From Texas Monthly: "Sara Burnett had initially planned to spend only a few weeks practicing at Blue Element Freediving, a training center in the Caribbean island nation of Dominica. The area is popular among free divers, who plunge deep into open water without a scuba tank, hitting depths that
From Amusing Planet: "During the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, the border between British Canada and upstate New York saw some of the fiercest fighting, much of which took place around Lake Champlain. This freshwater lake situated across the US-Canada border provided the British a direct
From The Conversation: "In a routine blood test that turned extraordinary, French scientists have identified the world’s newest and rarest blood group. The sole known carrier is a woman from Guadeloupe whose blood is so unique that doctors couldn’t find a single compatible donor. The discovery of
From The Smithsonian: "In the nearly 200 years since his mummy’s arrival at the Leeds City Museum in northern England, an ancient Egyptian priest named Nesyamun has slowly but surely revealed his secrets. Employed as a high-ranking priest and scribe at the Karnak state temple in Thebes, Nesyamun
From Wikipedia: "John Whiteside Parsons (born Marvel Whiteside Parsons) was an American rocket engineer, chemist, and Thelemite occultist. Parsons was one of the principal founders of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Aerojet. In 1939, Parsons converted to Thelema, a religious movement founded by English occultist Aleister Crowley. Parsons
From Eccentric Culinary History: "Prior to World War Two, pizza was barely known in the United States outside of a few Italian enclaves in the Northeast. For all of the praise heaped upon Lombardi’s in New York City, until the war, few people north of Houston Street had
From Lori Weiss at HuffPo: "Somewhere in West Tennessee, not far from Graceland, nine women – or "The 9 Nanas," as they prefer to be called – gather in the darkness of night. At 4am they begin their daily routine – a ritual that no one, not even their husbands,
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 Atlas Obscura: "A locked vault in a Baghdad mosque contains a Quran written in lovely, sweeping Arabic calligraphy which, if not for its ink, could be displayed in a museum. But this holy book was written in blood — Saddam Hussein's blood, to be precise. Following an
From Chess.com: "Ossip Bernstein was born in 1882 in the small Ukrainian town of Zhytomyr. Although he wasn't serious about chess until his late adolescent years, he quickly made a name for himself while studying law in Germany. At nineteen, he almost earned the title of
From NY Mag: "Marcel Malanga was standing in the foyer of the Palais de la Nation, the home of the leader of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder. It was just before dawn on May 19, 2024, and close by was
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 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.