Hi everyone! I'm going to keep this (mercifully) short. I don't do this a lot, and in fact I think I've only done this one other time in the last two years of this newsletter. I edit and publish this newsletter because I love
From the New York Times: "Annie Oakley, the most expert woman rifle shot ever known, died in Greenville, Ohio, a vivid and picturesque character known all over the world. Those who saw her at the height of her fame in the days of Buffalo Bill's Wild West
From Harper's: "Golf Manor is the kind of place where nothing unusual is supposed to happen. In short, it is the kind of place where, on a typical day, the only thing lurking around the corner is a Mister Softee ice-cream truck. But June 26, 1995, was
From the BBC: “The Geiger counter starts flashing and buzzing as I hold it against the 100-year-old Parisian doorknob. I am standing in the doorway between the historical lab and office of Marie Curie, the Polish-born, Paris-based scientist who invented the word "radioactivity" – and here is an especially
From ABC.net: “Two men are walking down a desert track. They are from different worlds, but they have one thing in common. They know what it’s like to be alone in the vast outback wilderness of central Australia. They know how the heat sears your skin, the way
From Academia: “Daniel Hudson Burnham, the Chicago architect and city planner, is recognized for his work on the development of American tall office building; for the construction of World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893; and for his city plans for Washington, D.C., Cleveland, San Francisco, and Chicago. What is
From the Library of Congress: "Thomas Paine was a national hero, best known as the author of Common Sense, which convinced many Americans to join the fight against the British. Over time, however, he became a social outcast, particularly for his controversial views on organized religion. He died in
From TheForce.net: "Here's how that came about: My co-producer was Tony Bongiovi. Jon Bon Jovi was his little cousin and by little I mean we were all in our 30s and early 40s but Jon at that time was 17 years old. And we were in
From Gareth Edwards at Every: "In September 1974, Ed Roberts was sitting at the bank in a foreclosure meeting. His once-profitable calculator company, Micro Instrument and Telemetry Systems, was on the verge of bankruptcy. But Roberts was soliciting a $65,000 loan. Not to spend on calculators, he explained
From Amitha Kalaichandran for Undark: "In May, I was invited to take part in a survey by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to better delineate how long Covid is described and diagnosed as part of The National Research Action Plan on Long Covid. The survey had
From Chris Lewicki: "Some mistakes feel worse than death. A February evening in 2003 started out routine at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA. I gowned up in cleanroom garb and passed into the High Bay 1 airlock in Building 179 where nearly all of NASA’
Links that interest me, and maybe you
From Now I Know: "Some believe that July 4, 1776, is not truly America's independence day. That honor should fall to either July 2, 1776, or August 2, 1776. On June 11, 1776, the Continental Congress created a sub-committee of five delegates – Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin
From Vice: "Back in 2010, in social media’s Wild West years, Eminem shared a photo on Twitter of a Donkey Kong machine, boasting a high score of 465,800, which, per DonkeyKongBlog, would have put him very near the top 30 scores in the world at the time.
From Aeon: "In September of 1848, Phineas Gage was using an iron ‘tamping rod’ to pack an explosive charge into a hole. The charge exploded prematurely, firing the iron straight through his head. Miraculously, Gage survived, but his doctor noted a marked change in Gage’s personality: he had
From Engora: "A spy, a scoundrel, and a scholar — William Playfair was all three. He led an extraordinary life at the heart of many of the great events of the 18th and 19th centuries, mostly in morally dubious roles. Among all the intrigue, scandal, and indebtedness, he found time
From Texas Monthly: "The day before he would take off his clothes and vanish into the rural countryside on a frigid night — defying logic, devastating those who loved him, and baffling some of the best criminal investigators in Texas — Jason Landry was thinking about socks. Not just any socks,
From The Guardian: "Nancy Miller Stratford sat alone behind the controls of a Spitfire fighter plane, charting an uncertain course through an impenetrable clot of dark clouds. On the horizon, the young pilot could see a promising patch of daylight, “like the devil waving his hand to come on
From the China Project: "It’s perhaps the most infamous case in the annals of modern Chinese crime. The tale begins in March 1995, as a nervous Zhu walked on stage to begin a Chinese zither recital. Her performance was flawless, if a touch rote. No one in the
From Scientific American: "In November 1949 Chien-Shiung Wu and her graduate student, Irving Shaknov, descended to a laboratory below Columbia University. They needed antimatter for a new experiment, so they made their own, using a machine called a cyclotron. The machine's multiton magnet was so gigantic that
From Flaming Hydra: "The best-kept secret in the history of Marvel Comics was in high dudgeon by the time he sat down at his typewriter. It was a July afternoon in 1971, and Ron Whyte, a playwright and activist, was about to hammer out an ill-advised letter. Truth be
From the BBC: "A man hoping to become the first person to complete an unbroken round-the-world walk is preparing for the last leg of his journey. Karl Bushby set off from Chile in 1998. Since then he has walked across American and Asian continents, swam 186 miles across the
From Nautilus: "The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver. There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper. His name might have been Anonymous. But it wasn’t.
From Science Alert: "Nearly two decades ago, an experiment floating high above Antarctica caught a weird signal. Designed to capture the radio spurts of cosmic rays falling from above, in 2006 the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) recorded a short pulse of radio waves from below – an event that