Newsletters – Page 4 – mathewingram.com/work

July 6, 2026

The violent history behind the humble spice called nutmeg

From mulled wine at Christmas to hot cross buns at Easter, nutmeg has become an essential spice in Europe. But its widespread adoption — including in the traditional Dutch breakfast pastry of ontbijtkoek — comes on the back of a sordid history of colonial exploitation. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, Dutch cultivation of nutmeg and the related spice mace involved “one of very few historical situations where Asian slaves worked on European-owned farms or plantations,” according to anthropologist Phillip Winn. The Banda Islands, once the world’s only source of nutmeg, were home to between 13,000 and 15,000 people until their conquest by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1621. The roughly 1,000 Bandanese who survived were enslaved alongside other laborers under the perkenier system, where hundreds of workers toiled on each plantation (in Dutch, perk). (via JSTOR Daily)

He restores and installs free-to-use pay phones in Vermont using VoIP

Remember pay phones? Those relics of telecom’s distant past were once everywhere — on many busy street corners, in bars and restaurants, even built into airliners’ seatbacks. Now, an engineer in Vermont is aiming to give the old-fashioned device some present-day relevance. Patrick Schlott, 32, is an electrical engineer by training who works at the South Burlington, Vt.–based eVTOL maker Beta Technologies. Inspired in part by the free-phone projects Futel and PhilTel, he’s restored and installed free-to-use pay phones at over half a dozen locations across Vermont. With Schlott’s phones, users can make coinless calls anywhere in the United States or Canada—with each phone routing its calls through local internet connections via a simple Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) gateway. Schlott recently spoke with IEEE Spectrum about the rugged charm of old tech and the joys of reverse engineering. (via Spectrum IEEE)

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.

July 3, 2026

A swarm of remote-controlled cockroaches that can swim

Swarms of cyborg insects controlled remotely via electrical implants can now operate underwater, thanks to tiny diving suits supplying them with oxygen – which could one day enable them to explore Mars. Hirotaka Sato at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and his colleagues first demonstrated in 2021 that Madagascar hissing cockroaches could be remotely controlled with electrodes embedded in sensory organs known as cerci. In 2024, they demonstrated that a swarm of 20 of these cyborg insects could coordinate. Cockroaches breathe through pores called spiracles on their abdomen. But Sato and his team were unhappy with the insects’ inability to search flooded areas, which aren’t uncommon in disaster zones, so they have developed a diving suit to allow them to operate underwater. The researchers 3D printed a watertight resin suit, which protects the abdominal spiracles from water. Tiny hoses run forwards from the suit to connect directly to the thorax. (via New Scientist)

Wheeled vehicles existed for 5,000 years before someone thought of the bus

Buses do not seem like the sort of thing that needed to be invented. Anyone can see that the wheel needed to be invented, and that some further innovations were required to build carriages large enough for a substantial group of people to travel in them simultaneously. Once big carriages were invented, however, we might assume that people automatically started running them on regular timetables between fixed locations. The practice is so universal today, and its advantages so obvious, that it does not seem to require active innovation. Surprisingly, however, this is not true. The world had thousands of wheeled vehicles for millennia before it had a single bus. We know exactly who invented buses, when he did so, and how quickly his invention spread across the world. Wheels started being used for transport some time after 3,500 BC. For a very long time, however, wheels were not a world-changing technology. Early carts were precarious, and roads were too bad for them to be very useful. (via Works In Progress)

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.

June 30, 2026

A $10M sports-forgery scam ended with a grisly death

In the last hours of his life, on the morning of July 16, 2025, Brett Lemieux stopped to chat with the workers building his mini-mansion. The crew had already demolished the first of three older homes Lemieux had recently purchased along East Hoover Street, a lane just two blocks long in Westfield, a wooded suburb 20 miles north of Indianapolis.After speaking with the workers and before he was found alone and dead, Lemieux — a 45-year-old remembered by his suburban neighbors as a dog-loving handyman, an enthusiastic baseball coach and a father admired for taking care of his disabled stepson — drove his Range Rover slowly toward his final parking spot, the driveway of one of his houses. Lemieux wasn’t coming out alive. His tinted windows allowed little perspective on his actions, but a goodbye letter he posted on the Facebook group Autographs 101 as he sat there soon exploded across social media. (via Bloomberg)

How the game of snooker got famous thanks to a train-wreck of a player

The World Snooker Championship was established in 1927 but struggled to outgrow its niche audience. Luckily, in the seventies and eighties, Alex Higgins was playing. Born in Belfast, Higgins was a two-time world champion nicknamed Hurricane. Immediately after shooting, he would jerk his body and cue to the side in a frenetic motion that no one would teach. He drank heavily (including during big matches), smoked eighty cigarettes a day, and was a prodigious gambler. His rebellious, precarious lifestyle connected him to working-class fans, but wrecked his career. After winning the 1972 World Championship, Higgins revealed that he was squatting in condemned buildings. During his appearances on Pot Black, he had prostitutes brought to his dressing room and was found urinating in a sink. He was caught urinating again, this time in an arena flowerpot, after clinching his second world title. He headbutted a tournament official in 1986, and in 1990 punched another in the stomach. (via The Paris Review)

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.

June 29, 2026

This Texas ranch is for remote-controlled telescopes only

Rockwood, Texas is home to a unique business called Starfront Observatories. Owner/operator Bray Falls hosts hundreds of other people’s telescopes in perfect conditions — ultra-dark skies (Class 1 on the Bortle scale), clear weather, and fast internet connections — so astrophotographers from around the world can run their scopes and make observations completely from their computers. Out in the middle of nowhere Texas, a young astrophotographer is running one of the largest telescope ranches on Earth. Stargazers from around the world ship their gear to Bray Falls, who tends 550 telescopes (and counting) on 40 acres outside Brady, the geographic heart of Texas. Customers control the scopes from a laptop anywhere on the planet for as little as 99 dollars a month. The imagery produced by the telescopes on this ranch is impressive. (via Kottke.org)

A teenaged girl’s study on hand-dryer noise was published in an academic journal

When Nora Keegan found her ears ringing after using a hand dryer and noticed other kids holding their ears at the sound of the machines, she decided to investigate. Nora, of Calgary, was 9 years old at the time. Nearly four years later, Nora’s research on the topic has been published in a scientific journal and she is just 13 years old. “Oh, it was crazy,” Nora told “Good Morning America” about learning via email that her research had been accepted into the Canadian journal Paediatrics & Child Health. “I remember I was at school and I was so happy.” Nora began her science experiment in fifth grade by driving around with her parents, both doctors, looking for hand dryers in public places that children frequent, like libraries and restaurants. The family purchased a professional decibel meter for Nora’s experiment and also used a ruler and measuring tape to measure the hand dryers’ volume. (via ABC News)

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

June 26, 2026

She started SiriusXM and a life-saving pharmaceutical company

Martine Aliana Rothblatt graduated from University of California, Los Angeles with J.D. and M.B.A. degrees in 1981, then began to work in Washington in the field of communications satellite law, then in bioethics and biomedicine. She is the founder and chairwoman of the board of United Therapeutics. She was also the CEO of GeoStar and the creator of SiriusXM Satellite Radio. She was the top earning CEO in the biopharmaceutical industry in 2018. In June 2022, Rothblatt unveiled the world’s most complex 3D printed object, a human lung scaffold, comprising four thousand kilometers of capillaries and 200 million alveoli. On December 7, 2018, Rothblatt earned certification in the Guinness Book of World Records for the farthest distance traveled (56.82 kilometers) by an electric helicopter. In 2004, Rothblatt launched the Terasem Movement, a transhumanist school of thought focused on promoting joy, diversity, and the prospect of technological immortality via mind uploading. (via Wikipedia)

A US Army officer was the first to detect tornados in the 1800s but was told to stop

According to the United States National Weather Service, the first tornado forecaster was one Lieutenant John Finley, a meteorologist with the Army Signal Corps. In 1878, Finely started studying the rapacious storms, his research bearing the fruit of the world’s first experimental tornado prediction on March 10, 1884, and routine tornado forecasts for 18 regions of the U.S. the same year. But in 1887, Finley’s superior General William Hazen ordered the lieutenant to cease issuing forecasts because he “believed that the harm done by such a prediction would eventually be greater than that which results from the tornado itself.” This even despite Finley’s claim that his forecasts were accurate 95.6 to 98.6 percent of the time and the fact that he published Tornadoes, the first book dedicated entirely to tornadoes, that same year. (via Nautilus)

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.

June 25, 2026

The US and Canada both claim ownership of this tiny island

Machias Seal Island sits in the Gulf of Maine, about ten miles off the coast, and roughly the same distance from New Brunswick’s Grand Manan Island. It’s too small and remote to support a town, or even a village. No one lives there permanently, but you’ll always find someone at home — two lighthouse keepers from the Canadian Coast Guard who rotate through in month-long shifts. But Machias Seal Island isn’t unambiguously Canadian. Canada claims it as its own, but so does the United States. The dispute dates back to the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which ended the American Revolution. The Americans point to a clause granting the U.S. rights to any territory within twenty leagues of its coast; the Canadians cite a 1621 land grant that claimed any island within six leagues of Canadian coastline for the British crown. Machias Seal Island, somewhat inconveniently, satisfies both conditions. (via Now I Know)

Towards the end of his life inventor Nikola Tesla was obsessed with pigeons and telepathy

On a February morning in 1935, a disoriented homing pigeon flew into the open window of an unoccupied room at the Hotel New Yorker. A maid rushed to the 33rd floor and knocked at the door of the hotel’s most infamous denizen: Nikola Tesla. The 78-year-old inventor quickly volunteered to take in the homeless pigeon.”The man who recently announced the discovery of an electrical death-beam, powerful enough to destroy 10,000 airplanes at a swoop, carefully spread towels on his window ledge and set down a little cup of seed,” reported The New York Times. Tesla had, for years, regularly been spotted skulking through the nighttime streets of midtown Manhattan, feeding the birds at all hours. He was known to leave his windows open so the birds could come and go. Once, he was arrested for trying to lasso an injured homing pigeon in the plaza of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. From his jail cell, Tesla told the polices that he and his bird could speak to one another mind to mind. (via Nautilus)

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.

June 23, 2026

Van Gogh truthers think the famous painter was murdered

Irv Arenberg, an 85-year-old retired ear surgeon, lives in Arizona and counts among his patients the late artist Vincent van Gogh. Arenberg was a teenager when he first encountered Van Gogh, in the guise of the 1956 biopic Lust for Life, and he became fascinated by the Dutch artist, whom he gradually got to know through undergrad art-history classes and the posters he hung in his dorm room. In 1990, after years of practicing medicine and reviewing Van Gogh’s case history via his hundreds of letters, Arenberg published a paper in JAMA diagnosing Van Gogh as suffering not from epilepsy, as the artist’s physician claimed a century earlier, but from Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear affliction that can cause vertigo, of which Van Gogh complained, and tinnitus, a persistent ringing in the ears. Ménière’s, to Arenberg, could better explain Van Gogh’s decision to slice off his ear. After retiring, in 2017, Arenberg recommitted himself to studying Van Gogh and became convinced that art historians had made an even more alarming mistake: Van Gogh had not committed suicide. He’d been murdered. (via Air Mail)

An earthquake in 2011 moved parts of Japan eastward by five or six millimetres

When the magnitude 9.0 Tōhoku earthquake struck off the coast of Japan in 2011, its seismic shivers did more than ripple through the planet. At least one wave traveled 2,900 kilometers (1,800 miles) down to the boundary between Earth’s mantle and liquid outer core, where it was reflected right back to the surface. And there, according to a new analysis of earthquake data from across Japan, it may have done something scientists have never identified before. GPS observations from the time of the earthquake showed that parts of Japan shifted eastward by up to 5 to 6 millimeters. The reflected wave, says a team led by seismologist Sunyoung Park of the University of Chicago, may be what gave Japan that eastward nudge. The Tōhoku earthquake remains one of the most closely studied natural disasters in history. Scientists are still combing through the observations it generated, searching for clues about how major earthquakes unfold and what happens in their aftermath. (via Science Alert)

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.

June 18, 2026

Former pro wrestler says he is happy working at Walmart

Former WWE wrestler Jon Heidenreich says he is very happy with the life he’s living 20 years removed from his TV run. A few months back, a photo went viral on social media showing Heidenreich working at a Walmart in New Orleans. The picture was shared by a co-worker who was excited to learn that Heidenreich was once a wrestling champion. This has led to Heidenreich taking bookings for appearances and signings again, along with getting booked for an interview on Insight with Chris Van Vliet. Heidenreich said the co-worker who posted the picture was actually from Walmart’s renovation team that travels around. When Heidenreich learned he was from Ohio, he asked if the man had ever heard of Ohio Valley Wrestling. They started talking about wrestling and the co-worker ordered an old Heidenreich action figure for him to sign. Heidenreich, 56, explained that his job at Walmart is working overnights putting out freight. He likes his job and couldn’t ask for a better life than he’s lived. (via f4wonline)

They blasted soil with gamma rays but it continued to emit CO2 for six years

Sébastien Fontaine has been trying to kill dirt. The biochemist, who runs a lab at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, wanted to know how much carbon is released by soil — just dirt alone, completely devoid of life. His team sealed dirt into jars and blasted them with sterilizing gamma radiation. Then they waited for the carbon dioxide released by the soil — a sign of ongoing microbial respiration — to drop. They waited, and waited, and waited some more: weeks, then months. Under a microscope, the irradiated soil showed no signs of life, but it continued to emit carbon dioxide. The soil wouldn’t stop breathing. Fontaine’s lab repeated the experiments and produced the same results. Finally, convinced that they weren’t dealing with an artifact of the experimental setup, they set out to find the source of breath in dead soil. Now, Fontaine and his colleagues have reported that their soil samples continued to consume oxygen and spew carbon dioxide for six years. (via Quanta)

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.

June 17, 2026

Two nuns who left a Brazilian convent are now married

Francília Costa and Luiza Silvério first met in a convent in Brazil back in 2019. Costa had been raised by deeply religious grandparents and was encouraged to join the convent, while Silvério joined as a teenager while searching for purpose. The pair initially didn’t like each other, with Silvério admitting that she thought Costa was “an unbearable and stuck-up little nun.” Costa shared that she also didn’t like Silvério. Proximity made the heart grow fonder in this case, and the pair gradually became close friends. However, they each struggled with their mental health while living in the convent. Together, Costa and Silvério made the decision to leave the convent in 2020 for their mental health. Neither could afford to live alone and so continued to live together. Then, one night in 2023, Costa realised her true feelings for her friend. She admitted her feelings to Silvério, who kissed her in return. The couple are now married. (via The Pink News)

An anonymous group posted code-breaking puzzles online and then suddenly disappeared

Cicada 3301 is the name of three sets of puzzles posted under the name ‘3301’ online between 2012 and 2014. The first appeared on 4chan on January 4, 2012, and ran for nearly a month; a second came in 2013, and a third in 2014. The third puzzle remains unsolved. The stated aim was to recruit “intelligent individuals.” The puzzles focused heavily on data security, cryptography, steganography, and Internet anonymity. One has been called “the most elaborate and mysterious puzzle of the Internet age,” and The Washington Post listed it among the “top 5 eeriest, unsolved mysteries of the Internet.” Many have speculated that the puzzles were a recruiting tool for the NSA, CIA, MI6, or Mossad. Cicada 3301’s last verified message came in April 2017. (via Boing Boing)

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.

June 16, 2026

On his deathbed her dad admitted that he robbed a bank

Thomas Randele was dying of lung cancer and had a secret. In March of 2021, with his daughter at his bedside after his first chemotherapy session, he made a stunning confession: He was a fugitive, and had been one for more than five decades. When he was 20 years old, he’d robbed an Ohio bank of $215,000. And his real name was not Thomas Randele but Theodore Conrad. He implored his daughter not to look into the case. But after this bombshell revelation, Ashley did what most curious people would do. With every click, her father’s dark past unspooled before her eyes. In Lynnfield, Massachusetts, Thomas Randele was a car salesman and a country club golf pro. He doted on his daughter and showed up for her soccer games in khaki pants and fast cars. But back in Cleveland, he was Ted Conrad, an elusive bank robber. He was barely out of his teens when he’d pulled off one of the largest heists in Ohio history — the equivalent of $1.7 million today — inspired by his favorite movie. (via CNN)

Some 3D printers are using the proboscis from a dead mosquito as a nozzle

Nature has long inspired engineering innovations. Recent advances in biohybrid research have taken this inspiration further by directly integrating biotic materials into engineered systems. 3D necroprinting is a biohybrid manufacturing technique that repurposes female mosquito proboscides as high-resolution 3D printing nozzles. The mosquito proboscis, with its unique geometry, structure, and mechanics, enables printed line widths as fine as 20 μm, surpassing commercially available 36-gauge dispense tips by ~100%. The mosquito proboscis dispense tip can withstand internal pressures of approximately 60 kPa, enabling effective fluid extrusion. Demonstrated applications include high-resolution printing of complex structures such as a honeycomb structure, a maple leaf, and bioscaffolds encapsulating cancer cells and red blood cells. (via Science.org)

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.

June 15, 2026

This British mansion has one resident who lives on the porch

When it last changed hands, in 2020, 2-8A Rutland Gate was Britain’s most expensive house, selling for £210m. The word “house” hardly does it justice; palace is probably more accurate. It is in Knightsbridge, one of the most glamorous parts of London, and has 45 rooms, four lifts, an indoor pool and 116 windows, 68 of which overlook Hyde Park. But no one is enjoying those views. This palace has been empty for years. There may not be anyone inside, but there is someone outside and I’m afraid I’ve woken him up. On the porch is a makeshift tent, made mostly from umbrellas. A bearded head emerges, looking a little bleary, but cheerful. The porch is filled with stuff, which spills out along the railings: baskets, books and newspapers, pictures, teddy bears, games, a couple of bicycles, lots of flowers in vases, pots and bins. (via The Guardian)

David Hockney says the Old Masters used a camera lucida to create their art

The story begins when Hockney visits an exhibit by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres at the National Gallery in London in 1999. At the exhibit, Hockney is struck, in particular, by the pen-and-ink drawings and, most specifically, by the portraits, which were produced around 1816. What catches his painter’s eye is that they seem incredibly detailed and “uncannily ‘accurate.'” Hockney, who knows from his own experience as a portrait painter how hard it is to produce such detail, suspects that something else might be at work. He knows that Andy Warhol used a slide projector to project photographs from which he traced his images, and Hockney is convinced Ingres must have used a similar device. But if Ingres made use of a similar device, what was it? Photography was not invented until 1839; the camera lucida, however, was invented in 1806. It consists of a prism at the end of a metal rod, which extends from a weighted stand or clamp that can be placed over a sheet of drawing paper. (via American Scientist)

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.

June 12, 2026

Three chess friends battled demons and saved each other

They began as strangers playing chess in Central Park. Frank was a scholar of South Asian textiles, known to friends as a guy who will lend a hand. Lincoln was homeless, living on a sidewalk on 59th Street. Paul was an older man living alone, in an apartment across the street from the Dakota, one of New York’s storied addresses.They formed the kind of casual friendships that can happen over a chessboard.Last year, when Frank realized that he had not seen Paul around in a while, he started asking people whatever happened to him. No one knew. So one day in September, he went to Paul’s apartment to check up on him, not knowing what to expect. He opened the door, and the smell that came out would have killed a herd of elephants. Paul, 87, was incoherent and ragged, and the place was filled with rotting food and rat feces. For the three men — Frank Ames, Paul Trahan and Lincoln Cyrus — that day last September began an unlikely chain of events that would ultimately save one life, maybe two. (via the New York Times)

Experiments on worms show that learning and memories can be transferred

In the 1960s, an eccentric behavioral psychologist named James McConnell convinced the scientific establishment that planarian worms, like Pavlov’s dogs, could be classically conditioned — and that memories of this training could be transferred from worm to worm through cannibalism. These bizarre findings were replicated by other scientists. Now, 60 years later, the worms have stopped learning, and nobody knows why. If a planarian is chopped in half, both halves will regrow into a new worm — the tail will grow a new head, and the head will grow a new tail. McConnell started beheading his trained planarians. The worms that grew back from the severed heads behaved as the originals had, associating light with a shock — a result he expected, given the preservation of their brains. What surprised McConnell was that the worms that regenerated from headless tails remembered, too. This meant that whatever form the worms’ memories took, they weren’t the exclusive purview of the brain. (via Quanta)

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.

January 2, 2026

How a mafia boss helped the US invade Sicily in World War II

A luxury ocean liner burned and capsized in New York Harbor on Feb. 9, 1942. The SS Normandie, being converted into a troopship, caught fire during welding work and took 6,000 tons of water from firefighting efforts before rolling onto its side in the Hudson River. The Navy immediately suspected sabotage. German U-boats had sunk 120 American merchant ships in the first three months after Pearl Harbor, and fears of Axis agents operating along the waterfront ran high. Naval Intelligence started looking into local dock workers. Italian and German workers controlled by organized crime networks remained silent when federal investigators asked them questions. Commander Charles Haffenden of the Office of Naval Intelligence needed help investigating the incident and protecting the waterfront. He turned to the one man who could make dock workers talk, Charles Lucky Luciano, who was serving 30 to 50 years in prison. (via Military.com)

This Finnish inventor has more patents than Edison or Nikola Tesla

The legacy of the Finnish inventor and engineer Eric Magnus Campbell Tigerstedt (1887–1925) is not very widely known, even among the Finnish public. Nevertheless, Tigerstedt’s short yet prolific life touched and crossed several cultural and national boundaries: he was born to a Swedish-speaking aristocratic family in Russia’s Grand Duchy of Finland, but he studied in Germany, worked in Denmark and died in the United States at the age of 37. During his ill-fated career, Tigerstedt managed to create around 70 novel electrical devices and methods, which received over 100 patents from all over the world. Many of his inventions were aimed at creating a functioning and commercially viable sound film technology, including various amplifiers, loudspeakers and microphones. Even inventions such as the Cryptographone and an electronic hearing aid can be seen as side products of his ultimate dream of recording and reproducing synchronised sound with film image. (via Helsinki.fi)

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.

December 31, 2025

Police catch 12-year-old hitman after he shoots the wrong person

Dubbed the “Child Assassin” by Swedish media, the unnamed minor was reportedly paid 250,000 Swedish crowns ($27,000) to travel to the city of Malmö and kill a certain person, but ended up shooting a 21-year-old man who was hanging out with some friends. It is unclear who ordered the killing and why, but authorities have reasons to believe that this wasn’t the 12-year-old’s first hit job. Swedish newspaper Expressen reported that the young suspect was apprehended on Tuesday, December 16, following eyewitness reports of the shooting. The minor had run away from his grandmother’s house in another city, where he had lived since he was 7 years old, and is believed to have become involved with violent gangs. (via Oddity Central)

A doctor invented sugar cubes after his wife hurt her hand breaking sugar

Jacob Christoph Rad invented sugar cubes in 1841. Until then, sugar could only be bought in the form of cones or cobs. These sugar cones were up to 1.50 metres high and hard as a rock. If you wanted to sweeten your coffee with them, you needed tools: a hammer, tongs and a sugar crusher. When Juliane Rad injured her hand (presumably for the umpteenth time) while breaking sugar, she demanded – so the story goes – that her husband finally do something to get sugar into a user-friendly form. Jacob Christoph Rad was just the man to do it, because he ran a sugar factory in the Moravian town of Datschitz. In his sugar factory, Rad experimented with a model resembling today’s ice cube moulds into which he filled moistened sugar mass, pressed it and let it dry. (via the DPM)

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.

December 31, 2025

Two strangers, a terrorist bomb and an amazing tale of courage

In the early hours of Friday, January 20, 2023, a dirty blue car parked outside St. James’s hospital in Leeds. The car was filled up to its windows with junk. Mohammad Farooq sat behind the steering wheel in the cold and dark, surrounded by his mess. His phone was in his hand. He was 27, overweight and round-faced, with black hair shaved neatly at the sides and swept over on top. His heart was pounding, and breathing took effort. It was, he decided, time to show them. At 12:53 a.m. he sent a carefully composed message to a senior nurse on ward J28, St. James’ acute assessment unit. “I’ve placed a pressure cooker on J28. It will detonate in one hour. Let’s see how many lives you will save.” He had read ISIS terror manuals that suggested causing an evacuation, then setting off a bomb, or stabbing or shooting those that emerged. He watched out of the window and waited for the sirens. (via Bungalow)

Rumoured to be a witch, she died in 1813 but wasn’t buried until 1998

For 185 years her skeleton was an object of derision, ridicule, and fascination. Joan Wytte is believed to be a local North Cornish woman known as the ‘Fighting Fairy Woman of Bodmin’ — abused and persecuted as a witch. Since her death, aged 38 in 1813 she has been in motion: stored in Bodmin Jail, used in a séance, examined, and hung in a museum. After her death the anatomist, William Clift, requested Joan’s body for scientific research, yet never bothered to collect her. William Hicks, the governor of the Bodmin Asylum in the 1840s and 50s, used her bones as a prop in a séance. Subsequently, Joan was derided as an item of ridicule and her bones were locked in storage until the prison closed in 1927. During the 1930s and 1940s she was in the custody of a Cornish doctor. It seems Joan was neglected until a ‘showman’ acquired her at auction in the 1950s for his new business venture — a Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. (via RebelBuzz)

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.