He donated millions of dollars to charity but it was all stolen

From New York magazine: "Andrew first met Matthew Christopher Pietras in September 2019 at the opening-night gala for the Metropolitan Opera. At 34, he was considerably younger than the other wealthy donors, not to mention handsome — tall, slim, and stylish. Pietras was vague about how he had made his fortune. He told Andrew he’d earned his MBA from NYU and once worked for a billionaire in Nicaragua. He also spoke frequently about one of his two current employers, Courtney Sale Ross, the art collector, filmmaker, philanthropist, and wealthy widow of Time Warner founder Steven Ross. Five years later, Pietras had donated millions to various institutions across the city, committing enough money to the Met that his name appeared near the top of its board of directors. The Frick Collection inscribed his name on a wall inside the museum. Then the first tranche of his largest gift yet, a $15 million donation to the Met Opera, didn’t go through. Forty-eight hours later he was found dead in his apartment."

Harvard astronomer says an interstellar object heading for Earth could be alien technology

From Futurism: "In a new paper, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb — the same scientist who suggested that 'Oumuamua, the first interstellar object ever detected back in 2017, was alien in nature — teamed up with researchers from the Britain-based Initiative for Interstellar Studies to hypothesize not only that the newly-discovered interloper 3I/ATLAS is alien in origin, but that it may be from a hostile civilization, too. Loeb is an enormously accomplished academic and the former chair of Harvard's prestigious astronomy department, but in recent years has often made headlines for suggesting that various detections in the cosmos might be alien spacecraft. Citing the so-called "dark forest" hypothesis — which posits that the universe is full of silent and aggressive aliens, all staying as quiet as possible to avoid mutually-assured destruction — Loeb and his colleagues Adam Hibberd and Adam Crowl suggest that 3I/ATLAS could theoretically provide evidence that we are not alone, and that our neighbors would do us harm."

Swanson invented the frozen TV dinner to get rid of 200 tons of leftover turkey

From The Smithsonian: "According to the most widely accepted account, a Swanson salesman named Gerry Thomas conceived the company’s frozen dinners in late 1953 when he saw that the company had 260 tons of frozen turkey left over after Thanksgiving, sitting in ten refrigerated railroad cars. (The train’s refrigeration worked only when the cars were moving, so Swanson had the trains travel back and forth between its Nebraska headquarters and the East Coast “until panicked executives could figure out what to do,” according to Adweek.) Thomas had the idea to add other holiday staples such as cornbread stuffing and sweet potatoes, and to serve them alongside the bird in frozen, partitioned aluminum trays designed to be heated in the oven. Betty Cronin, Swanson’s bacteriologist, helped the meals succeed with her research into how to heat the meat and vegetables at the same time while killing food-borne germs."

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.

Pro tip: Don't buy an apartment from someone who will become the world's oldest woman

From Adjacent Possible: "It’s 1965, in the lovely city of Arles in the south of France. There’s a 47-year-old notary public in town named Andre-Francois Raffray, who believes he has stumbled on a sweetheart deal. The French have a common tradition of buying apartments “en viager” or “for life”: you find an elderly person with a nice home and no close relatives who could inherit the house, and you pay them a monthly stipend until they die—at which point you get to own their house or apartment free and clear. Now our notary public Raffray has found a 90-year-old woman named Jeanne Calment who has no heirs and a beautiful second floor apartment. They strike a deal where he agrees to pay the elderly woman $2500 francs month — about $700 in today’s currency — until her death. He has to be thinking to himself that he’s just struck gold with this transaction.  Even if the woman goes on to live to a hundred, Raffray will get the keys to the apartment well before his own retirement age."

He painted murals for Facebook offices and made about $200 million

From the New York Times: "In 2005, Mr. Choe was invited to paint murals on the walls of Facebook’s first offices in Palo Alto, Calif., by Sean Parker, then Facebook’s president. As pay, Mr. Parker offered Mr. Choe a choice between cash in the “thousands of dollars,” according to several people who know Mr. Choe, or shares of the company that were then worth about the same. Mr. Choe, who said that at the time he thought the idea of Facebook was “ridiculous and pointless,” nevertheless chose to take the stock. Many advisers to the company at that time, which is how Mr. Choe would have been classified, would have received about 0.1 to 0.25 percent of the company, according to a former Facebook employee. That may sound like a paltry amount, but a stake that size is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, based on a market value of $100 billion after Facebook's IPO. Mr. Choe’s payment is valued at roughly $200 million, according to a number of people who know Mr. Choe and Facebook executives."

Riding up a steep cliff face with a self-balancing single-wheeled motorcycle

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