She became a hermit in 1920 after botched plastic surgery

From News.com.au: "Gladys Deacon was once heralded as one of the world’s most beautiful women. She overcame a traumatic childhood to become the belle of the ball in Parisian society, became a Duchess and had famous men falling over themselves to impress her. Her life revolved around a murder, an abduction and a stint modelling for Pond’s soap — Rodin and Proust both commented on her beauty, her intelligence and sharp wit. World famous artist Boldini painted her portrait. And yet the very thing that made her famous — her stunning looks — played a huge part in her downfall as Gladys’ world disintegrated in a whirlwind of divorce, a botched beauty treatment and a turn as a reclusive “crazy dog lady” before she died in a mental hospital."

A visit to L.A.'s forbidden, sunken city

From Zocalo: "The iron fence has been redone since the last time I was here, when my partner and I squeezed between bars that had been bent back by someone’s heavy equipment. San Pedro councilmembers and the Department of Parks and Recreation are always finding ways to keep people out of Sunken City; San Pedrans are always finding ways to get them back in. It's a neighborhood that fell into the ocean over a couple of decades, starting in 1929. A hotel was demolished, and the bungalows that could be saved were moved to other plots. Left behind were cracked foundations and a collapsed road, split and slumped and suspended along various precarious perches above the tidepools." 

The Mona Lisa has an identical twin and she's much better looking

From Daily Art: "Covered with multiple layers of dark and cracked varnish, she hung abandoned in cavernous museum basements for ages – since 1819, when the Museo del Prado was founded in Madrid. The museum assumed it was a bad 16th or 17th century copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s original, which dates back to the early 1500s. Even though the woman from the Prado painting bears an unmistakable resemblance to “La Gioconda,” she appears in front of a plain black backdrop rather than the colorful Tuscan countryside from the Louvre’s version. Everything changed when Prado’s curators decided the painting needed a face lift because it was going on loan to the Louvre. After some X-rays and infrared studies, everyone was shocked to find a beautiful landscape hidden beneath the dark paint behind the subject."

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!

He discovered a literary giant who turned out to be a fiction

From WITI: "Nearly 60 years ago, the exiled Guatemalan author Augusto Monterroso wrote a glowing introduction to the work of a provincial intellectual named Eduardo Torres. Monterroso had been charged with curating Torres’ archive, a project funded by the Endymion Journal and Publishing House headquartered in Missouri. Comparing Eduardo Torres to Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, Monterroso promised to edit a collection that would finally introduce this “great master of San Blas” to a global audience. Then, in 1978, Monterroso published a satirical novel called The Rest Is Silence, collecting interviews and essays, all attributed to a fictional character named Eduardo Torrres. At this point, readers realized that the Mexican translator had never existed."

Surveillance and the secret history of 19th-century wearable technology

From MIT Press: "According to a report in the October 7, 1879, Hartford Daily Courant, a Boston wife attached a pedometer to her husband when, after supper, he started to ‘go down to the office and balance the books.’ On his return, fifteen miles of walking were recorded. He had been stepping around a billiard table. The Washington Evening Star ran a story in the fall of 1895 in which an admiral gave his junior watch officers what looked to them like a common pocket watch but was really a pedometer. The admiral tracked the junior officer’s night watch activities. To the admiral’s dismay, the morning reading showed just two and a half miles traversed overnight, suggesting that the ensigns had been sleeping or resting during most of their watch."

How my father said he used to travel to school in the morning

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