From the New York Times: “As you watch the U.S. Artistic Swimming team practice for the Olympics — their bodies upside down, their legs scissoring in the air in perfect time, like frenzied offshore wind turbines — you will notice two things. First, the sport is much harder, and possibly even more insane, than you thought. Second, in a discipline whose enthusiasm for homogeneity is reflected in its pre-2017 name, synchronized swimming, one of the athletes in the pool is very much not like the others. His name is Bill May, and he is the only man on the team. A rule change in 2022 cleared the way for men to compete in the sport at this summer’s Paris Games. That means that this is May’s first and, realistically, last chance ever to fulfill his lifelong dream. He is 45 years old.”
Dick Van Dyke is almost a hundred years old but planning a cross-country tour
From Deadline: “As the star of cultural touchstones from The Dick Van Dyke Show to Mary Poppins to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to Diagnosis Murder, Van Dyke has been on screen for as long as almost everybody can remember. His received his first lifetime achievement award 30 years ago. The legend label is not new. Perhaps he struggles to accept it because it implies a finality, that your work is complete and you’re now a part of the past, not the present. Van Dyke does not consider himself done. “I’d still like to do a one man-show,” he says. He certainly wouldn’t be short of material. Van Dyke has been working for more than 70 years now, across film, theater and TV. The biggest screen moments of his career were celebrated in the recent CBS special Dick Van Dyke 98 Years of Magic, a very sweet variety show involving heartfelt tributes and a parade of performers giving their takes on Van Dyke’s most famous musical numbers.”
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From Defector: “On the morning of Aug. 5, 1936, Helen Stephens was supposed to be on top of the world. The day before, she had won the Olympic gold medal in the 100-meter dash. She’d defeated her longtime rival, a Polish sprinter named Stella Walsh. Then, it all fell apart. That morning, a Polish newspaper, the Warsaw-based Kurier Poranny, published a curious accusation: Stephens, the paper alleged, was not really a woman at all. “It is scandalous that the Americans entered a man in the women’s competition,” the paper plainly stated. The accusation should have been dismissed outright, the ravings of a sportswriter frustrated by the defeat of one of his country’s stars. But at the Nazi-run Berlin Olympics, the story had juice. At a press conference, a European journalist asked: “Are you really a woman? Are you a man running in women’s races?”
For Jock Sutherland, being hailed as the world’s best surfer was just one phase in an unlikely life
From the New Yorker: “Jock Sutherland surfs unusually well for a man of seventy-five. Surfing well at his age is unusual, full stop. But he has spent his whole life, nearly, in this wave-rich corner of Oahu. We paddled out through a gantlet of blue-gray lava rocks. I tried to mimic Sutherland’s every move—he had been navigating this tiny, swirling channel since the nineteen-fifties. There were a dozen people out, and every one of them greeted Jock as he paddled past: little shakas and fist bumps with old regulars. This spot, where the waves range greatly in quality and intensity, is known as Jocko’s. In the mid-sixties, he made his move on surfing’s main stage, riding enormous waves with rare, almost playful aplomb. He rode the Banzai Pipeline, the world’s most famous, most photogenic, and, at that time, most dangerous wave. He rose swiftly through the Surfer poll, and in 1969 was No. 1—the consensus best surfer in the world.”
Off to war in a plywood box: The glidermen of World War II
From Warfare History: “One of the problems was how to get the maximum number of troops on the ground before the defenders could adequately react, and, second, how to provide them with heavy weapons such as artillery, antiaircraft weapons, transport, and engineer equipment once they got to, or close to, their landing zone. The answer to both problems was the glider, not only for resupply of weapons, equipment, and ammunition, but as a means to get a lot of people on the ground quickly and together, fully equipped and ready to fight. Once loose from the tug, you could land a glider in a pasture, a field of wheat, even a marsh. There was no landing gear to worry about; you could jettison the tricycle undercarriage at need and land the glider on its belly, some rudimentary skids taking up some of the shock. You could build them as big as a tug could tow them.”
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A lifetime of love for the charismatic narwhal, the unicorn of the sea
From Knowable: “Martin Nweeia is a modern Renaissance man. He has a degree in English and biology, a working dental practice, and a side interest in zoology and anthropology; he has composed for documentary films and has become an expert on narwhals — the mysterious, one-toothed “unicorns of the sea.” The male narwhal typically hosts a roughly eight-foot-long, single exterior tusk, whose function has been a mystery for centuries. Nweeia has obtained many grants to investigate the narwhal and, in more than 20 trips to the Arctic, he has compiled ambitious logs of Indigenous knowledge about the tusk, conducted in-depth studies on the material it is composed of, and attached heart and brain monitors to narwhals to try to determine what they can sense through the protrusion. Nweeia lectures at Harvard’s School of Dental Medicine and holds a global fellow position at the Polar Institute at the Wilson Center.”
How did the first humans on the Canary Islands survive a thousand years of isolation?
From Science.org: “More than 1000 years ago, a young man stood on the northern shore of the island now known as El Hierro. Across the wave-swept Atlantic Ocean, he could see the silhouettes of other islands, but for him, those islands were as unreachable as the Moon. His ancestors here had farmed wheat, but he and his contemporaries grew only barley and raised livestock such as goats. His genes held evidence that his parents were closely related, like many of the roughly 1000 people on the island, who had not mingled with outsiders for centuries. Yet the first Canarians, who arrived from North Africa roughly 1800 years ago, survived and even thrived on this arid, windswept archipelago for more than a thousand years. They numbered in the tens of thousands when Europeans first started arriving at the start of the 14th century.”
A family discovered a rare Tyrannasaurus Rex fossil in North Dakota
From the New York Times: “In the summer of 2022, two boys hiking with their father and a 9-year-old cousin in the North Dakota badlands came across some large bones poking out of a rock. They had no idea what to make of them. The father took some photos and sent them to a paleontologist friend. Later, the relatives learned they’d made a staggering discovery: They’d stumbled upon a rare juvenile skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex. Part of the fossil, which measures about 32 inches, is believed to be the tibia, or shin bone, of a 10-foot-tall, 3,500-pound dinosaur that scientists are calling Teen Rex. Only a few such fossils have been discovered worldwide, according to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. The specimen is also the most complete T. rex the museum has ever collected, it said. The paleontologist who identified the fossil said the boys had made an “incredible dinosaur discovery that advances science.”
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters 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, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com
From the NYT: “It has been an article of faith for nearly a century, as if chiseled onto a tablet by Abner Doubleday himself: The leading hitter in major league history is, and always will be, Tyrus Raymond Cobb. But history evolves. We know that Doubleday did not, in fact, invent baseball. And as of Wednesday, Josh Gibson will replace Cobb as the leading hitter in the official records of the game. At .372, Gibson’s career batting average eclipses Cobb’s by six points. Major League Baseball announced the results of a newly integrated statistical database covering records from Negro Leagues that operated from 1920 to 1948. The formal acceptance of the data comes three-and-a-half years after MLB officially recognized the Negro Leagues in December 2020.”
From Knowable: “There’s a reason fashion designers look to animal prints for inspiration. Creatures have evolved a dizzying array of patterns: stripes, spots, diamonds, chevrons, hexagons and even mazelike designs. Some, like peacocks, want to be seen, to attract a mate or scare off a rival or predator. Others, like tigers or female ducks, need to blend in, either to sneak up on prey or to avoid becoming lunch themselves. Some patterns arise simply or randomly, but others develop via complex, precise interactions of pattern-generating systems. More than 70 years ago, mathematician Alan Turing proposed a mechanism that explained how patterns could emerge from bland uniformity. Scientists are still using his model to gain a deeper understanding of animal markings.”
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From Mental Floss: “During the American Revolution, George Washington approved a plan to kidnap a 17-year-old midshipman. Such kidnappings were not unusual. Throughout the war, Continental and British army leadership attempted—and sometimes succeeded—in kidnapping colonial governors and high-ranking military officers to gain leverage in stalled negotiations. The British unsuccessfully tried to abduct Washington himself in 1780. The teenaged midshipman was Prince William Henry, a son of King George III and third in line to the throne. William Henry arrived in New York City’s harbor on September 26, 1781, aboard the HMS Prince George; he was the first member of the British royal family to set foot in the American colonies.”
James Joyce used to pick drunken fights and then hide behind Ernest Hemingway
From Open Culture: “Hemingway characterized Joyce as a thin, wispy and unmuscled man with defective eyesight, and also noted that the two writers did a certain amount of drinking together in Paris. The author of Ulysses and other books would routinely pick drunken fights, then duck behind his burly friend and say, “Deal with him, Hemingway.” Hemingway, who was convinced he had the makings of a real pugilist, was likely happy to oblige. Hemingway’s biographer wrote that Joyce was an admirer of Hemingway’s lifestyle and worried aloud that his books were too “suburban” next to those of his friend. Joyce said “there is much more behind Hemingway’s form than people know.”
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From the BBC: “In 2020, Danish antiquities dealer Dr Ittai Gradel began to suspect an eBay seller he had been buying from was a thief who was stealing from the British Museum. More than two years later, the museum would announce that thousands of objects were missing, stolen or damaged from its collection. Why had it taken so long for it to do so? Dr Gradel collects ancient gemstones carved with intricate figures or motifs – the circle of dealers is small, so the internet has become a vital trading tool. On 7 August 2016, a grey and white piece of a cameo gemstone featuring Priapus – the Greek god of fertility – was posted for just £40. Dr Gradel knew he had seen the Priapus cameo before. He was sure it featured in an old gems catalogue he owned from one of the world’s most famous institutions, the British Museum.”
Remote tribe gets the Internet and now they are hooked on porn and social media
From the New York Times: “As the speeches dragged on, eyes drifted to screens. Teenagers scrolled Instagram. One man texted his girlfriend. And men crowded around a phone streaming a soccer match while the group’s first female leader spoke. Just about anywhere, a scene like this would be mundane. But this was happening in a remote Indigenous village in one of the most isolated stretches of the planet. The Marubo people have long lived in communal huts scattered hundreds of miles along the Ituí River deep in the Amazon rainforest. They speak their own language, take ayahuasca to connect with forest spirits and trap spider monkeys to make soup or keep as pets. But since September, the Marubo have had high-speed internet thanks to Elon Musk.”
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From JSTOR Daily: “Coke was the brainchild of Dr. John Stith Pemberton, who was injured while fighting for the Confederacy and then became addicted to the morphine prescribed for pain relief. Living in Atlanta after the war, the physician tried the new wonder drug cocaine and found it cured his morphine problem. In 1884, Pemberton began selling cocaine-laced wine. After Atlanta passed a temperance law the next year, he switched gears and started producing a soft drink named for its two key medicinal ingredients—coca leaf and the caffeine-containing African kola nut. But within just a decade, public attitudes regarding cocaine changed dramatically. Black laborers in the New Orleans area began using cocaine, and it became a popular recreational drug in Black neighborhoods. Medical journals warned of the “Negro cocaine menace,” and newspapers claimed that the drug caused Black men to commit crimes.”
The incredible saga of the lost Antarctic Volkswagen Beetles
From Jalopnik: “Normally, when planning an expedition to Antarctica, you might look for a beefy vehicle for wandering the great wasteland of snow and ice. Something like the building-size Antarctic Snow Cruiser, or the tough Soviet-made Kharkovchanka. You’d probably overlook, say, a 1960s Volkswagen Beetle. Rookie mistake! You’re going to end up like Australian explorer Douglas Mawson overlooking the hard-working People’s Car little car like that. Through a wonderful combination of timing, science and marketing, several Volkswagens made their way to Antarctica via Australian researchers in the 1960s. And, as it turns out, the humble little Beetle was damn useful for getting around. The first VW to end up in the Antarctic was stock, with just basic winterization thrown in to handle the incredible temperatures in the Antarctic. Volkswagen worked directly with Antarctic researchers to develop a better, more resilient vehicle for use around the base, which would arrive the very next year.”
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UNITED STATES – JUNE 3: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., questions Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during the House Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee on Coronavirus Pandemic hearing titled “A Hearing with Dr. Anthony Fauci,” in Rayburn building on Monday, June 3, 2024. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)
Even before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a public health emergency of international concern in January 2020, there were debates as to where—and how—the virus originated. Some cited the emergence of the earliest COVID cases in or around Wuhan, in China, as evidence of what came to be known as the “lab-leak” theory of the disease’s origin, since scientists had studied coronaviruses similar to the one that caused COVID at an institute in the city. However, most scientists—at least in the initial stages of the pandemic—argued that COVID likely emerged in a manner similar to other diseases caused by coronaviruses: as a result of interspecies transmission, specifically at a so-called “wet” market in Wuhan, where live bats and other animals were sold.
That didn’t stop members of the Trump administration promoting the idea of a lab leak, which conveniently allowed the White House to shift blame for COVID to the Chinese government. As the virus continued to spread, so did various versions of the theory. In February 2021, Facebook finally announced that it would remove any posts suggesting that the COVID virus was “man-made or manufactured,” and said that it reserved the right to permanently remove any accounts or pages that repeatedly shared such claims. The ban, however, only lasted until May of the same year, when Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said that it would no longer remove such claims, citing what it called “ongoing investigations” into the virus’s origins.
Meta’s ban of the lab-leak theory and subsequent reversal were quickly incorporated into a conservative worldview in which so-called authorities on COVID were inherently untrustworthy. As my colleague Jon Allsop pointed out at the time, a wave of commentators (often, though by no means always, on the right) argued that the media had failed in its duty to report accurately on COVID’s origins, claiming that many journalists had inappropriately discounted the lab-leak argument as a racist conspiracy theory when in fact the science wasn’t yet settled. (Matthew Yglesias described it as a “genuinely catastrophic media fuckup” and “a huge fiasco.”) As Allsop noted, however, the wave of commentary was not based on any new smoking gun proving that COVID had come from a lab. And so the debate over its origins continued.
Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
From The Guardian: “There was Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, all about the joys of spring, and as darkly funny as its title suggests. There was the American football song Fight Fiercely, Harvard, which seemed to make cruel mock of those cold, dreary afternoons I was forced to spend watching my school play rugby. I didn’t know then that Lehrer had started out by paying to have his own record cut because the record companies were shocked by his songs, and selling the LP to fellow students at Harvard. At that time, Lehrer’s principal accomplishment was that he was a mathematics prodigy who had entered Harvard aged 15, in 1943, taken a first class degree aged 18 and a master’s a year later. But in 1960, the year after I discovered him, Lehrer stopped writing and performing. He has spent the rest of his life as an obscure mathematics lecturer.”
The Renaissance painter Caravaggio died while on the run from a murder charge
From the New Statesman: “In May 1606, Caravaggio’s rackety life caught up with him. He already had a long list of misdemeanours against his name. He had been twice arrested for carrying a sword without a permit; put on trial by the Roman authorities for writing scurrilous verses about a rival, Giovanni Baglione (or “Johnny Bollocks” according to the poems); arrested for assault, in one incident being injured himself (his testimony to the police survives: “I wounded myself with my own sword when I fell down these stairs. I don’t know where it was and there was no one else there”); arrested again for smashing a plate of artichokes in the face of a waiter; for throwing stones and abusing a constable (telling him he could “stick [his sword] up his arse”); and for smearing excrement on the house of the landlady who had had his belongings seized in payment of missed rent. There were more incidents, all meticulously recorded in the Roman archives.”
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From the BBC: “In 1968, author JRR Tolkien refused The Beatles permission to make a film version of his fantasy epic The Lord of The Rings. “What I understand is that Denis O’Dell, who was their Apple film producer, who produced The Magic Christian, had the idea of doing Lord of The Rings,” director Peter Jackson said. “When they went to Rishikesh and stayed in India, it was about three months with the Maharishi at the beginning of 1968, he sent the books to The Beatles. I expect because there are three, he sent one book to each of the Beatles. I don’t think Ringo got one, but John, Paul and George each got one Lord of The Rings book to read in India. And they got excited about it. Ultimately, they couldn’t get the rights from Tolkien, because he didn’t like the idea of a pop group doing his story. So it got nixed by him. They tried to do it. There’s no doubt about it.”
Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law created a gentleman burglar named Raffles
From JSTOR Daily: “Sherlock Holmes captured the hearts of people around the world by solving crimes in the early 1900s. But less remembered is a fictional contemporary who was equally beloved for cleverly committing crimes: a gentleman burglar named Arthur J. Raffles, invented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, Earnest William Hornung. In twenty-five stories, plus one novel, written between 1898 and 1909, Raffles spent his days as a cricketing master and gentleman of leisure and his nights gleefully stealing from his fellow London elites, accompanied by his sidekick Bunny Manders. Some critics recoiled at presenting young readers with stories in which, as one put it, “one’s notions of right and wrong are turned topsy-turvy.” But Moss writes that they played to a widespread questioning of social hierarchies in the 1880s and ’90s.
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From Vanity Fair: “On a spring day in Rome in 1957, 30-year-old Bruno Lunenfeld gave one hell of a presentation. For four years he had been developing a therapy that would induce ovulation in women struggling with infertility. What he needed now was the support of the Istituto Farmacologico Serono, whose staff scientist had been working on a similar endeavor. The men listened politely, but at the end of the presentation they told him, with regret, that they couldn’t help. It seemed unlikely, for instance, that Serono would be able to procure the vast quantities of one specific essential substance without which the drug couldn’t be made. Lunenfeld left, but then a member of the board approached him with an idea. In the end, over a hundred post-menopausal nuns provided 30,000 liters of their urine, and that was enough to make 9,000 vials of 75 units, which in turn was sufficient for 450 ovulation induction cycles.”
The Webster Apartments: One of Manhattan’s last women-only boarding houses
From the Paris Review: “I am greeted by the same sight that greeted tens of thousands of young women before me, the same sight that greeted a younger self when my cab from JFK pulled up a decade ago, that greeted the department store girls arriving in the city with their belongings in trunks a century before that, and all the residents between and since: a red-brick facade towering over West Thirty-Fourth Street, its name proudly chiseled into stone, “The Webster Apartments.” Charles Webster was the cousin of Rowland Macy and head of Macy’s department store. Upon Webster’s death in 1916, he left one-third of his wealth to build and maintain a hotel for single working women in Manhattan’s retail district—somewhere the Macy’s shop clerks could lay their heads. Rent would be kept low enough for their meager earnings, with the apartments not run for profit. And so the Webster’s doors opened in November 1923.”
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From Terra Nullius: “On the 12th September 1919, Gabriele D’Annunzio proclaimed that he had annexed the city of Fiume to the Kingdom of Italy as the “Regency of Carnaro” – of which he was the Regent. The Italian government was thoroughly unimpressed and refused to recognise their newest purported land, demanding the plotters give up. Instead, D’Annunzio took matters into his own hands and set up a government. The citizens of Fiume quickly found themselves in the midst of one of the 20th Century’s strangest experiments: D’Annunzio instituted a constitution that saw the country divided into nine corporations to represent key planks of industry like seafarers, lawyers, and farmers. There was a 10th corporation that represented those who D’Annunzio called the “Supermen” and was reserved largely for him and his fellow poets.”
(Editor’s Note: I included the wrong link for a story yesterday about how Jingle Bells was originally a drinking song written by a notorious jerk. If you really wanted to read that one, it is here.)
When a 19-year-old Who fan was pulled from the crowd to fill in for drummer Keith Moon
From The Louder: “In November of 1973, 19-year-old Mike Halpin and a friend travelled from their hometown of Monterey for the Who’s show at the San Francisco Cow Palace. As soon as the concert began, Halpin noticed something was amiss with drummer Keith Moon: A few minutes into Won’t Get Fooled Again he ground to a halt, like a clockwork toy whose battery had just run out. And then he fell backwards, and had to be dragged offstage. When Pete Townshend half-jokingly asked the crowd whether there was a drummer in the house, Halpin’s friend pushed him forward. Halpin claimed the last thing he remembered was swallowing a shot of brandy and being introduced to the crowd by Roger Daltrey. However, video evidence shows Scott acquitted himself well. Halpin went on to get married, manage a rock club, play in several groups and become composer-in-residence at the Headlands Centre For The Arts in Sausalito.”
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From the Smithsonian: “The Lizzie Borden murder case is one of the most famous in American criminal history. New England’s major crime of the Gilded Age, its barbarity captivated the national press. And the suspected killer was immortalized by an eerie rhyme: Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one. The rhyme is not quite correct: the female victim was Borden’s stepmother, and the weapon wasn’t an ax, but rather a hatchet. Also, the killer struck the victims around half as many times as stated in the rhyme—19 blows rained down on 64-year-old Abby Borden, and 10 or 11 rendered the face of Lizzie Borden’s 69-year-old father, Andrew Borden, unrecognizable.” Fall River was rocked not only by the sheer brutality of the crime but also by the identity of its victims.”
Before Harry Potter’s sorting hat there was the Medieval Space Bonnet
From Atlas Obscura: “On a grey and drizzly afternoon in the University of Edinburgh’s opulent graduation hall, J.K. Rowling waited to receive an honorary degree. But before the degree could be conferred, she had to take part in a long-standing tradition. University Principal Timothy O’Shea merrily explained that she, along with all graduating students, must step forward and be tapped on the head with an object he calls “the medieval space bonnet.” The University of Edinburgh’s Sorting Hat-style graduation ceremony has been in place for at least 150 years, in which time the bonnet has tapped the heads of over 100,000 graduates. But the round silk and cloth bonnet is rumored to be much older than that. Legend has it that the bonnet was made from a pair of trousers that belonged to 16th-century Scottish Reformation leader John Knox.”
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From the City of Chowchilla: “On July 15, 1976, a busload of children aged 5 to 14 and their school bus driver, Ed Ray were abducted on a country road in Madera County at about 4 p.m. on their way back from a swim outing. The bus was later found empty, covered with bamboo and brush in a drainage ditch west of town. The victims, 19 girls and seven boys, were driven around for 11 hours in two vans before being entombed in a moving van and buried in a Livermore rock quarry. After 16 hours underground in an 8-foot by 16-foot space, two of the older children and Ray were able to escape after digging themselves out with only their hands, cutting themselves along the way. Investigators dug up the van and learned it had been buried in the quarry in November 1975. The son of the quarry’s owner, Fred Newhall Woods IV, 24, was later arrested, along with his two friends, James Schoenfeld, 24, and his brother, Richard Schoenfeld, 22.”
Why are there so many different human blood types? Scientists aren’t quite sure
From The Smithsonian: “When you get a blood transfusion, doctors have to make sure a donor’s blood type is compatible with the recipient’s blood, otherwise the recipient can die. The ABO blood group, as the blood types are collectively known, are ancient. Humans and all other apes share this trait, inheriting these blood types from a common ancestor at least 20 million years ago and maybe even earlier. But why humans and apes have these blood types is still a scientific mystery. The “type” actually refers to the presence of a particular type of antigen sticking up from the surface of a red blood cell. The human body naturally makes antibodies that will attack certain types of red-blood-cell antigens. For example, people with type A blood make antibodies that attack B antigens; people with type B blood make antibodies that attack A antigens. So, type A people can’t donate their blood to type B people and vice versa.”
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From The Economist: “Hansen’s disease, better known as leprosy, is a tropical malady that is rare in America. In 2020, just 159 cases were reported. Only 5% of people seem to be susceptible to infection. Because it is so rare, Americans seldom think about leprosy, and many clinicians have never seen it outside a textbook. This is starting to change. Nearly 17% of leprosy cases were in Florida in 2020, and over 80% of those were in central Florida, and this year the state has 16 cases. In the past, Americans with leprosy usually caught it while travelling to countries where it is more common, such as Brazil or India, or had been in close contact with people from such places. Armadillo wrestlers are also at risk—the nine-banded armadillo can carry the disease. This latest outbreak is unusual in that the patients are neither travelers nor armadillo wrestlers.”
Letters describe what life was like for a twenty-something in 18th century London
From The Smithsonian: “When Ben Browne was 27, he traded his small English town for the bustling streets of London to work as a law clerk. There, he led the typical life of a 20-something in a big city: His social life flourished, he fell in love and he was constantly stressed about money. The year was 1719. Some 65 letters that Browne sent to his father during this period are the focus of a new display at the historic Browne family home in Cumbria, England. In his letters, Browne described his new job training as a clerk to a lawyer, and complained about working long hours, copying legal documents from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. In one letter, he expressed frustration with his father’s decision to apprentice him to his employer for five years, rather than a shorter training period. Browne wrote that he needed money to pay rent—and to purchase stockings, breeches, wigs and other items he deemed necessary for his life in London.”
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From Medium: “Songwriter, producer, and McCann Erickson executive Roquel “Billy” Davis, conceived and co-wrote “I’d Like To Buy the World A Coke” for that famous 1971 campaign. Davis’s biography is every inch as remarkable as the fictional Don Draper or any other character from Mad Men. Born in Detroit in 1932, he wrote songs in the 1950s for Jackie Wilson with his partner, Berry Gordy. Early in his career, Davis also worked with Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and other blues and rock pioneers on the Chess label. Later, Davis and Gordy started the Detroit R&B label Anna Records and recruited a teenaged Aretha Franklin, along with Mary Wilson, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and what became the Four Tops. As Gordy took more control over the growing company, Davis’s work was increasingly marginalized. He began to look elsewhere.”
If sound could travel through space, the sun would be as loud as a jet airplane
From Reddit: “The Sun is immensely loud. The surface generates thousands to tens of thousands of watts of sound power for every square meter. That’s something like 10x to 100x the power flux through the speakers at a rock concert, or out the front of a police siren. Except the “speaker surface” in this case is the entire surface of the Sun, some 10,000 times larger than the surface area of Earth. Most of that sound energy just gets reflected right back down into the Sun, but some of it gets out into the solar chromosphere and corona. None of us (professional solar physicists) can be sure, yet, just how much of that sound energy gets out, but it’s most likely between about 30 and about 300 watts per square meter of surface, on average.”
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