Privilege, blackmail, and murder for hire in Austin

From Texas Monthly: "Erik Maund had always lived the high life, as you might expect of a man whose surname had been blasted on TV ads for decades. By the time he was in his forties, he was an executive at Maund Automotive Group, a car sales business whose first dealership was opened by his grandfather Charles Maund. He and his wife, Sheri, a former dealership office worker, lived in a seven-thousand-square-foot white brick mansion next to the Austin Country Club, where he teed off regularly with a close-knit group of friends. He owned a boat and a lake house. On Sundays he often enjoyed brunch at the club with his family. But on March 1, 2020, as the world was rattled by reports of a highly contagious virus turning up in nation after nation, Erik received a text that demanded his attention. It came from a stranger who knew about a night Erik had spent with an escort in Nashville a few weeks earlier and wanted money to keep quiet."

When a pope had another pope's body exhumed and put it on trial

From Wikipedia: "The Cadaver Synod is the name commonly given to the ecclesiastical trial of Pope Formosus, who had been dead for about seven months, in the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome during January 897. The trial was conducted by Pope Stephen VI, the successor to Formosus' successor, Pope Boniface VI. Stephen had Formosus' corpse exhumed and brought to the papal court for judgment. He accused Formosus of perjury, of having acceded to the papacy illegally, and illegally presiding over more than one diocese at the same time. At the end of the trial, Formosus was pronounced guilty, and his papacy retroactively declared null. This period, which lasted from the middle of the 9th century to the middle of the 10th century, was marked by a rapid succession of pontiffs. Between 872 and 965, two dozen popes were appointed, and between 896 and 904 there was a new pope every year."

When map-makers gave up trying to come up with new names for lakes

From Neatorama: "Minnesota is known as the "Land of Lakes", but that sobriquet would better fit Canada. Canada has so many lakes that just naming them takes a lot of work. Manitoba's innovative and morally commendable response was to name 4,200 bodies of water after individual Manitoban soldiers who gave their lives during World War II. Did geographers just get lazy by the time that they reached these two lakes in British Columbia? No. The British Columbia Geographic Names Office gave this body of water the official name of Another Lake because that's literally what local residents have called it since at least 1946. The Office rejected the name when it was originally submitted in 1968, but eventually seems to have given up resisting and accepted the common usage. And Another Lake has a similar origin story."

(Editor's note: If you like this newsletter, please share it with someone else. And if you really like it, perhaps you could subscribe, or contribute something via my Patreon. Thanks for being a reader!)

How the invention of dynamite gave rise to law enforcement as we know it

From the New York Times: "July 4, 1914. 9:16 a.m. The first indication that something had gone terribly wrong on the upper floors of 1626 Lexington Avenue arrived in the form of a deafening sound wave. The Times would later compare it to “a broadside from a battleship.” Seconds after the boom, East Harlem pedestrians were shielding themselves from fragments of brick and cement and glass raining down from above. A quick glance upward revealed that the top three floors of 1626 Lexington had been demolished by some sort of blast. The N.Y.P.D. would later determine that the explosion was an accident, but the bomb that detonated that morning had been intended for an act of political terrorism. The bombs came in all kinds of packages. Often they arrived in tin cans, emptied of the olive oil or soap or preserves they were manufactured to contain, now wedged tight with sticks of dynamite. Of all the bomb throwers of the period, no group was more closely associated with the infernal machines than the anarchists — to such a degree that the press began to call them the Dynamite Club."

The mascot for the Paris Olympics looks like a bird but it's actually a hat

From Now I Know: "They’re called the Phrygies, and their design is based on the Phrygian cap, a cap with deep significance in the history of France. The style of cap was adopted by the revolutionaries as a symbol of liberty during the French Revolution and has been a national staple ever since. You can find the cap most famously in the painting titled “Liberty Leading the People,” which depicts Marianne, the national personification of France since the French Revolution. She’s wearing a Phrygian cap in the painting. The cap isn’t originally French in origin but its association with freedom, liberty, etc. begins there. It also appears on the coat of arms of many Caribbean, Central American, and South American nations, including that of Argentina, El Salvador, and Haiti (in blue). And it also appears on the seal of the United States Senate."

How a clockmaker solved the problem of navigating at sea in the 1700s

From Forking Paths: "Many of the best scientific minds of the day—including Sir Isaac Newton—gave up on tackling the longitude problem, considering it unsolvable, a scientific impossibility. Then, in 1714, Parliament passed The Longitude Act of 1714, an early form of an X-Prize, in which roughly two million pounds (in today’s value) would be awarded to anyone who solved the longitude problem. Soon, scientists working for the prize became regarded as the “longitude lunatics,” fools tilting at scientific windmills, because only crazy people would try to solve such an obviously impossible problem. John Harrison changed everything. Harrison had little formal education, but was masterful working with wood and was fascinated by clocks. He refined them over decades—in one case spending seventeen years working on a single clock—producing five timepieces, including the first working marine chronometers."

The world's strangest-looking buildings

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