up his newspapers. A boy saw a blue car pull up, and saw Johnny talking to a stranger. What happened in the next few minutes would resonate for the next four decades, far beyond the rolling green hills of Iowa. Johnny would become a tragic abstraction, a face on a milk carton, a story that warned other kids away from paper routes and changed the way police handled missing-children cases.”
This language was long believed extinct but then one man spoke up
From Natalie Alcoba for the NYT: “As a boy, Blas Omar Jaime spent many afternoons learning about his ancestors. His mother, Ederlinda Miguelina Yelón, passed along the knowledge she had stored in Chaná, a throaty language spoken by barely moving the lips or tongue. The Chaná are an Indigenous people in Argentina and Uruguay whose lives were intertwined with the mighty Paraná River, the second longest in South America. Ms. Miguelina Yelón urged her son to protect their stories by keeping them secret. So it was not until decades later that he made a startling discovery: No one else seemed to speak Chaná. Scholars had long considered the language extinct.”
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From Truly Adventurous: “Tim Todd spent a quiet and, by all appearances, happy weekend with his wife, Patti. First thing Monday he went to meet his boss, private security kingpin Bill Pagano, to solidify his plans to have her killed. Bill, the former police chief of the small town of Festus, Missouri, said he had gone to St. Louis to rendezvous with a pair of hitmen who Tim was convinced would solve all his problems. Bill was Tim’s mentor. And Tim was Bill’s right-hand man. But the chummy brotherhood was a veneer. Bill was recording the conversation with his protégé to bring to his friends in law enforcement. The events already in motion would soon draw the attention of the entire Midwest.”
A whale named Hvaldimir escaped captivity and became a global celebrity
From Ferris Jabr at the NYT: “On April 26, 2019, a beluga whale appeared near Tufjord, a village in northern Norway, immediately alarming fishermen in the area. Belugas in that part of the world typically inhabit the remote Arctic and are rarely spotted as far south as the Norwegian mainland. Although they occasionally travel solo, they tend to live and move in groups. This particular whale was entirely alone and unusually comfortable around humans, trailing boats and opening his mouth as though expecting to be fed. And he seemed to be tangled in rope. When a fisherman named Joar Hesten got a closer look, he realized that the whale was in fact wearing a harness: one strap girdling his neck and another gripping his torso just behind his flippers.”
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From Elamin Abdelmahmoud for Rolling Stone: “Ralph Peer was the beginning of the business of country music. He went to the South with the sole purpose of finding competition for Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, a black woman. In the South, he was convinced to record Fiddlin’ John Carson, in what became recognized as the first commercial country-music recording, ‘The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane.’ Peer took credit for inventing something he called ‘hillbilly music,’ which is what country was known as until after the Second World War. It didn’t matter that what he found in the South were white and black musicians recording the same songs and playing the same music with the same instruments.”
Japanese custom requires every school child to have an identical $450 backpack
From One From Nippon: “Every year, around March, a curious social custom occurs in Japanese families. Parents of kids entering elementary school visit the grandparents and gingerly tread the topic of buying the kids a very expensive item: a randoseru. The Japanese school bag costs a whopping $450 on average. During the Meiji Reforms of the late 1800s, Japan aimed to modernize, and one tiny part of these reforms was the introduction of the rucksack for soldiers to carry their baggage, a word that eventually became “randoseru” in Japanese. And schools instituted rules: No commuting by car, rickshaw, or horse and every student had to carry their own books and notebooks in a randoseru.”
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From Jacobo Prisco for CNN: “In New York City, only about 100 of the 1,000 crosswalk buttons actually function, confirmed a spokesperson from the city’s Department of Transportation in an email. That number has steadily decreased in recent years: When the New York Times revealed that the majority of New York’s buttons didn’t work in 2004, about 750 were still operational. The world is full of buttons that don’t actually do anything. They’re sometimes called “placebo buttons” – buttons that are mechanically sound and can be pushed, but provide no functionality. Like placebo pills, however, these buttons may still serve a purpose, according to Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist.”
I stopped speaking at 19 and suddenly found my artistic voice
From Henn Kim for The Guardian: “As a teenager living near Busan, South Korea, I felt that the everyday noises around me were like a battlefield. When I was 17, I started wearing headphones to escape. I was 19 when I decided to stop speaking. Despite my silence, friends at school valued me as a listener. We communicated through nods and gestures. Growing up, I felt trapped because I couldn’t express my emotions. Now, without words, I felt inspired. I started to communicate via text messages. Unlike spoken words, these can be edited. I moved to Seoul and began working part-time at a club when I was 22. There I met like-minded people who loved art. Finally, I began to speak a little.”
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How a mentally disabled man recorded his life through property title deeds
From Word magazine: “Sometime in the mid-60s, George and Pansy began investing their limited resources in real estate; buying and selling valueless plots of land in the Seattle area. These investments never made much money, but they ultimately allowed George to create a strange, disjointed autobiography within the legal records of Washington State. Whenever a parcel of land is bought or sold, the title deed is recorded on 16mm microfilm in the county courthouse. George discovered that, due to a quirk of the law, anyone who pays the nominal per-page fee can record anything they want as a “title deed.” So he began using this recording system for purposes that were never even envisioned.”
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When a Chicago newspaper bought a bar to expose corruption
From the Sun-Times: “The Chicago Sun-Times began publishing an elaborate 25-part series in January 1978, following undercover work by a team of reporters who purchased a run-down dive bar — the Mirage tavern — to expose corrupt city inspectors who glossed over obvious code violations in exchange for bribes. Forty years later, the reporters who worked on the undercover series shared their memories at an event moderated by editor-in-chief of the Sun-Times Chris Fusco. “Even in an era where newspapers did a lot of undercover journalism, heavy-lifting, reporters being able to take months to do work on one story, this one stood out because of its creativity,” Fusco said.
This Japanese shop has been in business for over a thousand years
From Ben Dooley for the NYT: “Naomi Hasegawa’s family sells toasted mochi out of a small, cedar-timbered shop next to a rambling old shrine in Kyoto. The family started the business to provide refreshments to weary travelers coming from across Japan to pray for pandemic relief — in the year 1000. Japan is an old-business superpower. The country is home to more than 33,000 with at least 100 years of history — over 40 percent of the world’s total, according to a study. Over 3,100 have been running for at least two centuries. Around 140 have existed for more than 500 years. And at least 19 claim, like the Hasagewa family, to have been continuously operating since the first millennium.”
When people are going blind, their brain sometimes creates hallucinations
From Julia Rothman for The New Yorker: “When I first saw them, they were in the lobby of my building,” said Ron Markowitz, who suffers from Charles Bonnet syndrome. “These people were moving generally in my direction, but not reaching me. There didn’t appear to be any conversation between anybody. There was no noise or sound. They were on the ground, but there was no walking. They were just gliding. They were in brown tones and dressed in costime from the late nineteenth century. There were no hands or arms. I could see they had faces, but I couldn’t see their features. I was told that what I have is called Charles Bonnet syndrome – my brain is trying to compensate for what my eyes aren’t seeing. It’s trying to help me fill in the blanks.”
In every state but one, the game is called “Duck, Duck, Goose”
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipty engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, 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.
From Sean Thomas for The Independent: “Sitting in her little house near Tarbes, in the French Pyrenees, Marie-Pierre Manet-Beauzac is talking about her ancestry. The story of her bloodline is marked with a unique sadness: because she belongs to an extraordinary tribe of hidden pariahs, repressed in France for a thousand years. Marie-Pierre is a Cagot. If the word “Cagot” means nothing to you, that is not surprising. The history of the Cagot people is obscure; some assert it has been deliberately erased. Marie certainly believes that: “To talk about the Cagots is still a bad thing in the mountains. The French are ashamed of what they did to us, the Cagots are ashamed of what they were.”
Research shows there’s nothing wrong with marrying your first cousin
From Richard Conniff for Discover: “Charles Darwin, the grandchild of first cousins, married a first cousin. So did Albert Einstein. In our lore, cousin marriages are unnatural, the province of hillbillies and swamp rats. In the United States they are deemed such a threat to mental health that 31 states have outlawed first-cousin marriages. This phobia is distinctly American, a heritage of early evolutionists with misguided notions about the upward march of human societies. Their fear was that cousin marriages would cause us to breed our way back to frontier savagery. But a team of scientists led by Robin L. Bennett, president of the National Society of Genetic Counselors, found cousin marriages are not significantly riskier than any other marriage.”
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From Twenty Thousand Hertz: “Pinkfong’s version of Baby Shark is especially sticky, but I think that there’s something elementally enticing and irreducibly catchy about Baby Shark no matter what its arrangement. And I think this because the Pinkfong version, it’s not the first time that Baby Shark has gone viral. In 2006, Alexandra Mueller was working at a camp for kids teaching journalism. There was a song they sang at the camp called the Kleiner Hai [Music clip]. Kleiner Hai means little shark in German. As you can hear, the song has a different tune than Baby Shark, but it’s recognizably related. The verses mean more or less the same thing and it comes with all of the same hand motions.”
An engineer got a ticket and his response changed the way traffic lights work
From Thomas Claburn for The Register: “A Swedish engineer’s umbrage at a traffic ticket has led to a six-year legal fight and now a global change in the speed with which traffic light signals are timed. After Mats Järlström lost an initial legal challenge in 2014, a federal judge ruled that Oregon’s rules prohibiting people from representing themselves as engineers without a license from the state are unconstitutional. Järlström’s calculations and advocacy have led the Institute of Transportation Engineers to revisit its guidelines for the timing of traffic signals. As a result, yellow lights around the globe could last longer, since the ITE is an international advisory group of 90 countries.”
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Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. Before we begin, I realize that the “year-end round-up” newsletter has become so ubiquitous that you may have no room in your life for another one. But the round-up has become a time-tested tradition in the media business for some pretty compelling reasons – for one, the period between Christmas and New Year’s is kind of a dead zone, and round-ups are relatively easy to pull together when you are a) understaffed, b) tired c) hungover d) lacking in motivation or e) all of the above.
I am not immune to these kinds of pressures myself, I confess. But on top of that, I also find it kind of fascinating to look at which of the links I include here get the most clicks. That’s why when I started this newsletter, I also installed an open-source link-shortening service called Yourls, which lets me create custom links for the articles I share. It comes with built-in analytics that track the clicks on those links, in much the same way Twitter and other services do. I don’t really do anything with this information – I don’t sell it to advertisers, or pick different links to include based on whether they might get more clicks (at least not consciously). I just find it interesting! And maybe you will too.
This sample is obviously weighted with respect to time, in that the links I included in early versions of the newsletter have had time to accumulate more clicks. But I’m not sure how many people go back and look at previous versions of the newsletter, so it’s hard to say how much of an impact that has. Anyway, without further ado, here are the 10 most popular links since January, 2023:
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From Gareth Edwards at Every: “In September 1974, Ed Roberts was sitting at the bank in a foreclosure meeting. His once-profitable calculator company, Micro Instrument and Telemetry Systems, was on the verge of bankruptcy. But Roberts was soliciting a $65,000 loan. Not to spend on calculators, he explained to the bank, but for something much more important, something nobody had done before. He planned to build an affordable personal computer. This is the story of the man who created the personal computer, launched the careers of Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak, and decided—at the height of his success—to walk away, buy a horse farm, and go back to school to become a doctor.”
There’s a sunken galleon worth $20 billion, but no one can agree on who owns it
From Remy Tumin for the NYT: “When the San José made its final voyage from Seville, Spain, to the Americas in 1706, the Spanish galleon was considered to be one of the most complex machines ever built. Then it was destroyed in an ambush by the British in 1708 in what is known as Wager’s Action, sinking off the coast of Cartagena, Colombia, with a haul of gold, jewels and other goods that could be worth upward of $20 billion today. Some experts say that number is inflated. But the myth built around the San José has prompted the Colombian government to keep its exact location a secret as a matter of national security.”
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From the Washington Post: “At some point, Erik McIntyre inhaled the fungal spores. He couldn’t see them, or feel them, and it was weeks before he began to lose energy, to drop weight, to cough up blood at a karaoke bar in Arizona. Now he’s paralyzed from Valley fever, in a nursing home at age 53. The antifungal injections are less frequent now, and the lesions where the fungus grew on his face and arms have faded. But he knows he will never walk again. Valley fever has long haunted the American Southwest: Soldiers, construction workers, and prisoners have all encountered the fungus. But the threat is growing. Cases have roughly quadrupled over the past two decades.”
Why are there murals of angels holding guns in this Bolivian town?
From Amy Crawford for Atlas Obscura: “About an hour and a half south of La Paz, Bolivia, the town of Calamarca is in many ways a typical colonial settlement, a grid of houses and shops centered around a circa 1600 Baroque church that overlooks a small plaza. Inside this church, however, a remarkable gathering of angels has made the town a destination. Dressed in lace, feathers, and gold brocade—finery that resembled that of the Indigenous elites who administered Spanish colonial rule—these celestial beings are androgynous, posing like dancers with their wings discretely held behind them. What startles the viewer is that they are also bristling with weaponry: Each is armed with a musket—specifically, an arquebus, a common infantry gun of the 16th century.”
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From Amitha Kalaichandran for Undark: “In May, I was invited to take part in a survey by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to better delineate how long Covid is described and diagnosed as part of The National Research Action Plan on Long Covid. The survey had several questions around definitions and criteria to include, such as “brain fog” often experienced by those with long Covid. My intuition piqued, and I began to wonder about the similarities between these neurological symptoms and those experienced by people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. As a medical journalist with clinical and epidemiological experience, I found the possible connection and its implications impossible to ignore.”
A Russian whaling fleet hunted humpback whales almost to extinction
From Charles Homans for the Pacific Standard: “In five years of intensive whaling by first one, then two, three, and finally four fleets, the populations of humpback whales off the coasts of Australia and New Zealand were so reduced in abundance that they were completely destroyed. It was one of the fastest decimations of an animal population in world history, and it had happened almost entirely in secret. By the time a ban on commercial whaling went into effect, in 1986, the Soviets had reported killing a total of 2,710 humpback whales in the Southern Hemisphere. In fact, they had killed nearly 18 times that many, along with thousands of unreported whales of other species.”
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From Sarah Viren for the New York Times: “Liz Flatt drove to Austin mostly out of desperation. She had tried talking with the police. She had tried working with a former F.B.I. profiler who ran a nonprofit dedicated to solving unsolved murders. She had been interviewed by journalists and at least one podcaster. She had been featured on a Netflix documentary series about a man who falsely confessed to hundreds of killings. She didn’t know it at the time, but Flatt was at a crossroads in what she had taken to calling her journey, a path embarked on after a prayer-born decision five years earlier to try and find who killed her sister, Deborah Sue Williamson, or Debbie, in 1975.”
Human beings give birth because we were infected by an ancient virus
From Carrie Arnold for Nova: “The rise of the mammals may be feel like a familiar tale, but there’s a twist you likely don’t know about: If it wasn’t for a virus, it might not have happened at all. One of the few survivors of the asteroid impact 65 million years ago was a small, furry, shrew-like creature that lived in underground burrows and only ventured out at night, when predators weren’t active. The critter—already the product of some 100 million years of evolution—looked like a modern mammal, with body hair and mammary glands, except for one tiny detail: according to a recent genetic study, it didn’t have a placenta. And its kind might never have evolved one if not for a chance encounter with a retrovirus.”
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Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, an artificial intelligence pioneer, at his home in Toronto on Monday, April 24, 2023. Hinton is leaving Google so that he can freely share his concern that AI could cause the world serious harm. (Chloe Ellingson/The New York Times)
From Joshua Rothman for The New Yorker: “People say it’s just glorified autocomplete,” Geoffrey Hinton told me. “Now, let’s analyze that. Suppose you want to be really good at predicting the next word. If you want to be really good, you have to understand what’s being said. That’s the only way. So by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand. Yes, it’s ‘autocomplete’—but you didn’t think through what it means to have a really good autocomplete.” Hinton thinks that “large language models,” such as GPT, which powers OpenAI’s chatbots, can comprehend the meanings of words and ideas. And that they are either close to or are already able to reason in the same kind of way that human brains do. And that could be dangerous.”
The rise and fall of the bank robbery capital of the world
From Peter Houlahan: “Less than an hour later, the man the FBI called The Yankee walked out of Imperial Bank in Westwood, practically in the shadow of the Federal Building that houses the FBI’s L.A. Bank Robbery Squad, with $4,190. Diving into rush hour traffic on the 405 Freeway, The Yankee headed over the hills to the San Fernando Valley and pulled a final job just before closing time at the First Interstate in Encino for a take of $2,413. Four hours, six heists, $13,197. As impressive as The Yankee’s performance had been, a record for bank licks by one person in a single day, It did not entirely shock the FBI agents in bank robbery squad. This was L.A. after all, and by 1983, L.A. had long established itself as the undisputed “Bank Robbery Capital of the World.”
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In February, The Crimson, the student newspaper at Harvard University, broke the story that the school had decided to shut down the Technology and Social Change project, a research effort founded by Joan Donovan, a prominent disinformation researcher. This took many researchers in the field by surprise; Donovan was highly regarded in the field, and had reportedly been wooed by a number of prestigious institutions before agreeing to join Harvard and lead the project. Donovan was also one of the first researchers to get her hands on the documents leaked by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook staffer who collected evidence of alleged wrongdoing by the platform. Getting access to these documents seemed like a coup for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, which Donovan and the Technology and Social Change project were affiliated with.
Why would Harvard decide to shut down such a prominent and well-regarded effort? The Crimsonreported in February that according to unnamed sources within Harvard, Donovan was being forced out by Douglas Elmendorf, dean of the Kennedy School of Government, because she and her work were getting too much attention. The Crimson‘s sources said that Elmendorf had forbidden Donovan to spend any more money on the Technology and Social Change project or hire any more staff. However, according to James Smith, a Harvard spokesman who sent The Crimson a statement at the time, Donovan’s project was being shut down because university policy required that every research effort be led by a faculty member, and Donovan was a contract staffer.
Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
From Chris Lewicki: “Some mistakes feel worse than death. A February evening in 2003 started out routine at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA. I gowned up in cleanroom garb and passed into the High Bay 1 airlock in Building 179 where nearly all of NASA’s historic interplanetary spacecraft have been built since the Moon-bound Ranger series in the 1960s. After years of work by thousands of engineers, technicians, and scientists, there were only two weeks remaining before the Spirit Mars Rover would be transported to Cape Canaveral in Florida for launch ahead of its sibling, Opportunity.”
Literary fight club: What started the great poets brawl of 1968
From Nick Ripatrizone for Literary Hub: “One Saturday evening in 1968, the poets battled on Long Island. Drinks spilled into the grass. Punches were flung; some landed. Chilean and French poets stood on a porch and laughed while the Americans brawled. A glass table shattered. Bloody-nosed poets staggered into the coming darkness. Allen Ginsberg fell to his knees and prayed. The World Poetry Conference at Stony Brook University was almost over. At the center of it all was Jim Harrison, a self-described “nasty item,” a prominent, if obnoxious, student in comparative literature. He had no business graduating.”
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