{"id":266536,"date":"2024-10-29T10:01:36","date_gmt":"2024-10-29T15:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=266536"},"modified":"2024-10-29T10:01:44","modified_gmt":"2024-10-29T15:01:44","slug":"the-texas-doctor-and-the-imprisoned-saudi-princesses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2024\/10\/29\/the-texas-doctor-and-the-imprisoned-saudi-princesses\/","title":{"rendered":"The Texas doctor and the imprisoned Saudi princesses"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From the New Yorker<\/a>: “Dwight Burdick, a private physician to the Saudi royal family, was on a rotation at the King\u2019s palace, in Jeddah, when he got an urgent summons. Princess Hala, a daughter of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, had gone wild with a knife. Burdick was asked to enter her quarters and forcibly sedate her. Burdick, a lifelong peacenik with a neat white beard, had moved to Saudi Arabia from Texas in the mid-nineties. He had served for years on the King\u2019s personal medical detail, but had never before encountered Princess Hala. The request to drug her alarmed him\u2014forced sedation was a \u201cviolation of my professional ethics,\u201d he said\u2014but he was curious. Though he admired Abdullah, he knew little about the lives of the ruler\u2019s daughters.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was an R&B legend but it took her 30 years to get the royalties she deserved<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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NPR<\/a>: “Ruth Brown was R&B’s first major star. It was 1949 when Billboard changed the name of its Race Music category to Rhythm and Blues \u2014 the same year Brown released her first single. She was required to pay for touring and recording costs out of pocket and when Atlantic ended their professional relationship in the early 1960s, Brown had no savings to fall back on. She moved to Long Island, New York, and spent a decade and a half working a series of low-paying jobs, often as a single mother. But in 1976, her career was revitalized when she performed the role of Mahalia Jackson in a production of the musical Selma<\/em>. She used her new fame to leverage Atlantic Records into paying her back royalties \u2014 and she didn’t stop there. The deal she cut with the label also allowed dozens of other musicians to recoup their earnings as well.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: 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\u00a0see other issues\u00a0and sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

When Ray Bradbury and John Huston clashed over the screenplay for Moby Dick<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From the LA Review of Books<\/a>: “After months of working together closely, Bradbury writing pages and bringing them each night to Huston, the relationship between the two men had frayed. When Bradbury arrived in London, he found that Huston would barely speak to him. The tension was nearly unbearable. One night at dinner, Bradbury reached his passive-aggressive flash point. Seated at a table in a London restaurant, Huston and Bradbury were joined by a large group, including the writer Peter Viertel and the filmmaker Jack Clayton, who would be an associate producer on Moby Dick<\/em>. Huston made fun of Bradbury\u2019s journalist friends back in Dublin, and Bradbury was done with it. \u201cJohn,\u201d he said, and Huston glanced over at him. \u201cFuck you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This New York City prison barge was built to hold over 800 prisoners<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Wikipedia<\/a>: “The Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center, nicknamed “The Boat,” was an 800-bed jail barge or prison ship that was used to hold inmates for the New York City Department of Corrections. The barge was anchored off the Bronx’s southern shore, across from Rikers Island, near Hunts Point. It was built for $161 million at Avondale Shipyard in Louisiana, near New Orleans, and brought to New York in 1992 to reduce overcrowding in the island’s land-bound buildings for a lower price. It was designed to handle inmates from medium- to maximum-security in 16 dormitories and 100 cells and was at one time named the world’s largest prison barge by Guinness World Records.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This Irish mathematical genius carved his theorem into the side of a bridge<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Science Alert<\/a>: “On October 16 1843, the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton had an epiphany during a walk alongside Dublin’s Royal Canal. He was so excited he took out his penknife and carved his discovery right then and there on Broome Bridge. It is the most famous graffiti in mathematical history. Hamilton’s revelation changed the way mathematicians represent information. And this, in turn, made myriad technical applications simpler \u2013 from calculating forces when designing a bridge, an MRI machine or a wind turbine, to programming search engines and orienting a rover on Mars.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beachgoers get up close and personal with a cassowary, Australia’s “murder chicken”<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Beachgoers have a close encounter with a Cassowary, a bird capable of killing a human in one blow \ud83d\ude2c pic.twitter.com\/kwG55U4MvH<\/a><\/p>— internet hall of fame (@InternetH0F) October 26, 2024<\/a><\/blockquote>