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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.”

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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”

From Vanity Fair: “On a spring day in Rome in 1957, 30-year-old Bruno Lunenfeld gave one hell of a presentation. For four years he had been developing a therapy that would induce ovulation in women struggling with infertility. What he needed now was the support of the Istituto Farmacologico Serono, whose staff scientist had been working on a similar endeavor. The men listened politely, but at the end of the presentation they told him, with regret, that they couldn’t help. It seemed unlikely, for instance, that Serono would be able to procure the vast quantities of one specific essential substance without which the drug couldn’t be made. Lunenfeld left, but then a member of the board approached him with an idea. In the end, over a hundred post-menopausal nuns provided 30,000 liters of their urine, and that was enough to make 9,000 vials of 75 units, which in turn was sufficient for 450 ovulation induction cycles.”

The Webster Apartments: One of Manhattan’s last women-only boarding houses

From the Paris Review: “I am greeted by the same sight that greeted tens of thousands of young women before me, the same sight that greeted a younger self when my cab from JFK pulled up a decade ago, that greeted the department store girls arriving in the city with their belongings in trunks a century before that, and all the residents between and since: a red-brick facade towering over West Thirty-Fourth Street, its name proudly chiseled into stone, “The Webster Apartments.” Charles Webster was the cousin of Rowland Macy and head of Macy’s department store. Upon Webster’s death in 1916, he left one-third of his wealth to build and maintain a hotel for single working women in Manhattan’s retail district—somewhere the Macy’s shop clerks could lay their heads. Rent would be kept low enough for their meager earnings, with the apartments not run for profit. And so the Webster’s doors opened in November 1923.”

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Continue reading “The Vatican’s secret role in the science of in-vitro fertilization”

From Terra Nullius: “On the 12th September 1919, Gabriele D’Annunzio proclaimed that he had annexed the city of Fiume to the Kingdom of Italy as the “Regency of Carnaro” – of which he was the Regent. The Italian government was thoroughly unimpressed and refused to recognise their newest purported land, demanding the plotters give up. Instead, D’Annunzio took matters into his own hands and set up a government. The citizens of Fiume quickly found themselves in the midst of one of the 20th Century’s strangest experiments: D’Annunzio instituted a constitution that saw the country divided into nine corporations to represent key planks of industry like seafarers, lawyers, and farmers. There was a 10th corporation that represented those who D’Annunzio called the “Supermen” and was reserved largely for him and his fellow poets.”

(Editor’s Note: I included the wrong link for a story yesterday about how Jingle Bells was originally a drinking song written by a notorious jerk. If you really wanted to read that one, it is here.)

When a 19-year-old Who fan was pulled from the crowd to fill in for drummer Keith Moon

From The Louder: “In November of 1973, 19-year-old Mike Halpin and a friend travelled from their hometown of Monterey for the Who’s show at the San Francisco Cow Palace. As soon as the concert began, Halpin noticed something was amiss with drummer Keith Moon: A few minutes into Won’t Get Fooled Again he ground to a halt, like a clockwork toy whose battery had just run out. And then he fell backwards, and had to be dragged offstage. When Pete Townshend half-jokingly asked the crowd whether there was a drummer in the house, Halpin’s friend pushed him forward. Halpin claimed the last thing he remembered was swallowing a shot of brandy and being introduced to the crowd by Roger Daltrey. However, video evidence shows Scott acquitted himself well. Halpin went on to get married, manage a rock club, play in several groups and become composer-in-residence at the Headlands Centre For The Arts in Sausalito.”

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Continue reading “The tiny European country that ran on cocaine and yoga”

From the Smithsonian: “The Lizzie Borden murder case is one of the most famous in American criminal history. New England’s major crime of the Gilded Age, its barbarity captivated the national press. And the suspected killer was immortalized by an eerie rhyme: Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one. The rhyme is not quite correct: the female victim was Borden’s stepmother, and the weapon wasn’t an ax, but rather a hatchet. Also, the killer struck the victims around half as many times as stated in the rhyme—19 blows rained down on 64-year-old Abby Borden, and 10 or 11 rendered the face of Lizzie Borden’s 69-year-old father, Andrew Borden, unrecognizable.” Fall River was rocked not only by the sheer brutality of the crime but also by the identity of its victims.”

Before Harry Potter’s sorting hat there was the Medieval Space Bonnet

From Atlas Obscura: “On a grey and drizzly afternoon in the University of Edinburgh’s opulent graduation hall, J.K. Rowling waited to receive an honorary degree. But before the degree could be conferred, she had to take part in a long-standing tradition. University Principal Timothy O’Shea merrily explained that she, along with all graduating students, must step forward and be tapped on the head with an object he calls “the medieval space bonnet.” The University of Edinburgh’s Sorting Hat-style graduation ceremony has been in place for at least 150 years, in which time the bonnet has tapped the heads of over 100,000 graduates. But the round silk and cloth bonnet is rumored to be much older than that. Legend has it that the bonnet was made from a pair of trousers that belonged to 16th-century Scottish Reformation leader John Knox.”

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Continue reading “How Lizzie Borden managed to get away with murder”

From the City of Chowchilla: “On July 15, 1976, a busload of children aged 5 to 14 and their school bus driver, Ed Ray were abducted on a country road in Madera County at about 4 p.m. on their way back from a swim outing. The bus was later found empty, covered with bamboo and brush in a drainage ditch west of town. The victims, 19 girls and seven boys, were driven around for 11 hours in two vans before being entombed in a moving van and buried in a Livermore rock quarry. After 16 hours underground in an 8-foot by 16-foot space, two of the older children and Ray were able to escape after digging themselves out with only their hands, cutting themselves along the way. Investigators dug up the van and learned it had been buried in the quarry in November 1975. The son of the quarry’s owner, Fred Newhall Woods IV, 24, was later arrested, along with his two friends, James Schoenfeld, 24, and his brother, Richard Schoenfeld, 22.”

Why are there so many different human blood types? Scientists aren’t quite sure

From The Smithsonian: “When you get a blood transfusion, doctors have to make sure a donor’s blood type is compatible with the recipient’s blood, otherwise the recipient can die. The ABO blood group, as the blood types are collectively known, are ancient. Humans and all other apes share this trait, inheriting these blood types from a common ancestor at least 20 million years ago and maybe even earlier. But why humans and apes have these blood types is still a scientific mystery. The “type” actually refers to the presence of a particular type of antigen sticking up from the surface of a red blood cell. The human body naturally makes antibodies that will attack certain types of red-blood-cell antigens. For example, people with type A blood make antibodies that attack B antigens; people with type B blood make antibodies that attack A antigens. So, type A people can’t donate their blood to type B people and vice versa.”

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 “In 1976 a bus-load of children were kidnapped and buried alive”