Her mysterious death in Spain is still unsolved 35 years later

From The Guardian: "Nobody can recall who first phoned the police on the morning of 4 September 1990, but everyone remembers the girl. Her body, hanging from a pine tree on a steep slope above the Spanish frontier town of Portbou, was visible to anyone looking up from the beach or across from the opposite hillside. She was barefoot, with grey-blue eyes and thick chestnut-brown hair. She wore blue dungarees over a turquoise green shirt. In these years before the Schengen agreement, guards were stationed on the French border but these officers were experts in immigration and smuggling, not violent deaths. Instead, Enrique Gómez, a 35-year-old investigator from the Guardia Civil police force was called in from the nearby city of Figueres to investigate. Carles Cereijo, an 18-year-old reporter who had just begun working with the local El Punt Avui newspaper, got to the scene before him. Cereijo had been woken by a call from a waiter friend working the breakfast shift at a cafe.

This philosopher didn't think unluckiness existed until he met his wife

From New York: "Holly Davis didn’t believe in luck until she realized just how unlucky she was. Often, it was the little things. Reservations she made disappeared. Rides she booked never came. Someone else would fill out an annoying but vital online form without a hitch; the site would crash as soon as she tried. Her neighbors’ plants glowed a lustrous green while hers — same soil, same rain — shriveled with disease. Was this just adulthood, she wondered, to be waging an endless war against the everyday? The man who would eventually become her second husband didn’t think so, and he knew a thing or two about luck. He’d written a master’s thesis about it. His name was Lee John Whittington, and he didn’t believe in the salt-throwing, new-engagement-ring-buying sort of luck, either. At least in most cases he didn’t. Though he too laughed about it, hedged about it, he came to see his wife as the exception."

At one point in history Abraham Lincoln could have sent a fax to a Samurai

From Medium: "Today in ‘Bizarre Facts From the Timeline of Human History’ — Abraham Lincoln could have sent a fax to a Japanese samurai. That’s right kids, the fax machine was invented in 1843, the samurai ceased to exist in 1867 and Lincoln died in 1865. So it would’ve been tight, but it could have happened.The most unbelievable element of that trio of statistics is almost certainly the fax one but it is true — Scottish inventor Alexander Bain patented an ‘electric printing telegraph’, although it was not until 1865 (the year of Lincoln’s death) that the first telefax service, between Paris and Lyon, was established. The samurai existed for several centuries and were still going (just) when the fax was invented and were living a badass katana-swinging existence in the 1870s."

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.

This tech mogul used his millions to build a tiny home community for the less fortunate

From Macleans: "During the height of Smith’s hopelessness, he stumbled upon a news article about 12 Neighbours, a planned community of tiny homes on the north bank of the Saint John River. The miniature town was the brainchild of Marcel LeBrun, a software engineer turned multi-millionaire, who had channelled his nerdy affinity for problem-solving and his wealth into a subsidized, shelter-centric social enterprise. Smith had never heard of tiny homes before but he certainly saw LeBrun’s radical idea as a solution to his own housing crisis. The couple moved into the third home built by the 12 Neighbours team. LeBrun’s gargantuan act of altruism, channelled so efficiently into diminutive 240-square-foot homes, has raised questions about what the country’s policy-makers might learn about how to rectify its housing woes from one man with deep pockets—one who stepped in where the government has failed."

His ship sank in the 1800s but he was rescued by an island tribe and became their king

From Wikipedia: "Carl Emil Pettersson was one of the six children of Carl Wilhelm and Johanna Pettersson. His father left the family, and Carl went to sea around 1892, at about the age of 17. Later, around 1898, he ended up in the Bismarck Archipelago of German New Guinea, where he worked for a German trading house. On a recruiting trip in the Pacific, Pettersson's vessel sank off Tabar Island. He was washed ashore near a village and the islanders carried him to their local king. The king's daughter fell in love with him, and in 1907 they married. He created his own coconut plantation that he called Teripax, and became king after the death of his father-in-law. His nickname among the locals was "Strong Charley," and he was indeed famed for his physical strength. Swedish and German newspapers ran stories about Pettersson and his adventures as king."

The missing-square puzzle illustrated with graph paper

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