A former YouTube influencer is now in prison for child abuse

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. As many of you probably know, I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your Ghost 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. And I appreciate it, believe me! If you like this newsletter, please share it with someone else, and thanks for being a reader.

From The Cut: "Over the next six years, 8 Passengers would grow into one of the most-watched family YouTube channels of all time, amassing, at its peak, roughly 2.5 million subscribers and more than a billion views. Ruby and her husband, Kevin, distinguished themselves as a messy-but-wholesome alternative to the polished, world-traveling, Montessori-practicing parenting influencers taking over feeds. The most die-hard 8 Passengers fans not only followed along on YouTube but also gathered in dedicated online forums, where they analyzed the affairs of the Franke family, of which they had encyclopedic knowledge. These fans were, in late 2019, among the first to realize something was off. In 8 Passengers’ posts, Ruby appeared colder, they thought; the couple’s already stern parenting style had sharpened. Late in the summer of 2023, Ruby’s two youngest children, then ages 9 and 12 were found hundreds of miles from home. They were wounded and emaciated, the victims of abuse by Ruby and Hildebrandt."

She set a new record by hiking the 2,197-mile Appalachian Trail in 40 days

From I Run Far: "On September 21, 2024, Tara Dower set a new overall supported fastest known time (FKT) on the Appalachian Trail, in a time of 40 days, 18 hours, and 5 minutes, to be confirmed. The Appalachian Trail stretches 2,197 miles from Mount Katahdin in Maine to Springer Mountain in Georgia, and travels through New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Oftentimes considered the original long-trail thru-hike, it’s an unrelenting path through the eastern U.S. The trail has 465,000 feet of elevation gain. Dower’s mark surpasses Karel Sabbe’s previous overall and men’s supported FKT of 41 days, 7 hours, and 39 minutes, which he set in 2018."

One of the world’s oldest board games is even older than we thought

From Popular Mechanics: "Since the ancient board game—more commonly known as “58 Holes”—was first discovered in Egypt (in the late 19^th century), the prevailing theory was that the ancient game was invented there. But that might turn out to be incorrect. A recent study published in the European Journal of Archaeology details the discovery of six game boards on the Abseron Peninsula in present-day Azerbaijan, which rewrites the ancient history of a game already considered one the world’s oldest. Carved into rock or chiseled onto a transportable piece of wood, theses boards were laid out with two parallel lines of 10 holes at their centers. An arc of 38 holes around the central 10 brings the total for each board 58 holes. Frequently, though, holes were marked or connected to one another with a line, likely meaning that pieces would move to connected holes, analogous to a modern day game of “Chutes and Ladders.”

They exposed a tax cheater so they got to split a $74 million reward

From the Washington Post: "The IRS recovered $263 million from a single individual, ending more than a decade of tax evasion and one of its biggest whistleblower cases ever, according to lawyers from three firms involved in the case. The three informants will split $74 million, nearly a third of the government’s proceeds and the largest award allowed by law, the lawyers said. It’s a major win for the IRS whistleblower program, which rewards people who expose high-dollar tax cheats. The whistleblowers, who plan to remain anonymous, helped expose “an offshore tax evasion scheme” spanning about 15 years of tax returns. Due to recent IRS rule changes that allow whistleblowers to get paid once one taxpayer fulfills their tax debt, the three whistleblowers have already received their payments. They could still earn more money if the agency finds the other taxpayers liable for debts and is able to collect them."

Ernest Duchesne is the forgotten original discoverer of penicillin

From Amusing Planet: "In 1897, a young French medical student named Ernest Duchesne submitted a ground-breaking doctoral thesis in which he introduced a revolutionary idea that bacteria and moulds are locked in a constant struggle for survival, and this antagonism could be exploited for therapeutic use. Although the therapeutic properties of fungi and plants in treating infections was known since ancient times, it was Duchesne who showed experimentally that certain moulds destroyed pathogenic bacteria such as Salmonella typhi (which causes typhoid fever) and Escherichia coli in laboratory cultures and when injected into guinea pigs. What Duchesne had discovered was the natural antibiotic penicillin—an achievement typically credited to Scottish physician Alexander Fleming. Duchesne’s work remained largely forgotten until it was rediscovered more than 50 years later, after Fleming was awarded the Nobel Prize."

The annual moving of the Forty Acre Bog on Lake Chippewa

Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis's Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's The Browser, Clive Thompson's Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy's Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova's The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com