Category: Newsletters

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

How Mark Twain and Helen Keller formed a lifelong friendship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading “Welcome to The Torment Nexus”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Poles.org: “Born in Pittston PA, Faustin H. Wirkus was destined for the life of a coal miner, but he ran away at 18 and joined the Marines. In 1925, while he was a gunnery sergeant, he was appointed Marine administrator of La Gonave in order to halt internal disputes among the 12,000 natives on the small island. La Gonave had had a king named Faustin, so when Wirkus arrived the natives knelt before him, and Queen Ti Meminne pronounced him the reincarnation of the late ruler. Wirkus became king and wore a two-foot crown. He was admitted to voodoo rituals and was said to have acquired a deeper knowledge of black magic than any other white man of his time. However, officials of Haiti, which claimed jurisdiction over La Gonave became jealous and forced Wirkus to abdicate in 1929. He resigned from the Marines the same year.”

Queen guitarist Brian May has spent a decade fighting to save the badgers

From Scientific American: “Brian May has many strings to his guitar. The musician, who is still touring with his rock band Queen, is also an astrophysicist, specializing in 3D stereoscopic images of distant bodies. And to the UK public, he’s also a passionate campaigner for animal rights. After abandoning his PhD at Imperial College London in 1974 to follow his musical passions, May finally returned to complete his doctorate in 2007. Soon after, the rock star embroiled himself in a polarizing scientific row over whether the European badger was causing mass infection of cattle with bovine tuberculosis. Each year, the problem costs the UK government more than £100 million (US$130 million) and leads to the slaughter of more than 20,000 cows. In a BBC documentary airing in the United Kingdom on 23 August, May describes his decade-long research project to understand what is behind bovine TB.”

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 US Marine who became the king of a tropical island nation”

This is my last newsletter for CJR, as I am moving on from my job as the magazine’s chief digital writer. (In case the headline doesn’t make any sense, it comes from a Douglas Adams book, in which he describes how all the dolphins suddenly vanished from the Earth, leaving behind the message: “So long, and thanks for all the fish!”). As I reflected on the last seven years or so of writing about the intersection of media and technology, I started to think about what (if anything) has changed since my first CJR piece was published in October 2017—an essay headlined “The 140-character president,” about Donald Trump’s obsession with what was then known as Twitter.

Obviously, some things have changed quite a bit. Trump is no longer president (although he is trying hard to regain that position), and Twitter—now known as X—is owned by Elon Musk, the billionaire who also owns Tesla and SpaceX. Much has been written (by me and just about everyone else) about Musk’s problem-plagued acquisition of the platform, and the changes he has made to it; it is reportedly hemorrhaging money and scrambling for both users and revenue. None of this is particularly new—the old Twitter under co-founders Jack Dorsey and Ev Williams also seemed to be continually scrambling for money and users. The reasons have changed, however: Musk, who maintains that his guiding principle is to enable free speech, has enabled many of the worst kinds of speech, including white supremacy, racism, and misogyny. This has (not surprisingly) led to an exodus of both users and advertisers.

These days, one popular conspiracy theory is that Musk is a Russian stooge who is trying to help Trump get re-elected, a theory based in part on rumors about Russian troops in Ukraine using Musk’s Starlink for internet access and whispers that Putin-adjacent sources helped fund the purchase of Twitter. (The evidence for this is circumstantial—at best.) Russia’s involvement in a variety of nefarious projects (or rumors thereof) has been a consistent theme since I started writing for CJR. An early taste of that came in November 2017, when I traveled to Washington and sat in on a series of congressional hearings looking into whether Meta (then known as Facebook), Google, and Twitter had allowed Russia and Russian-aligned agents to use their services as the foundation of a gigantic disinformation campaign. Did this happen? Yes, at least in a limited way. Did it affect the outcome of the 2016 election? Opinion remains divided, but some of the smartest people in the field say no, it likely did not.

Continue reading “So long, and thanks for all the fish”

From Vox: “Don Poldermans was a prolific medical researcher at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, where he analyzed the standards of care for cardiac events after surgery, publishing a series of definitive studies from 1999 until the early 2010s. One crucial question he studied: Should you give patients a beta blocker, which lowers blood pressure, before certain surgeries? Poldermans’s research said yes. European medical guidelines recommended it accordingly. The problem? Poldermans’s data was reportedly fake. After the revelations, a new meta-analysis was published in 2014, evaluating whether to use beta blockers before non-cardiac surgery. It found that a course of beta blockers made it 27 percent more likely that someone would die within 30 days of their surgery. One provocative analysis from cardiologists Graham Cole and Darrel Francis estimated that there were 800,000 deaths between 2009 and 2013 compared to if the best practices had been established five years sooner.”

A shark’s case of indigestion revealed that a murder had been committed

From Now I Know: “In April of 1935, a fisherman named Bert Hobson caught a 14-foot tiger shark off the coast of Coogee Beach in Sydney. Hobson’s brother ran the local aquarium, so he brought it there — he figured the shark would make for a good exhibit. But the shark didn’t seem too happy. After a few days in which it seemed to adjust to its new home, the shark became irritable and began behaving erratically. It repeatedly rammed the walls of its tank before sinking to the bottom and swimming in lazy, irregular circles. Then it threw up, and what came out was a human arm. Upon closer inspection, there was something strange about this arm. It appeared to have been severed from its owner by a knife, not teeth. The arm had a distinctive tattoo, so the police asked the press to share a description in hopes that someone would recognize it, and someone did. Edwin Smith said his brother, James, had such a tattoo and had gone missing a few weeks earlier.”

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 “Faked research may have caused almost a million deaths”

From The New Yorker: “Everyone hopes for a miracle. And in Kenya—where evangelical Christianity is so popular that the President frequently prays with preachers during official events—the more miracles a pastor performs, the more followers he will gain. Some swiftly build large congregations and become multimillionaires. In 2018, Halua Yaa, a woman in the coastal town of Malindi, heard about a pastor named Paul Mackenzie, who, it was said, could heal the sick. Mackenzie ran a Pentecostal church called Good News International Ministries, on a spacious compound in Malindi, where he also lived. He urged his followers to avoid television, sports, and other secular pastimes, to refuse Western medicine, and to take their children out of school.”

She was an advocate for the disabled but she probably never actually existed

From IGN: “On March 4, 2019, the accessibility community mourned a prominent advocate: Susan Banks. Banks’ partner, Coty Craven, announced her passing on social media platforms such as Twitter/X. The industry lamented the loss of an individual that helped raise awareness for accessibility in games, particularly for Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. However, in the years since Banks’ alleged death, mounting evidence and accounts from those close to her work suggest that she was not the person she claimed to be. In fact, some are convinced that Banks may never have existed at all. Her various jobs are said to have included being a professional model, an asset manager at a financial firm, and a professor of Deaf Studies at Gallaudet University, all before the age of 30. IGN reached out to Gallaudet University’s Deaf Studies program, and they said nobody by the name of Susan Banks was ever employed at the University.”

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

Continue reading “A pastor led his followers into the woods. Hundreds have been found dead”

From CBC: “When a 44-year-old man from France started experiencing weakness in his leg, he went to the hospital. That’s when doctors told him he was missing most of his brain. The man’s skull was full of liquid, with just a thin layer of brain tissue left, a condition is known as hydrocephalus. “He was living a normal life. He has a family. He works. His IQ was tested at the time of his complaint. This came out to be 84, which is slightly below the normal range … So, this person is not bright — but perfectly, socially apt,” explains Axel Cleeremans. Cleeremans is a cognitive psychologist at the Université Libre in Brussels. When he learned about the case, which was first described in The Lancet in 2007, he saw a medical miracle — but also a major challenge to theories about consciousness. “It is truly incredible that the brain can continue to function, more or less, within the normal range — with probably many fewer neurons than in a typical brain.”

The killer lakes of Cameroon

From Damn Interesting: “On the night of 15 August 1984, a truck sagging with the weight of a dozen passengers trundled along a misty road in Cameroon, Africa. Although there had been no indication of a problem mere moments before, the vehicle suddenly sputtered and stalled. The driver turned the key, but the churning ignition was unable to reanimate the engine. Most of the Cameroonians clambered out of the vehicle to investigate, but two remained atop the truck. Within a few moments, each of the ten passengers who had stepped off the vehicle slumped to the ground. Within minutes, they were dead. They weren’t the only ones. In the neighboring low-lying villages, twenty-seven other residents inexplicably passed away in their sleep, and an unspecified number of animals perished in the vicinity. Investigators were at a loss to explain the mass fatalities.”

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 “Man who is missing 90% of his brain leads a normal life”

From Vanity Fair: “At 12:30 P.M. on November 22, 1963, bullets fired into the open roof of the presidential limousine tore through John F. Kennedy’s body. The first shot to hit the president went through his neck, but did not kill him. Within five seconds another shot damaged his brain and skull. During the critical time between the first shot and the fatal blow—about five seconds in which the president’s life might have been saved—the Secret Service agents within a few feet of the man they were duty-bound to protect—failed to take evasive action. Nine of the 28 Secret Service men who were in Dallas with the president the day he died had been out until the early hours of the morning. A few of them were sleep deprived and had been drinking while traveling with the president, an activity that was clearly prohibited in the Secret Service rulebook.”

Grocery billionaire claimed a tax deduction for the ransom paid after his kidnapping

From Wikipedia: “Theodor Paul Albrecht was a German entrepreneur who established the discount supermarket chain Aldi with his brother Karl Albrecht. In 2010, Theo was ranked by Forbes as the 31st richest person in the world, with a net worth of $16.7 billion. In 1971, Albrecht was kidnapped. A ransom of seven million German marks (approximately US$2 million at the time) was paid for his release. He was held at gunpoint by Heinz-Joachim Ollenburg, a lawyer, and his accomplice Paul Kron. The ransom sum was delivered by Franz Hengsbach, then Bishop of Essen. His kidnappers were eventually caught by authorities, but only half of the money was recovered. Albrecht later unsuccessfully claimed the ransom as a tax deductible business expense in court.”

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 “JFK’s Secret Service agents were too hungover to react quickly in Dallas”