He went from drug-busting cop to drug trafficking kingpin

From The Assembly: "Freddie Wayne Huff walked into the federal courthouse in Greensboro flanked by U.S. marshals. That Huff was once one of the finest drug interdiction officers in the country, responsible for millions of dollars in drug and cash seizures, was not in dispute this afternoon. Everyone — his legal team, the judge, even the prosecutor — commended his 12-year career as a Lexington police officer and later as a state trooper. Yet they were bewildered by his transformation from drug interdiction officer to drug kingpin. Using his knowledge gained from a decade of busting drug runners, Huff exploited law enforcement procedures to save cartels millions of dollars and catapult himself to the top of North Carolina’s drug trade.   For five years, from 2016 until his arrest in 2021, Huff ran a sprawling drug empire, stretching 1,400 miles from the Mexican border to North Carolina and fueled by a network of unlikely accomplices: a former cell tower technician, U.S. Army veterans, a former Marine Corps sergeant."

Why did a billionaire software developer's super-yacht suddenly capsize?

From Wired: "In the predawn hours of August 19, 2024, bolts of lightning began to fork through the purple-black clouds above the Mediterranean. From the rail of a 184-foot vessel, a 22-year-old named Matthew Griffiths took out his phone to record a video. The British deckhand was just a week and a half into his first official yacht job, and he wasn’t on just any boat. The yacht, the $40 million Bayesian, was a star of the superyacht world, considered to be a feat of minimal design and precision engineering. Below deck, the yacht’s owner, Michael Lynch, had every reason to be sleeping soundly. Months earlier, Lynch had walked out of a San Francisco federal courthouse a free man, acquitted of all charges in one of the largest fraud cases in Silicon Valley history. Lynch had built his fortune on understanding probability, on turning the unlikely into the possible. He had named his yacht Bayesian in honor of the statistical theorem that made him a billionaire, after the sale of his company Autonomy."

The idea of a football huddle was invented by a deaf quarterback in 1894

From The Smithsonian: "During a tight game in the fall of 1894, Paul Hubbard—quarterback for the Gallaudet University Bison, and known as “the Eel” for his canny maneuvers—made a simple move that changed sports forever: Concerned that his hand signs were tipping off his plans to the opposing defense, Hubbard summoned his offense and directed them to form a circle around him, creating what many consider the first football huddle. For the Bison, who have been fielding football teams since the 1880s, sight matters more than sound. Nestled in Northeast Washington, D.C., Gallaudet is the most famous and prestigious deaf university in the world. It’s been granting degrees since 1864. The Gallaudet student newspaper honored Hubbard in 1941 as the “daddy of huddle,” as did daily newspapers in Kansas, where he coached at the Kansas School for the Deaf, and Washington when Hubbard died in 1946."

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.

Why do Americans call the metal aluminum but the British say aluminium?

From Wikipedia: "British chemist Humphry Davy, who performed a number of experiments aimed to isolate the metal, is credited as the person who named the element. The first name proposed for the metal was alumium, which Davy suggested in an 1808 article on his electrochemical research. In 1812, Davy published his chemistry text Elements of Chemical Philosophy in which he used the spelling aluminum. In 1812, British scientist Thomas Young wrote an anonymous review of Davy's book, in which he proposed the name aluminium instead of aluminum, which he thought had a "less classical sound". This name persisted: although the -um spelling was occasionally used in Britain, the American scientific language used -ium from the start. In 1828, Noah Webster, entered only the aluminum spelling in his American Dictionary of the English Language.^[142] In the 1830s, the -um spelling gained usage in the United States; by the 1860s, it had become the more common spelling."

An expert says if you want Parmesan cheese the old-fashioned Italian way go to Wisconsin

From Slate: "When Alberto Grandi, an Italian historian started looking into the history of many quintessentially Italian foods, he found numerous inventions. He’s done debunkings of tiramisu, panettone, cheese pizza, and olive oil; the latter, he says, wasn’t popular in Italian cooking before the 1950s. Needless to say, Grandi’s work is controversial. People hate him specifically in Parma because the city is a bastion of Italian cuisine. Prosciutto di Parma is from there, and so is Parmesan cheese. Parma is the center of the only region in the world that makes Parmigiano-Reggiano, those big blond wheels of cheese you see at gourmet food stores that have an official trademark stamped into their sides. You can make Parmesan elsewhere, but there are restrictions. Namely: You can’t call it Parmigiano-Reggiano—it has to be labeled Parmesan. But Grandi told me that if you want to eat the original Parmigiano like his Italian great-grandparents used to eat, you should go to Milwaukee or Madison, Wisconsin.”

If you need someone to throw a knife, axe or broadsword, he's your guy

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