An IVF clinic mixup led to an unthinkable choice

From the New York Times: "Alexander wanted to share his wife’s happiness, but instead he was preoccupied by a concern that he was reluctant to voice: May did not look to him like a member of their family. She certainly did not resemble him, a man of Italian descent with fair hair and light brown eyes, or Daphna, a redhead with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. Alexander often turns to dark humor to mask a simmering anxiety, and in the days after the birth, he started to joke that their IVF clinic had made a mistake. Later he would explain that the jokes were a kind of superstition, a way of warding off something threatening: If you say the horrible thing out loud, it won’t happen."

Scientists discovered a top-secret military base hidden under the Arctic ice

From The Debrief: "When it first appeared in their radar images, NASA scientist Chad Greene and his team of engineers weren’t sure what they were seeing. Flying above northern Greenland, Greene and his crew were monitoring radar information collected from the ice sheet below. What they saw was the remains of a remote U.S. military base once used as a top-secret testing site for the deployment of nuclear missiles from the Arctic. Camp Century was constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers within the Greenland Ice Sheet in 1959. Also known as the “city under the ice,” this forgotten Cold War relic consists of a network of tunnels hewn into the near-surface portions of the ice sheet."

Actor Joaquin Phoenix was saved from a burning car by filmmaker Werner Herzog

From Wikipedia: "On January 26, 2006, while driving down a winding canyon road in Hollywood, Phoenix veered off the road and flipped his car. The crash was reportedly caused by brake failure. Shaken and confused, he heard someone tapping on his window and telling him to "just relax". Unable to see the man, Phoenix replied, "I'm fine. I am relaxed." The man replied, "No, you're not." The man then stopped Phoenix from lighting a cigarette while gasoline was leaking into the car cabin. Phoenix realized that the man was German filmmaker Werner Herzog. While Herzog helped Phoenix out of the wreckage by breaking the back window of the car, bystanders called an ambulance. Phoenix later approached Herzog to express his gratitude.

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. And I appreciate it, believe me!

His manuscript was stolen so he rewrote the book using hypnosis

From Weird Universe: "Heinrich Gerlach's semi-autobiographical novel, The Forsaken Army, recounts events at the Battle of Stalingrad, which he participated in as an officer in the 14th Panzer Division. But what sets the novel apart as a literary curiosity is that Gerlach wrote much of it while under hypnosis. Gerlach wrote the book while he was being held prisoner by the Soviets after the battle. However, the Soviets then confiscated his manuscript. Years later, after he was back in Germany, Gerlach used hypnosis to reconstruct his lost manuscript. When it was published in 1957, it became a bestseller."

When a group of Confederate spies tried to burn down New York city

From The Smithsonian: "Two months before the Civil War ended, a Confederate soldier was tried in a New York City courtroom for espionage, and for trying to burn down the largest city in the Union. The prosecution against Confederate officer Robert Cobb Kennedy alleged that on the night of the 24th of November last he attempted to set fire to the City of New York, "to the manifest detriment of life and property, and against every article or provision of honorable warfare.” Kennedy, a Louisiana planter’s son, was furious about Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s scorched-earth tactics in the South. In Toronto, he met up with other disgruntled Southerners in exile, and planned to infiltrate Northern cities to turn the tide of the war."

A television that every supervillain needs for their mansion

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