He won Jeopardy after trying to get on the show for 24 years

From The Ringer: "It was January 2001 when Harvey Silikovitz first tried to get on Jeopardy! He was working as an attorney in New York City and turned up at the audition in a Manhattan hotel at the urging of his friend Adam Taxin, who had just won more than $45,000 on the show. At the 2004 audition, he passed the test, but he never got “the call”—the formal invitation from a producer telling a waiting candidate that there is an upcoming spot for them on the show. Thus began a cycle of disappointments and auditions that never went anywhere, no matter how confident Silikovitz was about his performance after the fact. Then there was the time he traveled to a resort in the Poconos to line up for an open-to-the-public qualifying mini-audition, only to come down with a nasty stomach bug a few weeks later, the night before the real thing, and missed it."

She was the only woman to report on the D-Day invasion from the ground

From the Smithsonian: "Clouds of dust swirled and filled the night air as Martha Gellhorn walked up a rocky road on Omaha Beach. Gellhorn was one of the first journalists—and the only female correspondent—to view that hellish scene 80 years ago. Lacking proper credentials, she lied her way onto a hospital ship traveling from England to France, then rode in a water ambulance to the still-dangerous Normandy shore as artillery shells from battleships roared overhead. Among other hazards, she endured snipers, landmines and strafing by German warplanes, all to get the story. Gellhorn was a veteran war correspondent who covered multiple conflicts over her six-decade career. Leading up to D-Day, she reported on the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and the German annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938."

If you suffer from this disorder the sound of people chewing can be unbearable

From Asterisk: "I was somewhere around the age of 13 when I became unable to tolerate the sound of other people’s mouths. In a world in which everyone eats, my day to day became an obstacle course. In moments of silence, I was sensitive enough that even the subtle parting of lips could trigger in me the urge to flee. There wasn’t logic to what I felt. I knew that. It changed nothing. I learned strategies to hide my aversion. Restaurants and the school cafeteria were loud enough to mask eating sounds. You couldn’t eat in my car — it was, I said, just a cleanliness thing. I wore headphones everywhere. My family resigned to eating dinner with the TV on. My high school girlfriend called me out on what had become my habitual death stare when we ate near each other. I fell out with my best friend after I questioned his family’s table manners."

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.

Scientists say this tiny jellyfish is essentially immortal

From Natural History: "The Turritopsis dohrnii, an animal about 4.5 millimetres wide and tall can actually reverse its life cycle. It has been dubbed the immortal jellyfish. When the adult of this species is physically damaged or experiences stresses such as starvation, instead of dying it shrinks in on itself, reabsorbing its tentacles and losing the ability to swim. It then settles on the seafloor as a blob-like cyst. Over the next 24-36 hours, this blob develops into a new polyp - the jellyfish's previous life stage - and after maturing, medusae bud off. This phenomenon has been likened to that of a butterfly which, instead of dying, would be able to transform back into a caterpillar and then metamorphose into an adult butterfly once again. The process behind the jellyfish's remarkable transformation is called transdifferentiation and is extremely rare."

Leonard Nimoy based the Vulcan salute on an ancient Jewish hand gesture

From Wikipedia: "The Vulcan salute consists of a raised hand with the palm forward and the thumb extended, while the fingers are parted between the middle and ring finger. The blessing phrase "live long and prosper" is frequently spoken alongside it. In his 1975 autobiography I Am Not Spock, Nimoy, who was Jewish, wrote that he based it on the priestly blessing performed by Jewish Kohanim with both hands, thumb to thumb in this same position, representing the Hebrew letter Shin (ש in Square Script, or Paleo Hebrew 𐤔‎), which has three upward strokes similar to the position of the thumb and fingers. The letter Shin here stands for El Shaddai, meaning "Almighty (God)", as well as for Shekhinah and Shalom. When Nimoy was a child, his grandfather took him to an Orthodox synagogue, where he saw the blessing performed.

This origami purse has dozens of different compartments

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