At 77 years old she just finished running her 134th marathon

From the Washington Post: "She has broken world women’s records in the 75-79 age group for every distance and, at times, beaten the fastest men in that age group.Rice is 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighs 95 pounds. Her physiology is so striking that her maximal oxygen uptake (VO2 max) — a measure that reflects her aerobic fitness and endurance capacity — equals that of a 25-year-old woman, according to lab tests in the days after her World Record performance (3 hours, 33 minutes and 27 seconds) in last year’s London Marathon. Rice started running at age 35. Her goal was to drop the weight she’d gained during a trip to her native Seoul to visit family. A year later, she ran her first marathon in Cleveland without any serious training — she finished in 3 hours 45 minutes — and thought she probably could improve her time. Six months later, in Columbus, her second marathon, she did — by a whopping 29 minutes."

A little-known British freelancer's celebrity interviews seem too good to be true

From The Guardian: "In the spring of 2023, subscribers to the British local lifestyle magazine Somerset Life were eagerly anticipating their April edition – a Gardens Special promising top tips for green-fingered readers and the best places to see seasonal bluebells. But when the magazine landed on readers’ doormats, a story bigger than blooming gardens of south-west England was on the cover. In what appeared to be a world exclusive interview, the Hollywood A-lister Johnny Depp had confessed his love for the bucolic county. More than that, he had bought a secret hideaway in the area. The story was all the more intriguing for having been revealed in the most unlikely of places: the pages of the regional monthly magazine. The six-page feature stated: “It is true that he also bought an estate of 850 acres near Kingston St Mary which includes what is known as Somerset Mansion.” There was only one problem: he hadn’t."

Luxury cars and a mysterious kidnapping attempt help unravel the heist of a lifetime

From the New York Times: "In the balmy late afternoon of Aug. 25, 2024, Sushil and Radhika Chetal were house-hunting in Danbury, Conn., in an upscale neighborhood of manicured yards and heated pools. Sushil, a vice president at Morgan Stanley in New York, was in the driver’s seat of a new matte gray Lamborghini Urus. As they turned a corner, the Lamborghini was suddenly rammed from behind by a white Honda Civic. At the same time, a white Ram ProMaster work van cut in front, trapping the Chetals. A group of six men dressed in black and wearing masks emerged from their vehicles and forced the Chetals from their car. When Sushil resisted, the assailants hit him with a baseball bat and threatened to kill him, then wrapped his face with duct tape and hit him several more times with the bat as the van peeled off."

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.

Alabama university’s help desk is still answering the public’s calls 70 years on

From Oxford American: "If you sit at the information desk at Auburn University, answering the phones on a Wednesday night, you might be responsible for answering a question like this: “If you died on the operating table and they declared you legally dead and wrote out a death certificate and everything, but then you came back to life, what are the legal ramifications? Do you technically no longer exist? Do you have to be declared undead by a judge?” A little later, the phone will ring again, and the caller might ask, “Who is the most famous person in the world?” Your next question: “How do you get the Super Serum in Call of Duty?” And finally, when you pick up the phone close to eleven o’clock, quitting time, you might hear someone blow a giant raspberry then hang up. Phones have been ringing since 1953, when Auburn’s then dean of students, opened the line as a resource for students and then as a service to the public."

A cave in Romania is one of the only places where organisms live without any light

From Wikipedia: "Movile Cave in Romania was discovered in 1986 by Cristian Lascu during construction work a few kilometers from the Black Sea coast. It is notable for its unique subterranean groundwater ecosystem abundant in hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide, but low in oxygen. Life in the cave has been separated from the outside for the past 5.5 million years and it is based completely on chemosynthetic bacteria. These bacteria derive energy from oxidizing hydrogen sulfide and methane, forming the base of the food web. This makes the cave one of the few known ecosystems that do not rely on sunlight as a source of primary production. The organisms within Movile Cave have gained unique adaptations in order to survive its extreme chemosynthetic environment. Many of these species lack functional eyes, as vision is not necessary."

The dance of Earth and Jupiter

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