Putin’s daughter said to be working as a DJ in Paris

From the Wall Street Journal: "Vladimir Putin has an illegitimate daughter living under a pseudonym in Paris, where she works as a DJ, Ukrainian media has reported. The 21-year-old, who goes by the name of either Luiza Rozova or Elizaveta Olegovna Rudnova, was tracked down by a Ukrainian TV channel using leaked airline manifests. She is said to be a love child from a brief affair between Putin and Svetlana Krivonogikh, a former cleaner who is now one of Russia’s richest women. Ms Krivonogikh has previously been referred to in the media as “Putin’s acquaintance”. Reporters said that they had tracked down the birth certificate of Ms Rozova, who was born on March 3 2003."

Yard cleanup videos can earn influencers millions of dollars per year

From Why Is This Interesting: "There appears to be a cottage industry of people with lawn and yard care companies making videos of labor intensive, pro-bono work on properties that have been neglected. The recipe is simple: Find a property that has fallen into disrepair. Spend a ton of time sprucing it up with a time lapse video. Then, apparently, profit. A few of these videos are doing numbers, to the tune of 23m videos. This particular channel, SB Mowing, started out as an organically growing business that had some early savvy in Facebook and social media marketing. He’s now clocking 40 million total followers, and around 3 billion annual views, which, even with conservative estimates, is looking like upwards of millions of dollars of revenue."

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. And I appreciate it, believe me!

Scientists say Ethiopian wolves are the first carnivore that helps pollinate flowers

From Scientific American: "An Ethiopian wolf’s diet is pretty basic: its proverbial meat and potatoes consists of a large rodent called a giant mole rat (which is meat but looks rather like a fuzzy potato). But it turns out that the endangered canid also has a sweet tooth. It regularly laps up sugary nectar from a tall, fiery-hued flower that adorns the animal’s high-elevation ecosystem. In the process, the wolf may be serving as a pollinator, a role usually occupied by insects, birds and flying mammals—not large carnivores. That hypothesis comes from a team at the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Program, which published their observations on November 19 in the journal Ecology."

Why this neighborhood in Syracuse has a traffic light that is upside down

From Now I Know: "County Tipperary is a county in Ireland. In the early 1800s, many of its residents came to the United States as laborers working on the construction of the Erie Canal. And many of them ended up living in Syracuse, New York. In 1925, the city of Syracuse began installing traffic lights. However, one traffic light, at the corner of Tompkins Street and Milton Avenue, was positioned in the middle of Tipp Hill. The locals weren’t fond of it — not because of some Luddite-driven fear of technology, but out of a hatred for the British. For some reason, a vocal group of teens of Irish heritage believed that red was a British color. These teens didn’t like the idea that British red was positioned above Irish green, and started throwing rocks."

Luxury cheeses are being targeted by black market criminals

From the BBC: "When dairy farmer Patrick Holden sat down at his kitchen table to read his emails one day in July, he couldn’t believe his luck. A buyer, who claimed to represent a French supermarket chain, wanted to buy 22 tonnes of Hafod, his specialist cheddar. “It was the biggest order for our cheese we’ve ever received,” he recalls, “and, because it was from France, I thought, ‘finally, people on the continent are appreciating what we do’.” The order had been made through Neal’s Yard Dairy, an upmarket cheese seller and wholesaler, and the first batch of Hafod arrived at its London base in September. It took up just one square metre on a pallet but represented two years of effort and had a wholesale value of £35,000."

He wears a mobile sound system and improvises beats for people to freestyle

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