Category: Newsletters

From Historic Flix: “Mauro Prosperi, a former police officer from Italy, is a seasoned ultramarathon runner. His hobby saw him enter the Marathon des Sables in 1994, an annual six-day ultramarathon that takes participants through over 150 miles of scorching Moroccan desert. For their whole week in the desert, competitors have to carry all their own equipment and food and are penalized for exceeding their designated rations. They also have a minimum pace of 3 kilometers per hour. Mauro’s passion for adventure would end up taking him on an unexpected journey for survival – during this time, he had no food, water, or any idea of which way to head for help. He wandered the vast and inhospitable desert alone for more than a week, was forced to drink his own urine to stay alive, and was eventually found 180 miles from the race course.”

Buffalo Calf Robe Woman was a Cheyenne warrior who probably killed Custer

From Mental Floss: “For the Native Americans of the Northern Plains, the Battle of Little Bighorn was a glorious victory against U.S. government forces intent on claiming their land. Fought on June 25, 1876, in Montana Territory, the battle saw Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors quickly overwhelm and kill some 260 U.S. troops. George Armstrong Custer, the Civil War hero sent to remove the Native Americans to their reservations, was among them. Though the exact circumstances surrounding Custer’s death have long been the subject of debate, a new and intriguing account of his final moments surfaced in June 2005 when members of the Northern Cheyenne broke more than a century of silence to recount their tribe’s oral history of the battle. According to their account, it was a female fighter named Buffalo Calf Road Woman who knocked Custer off his horse that day, leaving him vulnerable, and who may have killed him.”

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 “The extraordinary survival story of ultra runner Mauro Prosperi”

From Literary Hub: “It was a fine early summer afternoon in England, and the port at Chelsea was just slipping out of sight when Benjamin Franklin—­at the urging of his fellow passengers—­kicked off his buckled shoes and tossed aside his heavy jacket. John Wygate, a fellow printer whom Franklin had taught to swim, had been regaling the gentlemen aboard the ferry with stories of Franklin’s fishlike agility in the water and the peculiar aquatic tricks he could perform. They had spent the morning viewing taxidermied crocodiles and rattlesnakes at Don Saltero’s curiosities shop and weren’t ready for the day’s amusements to end, even as they headed back to Blackfriars. Franklin likely put on a good show of modesty, demurring at first to the group’s excited requests for a demonstration, but was no doubt secretly pleased as he undressed for his dip in the Thames—­he loved both an audience and any excuse to get in the water.”

This computerized love-letter generator was a precursor to ChatGPT

From JSTOR Daily: “In the early 1950s, small, peculiar love letters were pinned up on the walls of the computing lab at the University of Manchester. The history behind them is even stranger; examples of the world’s first computer-generated writing, they’re signed by MUC, the acronym for the Manchester University Computer. In 1952, decades before ChatGPT’s computer generated writing was integrated into mainstream media outlets, two gay men—Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey—essentially invented AI writing. Alongside Turing, Strachey worked on several experiments with Artificial Intelligence: a computer that could sing songs, one of the world’s first computer games, and an algorithm to write gender-neutral mash notes that screamed with longing.”

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 “That time Ben Franklin jumped naked into the Thames river”

From Hackaday: “The Brennan Monorail was a train from the early 1900’s that seemed to defy the laws of physics. Not only did it keep itself perfectly balanced on a single rail, but it mysteriously leaned into corners without any driver input. This was a real invention – and it was unveiled to the public in 1910 by its inventor Louis Brennan. The idea was that using a single rail instead of two would make trains faster and railways cheaper to build. His train could take corners at greater speeds without being thrown off the tracks and railways would only need half the material. Unlike the monorails we’re familiar with today, which wrap themselves around tracks built high in the air, Brennan’s monorail could run on existing tracks. Although it looked a bit sketchy, it was very stable. At the heart of the train was a gyroscope that would correct the train’s tilt before the passengers noticed. This was a mind-blowing piece of engineering, especially for 1910.”

From Paul Kedrosky: “Something strange has happened to the word “delve” in the last two years. Its usage has exploded in everything from Amazon reviews, to undergraduate essays, to academic papers. There were, for example, more papers with the word “delve” in them in 2022 and 2023 together than in the prior 500 years combined. Everyone is on the delve train. It all has to do with a weird quirk of large language models (LLMs), understanding which requires a trip back through the Lord of the Rings, early American settlements, a 17th-century pastor, and Milton. Delving into something is a grandiloquent cliché and a quest for implied certainty. But it is also a cultural signifier, one with a thousand years of history at the intersection of religion, politics, science, risk, and literature, and one that is now being reflected back to us. Models are channeling all that history, in which is embedded our uneasy relationship with technology.”

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 “The 1910 monorail that used gyroscopes to stay upright”

From Vice: “One day last spring, near an old rural cemetery in southern Brazil, a black man named Marcelo Gomes held up the corners of a Confederate flag to pose for a cell-phone photo. After the picture was taken, Gomes said he saw no problem with a black man paying homage to the history of the Confederate States of America. “American culture is a beautiful culture,” he said. Some of his friends had Confederate blood. Gomes had joined some 2,000 Brazilians at the annual festa of the Fraternidade Descendência Americana, the brotherhood of Confederate descendants in Brazil, on a plot near the town of Americana, which was settled by Southern defectors 150 years ago. On the morning of the festa, a public-address system was blaring the Confederate song ‘Stonewall Jackson’s Way’ and Brazilians in ten-gallon hats and leather jackets called out greetings.”

Two cities received millions of dollars from Benjamin Franklin 200 years after he died

From Why Is This Interesting: “Imagine waking up one day to find out that someone from the past had left you a vast sum of money. Not just the recent past, but hundreds of years ago. Now, imagine they left you £1,000 at the time, but because it was compounding, it’s now worth millions.  That’s what happened to the city of Philadelphia & Boston, who in 1887 both received the equivalent of millions of dollars today, from none other than the long-deceased Benjamin Franklin. Then, a hundred years later, in 1987, the two cities received an additional $2m and $4.5m respectively. You see, Benjamin Franklin had declared in his will that a sum of money be left in a trust for 200 years. The resulting funds were only to be used to help out young tradesmen in either city, to help them access initial capital to make their start. After 100 years, the cities were to receive 75% of the funds, with the rest to continue compounding for another 100 years.”

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 “The Brazilian town where the American Confederacy lives on”

From WBUR: “hat’s most shocking about Jeremy Pauley isn’t his tattooed eyeball or the metal spikes protruding from his scalp. It’s his openness about trading in human remains. Standing in the doorway of his rural Pennsylvania home, dressed all in black, he greets an unannounced reporter with patience. Pauley makes his living in what’s called the “oddities” market, buying and selling human remains and even binding books in human skin. It’s all legal — provided the remains aren’t stolen. “It’s a niche field,” he says of his work, like “a collector or a preservation artist.” He won’t say much more, because of the sprawling criminal investigation in which he’s a prominent figure. It was Pauley’s arrest that pointed investigators to a nationwide network of stolen human remains trafficking and led them to Harvard Medical School. There, a lone morgue manager allegedly plundered parts from bodies donated for science, and sold them online for profit.”

How coffee helped the Union caffeinate their way to victory in the Civil War

From the Smithsonian: “Ten months into the Civil War, the Union was short on a crucial supply, the absence of which threatened to sap the fighting strength of the Northern army: coffee. This critical source of energy and morale was considered almost as vital as gunpowder; Union General Benjamin Butler ordered his soldiers to carry coffee with them always, saying it guaranteed success: “If your men get their coffee early in the morning, you can hold” your position. But by 1862, imports of coffee were down by 40 percent since the start of the war. The Union blockade of Southern ports, including New Orleans, had slowed coffee imports from Brazil to a trickle—and Union merchants and military contractors were able to reroute only a portion of that Brazilian coffee northward; even with Union port cities trying to pick up the slack, the U.S. imported 50 percent less by value from Brazil in 1863 than it did in 1860. A new source was badly needed.”

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 “Harvard Medical School and the trade in human body parts”

From the New York Times: “After six weekends of deliberating, a group of Austrian citizens decided how to divvy up the riches of the heiress Marlene Engelhorn, who is donating the bulk of her inheritance to charity in an attempt to challenge a system that allowed her to accumulate millions of euros. The Guter Rat für Rückverteilung (“good council for redistribution” in German), a group of 50 residents in Austria advised by experts, chose 77 organizations that would receive money from Ms. Engelhorn’s fortune over the coming years. Ms. Engelhorn, 32, turned to the public to help redistribute her wealth, challenging the lack of inheritance tax in her native Austria. In January, she sent invitations to 10,000 Austrian residents, asking them for help spending 25 million euros (about $26.8 million) of her fortune, which she inherited when her grandmother died. The research group Foresight selected 50 of those residents.”

Vikings never wore helmets with horns on them, so why do we always picture them that way?

From Vox: “Popular imagery of Vikings is filled with lots of horned helmets. It’s everywhere from football mascots (like the Minnesota Vikings) to far too many New Yorker cartoons. The only problem is that those horned helmets are a complete myth. The main culprit? Costume designer Carl Emil Doepler, who included horned helmets in his gorgeous costume designs for the 1876 performance of Wagner’s classic Norse saga, Der Ring des Nibelungen. The opera was so influential that Vikings with horned helmets became a new standard — despite the fact that they were mythical. Germans were fascinated by Vikings, at least in part because they represented a classical origin story free from Greek and Roman baggage. So Doepler and other scholars intertwined German and Norse history in a surprising way: They put stereotypical ancient German headdresses — like horned helmets — on Viking heads.”

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 “An Austrian heiress let a group of strangers donate her fortune”

From The Guardian: “Jordan Hatmaker knew something was wrong as soon as she tried to open her parachute. “You’re meant to look up to check: is it there? Is it square? And is it stable?” she says. It was none of those things. This was the second time that day that she and her skydiving coach had leapt from an aircraft 13,500ft above the fields of Suffolk, Virginia. Hatmaker was 35, and 10 jumps away from securing her skydiving licence. She and her coach had agreed to freefall to 4,000ft; as her training progressed, she was able to deploy her parachute at increasingly lower altitudes, and this was the lowest she had ever gone. Hatmaker activated her pilot chute and immediately knew something was wrong. The force of the inflation is designed to trigger the release of the main canopy, but instead, the pilot chute became wrapped around her leg in a malfunction known as a horseshoe. “I thought to myself: ‘This is going to hurt.’”

There’s a song written on a sinner’s buttock in Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights

From Open Culture: “An enterprising blogger named Amelia transcribed, recorded, and uploaded a musical score straight out of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted between 1490 and 1510. The kicker? Amelia found the score written on a suffering sinner’s butt. The poor, musically-branded soul can be seen in the bottom left-hand corner of the painting’s third and final panel, wherein Bosch depicts the various torture methods of hell. The unfortunate hell-dweller lies prostrate atop an open music book, crushed by a gigantic lute, while a toad-like demon stretches his tongue towards his tuneful buttocks. Another inhabitant is strung up on a harp above the scene. Although we can’t ascertain why Bosch decided to write out this particular melody, since scant biographical information about the painter survives, it’s possible that he decided to include music because it was viewed as a sign of sinful pleasure.”

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 “She jumped from a plane and then her parachute failed”

A video clip posted on social media sites on Monday showed Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, climbing the stairs to a private airplane that was parked on the tarmac at London’s Stansted airport. A fairly mundane image in many ways, were it not for the fact that Assange has been in prison in the UK for the past five years, and for most of that period has been fighting the US government’s attempts to extradite him to the US to face Espionage Act charges for publishing classified information (I wrote about the filing of the initial indictment). The plane that Assange boarded at Stansted flew to Bangkok and then to Saipan, the island capital of the Northern Marianas, which have been a US commonwealth since World War II.

Assange flew to Saipan to attend a hearing on Wednesday as part of a deal reached with the US government under which he agreed to plead guilty to a single count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security material. In exchange, he was released from prison, since the five years he spent there was more or less equivalent to what he would have received as a sentence for such a charge, and returned to his home country of Australia. The Northern Mariana Islands were chosen as the location for the court hearing because Assange didn’t want to set foot in the continental US, and because the islands are close to Australia, making it easier for him to travel there.

After news of the plea arrangement was published, Julian Assange’s mother told The Guardian that she was grateful her son’s “ordeal is finally coming to an end” and that the deal shows the importance and power of “quiet diplomacy”; John Shipton, Assange’s father, also expressed his joy at his son’s release from prison. Videos and photos posted on social media on Wednesday showed Assange’s wife, Stella, who married him in 2022 while he was in prison, embracing her husband (the two have been in a relationship since 2015 and have two sons, born in 2017 and 2019). A post from Stella Assange on X had a photo of the two hugging and said simply “Home.”

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

Continue reading “Julian Assange is free, but the troubling journalistic questions raised by his case remain”

From JSTOR Daily: “Behind a plate-glass window, framed by grand Doric columns, repose three bodies. Except for their leather loincloths, they are naked. From a pipe above each bed, a trickle of cold water runs down their faces. Their eyes are closed. They bear the marks of their deaths: one is swollen by drowning, one gashed by an industrial accident, another stabbed. A crowd of people gathers outside the window, staring at the bodies. This is the Paris Morgue, circa 1850. Theoretically, the purpose of the display was to enlist public help in identifying unnamed corpses. But around the turn of the century, the morgue developed a reputation as a gruesome public spectacle, drawing huge crowds daily. The morgue was even listed in tourist guidebooks as one of the city’s attractions: Le Musée de la Mort. The crowds that attended the morgue attracted snack peddlers and street performers, creating an almost festival atmosphere.”

The Beastie Boys paid for a punk legend to have sex reassignment surgery

From AntiMatter: “Donna Parsons said that it wasn’t until January of 2002 that she first heard the word transgender. As soon as she read about it, Donna saw herself—perhaps for the first time—and began transitioning almost immediately. Tragically, not long afterwards, Donna was diagnosed with colon cancer. She had an operation to remove the cancer that year, followed by six months of chemotherapy, but the cancer came back. “My understanding was that she was pretty much dying, and that she wanted to live out the rest of the little time she had left in the body of her choosing,” recalls Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz in Beastie Boys Book. “So Adam Yauch took care of it. He organized it so we gave her the money for the operation, but it was under the guise of reimbursement and unpaid back royalties for the Polly Wog Stew record from 1982. Donna got the operation, and then within a year passed away.”

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 “People used to visit the morgue as a form of entertainment”

From How Stuff Works: “Politicians are under a lot of scrutiny in the 21st century: a public servant can’t even accept millions of dollars in bribes without getting trouble. But let’s reflect back on a time in American history when a new governor could show up to his inauguration proudly sporting shoes made from a hanged felon whose corpse he skinned himself. Back in 1881, an outlaw named George Parrott, known by the nickname “Big Nose George,” was hanged in Rawlins, Wyoming. After Parrott’s 1881 death, nobody showed up to claim the body, so the doctor who pronounced him dead took his body home for “medical study.” He extracted Parrott’s brain and gave it to his friend, the surgeon Thomas Maghee, who wanted to study Parrott’s “criminal brain.” Osborne also sawed off the top portion of Big Nose George’s skull and gave it to Lillian Heath, a 15-year-old girl who went on to become Wyoming’s first female physician (she reportedly kept it her entire life, using it as an ashtray and a door stop).”

The Nobel Prize winner who bet against himself and lost

From Now I Know: “Robert Lucas, Jr. graduated from the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. in Economics and returned to the school as a professor in 1975. Over his career, he developed a macroeconomic theory called “rational expectations,” which, according to the Chicago Tribune, “holds that people aren’t surprised when the government attempts to stimulate the economy, so they adapt their behaviors accordingly during such times and thus alter the expected results of government policies.” It was somewhat controversial at first, but ultimately, the world of macroecon experts adopted Lucas’s view. And on October 10, 1995, Lucas was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work. The Nobel came with a $1,000,000 cash prize. But he only got half of it — because his ex-wife believed in him more than he believed in himself. A clause in his divorce agreement stated that if he won a Nobel, his wife would get half.”

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 “This Wild West governor wore shoes made of human skin”

From All That’s Interesting: “The great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, aspiring explorer and ethnographer Michael Rockefeller had no interest in managing his family’s empire upon graduating from Harvard in 1960. Instead, he set out for the remote wilds of Dutch New Guinea to collect art made by the largely uncontacted Asmat people. But Rockefeller’s boat capsized off New Guinea’s southern coast and that was the last anyone ever heard from him. Despite a search effort and a media firestorm, hr was never found and the authorities eventually declared him dead due to drowning in 1964. But in the decades since, various independent investigators claim to have uncovered evidence that the authorities actually buried the truth about Michael Rockefeller’s death because it was simply too horrific to reveal.”

North Korea’s lucrative trade in human hair is helping it skirt the impact of sanctions

From The Guardian: “They almost certainly don’t know it, but western owners of shiny new wigs and false eyelashes could owe their look to North Korean slave labour. In recent years, a booming trade in human hair has helped to sustain North Korea’s isolated economy, softening the impact of international sanctions and providing Pyongyang with vital revenue to pursue its nuclear ambitions. Last year, exports to China included 1,680 tonnes – or about 135 double decker buses worth – of false eyelashes, beards and wigs worth around $167m, according to Chinese customs data. Millions of dollars in sales of human hair helped drive a recovery in the secretive state’s exports in 2023, with wigs and other hair products making up almost 60% of declared goods sent to China, by far its biggest trading partner.”

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 “Was Michael Rockefeller eaten by a tribe of cannibals?”

From the Wall Street Journal: “The young Argentine couple in the pastel-colored house lived a seemingly ordinary suburban life, driving around this sleepy European capital in a white Kia Ceed sedan, always paying their taxes on time and never so much as getting a parking ticket. Maria Rosa Mayer Muños ran an online art gallery, telling acquaintances she’d left Argentina after being robbed in Buenos Aires by an armed gang at a red light. Her husband, Ludwig Gisch, ran an IT startup. Described by neighbors in their middle-class district of Črnuče as “normal” and “quiet,” the husband and wife appeared to be global citizens: switching from English and German with friends to accentless Spanish with their son and daughter, who attended the British International School. Yet almost everything about the family from number 35 Primožičeva street was a carefully constructed lie, according to intelligence officials.”

She was pronounced dead then they found her gasping for air in a body bag

From Popular Mechanics: “About two hours after the body of 74-year-old Constance Glanz arrived at the funeral home outside of Lincoln, Nebraska, earlier this month, an employee there noticed something strange. Glanz, who had been pronounced dead at a nearby nursing home, was breathing. After she was transported to a local hospital, Glanz survived for a few more hours. She was later declared dead for a second time. In 2023, a 76-year-old Ecuadorian woman was declared dead after a suspected stroke. Five hours later, she was found alive after her coffin was opened to change her clothing. Months earlier, an Iowa woman was taken to a funeral home where workers found her gasping for air in a body bag. In 2018, a South African woman who was initially declared dead was discovered alive in a mortuary refrigerator.”

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 “Unassuming married couple turn out to be Russian spies”

From Rolling Stone: “Sharonda had struggled with substance abuse when Danielle was a teenager, and had not been present for much of her life; they had only started speaking again in 2015, around the time Danielle had her first child. As part of an effort to reconnect with her daughter, Sharonda had set off on her own spiritual journey. She would eventually call herself a psychic, appointing Danielle as her guide. On April 8, Sharonda received a phone call from the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s office: Danielle, 34, had driven her car into a tree at high speed and did not survive the impact. Danielle’s partner, Jaelen Chaney, 29, had been found in their apartment stabbed to death. Her two children appeared to have been pushed out of a moving car, and, while the nine-year-old only had a few cuts, the eight-month-old died.” 

The man who sat by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel every day for forty years

From The New Yorker: “For forty-two years, from the time he discovered the hotel, in 1950, until it closed, last December 30th, Irving’s days had been as well ordered and as predictable as the Sun King’s. At seven o’clock every morning, wearing one of the many perfectly fitted tropical-weight suits that have been a special affection of his since a memorable day in the nineteen-thirties, he would stroll over from his house, in the lower reaches of Beverly Hills; enter the hotel under the long, sloping green-and-white striped awning that extended all the way from the driveway, above Sunset Boulevard, to the main entrance; turn right in the lobby; and arrive at the Polo Lounge. Occasionally, when the weather was particularly fine, he would take his breakfast outside, under the great Brazilian peppertree on the curving flagstone Polo Lounge patio.”

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 “Why did this celebrity astrologer kill her family?”

From Atlas Obscura: “Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre is one of the holiest places in Christianity and has been the site of pilgrimages since the 4th century. Care over the church is shared by no less than six denominations. The whole edifice is carefully parceled into sections, some being commonly shared while others belonging strictly to a particular sect. A set of complicated rules governs the transit rights of the other groups through each particular section on any given day, especially during the holidays. Sometime in the first half of the 18th century, someone placed a ladder up against the wall of the church. No one is sure to which sect he belonged. The ladder remains there to this date. No one dares touch it, lest they disturb the status quo, and provoke the wrath of others. The exact date when the ladder was placed is not known but the first evidence of it comes from a 1728 engraving by Elzearius Horn. It hasn’t moved since.”

Charles de Gaulle’s favorite daughter Anne had Down syndrome

From The Independent: “When Anne was born, in 1928, there would have been a huge stigma attached to having a child with Down syndrome. It was often thought to be a result of parental alcoholism, venereal disease, or overall degeneracy. Eugenics was also coming into vogue at the time. In those days the norm would have been to put a child like Anne into an institution. (Indeed, nearly four decades later, when playwright Arthur Miller fathered a son with Down syndrome, he not only put him in an institution, he pretended he never existed.) De Gaulle is generally thought of as a bit of a pig, but with Anne he was different. Apparently he delighted in telling her stories and singing her songs, doing little dances for her and putting on pantomimes. And in many ways, she was de Gaulle’s secret weapon: “She helped me overcome the failures in all men,” he said, “and to look beyond 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 “The immovable ladder on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre”

From New York: “One weekday in the summer of 2021, Christopher Pence entered his home office in Cedar City, Utah, and plugged a USB stick into his computer. He booted up Tails, an operating system designed to optimize privacy, and used it to access the dark web — a marketplace teeming with illicit goods and services like child pornography, weapons, and drugs. Christopher, who was 41 and worked for Microsoft as a systems engineer, wanted to hire a hit man to kill a young couple he had met on only a handful of occasions. Christopher was an unlikely client in the murder-for-hire trade. He was not violent and had no criminal record. When he wasn’t logging ten-to-12-hour days working, often while listening to one of his favorite Christian rock bands, he was helping his wife, Michelle, raise their 11 biological and five adopted children. The entire family, along with Christopher’s retired parents, lived in a 5,800-square-foot home on the northern edge of the Mojave Desert, surrounded by wind-raked brushland and snow-capped mountains in all directions. They were building greenhouses on the property and had plans to buy cows.”

If you really love Excel spreadsheets, this Las Vegas competition is for you

From The Verge: “It’s happy hour in Las Vegas, and the MGM Grand casino is crawling with people. The National Finals Rodeo is in town, the NBA’s inaugural in-season tournament is underway, the Raiders play on Sunday, and the U2 residency is going strong at the giant Sphere, so it seems everyone in every bar and at every slot machine is looking forward to something. (And wearing a cowboy hat.) Even for a town built on nonstop buzz, this qualifies as a uniquely eventful weekend. But I’d wager that if you wanted to see the most exciting drama happening at the MGM on this Friday night, you’d have to walk through the casino and look for the small sign advertising something called The Active Cell. This is the site of the play-in round for the Excel World Championship, and it starts in five minutes. There are 27 people here to take part in this event (28 registered, but one evidently chickened out before we started), which will send its top eight finishers to tomorrow night’s finals. There, one person will be crowned the Excel World Champion.”

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 “Why did a father of sixteen children hire a hit man?”