He was a gambling legend who won and then lost a fortune

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 Wall Street Journal: "The professional gambler Archie Karas arrived in Las Vegas in December 1992 with $50 to his name. He borrowed $10,000 from a friend and, over roughly the next three years—after a freewheeling and volatile saga of ups and downs, but predominantly ups—reportedly turned that money into $40 million.It was a run of good luck so unfathomable that it’s known in poker circles simply as “The Run.” Many details about The Run have gone fuzzy as the story has been retold in the three decades since, but its essential narrative made Karas a folk hero among gamblers. Shooting craps at his private table at Binion’s Horseshoe casino—betting as much as $300,000 a toss—Karas took in so much money at one point that he possessed every one of the casino’s $5,000 chips: about $18 million worth, he later told Poker News. Karas died Sept. 7 in Los Angeles County at age 73 of undisclosed causes."

She survived a bombing and he escaped a shark attack and then they found each other

From Esquire: "He remembers the moments just before. Water lapped against Colin Cook's legs as he straddled his surfboard a hundred yards from the shore of Leftovers Beach, on Oahu. He remembers the sun’s warm glow in the east, a little after 10:00 a.m., and that he had been out some two hours already. He remembers being exhausted but happy—the dopamine high that rushes the system after a long workout. He looked the part of a seasoned surfer that October morning in 2015. She remembers a noise loud enough to go unheard and blow out Celeste’s eardrums. She felt as if she’d been flipped in the air. She looked around. Black smoke clouded Boylston Street, blown-out plated glass was scattered across the sidewalk, and blood—blood everywhere. Kevin came into her vision and told her he was going to cinch her legs with a belt. She looked down and saw that her legs dangled by the skin around her knees."

Was this scrap of cloth once a tunic worn by Alexander the Great?

From the New York Times: "A fragile piece of purple-and-white fabric, frayed over more than two millenniums, that was found in one of a series of tombs in northern Greece decades ago is at the center of a new claim ruffling feathers in the country’s archaeological community. The debate erupted this month after Antonis Bartsiokas, a paleoanthropologist at Democritus University of Thrace, published a paper arguing that one of the tombs, believed up to now to house the remains and treasures of Alexander’s father, actually held items belonging to Alexander the Great himself and his half brother. That included a purple chiton, or tunic. The claim challenges the work of one Greece’s most renowned archaeologists, Manolis Andronicos, who led the discovery of the tomb in 1977."

This former coast guard station in the middle of the ocean is available to rent

From Outside: "Don’t worry about the sharks. They’re large, yes, but they’re sand-tigers, which are relatively docile compared to other species in the water. It’s the barracudas you might consider. From where I’m standing, on the edge of a light tower in the middle of the ocean, I can see dozens of them floating around the structure, waiting for a snack. Not that I’m planning on falling in, but when you’re 32 miles out in the middle of the ocean, perched on top of a 60-year-old light tower, watching a bunch of predators swimming below, you wonder. The Frying Pan Tower is a decommissioned Coast Guard light station built on the tip of Frying Pan Shoals, an unusually shallow stretch of water running for 30 miles from the tower west to the Barrier Islands along the coast."

The mystery behind a massive stone sphere that was discovered in Bosnia

From Earthly Mission: "The giant sphere, which measures about 3 meters in diameter and weighs up to 60 tons, was found in a forest near the town of Zavidovići, about 80 km north of Visoko Valley, where the controversial Bosnian pyramids. The man behind the discovery is Dr. Semir Osmanagich, a Bosnian archaeologist who calls himself the “Bosnian Indiana Jones” and has a reputation for making sensational and unsubstantiated claims about ancient civilizations. He last gained significant attention around a decade ago in 2005 when he made headlines by revealing the discovery of ancient pyramids connected by subterranean passages in Bosnia. Dr. Osmanagich believes the sphere is a man-made artifact that dates back to more than 1,500 years ago, and proves the existence of an advanced lost civilization."

He made a sign to cheer on random strangers at a marathon

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