{"id":286413,"date":"2026-07-17T08:49:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T13:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=286413"},"modified":"2026-07-17T08:49:06","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T13:49:06","slug":"how-a-suburban-mom-wound-up-working-for-a-mexican-cartel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2026\/07\/17\/how-a-suburban-mom-wound-up-working-for-a-mexican-cartel\/","title":{"rendered":"How a suburban mom wound up working for a Mexican cartel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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As Chelsie Marie Anderson rode through the desert, leaning her head against the bus window, she kept thinking, This is how I\u2019m going to die. <\/em>Anderson stuck out among the other passengers: an American woman with bleached-blonde tips, huge brown eyes, and olive skin on a bus in rural Mexico. The next day, she arrived at a gated community in a small city, sore and exhausted. Waiting for her was a stranger with a similar story. Like Anderson, Nicole Burns was from the region of South Carolina known as \u201cthe Upstate,\u201d and like Anderson, she was also fleeing the police. It was May 2020, and both women had become key cogs in a vast drug network that South Carolina\u2019s attorney general \u2014 in the largest narcotics-conspiracy investigation in state history \u2014 would later prosecute in a 103-person indictment called \u201cPrison Empire.\u201d For years, Mexican cartels had worked with South Carolina Department of Corrections prisoners to distribute meth, heroin, and cocaine. To sell the product outside prison walls, the inmates turned to women like Anderson and Burns. (via The Cut<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anthony Burgess said Clockwork Orange was inspired by real events but it was all a lie<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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In April 1944, Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess’s wife Lynne was working in London. Returning home from work after midnight, she was approached by four U.S. soldiers in civilian clothing, who grabbed her purse and tried to pry the golden wedding ring from her finger. One soldier \u201cwas prepared to break or even cut the finger,\u201d according to Burgess. Lynne screamed for help, but none arrived; her yells were silenced by punches to her body and kicks were the last thing she recalled as she fainted to the ground. She happened to be pregnant at the time and lost the child. The attack inspired an early passage in A Clockwork Orange<\/em>, in which a gang terrorizes a young couple in a cottage by physical assaulting the husband and raping the wife. This is the account you will read \u2014 or a slight variation thereof \u2014 if you open almost any non-fiction biography, newspaper article, book, or encyclopedia on Burgess and his famous novel. The only issue with the story is that none of it is true. (via The Memory Hole<\/a>)<\/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

The snake-wrangling 84-year-old who lives alone on a remote barrier island<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Every week, 84-year-old Carol Ruckdeschel walks the wind-whipped beach on Cumberland Island, Georgia. Wearing white rubber boots, and with her dark hair in pigtail braids, she jots down everything she finds in a field journal: spoonbills, sandwich terns, shearwaters, sea oats, moon snails, micromolluscs, whelks, calico crabs. This morning, she records a committee of vultures perching on a dead snag. Bottlenose dolphins swim offshore. Feral horses lope along the dunes. Shark teeth glint in the sand. Then, she comes across the carcass of a loggerhead turtle. She kneels beside it and extends her measuring tape. As she’s done some 4,000 times before, she cuts it open and performs a necropsy, investigating how it died, what it ate and recording every detail in fieldnotes so thorough and exquisite they once inspired curators at the Smithsonian to travel 700 miles south from Washington DC to meet her in person. (via the BBC<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either <\/em>through my Patreon<\/em><\/a> or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called <\/em>The Torment Nexus<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When a Pokemon character got banned for something he didn’t do<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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On December 16, 1997, millions of Japanese children sat down to watch TV \u2014 the 38th episode of the Pok\u00e9mon anime series. The episode was, by all accounts, a fairly standard adventure for a Pok\u00e9mon episode. But about twenty minutes into the show, screens across Japan filled with rapidly flickering red and blue lights \u2014 strobing at a rate that would prove catastrophic. Within hours, nearly 700 children had been rushed to hospitals, some suffering from epileptic seizures. Many more experienced vomiting, temporary blindness, and disorientation. It remains, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the most photosensitive epileptic seizures ever caused by a television show. The seizure-inducing sequence was caused by Pikachu’s Thunderbolt attack, but as Pikachu adorned lunchboxes and backpacks and video game cartridges around the world, it wasn\u2019t going away. The powers-that-be wanted to ensure that everyone knew they took the health crisis seriously, though. Something needed to change, and Porygon took the fall. He has never appeared in another show. (via Now I Know<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contrary to conventional wisdom people in ancient times often lived into their 80s<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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You might have seen the cartoon: two cavemen sitting outside their cave. One says to the other: \u2018Something\u2019s just not right \u2013 our air is clean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free-range, and yet nobody lives past 30.\u2019 This cartoon reflects a very common view of ancient lifespans, but it is based on a myth. People in the past were not all dead by 30. Ancient documents confirm this. In the 24th century BCE, the Egyptian Vizier Ptahhotep wrote verses about the disintegrations of old age. The ancient Greeks classed old age among the divine curses, and their tombstones attest to survival well past 80 years. Ancient artworks and figurines also depict elderly people: stooped, flabby, wrinkled. So what is the source of the myth that those in the past must have died young? One is to do with what we dig up. Those older than middle age are frequently given an open-ended age estimation, like 40+ or 50+ years, meaning that they could be anywhere between forty and a hundred and four (via Aeon<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How to get five complete rotations out of a tuck-and-roll dive<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Acknowledgements<\/strong><\/em>: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as <\/em>The Morning News<\/em><\/a> from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s <\/em>Curious About Everything<\/em><\/a>, Dan Lewis’s <\/em>Now I Know<\/em><\/a>, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s <\/em>The Browser<\/em><\/a>, Clive Thompson’s <\/em>Linkfest<\/em><\/a> and <\/em>Why Is This Interesting<\/em><\/a> by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy<\/em>. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com<\/em><\/p>\n

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As Chelsie Marie Anderson rode through the desert, leaning her head against the bus window, she kept thinking, This is how I\u2019m going to die. Anderson stuck out among the other passengers: an American woman with bleached-blonde tips, huge brown eyes, and olive skin on a bus in rural Mexico. The next day, she arrived at … <\/p>\n

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