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From the NYT: “It has been an article of faith for nearly a century, as if chiseled onto a tablet by Abner Doubleday himself: The leading hitter in major league history is, and always will be, Tyrus Raymond Cobb. But history evolves. We know that Doubleday did not, in fact, invent baseball. And as of Wednesday, Josh Gibson will replace Cobb as the leading hitter in the official records of the game. At .372, Gibson’s career batting average eclipses Cobb’s by six points. Major League Baseball announced the results of a newly integrated statistical database covering records from Negro Leagues that operated from 1920 to 1948. The formal acceptance of the data comes three-and-a-half years after MLB officially recognized the Negro Leagues in December 2020.”

From Knowable: “There’s a reason fashion designers look to animal prints for inspiration. Creatures have evolved a dizzying array of patterns: stripes, spots, diamonds, chevrons, hexagons and even mazelike designs. Some, like peacocks, want to be seen, to attract a mate or scare off a rival or predator. Others, like tigers or female ducks, need to blend in, either to sneak up on prey or to avoid becoming lunch themselves. Some patterns arise simply or randomly, but others develop via complex, precise interactions of pattern-generating systems. More than 70 years ago, mathematician Alan Turing proposed a mechanism that explained how patterns could emerge from bland uniformity. Scientists are still using his model to gain a deeper understanding of animal markings.”

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 all-time batting record is now held by a Black man”

From Mental Floss: “During the American Revolution, George Washington approved a plan to kidnap a 17-year-old midshipman. Such kidnappings were not unusual. Throughout the war, Continental and British army leadership attempted—and sometimes succeeded—in kidnapping colonial governors and high-ranking military officers to gain leverage in stalled negotiations. The British unsuccessfully tried to abduct Washington himself in 1780. The teenaged midshipman was Prince William Henry, a son of King George III and third in line to the throne. William Henry arrived in New York City’s harbor on September 26, 1781, aboard the HMS Prince George; he was the first member of the British royal family to set foot in the American colonies.”

James Joyce used to pick drunken fights and then hide behind Ernest Hemingway

From Open Culture: “Hemingway characterized Joyce as a thin, wispy and unmuscled man with defective eyesight, and also noted that the two writers did a certain amount of drinking together in Paris. The author of Ulysses and other books would routinely pick drunken fights, then duck behind his burly friend and say, “Deal with him, Hemingway.” Hemingway, who was convinced he had the makings of a real pugilist, was likely happy to oblige. Hemingway’s biographer wrote that Joyce was an admirer of Hemingway’s lifestyle and worried aloud that his books were too “suburban” next to those of his friend. Joyce said “there is much more behind Hemingway’s form than people know.”

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Continue reading “George Washington planned to kidnap a British prince”

From the BBC: “In 2020, Danish antiquities dealer Dr Ittai Gradel began to suspect an eBay seller he had been buying from was a thief who was stealing from the British Museum. More than two years later, the museum would announce that thousands of objects were missing, stolen or damaged from its collection. Why had it taken so long for it to do so? Dr Gradel collects ancient gemstones carved with intricate figures or motifs – the circle of dealers is small, so the internet has become a vital trading tool. On 7 August 2016, a grey and white piece of a cameo gemstone featuring Priapus – the Greek god of fertility – was posted for just £40. Dr Gradel knew he had seen the Priapus cameo before. He was sure it featured in an old gems catalogue he owned from one of the world’s most famous institutions, the British Museum.”

Remote tribe gets the Internet and now they are hooked on porn and social media

From the New York Times: “As the speeches dragged on, eyes drifted to screens. Teenagers scrolled Instagram. One man texted his girlfriend. And men crowded around a phone streaming a soccer match while the group’s first female leader spoke. Just about anywhere, a scene like this would be mundane. But this was happening in a remote Indigenous village in one of the most isolated stretches of the planet. The Marubo people have long lived in communal huts scattered hundreds of miles along the Ituí River deep in the Amazon rainforest. They speak their own language, take ayahuasca to connect with forest spirits and trap spider monkeys to make soup or keep as pets. But since September, the Marubo have had high-speed internet thanks to Elon Musk.”

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 gems from the British Museum ended up on eBay”

From JSTOR Daily: “Coke was the brainchild of Dr. John Stith Pemberton, who was injured while fighting for the Confederacy and then became addicted to the morphine prescribed for pain relief. Living in Atlanta after the war, the physician tried the new wonder drug cocaine and found it cured his morphine problem. In 1884, Pemberton began selling cocaine-laced wine. After Atlanta passed a temperance law the next year, he switched gears and started producing a soft drink named for its two key medicinal ingredients—coca leaf and the caffeine-containing African kola nut. But within just a decade, public attitudes regarding cocaine changed dramatically. Black laborers in the New Orleans area began using cocaine, and it became a popular recreational drug in Black neighborhoods. Medical journals warned of the “Negro cocaine menace,” and newspapers claimed that the drug caused Black men to commit crimes.”

The incredible saga of the lost Antarctic Volkswagen Beetles

From Jalopnik: “Normally, when planning an expedition to Antarctica, you might look for a beefy vehicle for wandering the great wasteland of snow and ice. Something like the building-size Antarctic Snow Cruiser, or the tough Soviet-made Kharkovchanka. You’d probably overlook, say, a 1960s Volkswagen Beetle. Rookie mistake! You’re going to end up like Australian explorer Douglas Mawson overlooking the hard-working People’s Car little car like that. Through a wonderful combination of timing, science and marketing, several Volkswagens made their way to Antarctica via Australian researchers in the 1960s. And, as it turns out, the humble little Beetle was damn useful for getting around. The first VW to end up in the Antarctic was stock, with just basic winterization thrown in to handle the incredible temperatures in the Antarctic. Volkswagen worked directly with Antarctic researchers to develop a better, more resilient vehicle for use around the base, which would arrive the very next year.”

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 “Here’s why Coca-Cola decided to take the cocaine out”

Even before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a public health emergency of international concern in January 2020, there were debates as to where—and how—the virus originated. Some cited the emergence of the earliest COVID cases in or around Wuhan, in China, as evidence of what came to be known as the “lab-leak” theory of the disease’s origin, since scientists had studied coronaviruses similar to the one that caused COVID at an institute in the city. However, most scientists—at least in the initial stages of the pandemic—argued that COVID likely emerged in a manner similar to other diseases caused by coronaviruses: as a result of interspecies transmission, specifically at a so-called “wet” market in Wuhan, where live bats and other animals were sold.

That didn’t stop members of the Trump administration promoting the idea of a lab leak, which conveniently allowed the White House to shift blame for COVID to the Chinese government. As the virus continued to spread, so did various versions of the theory. In February 2021, Facebook finally announced that it would remove any posts suggesting that the COVID virus was “man-made or manufactured,” and said that it reserved the right to permanently remove any accounts or pages that repeatedly shared such claims. The ban, however, only lasted until May of the same year, when Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said that it would no longer remove such claims, citing what it called  “ongoing investigations” into the virus’s origins.

Meta’s ban of the lab-leak theory and subsequent reversal were quickly incorporated into a conservative worldview in which so-called authorities on COVID were inherently untrustworthy. As my colleague Jon Allsop pointed out at the time, a wave of commentators (often, though by no means always, on the right) argued that the media had failed in its duty to report accurately on COVID’s origins, claiming that many journalists had inappropriately discounted the lab-leak argument as a racist conspiracy theory when in fact the science wasn’t yet settled. (Matthew Yglesias described it as a “genuinely catastrophic media fuckup” and “a huge fiasco.”) As Allsop noted, however, the wave of commentary was not based on any new smoking gun proving that COVID had come from a lab. And so the debate over its origins continued.

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

Continue reading “A Congressional hearing and weaponized uncertainty”

From The Guardian: “There was Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, all about the joys of spring, and as darkly funny as its title suggests. There was the American football song Fight Fiercely, Harvard, which seemed to make cruel mock of those cold, dreary afternoons I was forced to spend watching my school play rugby. I didn’t know then that Lehrer had started out by paying to have his own record cut because the record companies were shocked by his songs, and selling the LP to fellow students at Harvard. At that time, Lehrer’s principal accomplishment was that he was a mathematics prodigy who had entered Harvard aged 15, in 1943, taken a first class degree aged 18 and a master’s a year later. But in 1960, the year after I discovered him, Lehrer stopped writing and performing. He has spent the rest of his life as an obscure mathematics lecturer.”

The Renaissance painter Caravaggio died while on the run from a murder charge

From the New Statesman: “In May 1606, Caravaggio’s rackety life caught up with him. He already had a long list of misdemeanours against his name. He had been twice arrested for carrying a sword without a permit; put on trial by the Roman authorities for writing scurrilous verses about a rival, Giovanni Baglione (or “Johnny Bollocks” according to the poems); arrested for assault, in one incident being injured himself (his testimony to the police survives: “I wounded myself with my own sword when I fell down these stairs. I don’t know where it was and there was no one else there”); arrested again for smashing a plate of artichokes in the face of a waiter; for throwing stones and abusing a constable (telling him he could “stick [his sword] up his arse”); and for smearing excrement on the house of the landlady who had had his belongings seized in payment of missed rent. There were more incidents, all meticulously recorded in the Roman archives.”

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Continue reading “Why did Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity?”

From the BBC: “In 1968, author JRR Tolkien refused The Beatles permission to make a film version of his fantasy epic The Lord of The Rings. “What I understand is that Denis O’Dell, who was their Apple film producer, who produced The Magic Christian, had the idea of doing Lord of The Rings,” director Peter Jackson said. “When they went to Rishikesh and stayed in India, it was about three months with the Maharishi at the beginning of 1968, he sent the books to The Beatles. I expect because there are three, he sent one book to each of the Beatles. I don’t think Ringo got one, but John, Paul and George each got one Lord of The Rings book to read in India. And they got excited about it. Ultimately, they couldn’t get the rights from Tolkien, because he didn’t like the idea of a pop group doing his story. So it got nixed by him. They tried to do it. There’s no doubt about it.”

Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law created a gentleman burglar named Raffles

From JSTOR Daily: “Sherlock Holmes captured the hearts of people around the world by solving crimes in the early 1900s. But less remembered is a fictional contemporary who was equally beloved for cleverly committing crimes: a gentleman burglar named Arthur J. Raffles, invented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, Earnest William Hornung. In twenty-five stories, plus one novel, written between 1898 and 1909, Raffles spent his days as a cricketing master and gentleman of leisure and his nights gleefully stealing from his fellow London elites, accompanied by his sidekick Bunny Manders. Some critics recoiled at presenting young readers with stories in which, as one put it, “one’s notions of right and wrong are turned topsy-turvy.” But Moss writes that they played to a widespread questioning of social hierarchies in the 1880s and ’90s.

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 Beatles tried to make a LOTR movie but Tolkien said no”