He was a mafia assassin but really wanted to be a pop star​

In January of 2016, Avner Harari strolled out of a Tel Aviv prison for the umpteenth time and announced he was finally going straight. The convicted assassin had spent 40 of his 61 years behind bars and had cultivated a reputation as the Israeli mafia’s “Terminator”. Now, Harari hoped that people might forget the six mobsters that police allege he whacked, as he unveiled an unlikely career change. Harari had spent his most recent prison term crooning songs in the Mizrahi style, a Middle-Eastern music. His lilting voice was so angelic that inmates nicknamed him the Nightingale. Free from his cage after serving 37 months for firing an anti-tank missile at a rival crime boss and six years for conspiring to shoot another with a silencer, he released two tender ballads and then an album. But Harari’s record bombed. And 17 days after his release, a series of terrible explosions rocked Tel Aviv. (via the FT)

No one knows where the founder of the Nation of Islam was from or how he died

Wallace Fard Muhammad appeared in Detroit in 1930, where he founded a new religious movement that came to be called the Nation of Islam. Both his origin and fate are uncertain. Nation of Islam tradition holds that Fard was born in Mecca, while scholars have considered a wide variety of possible origins and backgrounds. In the 1960s, the FBI identified Fard as “Wallie Dodd Ford”, a Los Angeles restaurateur who had spent three years in prison in California for the sale of a narcotic; The Nation of Islam disputes the identification, while most scholars accept it. Fard disappeared in 1934. Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad maintained that Fard had been deported, while others speculated that Fard may have died by foul play or due to complications from his diabetes. (via Wikipedia)

Experiments show that wine experts can’t actually tell what wine they are drinking

An extreme example of oenophile claims failing to hold up is that dyeing white wine red confused expert wine tasters into describing them less like whites and more like reds. This is damning because red wines have tannins in them that come from the grape skins during fermentation. These are supposed to provide a different mouthfeel, but the lead author of the paper says that, even though anybody should be able to detect that feature, only about 2 to 3% of people detected the white wine flavor. Expertise in the world of wine is wildly overstated. Wine-related institutions are less reliable, more error-prone, and far less useful for consumers than they make themselves out to be. The prejudices of oenophiles don’t have a basis in what makes a wine desirable to normal people, and they don’t even seem to hold up when wine experts evaluate them. (via Cremieux Recueil)

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.

Her mother’s ex-boyfriend seemed nice but turned out to be a murderer

He was an early father figure. Then, he committed a terrible crime. Was he a monster hiding in plain sight all along? Scott looked in the picture exactly as I remembered him. Quiet, melancholic. He was in his mid-20s, much younger than my father, which had made him seem like a cool older brother. It was the early ’90s, and he wore a single hoop earring and rode a skateboard. He played Altered Beast with my brother and me on his Sega. He was six feet tall, and in my memory, he’s slouched, hands jammed in jeans, wearing a thinned-­out T-­shirt. He and my mother first met in a parking lot while they were both leaving a music club in Iowa City. The back door of her station wagon had been swung open and my pink bicycle was missing from the back seat. After he found it and wheeled the bike back, they chatted for a while and he asked for her number. (via New York)

One of the world’s largest Hindu temples is in suburban New Jersey

New Jersey might not be the first place that comes to mind when thinking about Hindu temples, but the Garden State is actually home to one the largest Hindu communities outside India anywhere in the world, so it’s fitting that it has one of the world’s largest temples. Constructed between 2011 and 2023 by the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), a Hindu denomination, in Robbinsville, the Swaminarayan Akshardham campus stretches over 185 acres and incorporates design elements inspired by ancient Indian culture, including nearly 10,000 statues. The temple is built from 1.9 million cubic feet of stone sourced from 29 different sites around the world. It boasts a puzzle like structure, intricately carved stones,  beautiful elephant carvings in teak wood from India, and over 2700 lamps. (via Atlas Obscura)

A short explanation of the discovery behind the Nobel Prize for physics

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