Category: Newsletters

Back in 1984, when Erin was 13, her life seemed perfect. Her father, John H. McCann III, was successful, charming, and funny. Erin and her younger sister, Meredith, who was ten, lived in a Tudor-style mansion in a wealthy suburb of Pittsburgh. There was a swimming pool in their backyard, along with a zip line, a tree house, and a playhouse from FAO Schwarz that looked like a log cabin. Then, one September morning, the doorbell rang. When Meredith opened the front door, two men in suits asked if her parents were home. Leah came downstairs and told the men that she would be right back to speak with them after dropping Meredith at school. By the time Erin and Meredith got home that afternoon, their mother had left town. Leah told her daughters that they wouldn’t be going back to Fox Chapel—not after the weekend, not ever. They would all disappear and start a new life elsewhere, under new names. (via The Atavist)

A Brazilian court has ordered the restoration of Henry Ford’s ghost town in the Amazon

A court in the northern Brazilian state of Pará has ruled that both federal and local officials must act to restore and preserve Fordlandia, a city established nearly a century ago by U.S. industrialist Henry Ford deep in the Amazon rainforest. Fordlandia, now a ghost town and a district of the city of Aveiro, was built in 1927 in Pará by the Ford Motor Co. as a rubber-tapping metropolis intended to secure a steady supply of natural rubber for tires. Designed to resemble an idyllic American suburb, it was once the third-largest settlement in the Amazon region. However, disease ravaged the rubber tree plantations, leading to the city’s abandonment. In 1945, the Brazilian government acquired the site. In 2015, Brazil’s federal prosecutors’ office in Pará sued the country’s Iphan architectural heritage agency and the city of Aveiro for failing to preserve Fordlandia. They also demanded that authorities grant the city protected status. (via AP News)

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 “What it’s like growing up with a dad who smuggles cocaine”

Loren Krytzer walked into the California auction room broke and unemployed. Seventy-seven seconds later, he walked out a millionaire — all thanks to a blanket. His life changed forever when he discovered that a forgotten old family heirloom, a Navajo blanket from the 1800s that had been sitting in his closet for seven years, was actually worth $1.5 million. And just in time, too. He had been scraping by, living in a shack on the edge of California’s Liona Valley, and had lost a leg after a near-fatal car accident. He inherited the blanket initially because no one in his family realized its value, either. When his grandmother died, he had gone to her house to collect the books she had promised him. The last bag in the house held two blankets passed down from his great-grandmother: a softer Hudson’s Bay blanket and the Navajo blanket his grandmother once laid out on the porch when her cat was having kittens. (via CNBC)

The US military has been sending cryptographic keys via the GPS satellite system

The U.S. military has likely been quietly broadcasting codes for its global encryption network using public GPS for nearly 20 years, turning each satellite into a hidden “numbers station,” according to Steven Murdoch, an information security expert, who detailed his findings in a new published article in a security journal. That means every device that uses GPS has been receiving hidden government information for years, and nobody outside the military knew it until now. Murdoch, a professor of security engineering and head of the Information Security Research Group at University College London, presented evidence that a 176-bit GPS sequence labelled “Subframe 4, Page 17” is encrypted material from the Pentagon’s Over-the-Air Distribution (OTAD) network, which delivers cryptographic keys to military personnel. (via 404 Media)

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 “Broke and unemployed man got $1.5 million for a family heirloom”

A Nepali climbing guide thought to have died on Mount Everest has been found crawling down to Base Camp, six days after he was last seen alive. Dawa Sherpa was last seen above Camp 3, at around 24,600ft, while coming down the mountain after summiting. Hopes for his survival were slim as the air at that altitude is thin – but on Thursday, a cleaning crew spotted the experienced climber, who had frostbite on his hands but appeared to be in good health, sliding slowly down. Five people have died so far in this year’s climbing, three of them Nepalis who were involved in the Everest preparations. Dawa Sherpa – also known as Hillary Dawa Sherpa after famed mountaineer Edmund Hillary – was “slowly sliding through” the Khumbu Icefall toward Base Camp when he was found, Pemba Sherpa said. “As far as I know, no one has survived alone at that altitude on Everest so far. This is a miracle to have survived for six days.” (via the BBC)

Former homeless dropout and professional gambler is an internationally renowned artist

As a child growing up in Kentucky in the sixties, George Widener exhibited
exceptional arithmetical skills. He was also a compulsive drawer with a photographic memory and an interest in machines. He joined the US military at 18 to work in intelligence, based in West Germany, using his pattern recognition skills to analyse photos from the Stasi and the KGB. He says that he left the military because of his poor social skills and enrolled at the University of Texas to study engineering. But his mind was so full of numbers and dates that he was unable to cope with the course. He ended up living in hostels and on the streets. Eventually he was put in hospital and diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. One way he has channelled his arithmetical ability is in gambling. He has learned how to count cards, a system of winning at blackjack by memorising cards and calculating their values. Another way he coped with his condition was by combining his interest in dates with his drawing. (via The Guardian)

Famous architect Antoni Gaudi died because he was mistaken for a beggar

Born in Spain in 1852, architect Antoni Gaudí became famous for working at the forefront of Catalan Modernism. In 1883, Gaudí began designing Sagrada Família, the Roman Catholic basilica in Barcelona associated with his name. Gaudí didn’t marry or have children, instead focusing steadfastly on his work. He engaged in extreme fasting, shunned meat and alcohol, and reportedly ate only lettuce dipped in milk for a typical lunch. After several of his close friends died in the early 1910s, he threw himself further into his work. He moved into his workshop inside the Sagrada Família, and his hygiene habits went sharply downhill; he wore shabby, ragged clothing, and stopped shaving. On June 7, 1926, during his daily walk to confession, Gaudí was hit by a tram. Because of the 73-year-old’s unkempt appearance (and the fact that he didn’t have identification in his pocket), people who witnessed the accident thought he was a beggar and taxi drivers wouldn’t bother taking a beggar to the hospital. (via Mental Floss)

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called The Torment Nexus.

Experts say a rare Stradivarius violin that was looted by the Nazis has been found

The most sublime of the violins made by Antonio Stradivarius (Cremona, c. 1644-1737) have names like roses: there is the Countess Polignac and the Davidov, the Lady Tennant and the Molitor. Stradivarius’s technique evolved with time; his violins’ bodies grew longer and deeper, their sound richer. In 1719, at the height of his Golden Period, he made nine known violins. Of those nine violins, two were lost in World War II — until now, when one seems to have surfaced. Pascale Bernheim is a founding director of a Paris group that is devoted to tracking down musical instruments looted during World War II. In April, her organization announced that it had located a legendary instrument: a Stradivarius that hadn’t been seen since 1944. The violin is worth at least ten million euros, but its current owner — a Strasbourg luthier — refuses to acknowledge that his instrument is the long-lost Lauterbach. (via European Review of Books)

Study shows that bees can use tools to solve problems without any training

A new study published in Science on Thursday found that bees utilized tools to solve complex problems to win a sugary treat, even if they had never been trained to use the tools. Some of the bees even cheated — skipping the problem altogether — to reap the reward, the researchers found. This isn’t the first time bumblebees have been seen to use tools to get what they want. A 2016 study found that such bees could learn to pull a string to receive a reward — and that untrained bees could learn this trick from their more educated peers. Still, it adds to the evidence that creative problem-solving and tool use aren’t just the domain of larger-brained animals, such as birds and apes. Bumblebees’ brains are relatively primitive — they have around one million neurons, compared with the 86 billion or so in human brains — yet the new experiment indicates that complex problem-solving doesn’t require complex gray matter. (via Scientific American)

Russell Crowe gives Ryan Gosling a hard time about all his endorsements

Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places 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 and Why Is This Interesting by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com

Romanian-born mathematician Stefan Mandel used simple probability and a massive ticket-buying operation to win lottery jackpots 14 times. Born into a poor Jewish family in Romania in 1931, Mandel developed a passion for mathematics at a young age but could not pursue an academic career because of financial hardship. Instead, he worked as an accountant to support his family. His monthly salary of $88 was barely enough to support his family. Mandel said that he needed a way to “get some serious money, quickly.” Having spent years studying probability theory and the work of Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci, he began exploring the lottery, convinced mathematics could improve the odds. After years of research, he developed a number-picking algorithm based on a method he called “combinatorial condensation.” The strategy relied on a simple principle: identify lotteries where the jackpot exceeded the cost of buying every possible number combination. If enough tickets covering all combinations could be purchased, a profit could be guaranteed. (via VnExpress)

Every spring a team of biologists counts over 50,000 puffins on this remote Welsh island

Skomer Island, located of the coast of Pembrokeshire, is an internationally important seabird island. Every year, The Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales (WTSWW) undertake their annual count to monitor the population of Puffins that return to the island every spring to breed. Puffin counting may sound like an easy job, but with over 50,000, it’s no mean feat. Every spring, the Skomer team set out on a calm, clear evening with binoculars and notepad in hand to count every single Puffin on land, in the sky and at sea. The island is broken up into seven sections, and the team must work against the clock and the elements to make sure they have accounted for every single Puffin. Timing is key – too early in the season and the bulk of birds won’t have returned, too late and they’ll be settled on eggs in their burrows. And there’s method to the Puffin madness – they use the same method today that the wardens have used since the 1980s. This means they can compare over 40 years of Puffin population data. (via Welsh Wildlife)

He had to learn how to walk again after he got a rare virus from a tick but it wasn’t Lyme

Martin Novar remembers flashes of his 65th birthday on Nov. 2, 2025. But he doesn’t remember anything else from that month. Memory is a tricky thing for Novar nowadays. When we made plans to meet at his house on Lake Owassa in Frankford Township for this story, he called three hours before the scheduled meeting, wondering where I was and offering directions. It’s not personal. He can’t remember any clients he’s had in the last year either and, after more than 20 years as an attorney, Novar was forced to give up his legal practice. He also doesn’t remember taking a hike with his dog, Raven, in the lush woodlands surrounding his Sussex County home in mid-November. He’d taken dozens of hikes like it before. Novar stayed at his partner Karen Ezra’s apartment in Brooklyn; when they spoke on the phone Thanksgiving morning, Novar was unintelligible. A lumbar puncture, also known as a spinal tap, showed that Novar was suffering from encephalitis, or inflammation in the brain. (via NJ.com)

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called The Torment Nexus.

In a Bond film where he drove on cobblestones they used Coca-Cola so the car would grip

There are two main vehicular-chase set pieces in No Time to Die. There’s an off-road battle set in Scotland’s countryside that features lots of SUVs—including Land Rover’s new Defender — of which many are launched spectacularly skyward. Then there’s a chase through the medieval streets of Matera in southern Italy. The Matera chase involves Jaguar XE sedans and Triumph motorcycles for the bad guys and the old DB5 for Bond. Only, the DB5 in this chase does things no DB5 could actually do. Like powerslides, donuts with Gatling guns poking out of the headlight buckets, and lurid drifts that go on for weeks. Since the replicas weren’t built for sale to the public or to be licensed to operate on public roads, they didn’t have to meet any government’s vehicle regulations. The interior is simply a welded roll cage, a single racing seat, a large wood steering wheel, and some bottom-hinged racing pedals. “We poured Coca-Cola on the ground to get some grip,” Higgins explains in his Manx accent. “The Coke seems to work better than anything. It was incredible how well it was working.” (via Car and Driver)

The train station in Cambridge got attention from a surprising audience: mathematicians

Cambridge North Station is clad in aluminum panels with a geometrical cutout design. The architecture firm, Atkins, originally claimed that the pattern was derived from Cambridge alumnus John Conway’s “Game of Life,” but eagle-eyed mathematicians soon realized that was incorrect. The design is in fact based on a mathematical rule studied by Stephen Wolfram, an Oxford alumnus, much to the dismay of rival university Cambridge. Though the firm’s website still references Conway, a Senior Architectural Designer at Atkins has since confirmed that it was, in fact, Wolfram’s Rule 30 that they used in the design. The mathematical façade transforms the building’s appearance from night to day —for the technically-minded, the pattern shown conforms to Wolfram’s rule 135 in the day, while at night the interior lights invert the pattern to rule 30. (via Arch Daily)

Look at this super-cute little blue octopus that was just discovered

Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places 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 and Why Is This Interesting by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com

A Georgia man convicted of leading an $11 million fraud scheme while in custody through contraband phones is now on the run after officials say he escaped from a federal prison camp. The United States Marshals Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other law enforcement agencies are searching for 34-year-old Arthur Cofield. According to authorities with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Cofield was discovered missing from the minimum-security camp next to the Federal Corrections Institution in Jessup on Tuesday afternoon. At the time of his escape, Cofield was serving a sentence of over 11 years for identity theft and conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud, and bank fraud. Federal prosecutors announced new charges against Cofield in a December 2020 press release. At the time, the Atlanta man was serving a prison sentence for armed robbery in Butts County and faced an attempted murder charge in Fulton County. (via CBS)

A Soviet moon rover was silent for 40 years and then started sending signals again

For nearly 40 years, Lunokhod 1 was neither destroyed nor forgotten in the usual sense. The Soviet rover had simply become impossible to locate with enough precision to remain scientifically useful. In 2010, that changed when researchers identified its exact position and recovered a laser signal that brought it back into active lunar research. The rover itself never resumed operation. What returned was its reflector, still capable of sending light back to Earth after decades of silence. Lunokhod 1 reached the Moon aboard the Soviet Luna 17 mission on November 17, 1970, becoming the first remote-controlled rover to operate on another world. Designed for a shorter lifespan, it remained active through 11 lunar day-night cycles before communications ceased in 1971. (via Daily Galaxy)

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 ran an $11M fraud scheme from prison and just escaped”

A Kitchener, Ont., teen has won the best project award for innovation at the Canada-Wide Science Fair. Eigenpulse: Eliminating Demographic Bias in Pulse Oximetry and Remote PPG from First Principles was the name of the project by Gurnoor Kaur, a Grade 11 student at Cameron Height Collegiate Institute in Kitchener. The judges at the Edmonton competition say the 17-year-old’s work fixes a 35-year-old problem in blood oxygen sensors, which has led to higher mortality in Black patients. She noticed on systems that monitored vital signs and detected oxygen, there can be a demographic bias, so on lighter skin patients, the error is lower than it is on darker skin patients. “There is a mathematical instability in current cardiac models and to be able to resolve that, you need to add a missing term,” she said. “I solved the mathematical instability and using that I was able to start to remove this demographic bias.” (via the CBC)

In 1920 doctors said eating canned salmon made prisoners in New York into human magnets

Dr. John B. Ransom, in a report sent to the Superintendent of Prisons, declared that thirty-two convicts of Clinton prison at Dannemora had been turned into human magnets as the result of a peculiar poisoning that had been baffling medical scientists for the last week or more. Dr. Ransom is the prison physician, and he called to his assistance in determining the mysterious ailment of the prisoners. They found that whenever any of the men touched steel sparks would fly and their finger tips would violently vibrate the filaments of electric bulbs. They traced the trouble to what is termed the deadly botulinus germ, which they believe came from canned salmon served to the men about two weeks ago. While knowing that this germ generates electricity, they are unable to understand how it turns the victims into human electrodes. (via the New York 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 “A teenager fixed a 35-year-old problem with oxygen sensors”

Berlin-based Italian photographer Paride Ambrogi recently combined two of his loves, photography and pasta, in a brilliant, possibly tasty way. Ambrogi made the Ravihole Camera, a working pinhole camera made entirely from fresh pasta dough. Ambrogi made the Ravihole as part of a workshop on fresh-filled pasta in Hamburg, Germany. Alongside the pasta workshop, Ambrogi and his fellow Italian friends who live in Berlin installed a small exhibition dedicated to pasta culture, where Ambrogi brought the Ravihole to share. Ambrogi admits his initial idea for the exhibition was to take black-and-white photos of a friend during the Christmas holidays while making pizzoccheri, a traditional pasta from Valtellina in northern Italy. However, Ambrogi and his friend “drank too many glasses of wine,” and it never happened. So after returning to Berlin after the holidays, Ambrogi had to come up with another idea. (via PetaPixel)

A New York firefighter came back to life after 10 years in a coma-like state

On the morning of December 29, 1995, the roof of a building in which Donald Herbert was fighting a fire collapsed, pinning him down and starving his brain of oxygen for over six minutes. He was rescued from the collapsed structure, but suffered cardiac arrest and was taken to a hospital where he lapsed into a coma. A year later, he regained consciousness for the first time but had speech and vision problems and could not eat or walk without help. Herbert could barely remember anything and he had no longer recognized his relatives and friends. He remained in a minimally conscious state for over nine years until, on April 30, 2005, he awoke and asked where his wife was. He was then able to speak to his friends and family for over 14 continuous hours. He asked how old he was, and how long he had been gone, expressing surprise when he learned that he had been unresponsive for almost ten years. (via Wikipedia)

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 “Italian photographer made a pinhole camera out of pasta”

When Denis Alimov passed through the arrivals hall of El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá on the morning of February 24, 2026, he had the outward appearance of a middle-aged Russian tourist escaping Moscow’s harsh winter: a salt-and-pepper goatee, a light travel bag, a connecting flight from Istanbul, and a reservation at a Cartagena beach resort. Within minutes, Colombian migration officers had him in handcuffs. The Interpol Red Notice — activated as he flew in at the request of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York — had been waiting at the gate. Alimov stood accused of orchestrating the attempted assassination of two prominent Chechen dissidents based in Europe, having offered a bounty of $1.5 million on each of their heads — payable whether the target arrived in Russia dead or merely, in the deadpan vocabulary of Russian intelligence, “legally deported.” The FBI had been tracking Alimov for over a year — in part, by reading the Google Translate-assisted exchanges between him and one of his would-be foreign assassins. (via The Insider)

Police responded to reports of gunfire and found the shooter was a dog

Police responding to reports of a shotgun blast at a convenience store sounds like the opening of countless American crime movies, but when cops in Nebraska responded to a recent such call they found an unusual culprit: a dog. Local TV station KNOP News 2 reported that police in the town of Scottsbluff were called out to a local store recently after reports of a blast involving a shotgun. Upon arrival they found a truck with blast damage in one of its doors and a woman who had been struck in the arm by a pellet from a shotgun. However, investigation showed a canine cause behind the shooting when it was revealed the blast happened as the vehicle had pulled up to the store as a dog had been moving from one side of its back seat to another. Somehow, the dog had triggered the shotgun – which had a live round chambered – to fire, damaging the vehicle and striking a female passerby. (via The Guardian)

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 “Russian hitman busted because he used Google Translate”

In almost 40 years, Mako Nishimura never lost a fight. She told me this as if it were as obvious as night following day. Nishimura is 5ft-nothing and slight of build. She is also probably the only woman ever to have been a full-fledged yakuza, a member of Japan’s feared and rule-bound criminal underworld. She must have defeated many male gangsters. How, I asked her, did she do it? “First the legs,” she said, hands clasped, maintaining the calm demeanour of a village priest. Nishimura’s relaxed attitude to violence is what first caught the attention of yakuza members in 1986, when she was a 19-year-old runaway and former juvenile-prison inmate living in Gifu, a city near Nagoya. She was getting more deeply involved in serious crime, too, running sex workers and extorting local businesses, as well as selling – and taking – large quantities of methamphetamines. Yakuza life nonetheless appealed. It offered respect, protection and, above all, the opportunity to make big money. (via The Guardian)

This is what happened when a software engineer decided to randomize his entire life

Max Hawkins had started to feel trapped by his optimized life. Every weekday, he woke up at exactly 7 a.m. and grabbed a single-­origin pour-­over. He got on his bike and rode 15 minutes and 37 seconds along the best possible route to Google, where he was a software engineer. He spent eight hours working, then met friends for a beer at a craft brewery or a hang in Mission Dolores Park. But despite his great job and charmed life, something felt off.One afternoon at work, while reading an academic paper, he located the source of his ennui. The study, which tracked the movements of 100,000 anonymized mobile-phone users over six months, had found that human mobility is surprisingly predictable: Our days default to simple, repeatable patterns.  The engineer part of Max’s brain thought the research was pretty cool, but he also found it unsettling. “There was something very programmed about the way I was living,” he told me. If his movements were that predictable, where did that leave his free will? (via The Atlantic)

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 “The rise and fall of the world’s only female yakuza gangster”

In 1963, a Turkish resident who simply wanted to expand his house ended up making an unexpected and monumental discovery. While knocking down a wall in his basement, he found a mysterious room—then another, and another. Without realizing it, he had uncovered the entrance to Derinkuyu: an underground city capable of housing up to 20,000 people beneath Cappadocia. The part that extends below ground level is, on average, between six and 10 times deeper than the height of the above-ground buildings of the ancient city that used to be there. Derinkuyu means “deep well,” and the name is no exaggeration. Scientists say Derinkuyu’s origins may date back to around the eighth century B.C. The result is a vast underground complex with rooms, stables, cellars, tombs, schools and even churches with refectories. Some of these spaces continued to be used until the 19th century before Derinkuyu fell into oblivion. (via History.com)

In the early 1900s Britain was obsessed with this game featuring a giant ball

A search of the patents registered in the second half of the 19^th century by Moses G Crane of Massachusetts reveals a man who was never short of ideas. Crane had three sons who played football at Harvard, but he was not a fan of the sport. Apparently he believed that “to the average person without a college education it is incomprehensible, dull, cruel”, and he was particularly irritated at how hard it was to follow the progress of a small brown ball. And so Crane donned his thinking cap. “If the ball were only made large,” he said, “yes, large enough so that a player on one side could not see who was on the other, you would then have a chance to interest spectators.” In 1894 he found someone who could make his monster ball, at a cost – for materials alone – of some $175, about $4,500 in today’s money, and after several months of experimentation his son Edwin produced some rules. And so the sport of Pushball was born. (via The Guardian)

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 was renovating his basement and found an underground city”

There is one time of day when Dawn Faizey Webster can feel normal. It’s after dinner, once she has been changed into her pyjamas and she is lying in bed, watching television. After a certain amount of time or a certain number of episodes, Netflix, the ever-considerate streaming service, asks its viewers “Are you still watching?” If you don’t respond by pressing a button on the remote, it assumes you’ve nodded off and pauses the stream. Dawn can’t press buttons. She can’t move her fingers or toes or her arms or legs. She can’t swallow. She can’t speak. She hasn’t been able to do any of those things since Tony Blair was prime minister. When Netflix suspects she has fallen asleep and the “still watching” message appears, she can only hope to attract a carer’s attention through the baby monitor in her room. Dawn, 53, has been locked in since suffering a stroke in her brainstem in the summer of 2003. (via The Times)

Who are the mysterious saboteurs behind a five-day Berlin power blackout?

Sebastian Brandt, chief technician of the Immanuel hospital in the leafy, affluent Wannsee district of Berlin, guessed something was wrong as soon as he opened the window of his home and smelled diesel. It was 3 January, a freezing Saturday morning, and luckily the hospital opposite had relatively few patients on this post-holiday weekend. As he looked out, the diesel fumes told him that the emergency generator – a huge, deafening, decades-old machine in the basement – had kicked in. That meant the hospital was no longer getting power from the grid. And that meant Brandt was not going to have a quiet weekend. What Brandt didn’t know was that his hospital was cut off because a couple of hours earlier, at about 6am, approximately 12km away, someone had set fire to five high-voltage cables fixed to the underside of a bridge over the Teltow canal, a long waterway that cuts through the southern part of the German capital. (via The Guardian)

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 “What it’s like to suffer from locked-in syndrome”

In 1925, Ernest Hemingway published In Our Time, his first collection of short stories, which included his first published boxing story, “The Battler.” On a cool Tuesday evening in October of 1955, three decades after the publication of “The Battler,” an adaptation of Hemingway’s boxing story aired on NBC. Sponsored by Pontiac, Playwrights ’56 was placed in a risky time slot, airing opposite the popular game show The $64,000 Question. In panic mode, producer Fred Coe plucked a relatively unknown actor from the cast. He was young, good-looking, and importantly, already familiar with the script. That unknown’s name was Paul Newman. Ernest Hemingway had not been directly involved in the production of “The Battler.” Instead, his short story was adapted by A. E. Hotchner. Hotchner and Newman bonded during that hectic 1955 production, and they remained good friends throughout their lives. The two each chipped in $20,000 of seed money to found Newman’s Own salad dressing. (via Saturday Evening Post)

Japanese company sells out of robot wolves as record bear attacks drive demand

A Japanese manufacturer of animatronic wolves designed to scare off wild animals is being swamped with orders as the East Asian country grapples with rising bear attacks. Ohta Seiki, a company based in Hokkaido, has already received about 50 orders for its “Monster Wolf” device this year, more than the typical volume for an entire year. The surge in demand for the robotic wolf follows a record 13 fatal bear attacks in 2025-2026, more than twice the previous high. There were more than 50,000 bear sightings nationwide in that period, more than double the previous record set two years earlier. The animals were seen entering homes, roaming near schools, and rampaging through stores and hot spring resorts on an almost daily basis. The number of bears captured and culled nearly tripled from a year earlier to 14,601, also an all-time high. In the month of April alone, some northern regions reported nearly four times as many sightings as all of last year as bears emerged from hibernation. (via The Independent)

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 Hemingway’s love of boxing changed salad dressing”