Author: mathewi

From the Guardian: “The Red Cross and the Vatican both helped thousands of Nazi war criminals and collaborators to escape after the second world war, according to previously unpublished documents. The Red Cross has previously acknowledged that its efforts to help refugees were used by Nazis because administrators were overwhelmed, but the research suggests the numbers were much higher than thought. Gerald Steinacher, a research fellow at Harvard University, was given access to thousands of internal documents, including Red Cross travel documents issued mistakenly to Nazis. They throw light on how and why mass murderers such as Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele and Klaus Barbie and thousands of others evaded capture by the allies. Steinacher says Britain and Canada alone inadvertently took in around 8,000 former Waffen-SS members in 1947, many on the basis of valid documents issued mistakenly.”

The world’s first refrigerated feast struck fear into many of those who were invited to it

From Atlas Obscura: “In October of 1911, some 400 guests sat down to one of the most pivotal meals of the 20th century. The setting was the Louis XVI room in Chicago’s Hotel Sherman, a luxurious meeting place for the elite that catered to swaggering politicians and mafiosi alike. There, under the cavernous, molded ceilings, the mayor of Chicago, the city’s health commissioner, and other bigwig bureaucrats steeled their nerves for the world’s first-ever “cold-storage banquet.” In his toast, the secretary of the National Poultry, Butter, and Egg Association praised guests’ bravery in trying a meal that relied on nascent technology: “What better example of courage could we have than their presence today, for it took considerable courage in the face of all that has been written in the newspapers to sit down to such a spread.” This was nearly two years before the first commercial refrigerators started appearing in American homes.”

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Continue reading “Red Cross and Vatican helped thousands of Nazis escape”

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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Continue reading “The professional soccer player who was also a cocaine kingpin”

From Wired: “The first picture Neil Armstrong ever snapped from the surface of the moon shows a jettisoned waste bag that may well contain poop. The Apollo crews left a total of 96 bags of waste, including urine and feces, across their six landing sites, which are still sitting there to this day: a celestial reminder that wherever humans go, we bring our shit with us. These bags, sometimes known as the “poo bags,” have been the subject of much interest and speculation since they were deposited on the moon more than 50 years ago. Human feces is packed with microbial life, which means that the moon hosted life on its surface for an unknown period of time after each landing. Learning how long those microbes survived in the extraterrestrial excrement would reveal insights into the mystery of life’s origins on Earth and its potential existence elsewhere.”

Forgotten Hollywood: The mysterious murder of an actress known as The Black Dahlia

From The Golden Globes: “On January 15, 1947, the mutilated body of a young woman was found in the Leimert Park area of Los Angeles in an empty lot, severed at the waist. According to the Los Angeles Times, she was face up, a few inches from the sidewalk, just north of the middle of the block. Her blue eyes were open, her hands were over her head with her elbows bent at right angles; her knees were straight and legs spread. She was missing her intestines and was slashed across the face from ear to ear. There were cuts and bruises on the body because whole sections of skin had been removed, and the body was drained of blood. A cement bag with blood was found nearby. An autopsy showed she died of a cerebral hemorrhage because of blows to the face. The woman was identified by the FBI as Elizabeth Short, an aspiring actress, whose prints were in the FBI files because she had been arrested for underage drinking in 1943.”

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Continue reading “Life briefly existed on the moon in the form of astronaut poop”

From Now I Know: “After the Manhattan Project came to a close, nuclear weapons testing continued for decades. In 1957, the government detonated 29 bombs in the Nevada desert as part of Operation Plumbbob, hoping to develop better weapons. The researchers dug a 500 foot deep hole, dropped the bomb to the bottom, and blew it up, but the bomb yield was much greater than anticipated – 50,000 times greater. Fire shot hundreds of feet into the air from the mouth of the uncapped shaft. So a one ton iron lid was placed at the top of the shaft in hopes of keeping any flames underground. When the bomb went off, it shot the manhole cover skyward, at incredible speeds. How fast? Dr. Robert Brownlee estimated that the manhole cover was traveling at a speed of at least 125,000 miles per hour, making it easily the fastest-moving object in history.”

Severe autism can be permanently reversed, groundbreaking new study suggests

From The Telegraph: “Severe autism can be reversed and symptoms reduced to an indistinguishable level, scientists have discovered. Two non-identical twin girls in the US were found to have a level of autism at 20 months old that required very substantial support. A groundbreaking trial saw their parents and a team of medical experts create a bespoke two-year programme of interventions designed to help the children thrive and flourish as much as possible. Scientists say the programme was successful, with both girls undergoing dramatic improvements in the severity of their symptoms. The progress of one of the girls, described only as Twin P, was heralded as “a kind of miracle” by one of the paediatricians. “One of the twins’ symptoms were reversed to the point of being indistinguishable from children who had never had a history of autism symptoms,” said Dr Chris D’Adamo from the University of Maryland.

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Continue reading “The fastest man-made object in history was a manhole cover”

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Born in 1874 in Albany, N.Y., Charles Fort started his career as a journalist and aspiring fiction writer until his uncle’s death in 1906 left him with enough money to pursue his paranormal research full time. By then he had already been collecting reports of various anomalies and strange occurrences, living in Manhattan and making regular pilgrimages to the New York Public Library to scour scientific journals and foreign newspapers. He gathered up accounts of frogs and fish raining from the heavens, mysterious disappearances, strange animal mutilations, unexplained flying objects, and anything else that seemed to lie outside the domain of accepted science. Encouraged by the novelist Theodore Dreiser, Fort tried first to string this news of the weird into two books he called X and Y: The first suggested that humans were being controlled telepathically by sinister beings on Mars, the second that there existed a secret malevolent civilization at the South Pole.”

Google Earth led a team of scientists to discover an untouched mountaintop rainforest

From The Verge: “In 2018, what is left to explore in the world? It seems unlikely, say, that humans might find an untouched forest to study, someplace that hasn’t been bulldozed and burnt and exploited within an inch of its life. But that’s exactly what happened this past spring, when a Welsh researcher, Dr. Julian Bayliss, led a 28-person team that included scientists specially selected for their different talents as well as logistics experts, rock climbers, and filmmakers to the top of a mountain in Mozambique. The story of the Mount Lico expedition began six years ago when Bayliss, a conservation scientist and butterfly expert, happened to spy a small forest atop a mountain using Google Earth. While locals were aware of Mount Lico, its tall, sheer walls meant that it was nearly impossible to access, which made it likely that the land on top was untouched by humans.”

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Continue reading “The scholar who inspired a legion of cranks and crackpots”

From The Guardian: “Millions of Britons were forced to drink subpar cups of tea last November due to the record-breaking low pressure caused by Storm Ciarán. The low pressure caused the boiling point of water to drop below the 100C temperature some experts recommend to extract the full flavour from tea leaves. The study by meteorologists at the University of Reading, published in the journal Weather, reported that the water was boiling at 98C on the morning of the storm. For water to boil, the atmospheric pressure must match the vapour pressure of the liquid. On that date, the barometer fell to 956.0 millibars, the lowest pressure recorded since a reading of 952.1 millibars in February 1989. Before that the previous reading as low was more than 200 years ago, when a measurement of 946 millibars was taken in December 1821.”

Battery X was a top-secret test involving female anti-aircraft crews during World War II

From JSTOR Daily: “During World War II, women were actively involved in Washington DC’s air defense system. Their work was hush-hush and the nation’s capital never came under attack, so their work has largely been forgotten. The Antiaircraft Artillery Volunteers worked as plotters for the Army’s Coast Artillery Antiaircraft Command. They provided real time 3-D visualizations of the region’s air traffic. More than three hundred women volunteered for this work at Bolling Field, located across the Potomac from DC. The second group were some of the “militarized civilians” of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps, which was formed in May 1942. They served in a test of mixed female/male anti-aircraft gun crews around Washington, the only known American test of mixed-sex military units during the war. The Pentagon didn’t declassify it until 1968.”

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Continue reading “Storm causes Britain to suffer weaker tea than normal”

News events often hit social media like a rock thrown into a beehive, but when it’s the attempted assassination of a presidential candidate, the effect is more like a grenade. The impact sends angry bees flying in all directions, spreading misinformation and mindless speculation as they go. Nothing is too outlandish or improbable to be shared—and not just by anonymous accounts on X, but, in some cases, members of Congress. In the moments after Trump was shot on Saturday—he sustained an injury to his ear, then was hustled offstage while pumping his fist at the crowd—the shooter was variously rumored to be a member of Antifa, a trans activist, and a Black Lives Matter operative. (He doesn’t appear to have been any of these things.) Different accounts described the shooting as both a “false flag” operation on the part of the Trump campaign in order to garner sympathy, and a carefully planned assassination plot on the part of the Biden administration and the “deep state.”

A typical comment came from one anonymous user who posted to X: “When did the Secret Service start allowing the President under duress to tell them ‘to wait’, then stand up to be seen by the crowd fist-pumping? Can you blame me for thinking this is fake?” Users claiming to be law enforcement officers also scoffed at the idea that the Secret Service would allow Trump to grandstand while his life was in danger. According to the New Statesman, more than fifty thousand X users liked a post claiming that the photo of Trump raising his fist under the Stars and Stripes flag was staged: “Great camera angle; great quality; no Secret Service agent in front of his head covering the wound; conveniently placed US flag.” Another post read: “This is price you pay when you take down the elite satanic paedophiles,” then suggested that the “order” for the assassination “likely came from the CIA” and accused Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Mike Pence of being involved. It was viewed almost five million times.

According to a report from NewsGuard, a service that tracks misinformation, the word “staged” appeared in posts on X more than three hundred thousand times on Saturday and Sunday—an increase of almost four thousand percent over the previous two-day period. There were also more than eighty thousand mentions of the phrase “inside job,” which represented an increase of more than three thousand percent compared with a similar period before the shooting. Social media bots and fake accounts helped amplify the false claims on a number of platforms, according to Cyabra, an Israeli tech firm which found that 45 percent of the accounts using hashtags like #stagedshooting were inauthentic.

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

Continue reading “Trump’s assassination attempt, BlueAnon, and the X factor”

From the Washington Post: “Anna Kohler was running late as she darted toward the L train that was about to leave a New York subway station for her neighborhood in Brooklyn. Like many subway commuters, Kohler, 29, hoped for an uneventful trip to the Morgan Avenue station where she was planning to get off and meet a friend at a nearby bar before heading home. She caught her train but didn’t get the peaceful ride she wanted. Instead, she entered the subway car to find one of the greatest parties she’d ever seen. Fake ivy and gold tinsel hung from the handrails. A red carpet led to a table topped with a five-tiered wedding cake. An emcee on a mic welcomed her and other newcomers. Music, including Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice” was blasting as people danced and screamed. Unbeknownst to Kohler, boarding that particular subway car had made her a guest at a wedding reception for Daniel Jean and Esmy Valdez.”

A murder confession found on a piece of wood in an old house 120 years after the crime

From Atlas Obscura: “Renovating an old home sometimes unearth interesting surprises—a lovely hardwood floor under the carpet, a unique tile pattern in the kitchen, or even treasures hidden in the walls. Of all the strange discoveries that might be had, one of the last you’d expect to find is a murder confession. Yet in one home in Fountain, Colorado, that is exactly what the owners found while remodeling in 1986. The note was discovered on an old piece of molding by the owner’s daughter, who was assisting in the process by removing old nails from discarded wood. They called a reporter, who brought the confession to the police for analysis, and they confirmed that the handwriting matched the style of the time. The note describes in detail how Spicer killed Sebastian, as well as the motive: getting $5,000 worth of jewelry and cash.”

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Continue reading “This couple had their wedding reception on a NYC subway train”

From the CBC: “It’s a call Carolyn Abraham won’t soon forget. In the spring of 1999, while working as the senior medical reporter for the Globe and Mail, Abraham received a tip from McMaster University — the office of Sandra Witelson, to be exact, a professor of neuroscience. They said that they had received Einstein’s brain. When Einstein died, his body was sent for a routine autopsy. Dr. Thomas Harvey, chief pathologist at the Princeton Hospital, was assigned to the job. But before Harvey would pronounce the official cause of death, he cut out Einstein’s brain and preserved it for future research. Mere days later, Harvey’s actions were hailed in the headlines, but it turned out that he had acted before consulting with Einstein’s surviving family, and the scientist’s own wishes didn’t jibe with what transpired. (Einstein had told his biographer Abraham Pais: “I want to be cremated so people don’t come worship at my bones”).

The hunt to identify a girl in a thrift-shop photo turns into a story of love and loss

From Flashbak: “In 2015, Meagan Abell was shopping in Richmond, Virginia when she spotted four sets of medium-format negatives protected in plastic sleeves in a box of vintage photographs. Abell bought the negatives, scanned them and saw the beautiful pictures of two young women standing on a seashore bathed in light. She set about finding out who the women were, and where and when the pictures were taken. She posted the photos on Facebook and asked for help. The woman in red was identified as Claudia Thompson, a jazz singer signed to Edison International, a small record label founded in Hollywood, California, in the late 1950s. The label lasted a few yers before the rights to the Edison catalog were transferred to Sundazed Music – including the jazz album Goodbye Love by Thompson and jazz guitarist Barney Kessel released in 1959.”

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Continue reading “Why a Princeton doctor decided to steal Einstein’s brain”

From The Free Press: “This is a story that ends with my own assisted death in Switzerland.” That is how the suicide note began. Allan Kassenoff was standing in the driveway of his Westchester home on Saturday, May 27, 2023, when he read it. His wife, Catherine, had emailed it to dozens of people—including judges, attorneys, journalists, police, friends, and even staff at Allan’s law firm—but she hadn’t sent it to her husband. A colleague had forwarded it to him. Allan and Catherine had spent the previous four years fighting in court over the custody of their three young daughters. After millions of dollars, and over 3,000 court filings, the divorce still hadn’t been finalized. In four single-spaced pages, the email accused Allan of “ruining the lives of my children, me,” and so many other “parents (mostly mothers) who have tried to stand up against abuse.”

How the Industrial Revolution led to the creation of the S’more, America’s favorite camping snack

From Scientific American: “This summer, millions of marshmallows will be toasted over fires across America. Many will be used as an ingredient in the quintessential summer snack: the s’more. Eating gooey marshmallows and warm chocolate sandwiched between two graham crackers may feel like a primeval tradition. But every part of the process – including the coat hanger we unbend to use as a roasting spit – is a product of the Industrial Revolution. The oldest ingredient in the s’more’s holy trinity is the marshmallow, a sweet that gets its name from a plant called, appropriately enough, the marsh mallow. The modern marshmallow looks much like its ancient ancestor. But for hundreds of years, creation of marshmallows was very time-consuming. Each one had to be manually poured and molded, and they were a treat only the wealthy could afford.”

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Continue reading “The wife who took her revenge from beyond the grave”