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From Vice: “One day last spring, near an old rural cemetery in southern Brazil, a black man named Marcelo Gomes held up the corners of a Confederate flag to pose for a cell-phone photo. After the picture was taken, Gomes said he saw no problem with a black man paying homage to the history of the Confederate States of America. “American culture is a beautiful culture,” he said. Some of his friends had Confederate blood. Gomes had joined some 2,000 Brazilians at the annual festa of the Fraternidade Descendência Americana, the brotherhood of Confederate descendants in Brazil, on a plot near the town of Americana, which was settled by Southern defectors 150 years ago. On the morning of the festa, a public-address system was blaring the Confederate song ‘Stonewall Jackson’s Way’ and Brazilians in ten-gallon hats and leather jackets called out greetings.”

Two cities received millions of dollars from Benjamin Franklin 200 years after he died

From Why Is This Interesting: “Imagine waking up one day to find out that someone from the past had left you a vast sum of money. Not just the recent past, but hundreds of years ago. Now, imagine they left you £1,000 at the time, but because it was compounding, it’s now worth millions.  That’s what happened to the city of Philadelphia & Boston, who in 1887 both received the equivalent of millions of dollars today, from none other than the long-deceased Benjamin Franklin. Then, a hundred years later, in 1987, the two cities received an additional $2m and $4.5m respectively. You see, Benjamin Franklin had declared in his will that a sum of money be left in a trust for 200 years. The resulting funds were only to be used to help out young tradesmen in either city, to help them access initial capital to make their start. After 100 years, the cities were to receive 75% of the funds, with the rest to continue compounding for another 100 years.”

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Continue reading “The Brazilian town where the American Confederacy lives on”

From WBUR: “hat’s most shocking about Jeremy Pauley isn’t his tattooed eyeball or the metal spikes protruding from his scalp. It’s his openness about trading in human remains. Standing in the doorway of his rural Pennsylvania home, dressed all in black, he greets an unannounced reporter with patience. Pauley makes his living in what’s called the “oddities” market, buying and selling human remains and even binding books in human skin. It’s all legal — provided the remains aren’t stolen. “It’s a niche field,” he says of his work, like “a collector or a preservation artist.” He won’t say much more, because of the sprawling criminal investigation in which he’s a prominent figure. It was Pauley’s arrest that pointed investigators to a nationwide network of stolen human remains trafficking and led them to Harvard Medical School. There, a lone morgue manager allegedly plundered parts from bodies donated for science, and sold them online for profit.”

How coffee helped the Union caffeinate their way to victory in the Civil War

From the Smithsonian: “Ten months into the Civil War, the Union was short on a crucial supply, the absence of which threatened to sap the fighting strength of the Northern army: coffee. This critical source of energy and morale was considered almost as vital as gunpowder; Union General Benjamin Butler ordered his soldiers to carry coffee with them always, saying it guaranteed success: “If your men get their coffee early in the morning, you can hold” your position. But by 1862, imports of coffee were down by 40 percent since the start of the war. The Union blockade of Southern ports, including New Orleans, had slowed coffee imports from Brazil to a trickle—and Union merchants and military contractors were able to reroute only a portion of that Brazilian coffee northward; even with Union port cities trying to pick up the slack, the U.S. imported 50 percent less by value from Brazil in 1863 than it did in 1860. A new source was badly needed.”

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Continue reading “Harvard Medical School and the trade in human body parts”

From the New York Times: “After six weekends of deliberating, a group of Austrian citizens decided how to divvy up the riches of the heiress Marlene Engelhorn, who is donating the bulk of her inheritance to charity in an attempt to challenge a system that allowed her to accumulate millions of euros. The Guter Rat für Rückverteilung (“good council for redistribution” in German), a group of 50 residents in Austria advised by experts, chose 77 organizations that would receive money from Ms. Engelhorn’s fortune over the coming years. Ms. Engelhorn, 32, turned to the public to help redistribute her wealth, challenging the lack of inheritance tax in her native Austria. In January, she sent invitations to 10,000 Austrian residents, asking them for help spending 25 million euros (about $26.8 million) of her fortune, which she inherited when her grandmother died. The research group Foresight selected 50 of those residents.”

Vikings never wore helmets with horns on them, so why do we always picture them that way?

From Vox: “Popular imagery of Vikings is filled with lots of horned helmets. It’s everywhere from football mascots (like the Minnesota Vikings) to far too many New Yorker cartoons. The only problem is that those horned helmets are a complete myth. The main culprit? Costume designer Carl Emil Doepler, who included horned helmets in his gorgeous costume designs for the 1876 performance of Wagner’s classic Norse saga, Der Ring des Nibelungen. The opera was so influential that Vikings with horned helmets became a new standard — despite the fact that they were mythical. Germans were fascinated by Vikings, at least in part because they represented a classical origin story free from Greek and Roman baggage. So Doepler and other scholars intertwined German and Norse history in a surprising way: They put stereotypical ancient German headdresses — like horned helmets — on Viking heads.”

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Continue reading “An Austrian heiress let a group of strangers donate her fortune”

From The Guardian: “Jordan Hatmaker knew something was wrong as soon as she tried to open her parachute. “You’re meant to look up to check: is it there? Is it square? And is it stable?” she says. It was none of those things. This was the second time that day that she and her skydiving coach had leapt from an aircraft 13,500ft above the fields of Suffolk, Virginia. Hatmaker was 35, and 10 jumps away from securing her skydiving licence. She and her coach had agreed to freefall to 4,000ft; as her training progressed, she was able to deploy her parachute at increasingly lower altitudes, and this was the lowest she had ever gone. Hatmaker activated her pilot chute and immediately knew something was wrong. The force of the inflation is designed to trigger the release of the main canopy, but instead, the pilot chute became wrapped around her leg in a malfunction known as a horseshoe. “I thought to myself: ‘This is going to hurt.’”

There’s a song written on a sinner’s buttock in Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights

From Open Culture: “An enterprising blogger named Amelia transcribed, recorded, and uploaded a musical score straight out of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted between 1490 and 1510. The kicker? Amelia found the score written on a suffering sinner’s butt. The poor, musically-branded soul can be seen in the bottom left-hand corner of the painting’s third and final panel, wherein Bosch depicts the various torture methods of hell. The unfortunate hell-dweller lies prostrate atop an open music book, crushed by a gigantic lute, while a toad-like demon stretches his tongue towards his tuneful buttocks. Another inhabitant is strung up on a harp above the scene. Although we can’t ascertain why Bosch decided to write out this particular melody, since scant biographical information about the painter survives, it’s possible that he decided to include music because it was viewed as a sign of sinful pleasure.”

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Continue reading “She jumped from a plane and then her parachute failed”

A video clip posted on social media sites on Monday showed Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, climbing the stairs to a private airplane that was parked on the tarmac at London’s Stansted airport. A fairly mundane image in many ways, were it not for the fact that Assange has been in prison in the UK for the past five years, and for most of that period has been fighting the US government’s attempts to extradite him to the US to face Espionage Act charges for publishing classified information (I wrote about the filing of the initial indictment). The plane that Assange boarded at Stansted flew to Bangkok and then to Saipan, the island capital of the Northern Marianas, which have been a US commonwealth since World War II.

Assange flew to Saipan to attend a hearing on Wednesday as part of a deal reached with the US government under which he agreed to plead guilty to a single count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security material. In exchange, he was released from prison, since the five years he spent there was more or less equivalent to what he would have received as a sentence for such a charge, and returned to his home country of Australia. The Northern Mariana Islands were chosen as the location for the court hearing because Assange didn’t want to set foot in the continental US, and because the islands are close to Australia, making it easier for him to travel there.

After news of the plea arrangement was published, Julian Assange’s mother told The Guardian that she was grateful her son’s “ordeal is finally coming to an end” and that the deal shows the importance and power of “quiet diplomacy”; John Shipton, Assange’s father, also expressed his joy at his son’s release from prison. Videos and photos posted on social media on Wednesday showed Assange’s wife, Stella, who married him in 2022 while he was in prison, embracing her husband (the two have been in a relationship since 2015 and have two sons, born in 2017 and 2019). A post from Stella Assange on X had a photo of the two hugging and said simply “Home.”

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

Continue reading “Julian Assange is free, but the troubling journalistic questions raised by his case remain”

From JSTOR Daily: “Behind a plate-glass window, framed by grand Doric columns, repose three bodies. Except for their leather loincloths, they are naked. From a pipe above each bed, a trickle of cold water runs down their faces. Their eyes are closed. They bear the marks of their deaths: one is swollen by drowning, one gashed by an industrial accident, another stabbed. A crowd of people gathers outside the window, staring at the bodies. This is the Paris Morgue, circa 1850. Theoretically, the purpose of the display was to enlist public help in identifying unnamed corpses. But around the turn of the century, the morgue developed a reputation as a gruesome public spectacle, drawing huge crowds daily. The morgue was even listed in tourist guidebooks as one of the city’s attractions: Le Musée de la Mort. The crowds that attended the morgue attracted snack peddlers and street performers, creating an almost festival atmosphere.”

The Beastie Boys paid for a punk legend to have sex reassignment surgery

From AntiMatter: “Donna Parsons said that it wasn’t until January of 2002 that she first heard the word transgender. As soon as she read about it, Donna saw herself—perhaps for the first time—and began transitioning almost immediately. Tragically, not long afterwards, Donna was diagnosed with colon cancer. She had an operation to remove the cancer that year, followed by six months of chemotherapy, but the cancer came back. “My understanding was that she was pretty much dying, and that she wanted to live out the rest of the little time she had left in the body of her choosing,” recalls Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz in Beastie Boys Book. “So Adam Yauch took care of it. He organized it so we gave her the money for the operation, but it was under the guise of reimbursement and unpaid back royalties for the Polly Wog Stew record from 1982. Donna got the operation, and then within a year passed away.”

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Continue reading “People used to visit the morgue as a form of entertainment”

From How Stuff Works: “Politicians are under a lot of scrutiny in the 21st century: a public servant can’t even accept millions of dollars in bribes without getting trouble. But let’s reflect back on a time in American history when a new governor could show up to his inauguration proudly sporting shoes made from a hanged felon whose corpse he skinned himself. Back in 1881, an outlaw named George Parrott, known by the nickname “Big Nose George,” was hanged in Rawlins, Wyoming. After Parrott’s 1881 death, nobody showed up to claim the body, so the doctor who pronounced him dead took his body home for “medical study.” He extracted Parrott’s brain and gave it to his friend, the surgeon Thomas Maghee, who wanted to study Parrott’s “criminal brain.” Osborne also sawed off the top portion of Big Nose George’s skull and gave it to Lillian Heath, a 15-year-old girl who went on to become Wyoming’s first female physician (she reportedly kept it her entire life, using it as an ashtray and a door stop).”

The Nobel Prize winner who bet against himself and lost

From Now I Know: “Robert Lucas, Jr. graduated from the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. in Economics and returned to the school as a professor in 1975. Over his career, he developed a macroeconomic theory called “rational expectations,” which, according to the Chicago Tribune, “holds that people aren’t surprised when the government attempts to stimulate the economy, so they adapt their behaviors accordingly during such times and thus alter the expected results of government policies.” It was somewhat controversial at first, but ultimately, the world of macroecon experts adopted Lucas’s view. And on October 10, 1995, Lucas was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work. The Nobel came with a $1,000,000 cash prize. But he only got half of it — because his ex-wife believed in him more than he believed in himself. A clause in his divorce agreement stated that if he won a Nobel, his wife would get half.”

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Continue reading “This Wild West governor wore shoes made of human skin”

From All That’s Interesting: “The great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, aspiring explorer and ethnographer Michael Rockefeller had no interest in managing his family’s empire upon graduating from Harvard in 1960. Instead, he set out for the remote wilds of Dutch New Guinea to collect art made by the largely uncontacted Asmat people. But Rockefeller’s boat capsized off New Guinea’s southern coast and that was the last anyone ever heard from him. Despite a search effort and a media firestorm, hr was never found and the authorities eventually declared him dead due to drowning in 1964. But in the decades since, various independent investigators claim to have uncovered evidence that the authorities actually buried the truth about Michael Rockefeller’s death because it was simply too horrific to reveal.”

North Korea’s lucrative trade in human hair is helping it skirt the impact of sanctions

From The Guardian: “They almost certainly don’t know it, but western owners of shiny new wigs and false eyelashes could owe their look to North Korean slave labour. In recent years, a booming trade in human hair has helped to sustain North Korea’s isolated economy, softening the impact of international sanctions and providing Pyongyang with vital revenue to pursue its nuclear ambitions. Last year, exports to China included 1,680 tonnes – or about 135 double decker buses worth – of false eyelashes, beards and wigs worth around $167m, according to Chinese customs data. Millions of dollars in sales of human hair helped drive a recovery in the secretive state’s exports in 2023, with wigs and other hair products making up almost 60% of declared goods sent to China, by far its biggest trading partner.”

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Continue reading “Was Michael Rockefeller eaten by a tribe of cannibals?”

From the Wall Street Journal: “The young Argentine couple in the pastel-colored house lived a seemingly ordinary suburban life, driving around this sleepy European capital in a white Kia Ceed sedan, always paying their taxes on time and never so much as getting a parking ticket. Maria Rosa Mayer Muños ran an online art gallery, telling acquaintances she’d left Argentina after being robbed in Buenos Aires by an armed gang at a red light. Her husband, Ludwig Gisch, ran an IT startup. Described by neighbors in their middle-class district of Črnuče as “normal” and “quiet,” the husband and wife appeared to be global citizens: switching from English and German with friends to accentless Spanish with their son and daughter, who attended the British International School. Yet almost everything about the family from number 35 Primožičeva street was a carefully constructed lie, according to intelligence officials.”

She was pronounced dead then they found her gasping for air in a body bag

From Popular Mechanics: “About two hours after the body of 74-year-old Constance Glanz arrived at the funeral home outside of Lincoln, Nebraska, earlier this month, an employee there noticed something strange. Glanz, who had been pronounced dead at a nearby nursing home, was breathing. After she was transported to a local hospital, Glanz survived for a few more hours. She was later declared dead for a second time. In 2023, a 76-year-old Ecuadorian woman was declared dead after a suspected stroke. Five hours later, she was found alive after her coffin was opened to change her clothing. Months earlier, an Iowa woman was taken to a funeral home where workers found her gasping for air in a body bag. In 2018, a South African woman who was initially declared dead was discovered alive in a mortuary refrigerator.”

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 “Unassuming married couple turn out to be Russian spies”