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Svetlana, who was then eighty-one years old, lived in a senior citizens’ center in Spring Green, Wisconsin. When we met, she was dressed in baggy gray sweatpants and sunglasses. She was short and compact, and her once red hair had turned white and had started to thin. Scoliosis had given her a hunch, and she used a cane. She showed me her one-bedroom apartment, and the little desk by a window where her typewriter stood. Her bookshelf included the Russian-English dictionary that her father had used. Svetlana was welcoming, and spoke with the energy of someone who hadn’t told her story in a long time. After a few hours, she wanted to take a walk. We headed down a quiet street, to a garage sale, where a man in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt was selling a small cast-iron bookshelf. He asked Svetlana if she wanted to buy it. She couldn’t, she said. She had only twenty-five dollars until her welfare check came. (via the New Yorker)

She discovered 35 forgotten Rembrandt etchings while cleaning out an old desk

Charlotte Meyer is a Dutch woman who made a life-changing discovery in 2020, when she decided to sort through a drawer of heirlooms that had long gone untouched. Years before, when Meyer’s grandfather died, he left her a folder of prints that had been in the family for roughly a century. When Meyer finally opened the folder, she found 35 etchings created by the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn, whose 17th-century paintings and prints are renowned as some of the greatest visual art to come out of the Western world. Meyer’s grandfather collected the etchings between 1900 and 1920. They were small, with some measuring only a few centimeters in length. At first, Meyer wasn’t sure if the artworks were truly by Rembrandt. She felt sheepish calling experts at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, but when the experts arrived at Meyer’s home and went through the etchings, the full weight of the find sank in. (via the Smithsonian)

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Continue reading “He found Stalin’s daughter living in a Wisconsin retirement home”

Svetlana, who was then eighty-one years old, lived in a senior citizens’ center in Spring Green, Wisconsin. When we met, she was dressed in baggy gray sweatpants and sunglasses. She was short and compact, and her once red hair had turned white and had started to thin. Scoliosis had given her a hunch, and she used a cane. She showed me her one-bedroom apartment, and the little desk by a window where her typewriter stood. Her bookshelf included the Russian-English dictionary that her father had used. Svetlana was welcoming, and spoke with the energy of someone who hadn’t told her story in a long time. After a few hours, she wanted to take a walk. We headed down a quiet street, to a garage sale, where a man in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt was selling a small cast-iron bookshelf. He asked Svetlana if she wanted to buy it. She couldn’t, she said. She had only twenty-five dollars until her welfare check came. (via the New Yorker)

She discovered 35 forgotten Rembrandt etchings while cleaning out an old desk

Charlotte Meyer is a Dutch woman who made a life-changing discovery in 2020, when she decided to sort through a drawer of heirlooms that had long gone untouched. Years before, when Meyer’s grandfather died, he left her a folder of prints that had been in the family for roughly a century. When Meyer finally opened the folder, she found 35 etchings created by the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn, whose 17th-century paintings and prints are renowned as some of the greatest visual art to come out of the Western world. Meyer’s grandfather collected the etchings between 1900 and 1920. They were small, with some measuring only a few centimeters in length. At first, Meyer wasn’t sure if the artworks were truly by Rembrandt. She felt sheepish calling experts at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, but when the experts arrived at Meyer’s home and went through the etchings, the full weight of the find sank in. (via the Smithsonian)

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.

Continue reading “He found Stalin’s daughter living in a Wisconsin retirement home”

Sean Penn always knew that rescuing Jacob Ostreicher from his years of Bolivian imprisonment would be difficult. Ostreicher, a then-52-year-old Hasidic businessman who had moved to the country from Brooklyn to manage a rice farm, got stuck there for two and a half years after he was accused of money laundering and criminal organization. His detainment in one of Bolivia’s most brutal prisons had attracted international attention — ABC News’ Nightline had run a segment about his incarceration; it was covered by the New York Times, the BBC, the Associated Press, and the Bolivian and Jewish press. It seemed like he would never get back to the States. Until suddenly, in December 2013, he returned. The Bolivian justice minister claimed Ostreicher had slipped away while out of prison on house arrest. Chaya Gitty Weinberger, Ostreicher’s daughter, told the Times that her father had been “dropped off in Pacific waters,” then released — but only after her uncle had negotiated a ransom. A State Department spokesperson would only confirm to news organizations that Ostreicher was in the United States. What really happened remained a mystery. (via NY mag)

This Nobel Prize winner’s invention can generate pure drinking water from the air

A Nobel laureate’s environmentally friendly invention that provides clean water if central supplies are knocked out by a hurricane or drought could be a life saver for vulnerable islands, its founder says. The invention, by the chemist Prof Omar Yaghi, uses a type of science called reticular chemistry to create molecularly engineered materials, which can extract moisture from the air and harvest water even in arid and desert conditions. Atoco, a company that Yaghi founded, said its units, comparable in size to a 20ft shipping container and powered entirely by ultra-low-grade thermal energy, could be placed in local communities to generate up to 1,000 litres of clean water every day, even if centralised electricity and water sources were interrupted by drought or storm damage. Yaghi, who won the 2025 Nobel prize in chemistry, said the invention would change the world and benefit islands in the Caribbean. (via The Guardian)

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Continue reading “How Sean Penn saved a man trapped in a Bolivian prison”

When World War II came to America, baseball was one of the early victims. Many Major League players were in their early 20s and, therefore, subject to the draft. the owner of the Cubs, Philip K. Wrigley (of chewing gum fame) started the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1943. While many know about the AAGPBL due to the 1992 movie A League of Their Own, few realize that women played professional, minor league baseball until 1931. That year,  a young woman named Jackie Mitchell ended women’s hopes of breaking into the big leagues. How? By striking out Babe Ruth. And, for good measure, she struck out Lou Gehrig too. Ruth, then 36 years old and on the downside of his career, led the league in home runs with 46 – but it was a tie. The other guy to also hit 46 homers was Gehrig, a 28 year old first baseman, and Ruth’s teammate on the New York Yankees. (via Now I Know)

The name of the Chicxulub meteor crater was chosen because it’s hard to pronounce

The Chicxulub crater is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is offshore, but the crater is named after the onshore community of Chicxulub Pueblo. It was formed slightly over 66 million years ago when an asteroid, about ten kilometers in diameter, struck Earth. The crater is estimated to be 200 kilometers in diameter and is buried to a depth of about 1 kilometer beneath younger sedimentary rocks. It is one of the largest impact structures on Earth. The crater was discovered by Antonio Camargo and Glen Penfield, geophysicists who had been looking for petroleum in the Yucatán Peninsula during the late 1970s. Hildebrand, Penfield, Boynton, Camargo, and others published their paper identifying the crater in 1991. Penfield recalled that part of the motivation for the name Chicxulub was “to give the academics and NASA naysayers a challenging time pronouncing it” after years of dismissing its existence. (via Wikipedia)

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.

Continue reading “A teenaged girl struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in 1931”

When World War II came to America, baseball was one of the early victims. Many Major League players were in their early 20s and, therefore, subject to the draft. the owner of the Cubs, Philip K. Wrigley (of chewing gum fame) started the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1943. While many know about the AAGPBL due to the 1992 movie A League of Their Own, few realize that women played professional, minor league baseball until 1931. That year,  a young woman named Jackie Mitchell ended women’s hopes of breaking into the big leagues. How? By striking out Babe Ruth. And, for good measure, she struck out Lou Gehrig too. Ruth, then 36 years old and on the downside of his career, led the league in home runs with 46 – but it was a tie. The other guy to also hit 46 homers was Gehrig, a 28 year old first baseman, and Ruth’s teammate on the New York Yankees. (via Now I Know)

The name of the Chicxulub meteor crater was chosen because it’s hard to pronounce

The Chicxulub crater is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is offshore, but the crater is named after the onshore community of Chicxulub Pueblo. It was formed slightly over 66 million years ago when an asteroid, about ten kilometers in diameter, struck Earth. The crater is estimated to be 200 kilometers in diameter and is buried to a depth of about 1 kilometer beneath younger sedimentary rocks. It is one of the largest impact structures on Earth. The crater was discovered by Antonio Camargo and Glen Penfield, geophysicists who had been looking for petroleum in the Yucatán Peninsula during the late 1970s. Hildebrand, Penfield, Boynton, Camargo, and others published their paper identifying the crater in 1991. Penfield recalled that part of the motivation for the name Chicxulub was “to give the academics and NASA naysayers a challenging time pronouncing it” after years of dismissing its existence. (via Wikipedia)

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.

Continue reading “A teenaged girl struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in 1931”

More than halfway through the crime novel he wrote, Robert Fuller describes the frustration of a detective locked in a mystery. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Now what?” he said aloud. It has been a week since someone made their way into Fuller’s assisted living apartment in Potomac, Maryland, police say, and fatally shot the 87-year-old millionaire in the head. Authorities released surveillance video Friday of a suspect walking on the facility’s grounds the morning of Feb. 14 around the time Fuller was killed. The video shows the back of a slender person wearing dark pants with long dark hair flowing over a yellowish checkered shirt. Investigators hope someone will recognize the shirt or the person’s gait, produced as if they’re favoring one foot. Detectives don’t know if the person depicted is a man or woman, was acting alone or what their motive was. (via MSN)

A colonel in the Mexican revolution was born female but lived as man for 70 years

Amelio Robles Ávila was a colonel during the Mexican Revolution. Assigned female at birth, Robles lived openly as a man from age 24 until his death at age 95. From a young age, Robles showed an interest in activities that were considered masculine, learning to tame horses and handling weapons, and becoming an excellent marksman and rider. Robles gained the respect of peers and superiors as a capable military leader, and was eventually given his own command. According to historians, Robles adopted a male identity not as a survival strategy but because of a strong desire to be a man. Robles’s male identity was accepted by family, society, and the Mexican government. According to a former neighbor, if anyone called Robles a woman or Doña (an honorific for women, similar to English Lady), he would threaten them with a pistol. (via Wikipedia)

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Continue reading “He wrote a murder mystery and now his death has become one”

Around 2,000 strange tunnels have been found around central Europe. These aren’t like the well-known catacombs of Paris or Rome. Known as the erdstall, these passages are extremely narrow, never more than two feet wide nor high enough for an adult to walk in, and sometimes the passages become seemingly impossibly narrow, with some as small as 16 inches in diameter. Determining their age and purpose is made difficult by the fact that almost no archaeological evidence has been found inside any of them. A ploughshare was found in one, millstones in a couple others, but apart from that the erdstall are eerily empty. Carbon analyses of coal and pottery fragments found within point to construction dates of around 900 to 1200 AD, but no written records from the Middle Ages mention the erdstall’s existence. (via Weird Medieval Guys)

A Great Dane was awarded a medal in World War II for peeing on an explosive device

Animals have played pivotal roles on the front lines of many battles. Horses, elephants, and even dolphins have been employed for their strength, intelligence, and adaptability. During World War II, one brave animal stood out as a hero for using an unlikely defense tactic against the enemy: her urine. Juliana was the name of a Great Dane who had even greater instincts. In April 1941, amid the ongoing German bombing campaign known as the Blitz, explosives rained down across the U.K. When a bomb fell through the roof of the house where Juliana lived with her owner, the fast-acting pooch made her way over to the incendiary device and extinguished its flame by urinating on it. Juliana’s bravery earned her a medal from the Blue Cross. (via History Facts)

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Continue reading “There are thousands of secret tunnels throughout Europe”

It’s the kind of headline that might seem either like a hypothetical philosophical concern, or a deeply worrying revelation, depending on how you feel about AI: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently said the company is “no longer sure whether Claude is conscious.” On the one hand, whether an AI is or is not “conscious” could be seen as a question for the philosophically inclined, or for psychologists and other academics who specialize in such things. Does it really matter? What do we even mean when we say something is conscious? It’s a grey area (literally, as in grey matter). At the same time, however, it’s at least mildly concerning that a company that has been building and releasing sophisticated AI doesn’t really know what it has created. Do we need to be worried about Claude or any other significantly developed artificial intelligence achieving human-like consciousness and then doing something we might not like? Anthropic says it doesn’t think so, but also admits that it doesn’t really know.

Like it or not, this is where we are when it comes to AI. And if we’re looking for things to be optimistic about, I think Anthropic at least deserves some credit for being so forthcoming about the risks and rewards of its AI engines, and for providing a vast amount of detail about the machinery underneath Claude’s hood (which is more than other AI companies are doing). The company’s so-called “system cards,” which might sound like flash cards handed out at press conferences, are 300-page documents that list the tests and challenges Claude has either passed or failed, along with any concerns about things like “deceptive behavior,” where the AI says one thing and does another.

Anthropic also employs a number of risk-oriented and ethics-focused staffers who pay attention to such things, along with an in-house philosopher named Amanda Askell, whose job is to train Claude to be a decent artificial person, whatever that means. Presumably exterminating the human race is off the table! All that said, however, there are definitely some elements of what is happening at Anthropic (and presumably elsewhere, since Claude isn’t dramatically different than ChatGPT or Gemini or any of the other AI engines) that are… worth considering. As Futurism noted in its piece about whether Claude is conscious:

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Continue reading “Is it bad that Anthropic doesn’t know if Claude is conscious?”