From Washington Post: “The ball blazed five feet over the goal’s crossbar. Even the team’s security guard couldn’t hide his frustration, kicking the dirt, wondering aloud why Capiatá’s fate had been put in Marset’s hands. Over the next two years, the reasons would become clear. Sebastián Marset, it turned out, was among the most important drug traffickers in South America, and one of the key figures behind a surge of cocaine arriving in Western Europe, according to Latin American, U.S. and European investigators. Instead of hiding from authorities, he had used his fortune to purchase and sponsor soccer teams across Latin America and in Europe. U.S. and South American investigators would learn that he was using those teams to help launder millions in drug proceeds.”
What we can learn about decision making from hunter-gatherer tribes like the Ju’hoansi
From Aeon: “For the vast majority of human history, people made group decisions through consensus. It is perhaps the most conspicuous feature of political life among recent hunter-gatherer societies, from the Ju/’hoansi to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia to the Indigenous societies of the early Americas. As an anthropologist, I have observed consensus-based decision-making myself among hunter-gatherers in the rainforests of Malaysia. Though the small-world life of hunter-gatherers may seem far removed from our global world, the problems of group life have remained fundamentally the same for hundreds of thousands of years. In the face of conflict and polarisation, ancient human groups needed processes that yielded good outcomes. What can we learn from a political form shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of trial and error?”
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This couple’s hobby is illegally scaling the world’s tallest buildings together
From CNN: “What was your most thrilling first date? In 2016, two young Russians known for their extreme “rooftopping” adventures — where they attempt to illegally climb vertiginous landmarks like La Sagrada Familia and the Eiffel Tower — skipped the perfunctory happy hour cocktail and instead ascended China’s tallest incomplete skyscraper, the 1,957-foot-high Goldin Finance 117. At the time, Ivan Beerkus and Angela Nikolau didn’t know they’d end up together. Beerkus had invited Nikolau, a rare female member of the rooftopping community (she was scaling the proverbial glass wall before breaking it), to join him for the climb to produce sponsored social media posts. But it was the beginning of a long romantic and creative partnership, which has led them to travel thousands of miles — and thousands of feet in the air — together.
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Author Jonathan Swift was a pioneer of microfinance in the 1700s
From The Fitzwilliam: “Jonathan Swift was the Anglo-Irish Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, and a public intellectual who wrote about a wide range of social and economic issues. Swift was already famous by the time Gulliver’s Travels was published in 1726, which further boosted his fame across Europe. Both through the sales of his books, and his position as Dean, Swift amassed substantial personal wealth. At some point in the 1720s, Swift started a fund with £500 of his own money, and began making interest-free loans sized between £5 and £10 aimed at “poor industrious tradesmen”. Swift’s fund had two distinctive features: first, borrowers were expected to make partial repayments on a weekly basis. Second, in order to get a loan from Swift, you had to provide signatures from two people who knew you and attested to your good character.”
Scientists find oxygen being created in the deep ocean where photosynthesis is impossible
From the BBC: “Scientists have discovered “dark oxygen” being produced in the deep ocean, apparently by lumps of metal on the seafloor. About half the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean. But, before this discovery, it was understood that it was made by marine plants photosynthesising – something that requires sunlight. Here, at depths of 5km, where no sunlight can penetrate, the oxygen appears to be produced by naturally occurring metallic “nodules” which split seawater – H2O – into hydrogen and oxygen. Several mining companies have plans to collect these nodules, which marine scientists fear could disrupt the newly discovered process – and damage any marine life that depends on the oxygen they make. The nodules form when dissolved metals in seawater collect on fragments of shell or other debris, a process that takes millions of years.”
He hiked across Switzerland, guided only by the locals’ hand-drawn maps
From the New York Times: “Last summer, frustrated with the predictability of recent travel experiences, I set out to walk across Switzerland without a phone or a preplanned route. I allotted 12 days, beginning on the shores of Lake Geneva, in the west, and heading in the general direction of Lake Constance, in the northeast — a distance, as the crow flies, of about 150 miles. Nostalgic for the time before ubiquitous connectivity, when we relied on paper maps and conversations with strangers, I came up with a novel way to organize my trip: Each day, I planned to ask locals I met to sketch hand-drawn maps for me, which I would then follow as best I could. I wanted to know if it was possible to walk across a country like this. I wanted to know what it would teach me about how technology and convenience have changed the way we travel. I wanted to be lost.”
A dolphin plays with air bubbles it creates with its blowhole
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