Category: Newsletters

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

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

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

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Did Meriwether Clark commit suicide or was he murdered?”

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

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

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

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Waiters in France went on strike for the right to grow mustaches”

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

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

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

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 “Wallace Tillinghast and the New England airship hoax of 1909”

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

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

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

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “They killed dozens of people but their identities remain a mystery”

From New York: “In early 2023, Alex took a job at Cloud 9, a strip-mall smoke shop off Atlanta’s I-85. He had recently graduated from college and wanted something laid-back; the shop, with its graffitied ceilings and cheesy blue-light displays, seemed like the ideal register job for a stoner with a music degree.It didn’t take long for him to realize that many of his customers weren’t there for rolling papers or vapes. They were coming instead for Galaxy Gas, the shop’s toddler-size, candy-flavored, Day-Glo–colored tanks of nitrous oxide. He didn’t know anything about nitrous when he started, but his manager walked him through the basics. Soon, he understood exactly what nitrous oxide was. How could he not? His customers were buying hundreds of dollars worth of tanks at a time, inhaling as much as they could in the parking lot of the store, then coming back for more, often with strange new limps and tremors.”

It’s an Andy Warhol lottery except you never know whether you won

From Now I Know: “In 2021, an group called MSCHF bought Andy Warhol’s sketch “Fairies” for $20,000. That October, they sold it at a huge profit of $250,000 — if you include the 999 fake copies they also sold that month. MSCHF is a Brooklyn, NY-based art collective known for its creative destruction. In April 2020, they purchased a painting of 88 dots by artist Damien Hirst for $30,000, then hand cut each of the dots out of the canvas. MSCHF sold each of the dots for $480, making a small profit, and then sold the spotless canvas (now titled “88 Holes”) for an additional $261,400. The Warhol “Fairies” effort was more of the same. The group purchased an authentic 1954 Warhol pen drawing, then used digital technology and a robotic arm to recreate the artist’s exact strokes, before using heat, light and humidity to artificially age the paper.” Then they destroyed any evidence of which of the 1,000 was the real Warhol.” 

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “The hot new party drug is blueberry-flavored nitrous oxide”

From the BBC: “A young boy was found alive after surviving five days in a game park inhabited by lions and elephants in northern Zimbabwe, according to a member of parliament in that country. The ordeal began when Tinotenda Pudu wandered at least 23 km (14 miles) from home into the “perilous” Matusadona Game Park, said Mashonaland West MP Mutsa Murombedzi. He spent five days “sleeping on a rocky perch, amidst roaring lions, passing elephants, eating wild fruits”, she said. Matusadona game park has about 40 lions. The Zimbabwe Parks & Wildlife Management Authority confirmed the incident to the BBC but said the boy walked 49 km (30 miles) from home. Murombedzi said the boy used his knowledge of the wild and survival skills to stay alive.”

There are unexploded rocket-launched grenades on the moon

From Standing Well Back: “It may seem bizarre, but rocket propelled Ggenades were taken to the moon on a couple of the Apollo missions to the moon in the 1970s. Three were fired, and five were abandoned.  So there is an interesting EOD task outstanding on someone’s operational docket for a future mission. One of the ambitions of the Apollo project was to understand the geology of the Moon. Accordingly, a number of passive and active seismic experiments were planned. For one, a number of rocket propelled explosive devices containing varying amounts of explosives were used, and the launch initiation was radio-controlled, with the impact causing the detonation when they struck the moon. In much of the documentation the system is called a mortar but elsewhere the charges are referred to as rocket propelled charges or grenades.”

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 7-year-old boy survived for five days in a wild game park”

Net neutrality—or the idea that all digital information should flow through the internet unencumbered by restrictions and without internet companies showing favoritism toward some types and sources of content over others—sometimes feels like an immutable law of the modern world; like gravity or magnetic attraction. But in reality, it’s a political football that has been tossed back and forth for decades between open-internet advocates and free-market conservatives, who feel that neutrality rules are unnecessary and a brake on innovation and growth. Last week, the opponents of net neutrality won a significant victory when judges on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Federal Communications Commission didn’t have the right to impose such rules when it did so last year. Now critics say that the death of the rules could allow the internet to become distorted by partisan political and corporate interests. It could also make existing online even more difficult for news publishers and journalism in general.

Net neutrality first appeared as a concept in a paper written by Tim Wu—then an associate professor at the University of Virginia; now a Columbia University law professor—in 2003, published in the Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law. In the paper, Wu foresaw that “communications regulators over the next decade will spend increasing time on conflicts between the private interests of broadband providers and the public’s interest in a competitive innovation environment centered on the Internet”—a prediction that was spot on. The idea of net neutrality, Wu wrote, is no different than promoting fair competition in any industry, ensuring that “the short term interests of the owner do not prevent the best products or applications becoming available to end-users” and preserving “a Darwinian competition among every conceivable use of the Internet so that the only the best survive.”

This idea helped shape FCC rules, in 2004, that aimed at what the commission called “preserving internet freedom,” including a user’s right to choose any device they wanted to connect to an internet network, the applications they wanted to run, and the content they wanted to consume. In 2008, the FCC took action against Comcast for throttling the internet speed of cable customers who used a file-sharing system called BitTorrent, which Comcast didn’t like because it sucked up too much bandwidth. (Comcast paid a fine but did not admit any wrongdoing.) In 2014, the FCC issued an Open Internet Order that prohibited telecom and broadband companies from blocking their customers’ access to competing services or websites. The following year, the commission officially defined internet service providers (or ISPs) as “Title II” carriers, similar to phone or other utility providers, giving the agency control over their activities under the Telecommunications Act.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I was the chief digital writer

Continue reading “Net neutrality is dead again and journalism could suffer”

From the New York Times: “It seemed like the most ordinary interaction in the world.The man was trying to find “Flight Into Egypt,” a century-old oil painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner depicting a biblical scene. Mr. Khalil walked the visitor over to the painting, and they got to chatting about Egypt. As it turned out, the visitor was not really a visitor at all. He was a Met curator, planning a big new exhibit with ancient Egypt as part of the theme. And Mr. Khalil is not just any security guard. He is also a sculptor, inspired greatly by the ancient works of his homeland.Their chance encounter was brief — five minutes, maybe less — but it set in motion events that changed Mr. Khalil’s life in a way he never could have imagined.To understand how Mr. Khalil, 45, ended up in just the right place at just the right time, it helps to rewind a bit — to understand how he landed a job at the Met, how he arrived in New York in the first place, how a young man from a poor family in a small village in Egypt even got to go art school.”

The hidden network of Hedgehog Highways is growing in the United Kingdom

From Reasons To Be Cheerful: “These days more and more British hedgehogs need rescuing. They may be covered in sharp spines, but that’s no defense against the habitat loss and fragmentation. In urban areas, hedgehogs love to travel between gardens, where there are usually plenty of insects to feed on and nooks to hide in. But with most gardens surrounded by fences and walls, hedgehogs can’t gain access to those critical refuges. So a major prong of the hedgehog conservation strategy is to cut tiny holes in garden fences, which allows hedgehogs to come and go as they please. Connecting urban gardens this way creates what are known as hedgehog “highways” — and they’ve been spreading across British towns and cities. A 2021 study estimated that more than 120,000 such highways connected about 240,000 gardens across the UK, which amounts to about one percent of all residential gardens in the country.” 

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “He’s a security guard at the Met, now his work is showing there”

From My Modern Met: “There are many stories of historical treasures hiding for decades in attics and cupboards around the world, but few match what was found in a closet in Ohio in 2012. A few months after the death of Neil Armstrong, his widow, Carol, came across a white bag in a closet. Upon closer inspection, she found tiny parts that looked like they could have belonged to a spaceship. In the end, it wasn’t just any spaceship but a collection of items from the Lunar Module Eagle of the Apollo 11 mission. The white bag, which made the trip to the Moon, contained the waist tether he used to support his feet during the only rest period he got on the Moon, utility lights and their brackets, equipment netting, a mirror made of metal, an emergency wrench, the optical sight that was mounted above Armstrong’s window and, most importantly, the 16mm data acquisition camera (DAC) that recorded the footage of the lander’s final approach.”

How could a man rob two banks at the same time? Because they were identical twins

From The Atavist: “Te light was giving way to darkness as detective Patrick Brear arrived at the CBC Bank in Heathcote, an old gold-mining town in southern Australia. The quaint two-story redbrick building had been the scene of a crime. The bandit was the state’s most wanted man, suspected in two dozen armed robberies. Brear and his partner, detective John Beever, had been hunting him for over a year. They knew his MO well. He liked to hit rural targets just before they closed for the day, then escape into the bush under cover of darkness. The timing of many of his crimes was the inspiration for his nickname. Though it pained Beever and Brear to admit it, there was something different about this criminal, almost superhuman. He was known to pull off two robberies within a half-hour of each other, in towns that were more than a dozen miles apart.”

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 “Neil Armstrong’s closet was full of pilfered space artifacts”

From Oxford University Press: “This article provides evidence for the first time of a systematic policy of direct collusion between the Time Inc. media empire and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. For the first two decades of the Cold War, both Time and Life magazines established policies that provided the CIA with access to their foreign correspondents, their dispatches and research files, and their vast photographic archive that the magazines had accumulated to accompany their stories. These were significant resources for a fledgling intelligence agency. Photographs of foreign dignitaries, rebel groups, protestors, and topography were vital pieces of intelligence, helping the Agency to map and visualize its targets. Depending upon the story, direct access to dispatches returned by foreign correspondents might provide the Agency with important clues to local political, social, and economic conditions, as well as insights into the intentions and capabilities of ruling elites in countries of concern.”

Sigmund Freud started using a couch because he didn’t want to look at his patients

From The Atlantic: “A person who is “on the couch” is known to be in therapy, but most therapists these days don’t ask their clients to lie down. The first time mine did, I resisted. I didn’t want to be on display or unable to see her reactions. Plus, the idea seemed antiquated. Sigmund Freud was inspired to use the couch more than a century ago after observing dramatic hypnotherapy demonstrations by his teacher Jean-Martin Charcot. In psychoanalysis, Freud thought a therapist being out of view would help people access emotions or memories that might be repressed. (He also said that he could not “put up with being stared at by other people for eight hours a day.”) Many of Freud’s ideas about the unconscious haven’t held up, but he may have been onto something with the couch, as I discovered when I eventually followed my therapist’s suggestion. The couch might not be for everyone, but it could be worth a try.”

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 “Time Inc. colluded with the CIA says one researcher”

From Big Think: “Back in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviet Union was far ahead of the USA in the space race, launching the first satellite, the first human into space, and many other spaceflight firsts. This dominance continued for several years, and by the mid-1960s, they were planning a 1967 Moon landing: years ahead of even the most ambitious schedule for the United States. After the disastrous Apollo 1 fire, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that the Soviets would be the first to walk on the Moon. Yet they never even came close. The unexpected illness and death of one supremely competent but unsung Soviet figure, Sergei Korolev, changed everything. Without Korolev as the chief designer, everything went downhill quickly for the Soviets.”

A mysterious nerve disease in a mountain town might be a result of poisonous mushrooms

From Knowable: “Well known to skiers, the French mountain town of Montchavin has grabbed the attention of medical researchers as the site of a highly unusual cluster of a devastating neurological disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. ALS is both rare and rather evenly distributed across the globe: It afflicts two to three new people out of 100,000 per year. Montchavin’s year-round resident population is only a couple hundred, and neighboring villages aren’t much bigger, so the odds are strongly against finding more than just a few ALS patients in the immediate area. Yet physicians have reported 14. he notion that something in food might cause ALS does not come out of the blue. It comes from Guam, where US medical researchers, near the end of World War II, documented an epidemic of neurological disease among the island’s native Chamorro people.”

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 secret reason that the US beat Russia to the moon”

From Curbed: “As the Coast Guard sped toward the cruise ship, Pam was still on the phone with the Norwegian employee in Miami, begging her to tell the ship to wait. As they approached the looming 14 white decks, she got an update: The captain was refusing their request. They would not be allowed to board. They were able to watch as the ship that held their clothes, their medication, their luggage, and their phone chargers started her mighty engines and sailed away. Cruisers of all stripes are familiar with the concept of force majeure, an arcane clause in maritime law. Force majeure, an “act of God” — it’s the acknowledgment that on the high seas, a ship is vulnerable to significant events beyond its control. Cruise ships are not responsible for acts of God. In fact, as the passengers were about to learn, they are not responsible for much of anything.”

Google Street View captured a man loading a body into the trunk of a car

From the New York Times: “It was a routine image picked up by Google Street View: a man loading a white bag into the trunk of a car. But that unexceptional picture, the authorities in Spain said on Wednesday, was among the clues that helped lead them to two people whom they recently arrested in the case of a man who disappeared last year. In a news release, the National Police said that officers had detained a woman described as the partner of the man who disappeared in the province of Soria, in the country’s north, along with a man who they said was also the woman’s partner. The two were detained last month at two locations in Soria, which is about 100 miles north of Madrid, police said. Investigators later located human remains that they believe could belong to the missing man. The police did not identify the people who had been detained or the victim.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “They missed their cruise ship but that was just the beginning”