The last of a dying breed of mountain-climbing ice men

From the New York Times: "For 60 years, Baltazar Ushca worked a rare but rigorous trade: ice merchant. Once or twice a week, he climbed snow-capped Mount Chimborazo, Ecuador’s highest peak, to hack ice from a glacier with a pickax, wrap the 60-pound blocks in hay and transport

Frank Lloyd Wright founded a bizarre sex commune

From The Independent: "Taliesin was an architectural commune set up in 1932 in Wisconsin by Wright and his wife, the mysterious Olgivanna. Staffed by young, eager, and mostly male architects who wanted to learn from the master, it quickly evolved into a place where Olgivanna, Wright’s third wife,

She survived the Dating Game killer and then asked him why

From The Cut: "The second time I met Rodney Alcala was on March 23, 2013. We were inside one of the North Infirmary Command buildings on Rikers Island, two months after he’d been sentenced for raping and murdering Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Jane Hover, both women in their

Cow and deer herds always face magnetic north

From National Geographic: "For centuries, farmers have known that their livestock not only gather in large herds but also tend to face the same way when grazing. Experience and folk wisdom offer several possible reasons for this mutual alignment. They stand perpendicularly to the sun’s rays in the

He was a gambling legend who won and then lost a fortune

From the Wall Street Journal: "The professional gambler Archie Karas arrived in Las Vegas in December 1992 with $50 to his name. He borrowed $10,000 from a friend and, over roughly the next three years—after a freewheeling and volatile saga of ups and downs, but predominantly ups—

How trying to avoid peanut allergies made them worse

From the Harvard Gazette: "The 1990s was the decade of peanut allergy panic. The media covered children who died of a peanut allergy, and doctors began writing more about the issue, speculating on the growing rate of the problem. In 2000 the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a recommendation

The famous Stanford Prison Experiment was a fake

From Vox: "The Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous and compelling psychological studies of all time, told us a tantalizingly simple story about human nature. The study took paid participants and assigned them to be inmates or guards in a mock prison at Stanford University. Soon after

Scientists say anyone can learn to do echolocation

From Scientific American: "Human echolocation has at times allowed people to ride bikes or play basketball despite being completely blind from a very young age. These echolocators typically perceive their environment by clicking sharply with their tongues and listening to differences in the sounds reflected off objects. Brain-imaging studies

They said she died in a fire as a baby but she was kidnapped

From The Guardian: "When Delimar Vera was six years old, the woman she thought was her mother – Carolyn Correa – turned to her and said, “There’s a bad lady who wants to take you away from us, but you’re not going to let her, right?” Vera promised she

The Texas doctor and the imprisoned Saudi princesses

From the New Yorker: "Dwight Burdick, a private physician to the Saudi royal family, was on a rotation at the King’s 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

He's still in prison for a crime that doesn't exist any more

From Scientific American: "A bipartisan group of Texas legislators has just done something extraordinary: they have unanimously subpoenaed Robert Roberson, convicted in 2003 of killing his daughter based on the now-discredited theory of shaken baby syndrome, to testify before them five days after he was scheduled to be executed,

Banana duct-taped to a wall could sell for more than $1M

From The Art Newspaper: Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana caused an uproar at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019 and quickly went viral as a symbol of the absurdism of the contemporary art market, though Cattelan himself described Comedian (2019), his first “sculpture” in 15 years, as “a sincere commentary