Category: Newsletters

From the New York Times: “Marie Cooper led her life according to her Christian faith. She baked pies for her neighbors in northern West Virginia, and said grace before even a bite of food. She watched Jimmy Swaggart, a televangelist preacher — a little too loudly, in her daughter Sherry Uphold’s opinion. And she always said that at the end of her life, she did not want to be resuscitated. Last winter, doctors found cancer cells in her stomach. She’d had “do not resuscitate” and “do not intubate” orders on file for decades and had just filled out new copies, instructing medical staff to withhold measures to restart her heart if it stopped, and to never give her a breathing tube. In February, Ms. Cooper walked into the hospital for a routine stomach scope to determine the severity of the cancer. After the procedure, Ms. Uphold visited her mother in the recovery room and saw her in a panic. Doctors restrained her and inserted a breathing tube down her throat, violating the wishes outlined in her medical chart.”

Sexually frustrated dolphin blamed for attacks that injured dozens of swimmers in Japan

From The Telegraph: “A lonely dolphin acting out of sexual frustration is believed to be the culprit behind a spate of attacks on swimmers in Japan this summer. Since July this year, 18 people have been hurt in dolphin attacks near the seaside town of Mihama, with some requiring dozens of stitches. Posters warning beachgoers of the menace feature an open-mouthed dolphin baring razor-like teeth. It says that the mammals “are known to be dangerous to humans” and to get out of the water if they are seen nearby. Japan’s problematic mammal is believed to be a solitary male bottlenose dolphin, who may also be responsible for injuring swimmers in 2022 and 2023, and trying to press his genitals against them. Putu Mustika, a lecturer and marine researcher at James Cook University in Australia, told The New York Times that dolphins can inadvertently harm humans by dint of their sheer strength when acting out mating behaviours.”

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 “Doctors saved her life but she didn’t want them to”

From NBC News: “Long before his bleak final years, when he struggled with mental illness and lived mostly on the streets, Victor Carl Honey joined the Army, serving honorably for nearly a decade. And so, when his heart gave out and he died alone 30 years later, he was entitled to a burial with military honors. Instead, without his consent or his family’s knowledge, the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office gave his body to a state medical school, where it was frozen, cut into pieces and leased out across the country. A Swedish medical device maker paid $341 for access to Honey’s severed right leg to train clinicians to harvest veins using its surgical tool. A medical education company spent $900 to send his torso to Pittsburgh so trainees could practice implanting a spine stimulator. And the U.S. Army paid $210 to use a pair of bones from his skull to educate personnel at a hospital near San Antonio.”

A treasure trove of over 20 million collectible baseball cards is finally revealed

From the New York Times: “In a former antique shop off a four-lane highway in rural Virginia, Tim Banazek knelt before a white banker’s box labeled “Autographed Baseballs” that was stashed at the bottom of a steel bookcase. He pulled the first ball out and examined the signature in the fluorescent light. It was Willie Mays’s. Every day, Mr. Banazek unearths new historic treasures from a collection of sports cards that he purchased in 2021 from a quiet hobbyist. But this is not just any assemblage. It is quite possibly the largest private collection of sports cards in the world — and probably by a wide margin. Mr. Banazek estimates that it includes 20 million cards, although other visitors have pegged the number even higher. For comparison, Paul Jones, a man in Idaho who claimed to have the largest private baseball card collection, told a local newspaper in 2020 that his holdings amounted to 2.8 million cards.”

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

Continue reading “This university cut up and sold unclaimed bodies”

From The Cut: “A few years later, when I was away at college, I learned that my father had been tapping the phone lines. My mother had been adamant: “I am not cheating. I am not a cheater. When do I have time to cheat?” But my father’s career in car sales had given him a sensitive radar for dishonesty. So starting when I was in high school, in the mid-1990s, he would climb into the attic after she went to bed and situate himself at a makeshift station he had equipped with wires, jacks, and recording devices.Dad’s goal was to gather evidence to use as leverage in the divorce. He also used the recordings to exact revenge. After he found out that Mom bought a slinky yellow dress — a dress he thought she certainly wasn’t planning to wear for him — he cut off her credit cards. I remember my father making copies of the tapes, packaging them neatly in brown paper, and sending them to some of our relatives in Ohio.”

Loos, lewdness, and literature from the 1700s: Tales from the Boghouse

From Public Domain Review: “The literary scholar Roger Lonsdale once suggested that our knowledge of eighteenth-century poetry has depended heavily on what our anthologies have decided to print. For the most part modern anthologies have, in turn, drawn on collections put together at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the next, when the ideal for inclusion was essentially that of “polite taste”. The obscene, the feminine, and the political were by general cultural agreement usually omitted. Among the works that would never have been a source of poems for the canon was the collection of verse published in four parts by J. Roberts beginning in 1731, The Merry-Thought: or, the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany, commonly known simply as The Bog-House Miscellany. Its contemporary reputation may be described as infamous.”

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

Continue reading “Her father tapped the phones and revealed a family mystery”

From Texas Monthly: “FBI Special Agent Curt Hunt was working in the yard of his San Antonio home one quiet Saturday morning when the call came in: The Texas Commerce Bank off Loop 410 had been robbed. Motor bank? In his 22 years as an agent, the intense, wiry Hunt had worked a lot of bank robberies—there are about twenty a year in San Antonio—but they almost always involved a robber walking into a bank lobby, pointing a gun at a teller, and demanding all the money in the drawer. How could anyone possibly get past the locked doors and bulletproof glass of a motor bank? It was September 21, 1991. Hunt rushed to the scene to begin investigating what would turn out to be the biggest bank robbery in San Antonio history. Grim bank officials told Hunt that someone had gotten away with almost $250,000—all the more astonishing considering that the average bank robber gets no more than $2,000. The robber had reached the vault—another rarity—and then made his escape so efficiently that a customer waiting several yards away for the bank to open did not even know there had been a robbery.”

Norwegian princess married a shaman who says he once came back from the dead

From the BBC: “Princess Märtha Louise, 52, and Durek Verrett, 49, announced their engagement in 2022. The princess – a former equestrian and the eldest of Norwegian King Harald’s two children – was previously married to the late writer and artist Ari Behn. Mr Verrett says on his site that he is a sixth generation shaman, “servant of god and energy activator” who “demystifies spirituality” through his “no-nonsense teachings”. In an interview with Vanity Fair magazine, he claimed to have risen from the dead and said that when he was a child a relative had predicted he would one day marry the princess of Norway.Märtha Louise has long attracted controversy in Norway for decades for her involvement in alternative treatments. In 2007, she announced she was clairvoyant and ran a school which taught students to “create miracles” and talk to angels.

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

Continue reading “When a lovestruck cop tried to pull off a massive bank heist”

In case you are a first-time reader, this is The Torment Nexus (you can find out more about me and this newsletter — and why I chose to call it that — in my inaugural post.) Since this is only the second edition of the newsletter, I am still working out some bugs, so if things seem a little out of place, bear with me.

In a way, this is a continuation of the newsletter I’ve been writing for the last few years about the intersection between technology and the media, as chief digital writer at the Columbia Journalism Review (you can find some of those pieces here, and they are also all published on my personal website.) As I mentioned in my inaugural post, I’ve been writing about tech and its impact for about 30 years or so, ever since the first web browser was invented.

For me, this newsletter is a return to the days when I used to write about tech on my personal blog. In the same way, there is no large entity or organization in between me and my readers now — it’s just me and you, figuring things out together. And maybe along the way, getting a sense of how much work my editors put into making me seem coherent. 😄

And with that, on to this week’s newsletter! Thanks for reading – and if you decide to subscribe, or you have already, thank you for that as well! If you enjoy this newsletter, please share it and/or give it a thumbs up or heart emoji or whatever on the network of your choice. None of these newsletters are behind a paywall at this point (I haven’t decided if I will do that in the future) and every issue is available via Ghost, through Substack, and on my website.

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Continue reading “The Second Circuit’s decision in the Internet Archive case is bad”

From Outside: “Ten minutes into his dive, Dave Shaw started to look for the bottom. Utter blackness pressed in on him from all sides, and he directed his high-intensity light downward, hoping for a flash of rock or mud. Shaw, a 50-year-old Aussie, was in an alien world, more than 800 feet below the surface pool that marks the entrance to Bushman’s Hole, a remote sinkhole in the Northern Cape province of South Africa and the third-deepest freshwater cave known to man. Only two divers had ever been to this depth in Bushman’s before. One of them, a South African named Nuno Gomes, had claimed a world record in 1996 when he hit bottom, on open-circuit gear, at 927 feet. Shaw touched down and started swimming. Suddenly, he stopped. About 50 feet to his left, perfectly illuminated in the gin-clear water, was a human body.”

A shocking crime divided a Minnesota town

From The Atavist: “Grand Marais is a quiet outpost on Lake Superior’s North Shore, set among boreal forest in the easternmost corner of Minnesota. The town of roughly 1,300 is home to a mix of artists and outdoor enthusiasts, working-class people and professionals, liberals and diehard Trump supporters. The residents of Grand Marais have had a lot to discuss in recent years. A suspicious fire that destroyed the historic Lutsen Lodge. The suicide of their neighbor Mark Pavelich, a star on the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that defeated the Soviet Union. Plans for the 40 acres owned by convicted sex offender Warren Jeff’s fundamentalist clan. All those events stirred plenty of talk. But nothing has captivated local conversation quite like what happened between Larry Scully and Levi Axtell in March 2023. A shocking act of violence attracted international attention and split the town over questions of truth and justice.”

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

Continue reading “In a cave 800 feet down, divers found a human body”

From the New York Times: “The trip had been a long shot. Bob Garrison reminded himself of that as he stood on a pier a thousand miles from home. Behind him lay the tile-roofed beach town of San Clemente, Calif., his last stop. Before him stretched the Pacific Ocean, immense and unbound. Gulls cried. Surf broke. It was Monday, his last day. Mr. Garrison could afford only so much time off. And yet what if he was close? He had spent the last two days following up on leads, scouring parks, passing out fliers. “MISSING,” they said, in block letters over photos of a 45-year-old man from Seattle, 6 feet, 6 inches tall with a beard to his chest, an ice-ax tattoo and a silver cross necklace. On this June day, Mr. Garrison, an engineer from rural Ellensburg, Wash., was not thinking about California’s humanitarian crisis. He was just a 70-year-old man trying to rescue his son.”

How Mark Twain and Helen Keller formed a lifelong friendship

From Open Culture: “While many people grow more conservative with age, Twain and Keller both grew more radical, which accounts for another little-known fact about these two nineteenth-century American celebrities: they formed a very close and lasting friendship that in Keller’s case may have been one of the most important relationships in either figure’s lives. Twain’s importance to Keller, and hers to him, begins in 1895, when the two met at a lunch held for Keller in New York. According to the Mark Twain Library, Keller “seemed to feel more at ease with Twain than with any of the other guests.” She would write, “He treated me not as a freak, but as a handicapped woman seeking a way to circumvent extraordinary difficulties.” After the meeting, he wrote to his benefactor Henry H. Rogers, asking Rogers to fund Keller’s education. Rogers made it possible for her to continue her education and to achieve the enduring fame Twain had foreseen.”

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

Continue reading “A father’s desperate search for a son who didn’t want to be found”

From The Economist: “One winter morning in 2022 I found myself being pushed, blindfolded, into a Taliban interrogation room in Kabul. A guard I couldn’t see shoved me into a chair. I heard the door close, then nothing. I had no idea why the Taliban had taken me. One possibility was that they might be trying to use me as a bargaining chip in their dealings with the West. My speculation was interrupted by a voice to my right telling me, in English, to remove my blindfold. When I did so I saw a powerfully built man sitting at a desk. He wore a black skullcap, and a bulky camouflage jacket which made him look even larger. For the next hour the man grilled me, trying to get me to admit I was a spy. Had I been to Iran? Which was my favourite Bond film? He wrote down my responses. Suddenly he looked up from his notes and said: “You’re going to be hanged.”

Scientists made the skin of mice transparent using a common food dye

From Scientific American: “In mere minutes, smearing mice with a common food dye can make a desired portion of their skin almost as transparent as glass. In a study published in Science, researchers spread a solution of the dye tartrazine, a common coloring for foods, drugs and cosmetics, onto living mice to turn their tissues clear—creating a temporary window that revealed organs, muscles and blood vessels in their body. The procedure—a new form of a technique known as “optical tissue clearing”—has not yet been tested in humans, but it may someday offer a way to view and monitor injuries or diseases without the need of specialized imaging equipment or invasive surgery. The fats and proteins in skin typically have higher refractive indexes than the water, which creates a contrast that you can’t see through. In the study, Ou and his colleagues looked for light-absorbing molecules that could make the various refractive indexes within the layers of skin more similar—reducing the amount of light scattered throughout.”

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

Continue reading “How a journalist became the Taliban’s portrait artist”

Hi everyone! Just wanted you to know that I’ve launched a newsletter about technology and society called “The Torment Nexus,” where I will be writing analysis and commentary about technology and culture. I was recently laid off from my job as the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I have been writing since 2017 about the intersection of technology, media, and culture, so I decided to run this up the old flagpole and see if anyone salutes 😄

I’m publishing The Torment Nexus via Ghost, an open-source publishing system, as I do my other newsletter, a collection of interesting, odd, and/or unusual links called When The Going Gets Weird. If you’re more comfortable with Substack, I’m also publishing it through that software as well, and if you prefer to read it the old-fashioned way, I will also be posting some or all of the posts here on my website, as I do with almost everything I write. Feel free to share this and other posts with anyone you think might have an interest in these kinds of topics!

In case the name Torment Nexus doesn’t ring a bell, it comes from a hilarious meme that Alex Blechman—a writer for The Onion—came up with awhile back, and I think it sums up so much about where we are right now in terms of our relationship with technology. Here Alex’s original tweet:

Continue reading “Welcome to The Torment Nexus”

From Esquire: “Heidi Guilford rode shotgun in her boyfriend’s white Dodge Charger. Her stepsister and a couple friends sat in the back, with the windows rolled down for the smokers. It was a cool night in June—sweatshirt weather—an unremarkable Sunday on an island off the coast of Maine. Roger seemed upset, bordering on frantic, going on about Dorian and Briannah Ames, a married couple who lived down on Roberts Cemetery Road, about a half mile out of town. He said the Ameses had been harassing him, that he was sick of it, and that nothing was being done about it.It all happened so fast. Less than twenty minutes after leaving the parking lot, Roger was bleeding to death in the back seat of Isles’s car. The group of friends, stunned, believed they had just witnessed a homicide—one lobsterman killing another with an ax in a bloody brawl. But did they? A man died—was killed, in what the state itself said was a homicide—and yet to this day, no one has been charged with a single crime related to his death.”

Lincoln shared a bed with a man for four years and fell into a deep depression when he died

From People: “Abraham Lincoln was, by most accounts, the greatest president the United States has ever had. He led the country through the Civil War and played a pivotal role in the emancipation of enslaved Black Americans. But through his professional and political triumphs, he is said to have suffered from crippling, lifelong depression. It’s a side of the great American president that history books don’t typically dwell on, and the new documentary Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln takes a look at another aspect of Lincoln’s life that often has gone overlooked: his sexuality. The documentary covers Lincoln’s relationships with several men over the years, most notably Joshua Speed, the co-owner of a general store with whom the future U.S. president shared a bed — for four years. The film features interviews with more than a dozen scholars and historians and offers letters and never-before-seen photos, while laying out the thesis that Lincoln was probably gay or at least bisexual.”

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

Continue reading “They saw a man killed with an ax but no one was ever charged”

From Curbed: “Sometimes Wu remembers how his family balked when he told them he was going to start ratting out lawbreakers in New York City. But for a chance at making nearly $90 for a minute of his time, he found he could push their skepticism to the bottom of his consciousness.The source of the money was the city itself, thanks to the Citizens Air Complaint Program, which allows members of the public to claim a reward by sending in videos of buses and trucks that idle illegally. The statutory limit for leaving your engine running is three minutes. But on a block with a school, that drops to 60 seconds, which is what has now drawn Wu several times to this particular block in Manhattan that’s being poisoned by the pooling diesel exhaust of nearly a dozen yellow school buses. Wearing a mask to filter out the acrid tang of sulfates and carbon soot, Wu uses his phone’s camera to capture the license plates and company markings on the buses.”

Was Rudolph Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, murdered?

From History.com: “On September 29, 1913, Rudolf Diesel, inventor of the engine that bears his name, disappears from the steamship Dresden while traveling from Antwerp, Belgium to Harwich, England. On October 10, a Belgian sailor aboard a North Sea steamer spotted a body floating in the water; upon further investigation, it turned out that the body was Diesel’s. There was, and remains, a great deal of mystery surrounding his death: It was officially judged a suicide, but many people believed (and still believe) that Diesel was murdered. Diesel patented a design for his engine on February 28, 1892 and at the time of his death, he was on his way to England to attend the groundbreaking of a new diesel-engine plant—and to meet with the British navy about installing his engine on their submarines. Conspiracy theories began to fly almost immediately: “Inventor Thrown Into the Sea to Stop Sale of Patents to British Government,” read one headline.”

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

Continue reading “You can make six figures in New York by reporting idling trucks”

From CBS News: “Jan Dell is a former chemical engineer who has spent years telling an inconvenient truth about plastics. “So many people, they see the recyclable label, and they put it in the recycle bin,” she said. “But the vast majority of plastics are not recycled.” About 48 million tons of plastic waste is generated in the U.S. each year; only 5 to 6 percent of it is actually recycled, according to the Department of Energy. The rest ends up in landfills or is burned. Dell founded a non-profit, The Last Beach Cleanup, to fight plastic pollution. Inside her garage in Southern California is all sorts of plastic with those little arrows on it that make us think they can be recycled. But, she said, “You’re being lied to.” Those so-called chasing arrows started showing up on plastic products in 1988, part of a push to convince the public that plastic waste wasn’t a problem because it can be recycled. Davis Allen, an investigative researcher, said the industry didn’t need for recycling to work: “They needed people to believe that it was working.”

Boat fish don’t count: Inside the dangerous and secretive world of extreme fishing

From The Atlantic: “Brandon Sausele is 27 years old. Shaggy-haired, tattooed, and muscular, he is a devoted practitioner of an extreme sport known as “wetsuiting,” which is both easy to describe and impossible for the uninitiated to understand. When I was first getting into the sport a few years ago, the advice I received from another fisherman was simply: Don’t. Wetsuiting is a form of saltwater fishing that involves wearing a wetsuit and wading or swimming out to offshore rocks—almost exclusively at night, often during storms—to access deeper water or faster currents than can be reached in traditional waders. The quarry are striped bass, a fish that migrates every spring to as far north as Maine, and the largest come close to shore at night. Stripers prefer inclement weather and rough water, which make ambushing their prey easier, but also make conditions more dangerous for the men—wetsuiters are nearly all men—who chase them.”

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

Continue reading “Plastic recycling is a hoax and the industry knows it”

From Lori Emerson: “In need of a practical way to overcome social isolation; communicate emergencies, weather, and crop prices, farmers began to take advantage of the growing ubiquity of both telephone sets and barbed wire fencing. They would hook up telephones to wire strung from their homes to a nearby fence; at the time, telephones had their own battery which produced a DC current that could carry a voice signal; turning a crank on the phone would generate an AC current to produce a ring at the end of the line. These networks had no central exchange, no operators–and no monthly bill. Instead of ringing through the exchange to a single address, every call made every phone on the system ring. Soon each household had its own personal ringtone…but anyone could pick up. Reportedly, the quality of the signal traveling over the heavy wire was excellent, but weather would frequently cause short circuits.”

An elite rock climber lost his vision so he found a way to climb blind

From the Washington Post: “Molly Thompson craned her neck so she could make out the man climbing the tower of red rock. Squinting into the desert sun, she tried to identify a crack he could grab on to or a ledge wide enough for his foot. The climber, struggling to keep his grip, was her husband, Jesse Dufton. His left arm trembled from the effort. His foot probed for a more secure hold, but found nothing. “A little bit higher there should be a foothold,” Molly said into a headset. When Jesse extended his foot again, it missed the tiny outcropping. He returned his foot to its original position and tiptoed on three millimeters of quartzite, 200 feet above the ground. He did not look down. He did not look anywhere. Jesse has advanced rod-cone dystrophy. Put another way: He is completely blind. And another: He is one of the world’s few elite blind rock-climbers.”

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

Continue reading “Farmers used to use barbed-wire fences as a phone network”

From Afar: “Gary Beeck’s island had all the basic ingredients of a tropical daydream: swaying palms, epoxy-clear water, a blond frill of sand fading to jungle. But a surge of trepidation hit when Beeck, a retiree from Perth, Australia, neared the uninhabited island off Sumatra’s volcano-pocked coast in May. Later that day, the boat and crew that carried him would return to shore; Beeck would stay behind, alone. Beeck had booked a “castaway” stay on the island though the travel company Docastaway. For 12 days and with just a few basic survival supplies, he planned to live off wild coconuts, plus whatever food he could catch and forage. During the drive to the boat launch that morning, a local guide had offered a final chance to purchase provisions before leaving civilization behind—there were ripe mangoes, sweetly starchy bananas. He said no. Later, and only when it was too late to change his mind, Beeck would reconsider.”

The world’s oldest hotel has been operating for more than 1300 years

From Moss and Fog: “The oldest hotels in Europe have nothing on Nisiyama Onsen Keiunkan, a traditional Japanese Ryokan that has been family run for an astonishing 52 generations. Operating since 705 AD, the hotel has all its hot water sourced directly from the local Hakuho Springs. Guests can still enjoy the same hot spring baths that visitors have been using for over a thousand years. It is located at the foot of the Akaishi Mountains, in Yamanashi Prefecture. In addition to being the oldest operating hotel, it may also be the world’s oldest continuously-operating business. Although the facilities are much younger, the business has operated continuously for over 1300 years. The Nishiyama Hot Spring is said to have had many commanders of the warring period visiting it. Amidst the unification of Japan, it is said that Tokugawa Ieyasu visited twice.”

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

Continue reading “Some people are paying to be left alone on a deserted island”

From Cracked: “According to Lucy, she was driving home from MGM one evening when “all of a sudden, I heard music!” The beat was really thumping so Lucy looked down to turn off the car radio — except it wasn’t on. The music got louder as she drove, understandably freaking her out as she realized the groove was coming from inside her mouth. The next day on the studio lot, Lucy told the story to Buster Keaton, as one does. Keaton told her to chill, explaining the phenomenon of receiving AM radio through teeth fillings. On a drive home via an alternate route, Ball’s bridgework once again picked up a signal. She described the pulses in her mouth: Da da da dut! Da da da dut! Her pearly whites continued to vibrate with dots and dashes, which she now identified as Morse code. Eventually, Ball claims, her whole jaw was vibrating “and then I got the hell out of there.” She rushed into the MGM security office the next morning, and according to Ball, “they found an underground Japanese transmitting radio station!”

Smedley Butler foiled a high-level plot to overthrow the US government in the 1930s

From Damn Interesting: “In the early 1930s, a secret collection of prosperous men are said to have assembled in New York City to discuss the dissolution of America’s democracy. To assist them in their diabolical scheme, the resourceful plotters recruited the assistance of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, a venerated, highly decorated, and considerably jaded former Marine. It was the conspirators’ earnest hope that their army of 500,000 Great War veterans, under the leadership of General Butler, could overpower the US’ feeble peacetime military and reconstitute the government as a more economical fascist dictatorship. After Butler revealed the plot, MacGuire and the wealthy men he allegedly represented all denied involvement in any such plot, referring to such suggestions as “a joke, a publicity stunt.” But the investigative HUAC committee concluded that there was indeed compelling evidence of a plot.

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

Continue reading “Lucille Ball said she caught Japanese spies with her teeth”