{"id":259826,"date":"2024-03-22T08:45:48","date_gmt":"2024-03-22T13:45:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=259826"},"modified":"2024-03-22T08:45:48","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T13:45:48","slug":"when-i-discovered-that-my-mother-was-a-sex-worker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2024\/03\/22\/when-i-discovered-that-my-mother-was-a-sex-worker\/","title":{"rendered":"When I discovered that my mother was a sex worker"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From The Guardian<\/a>: “I think I was about 10 years old when I discovered my mother was a sex worker. I arrived home one afternoon from school and caught her at work. Hearing sounds I vaguely associated with sex, I let myself in, then <\/strong>quietly straight back out again. I wasn\u2019t actually sure what I knew for quite a while. Eventually, I put it together: an unusually high level of phone calls, whispered conversations in the hall and a too-young viewing of the film Pretty Baby meant I realised what her new business was. She certainly wasn\u2019t a secretary any more, as I had always believed her to be. She was in her mid-40s, and maybe she had long ago found other ways to support us. I am unsure of much of my personal history \u2013 where one lie ends, and another begins.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong><\/em>: I neglected to include a link to yesterday’s top story about Havana Syndrome, so if you still want to read it, <\/em>you can find it here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Frank Oppenheimer differed from his more famous brother Robert<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Knowable magazine<\/a>: “During the post-World War II years, the emotionally close ties between the brothers (Robert \u2014 the \u201cfather of the atom bomb\u201d \u2014 and his younger brother, Frank \u2014 the \u201cuncle\u201d of the bomb, as he mischievously called himself)\u00a0were strained and for a time even fractured. Both hoped that the nascent nuclear technology would remain under global, and peaceful, control. Both hoped that the sheer horror of the weapons they helped to build could lead to a warless world. They were on the same side, but not on the same page when it came to tactics. Robert \u2014 whose fame surged after the war \u2014 believed decisions should be left to experts who understood the issues and had the power to make things happen \u2014 that is, people like himself. Frank believed just as fiercely that everyday people had to be involved. It took everyone to win the war, he argued, and it would take everyone to win the peace. In the end, both lost.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: 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<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Girls around the world were forced into service with the secretive Catholic group Opus Dei<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From the Financial Times<\/a>: “Opus Dei has 95,000 members worldwide, some of them highly influential. Its supporters have been central to the conservative takeover of the US judiciary. Within the Church, Opus Dei members have been in charge of the Vatican\u2019s press office and its bank. Far less known are the women whose labour has propped up Opus Dei for decades. Called \u201cassistant numeraries\u201d, they give their lives to the organisation as domestic workers. In many cases, they have done so without pay and against their will. Anne Marie was one of 16 former assistant numeraries who worked as unpaid domestic servants for Opus Dei from 1977 to 2020. Recruited as young girls from rural and working-class backgrounds, the women said they were coerced into domestic servitude \u2014 in effect modern slavery \u2014 through a rigid system of psychological control.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Editor’s note<\/strong><\/em>: If you like this newsletter, please share it with someone else. And if you <\/em>really <\/strong><\/em>like it, perhaps you could subscribe, or contribute something via <\/em>my Patreon<\/em><\/a>. Thanks for being a reader!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of the whales that have been killed by humans were turned into margarine<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Scope of Work<\/a>: “I used to associate whaling with the era of oil lamps, three-masted whalers, and hand-thrown harpoons, but most whales were actually killed after 1945, by which time we\u2019d forgotten most of our other uses for the products of whaling \u2013 spermaceti, baleen, heaps of lean whale meat. By the time we banned commercial whaling in 1986, the leading use of whale oil was in margarine. A huge fraction of all recorded whale hunting took place basically in order to provide the world with something that felt like a luxury as it rebuilt after the war. As Seth Miller memorably put it, \u201cmostly, the whales were spread on toast.\u201d The invention that catalyzed this maritime Grand Guignol was the Wesson process, which deodorizes oil using a combination of superheated steam and vacuum.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brains are not required when it comes to solving problems, simple cells can do it<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Scientific American<\/a>: “The planarian is nobody’s idea of a genius. A flatworm shaped like a comma, it can be found wriggling through the muck of lakes and ponds worldwide. Its pin-size head has a microscopic structure that passes for a brain. Its two eyespots are set close together in a way that makes it look cartoonishly confused. It aspires to nothing more than life as a bottom-feeder. But the worm has mastered one task that has eluded humanity’s greatest minds: perfect regeneration. Tear it in half, and its head will grow a new tail while its tail grows a new head. After a week two healthy worms swim away. But it’s the tail end of the worm that intrigues Tufts University biologist Michael Levin. He studies the way bodies develop from single cells, and his research led him to suspect that the intelligence of living things lies outside their brains to a surprising degree.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The astrolabe was the equivalent of a smartphone in the Middle Ages<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Open Culture<\/a>: “For residents of much of the world in the Middle Ages, the astrolabe was a must-have, all-in-one device, says University of Cambridge historian Federica Gigante. \u201cIt\u2019s basically the world\u2019s earliest smartphone,\u201d Gigante said. \u201cWith one simple calculation, you can tell the time, but you can also do all sorts of other things.\u201d Franz Lidz and Clara Vannucci add that astrolabes, which resembled large, old-fashioned vest pocket watches, also allowed their users to determine distances, heights, latitudes and even (with a horoscope) the future. Gigante says that when she got the chance to pay the Miniscalchi-Erizzo astrolabe closer scrutiny, she could identify Arabic inscriptions, \u201cfaint Hebrew markings,\u201d and Western numerals, a powerful record of scientific exchange between Muslims, Jews and Christians over nearly a millennium.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes bumble bees fall asleep inside the flowers they are harvesting<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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While bumble bees live socially in hives usually located underground (with 50 – 500 individuals), foragers or males can happen to sleep in flowers, especially when tired after too much work pic.twitter.com\/f6j3YXrOYJ<\/a><\/p>— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) March 21, 2024<\/a><\/blockquote>