A podcast claims non-speaking autistic people can read minds

From The Cut: "A friend suggested Katie and Houston try a form of communication known in the autism world as spelling. Spelling involved not just Houston but Houston and Katie as a team. Katie held in the air an 8.5-by-11-inch board or stencil covered with the letters of the alphabet and numerals 0 to 9. Houston’s role was to use a pencil to point to letters on the board to make words he wanted to say. All summer long, in 2018, Katie and Houston spent four, five, six hours every day at their dining table trying to master the technique. Each spelling lesson consisted of a reading on a topic, like constellations, followed by questions that had just been answered by the reading. After each lesson, Katie lifted a black plastic stencil letter board in front of Houston’s chest and he pointed. Three months before Houston’s birthday, he spelled I-M S-P-E-C-I-A-L. And then he spelled I C-A-N H-E-A-R T-H-O-U-G-H-T-S."

Fans of the game Magic:The Gathering could help solve a prime number puzzle

From Scientific American: "A game of Magic: The Gathering begins well before players lay down their first card. As a collectible card game, Magic requires competitive players to select the optimal deck of cards based on how they think it will function against hypothetical opponents with many different strategies—then the game itself offers proof or disproof of the player’s predictive powers. Because about 30,000 different cards are available today—though they’re likely not all owned by a single individual—there are many degrees of variation. In the fall of 2024 a Reddit user posted a combination of 14 moves that use about two dozen Magic cards and could potentially deal infinite damage. The outcome of the game depends on the answer to a mathematical puzzle that is almost 180 years old: Are there an infinite number of prime number twins?"

These special goggles were designed for watching gorillas without antagonizing them

From Now I Know: "Bokito was a gorilla at the Diergaarde Blijdorp zoo in the Netherlands. On May 18, 2007, Bokito jumped over the ditch that separated his Rotterdam enclosure from the public and violently attacked a woman, dragging her around for tens of metres and inflicting bone fractures as well as more than a hundred bite wounds. But the victim was no random zoo visitor. She had been visiting the zoo as often as four times a week, specifically to visit Bokito. And she'd look at him and smile and laugh. Zoo staff advised that she (and others) not make direct eye contact with Bokito while smiling at him, as apes often misinterpret that friendliness as aggression. But she continued, thinking that he enjoyed it. After the attack, the zoo came up with a simple, elegant, and somewhat creepy solution called BokitoKijkers, Dutch for "Bokito Viewers."

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 through my Patreon 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 The Torment Nexus.

In 1967 I spent the summer in Pennsylvania with Joseph Stalin's daughter

From Politico: "My father, the diplomat George F. Kennan, disliked the telephone. So when he called me in March 1967, I knew it was something important. At the time, I was 36 years old and living in California—recently divorced, newly employed as a book critic for San Francisco magazine, looking after my three children and dating architect Jack Warnecke, who would later become my second husband. But I’d soon find myself in the middle of one of the buzziest stories of that year—now a mostly forgotten footnote of Cold War history. It started with that call: My father wanted to tell me that the State Department had asked him to go to Switzerland on a secret mission to establish the bona fides of a woman who had defected from the Soviet Union and claimed to be the daughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. When they met in Switzerland, Svetlana expressed her desire to defect to the United States in the coming weeks. My father offered to provide her with peace and quiet at our family farm in East Berlin, Pennsylvania."

It turns out that the best way to fly a rhino somewhere is upside down

From ZME Science: "In the skies above South Africa, a surreal scene unfolded: a 1,300-kilogram black rhinoceros swings gently upside down from a helicopter. Legs bound to soft straps, horn pointed downward, it looks like something out of a Salvador Dalí dream. For the critically endangered black rhinoceros, being lifted by its feet is sometimes the only ticket to survival. What seems absurd at first glance is, in fact, the safest, fastest, and most effective way to relocate these creatures to new habitats. A 2021 study found that the upside-down posture resulted in slightly better oxygen levels and lower carbon dioxide in the blood. The reason? When a rhino hangs vertically, gravity helps stretch its spine and clear its airways. By contrast, when lying on its side, abdominal pressure can compress the lungs. Even more remarkably, the rhino’s horn acts like a tailfin—a natural stabilizer that reduces spinning midair."

Professional hide-and-seek players versus an FBI search team

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