She never stopped believing that her son was still in there

From The Atlantic: "Like so many other family members of vegetative patients, she held on to a mother’s belief that Ian could understand everything around him. She took care, when shaving him, to leave the wispy mustache he had been trying to grow. When his high-school friends went to see the Grateful Dead, she brought him along in his wheelchair and a tie-dyed shirt. Science would take decades to catch up with Eve, but she turned out to be right in one crucial respect: Ian is still aware. Doctors now agree that he can see, he can hear, and he can understand, at least in some ways, the people around him. Ian is part of a landmark study published last year, which found that 25 percent of unresponsive brain-injury patients show signs of awareness, based on their brain activity. The finding suggests that there could be tens of thousands of people like Ian in the United States—many in nursing homes where caretakers might have no clue that their patients silently understand and think and feel."

Roads and railway tracks are under attack by a 75-foot roving mud puddle

From Alta Online: "My obsession with the roving mud puddle of Imperial County started when my then-boyfriend sent me a YouTube video. Titled “Giant Moving Mud Puddle Tries to Take Out a TRAIN,” the clip from science influencer Physics Girl showed a brown, bubbling puddle some 50 feet from Highway 111, where the road runs along the Salton Sea’s eastern shore. In 2018, the muck traveled at least 60 feet over the course of several months, with some reports that it then matched that distance in one day. Nothing seemed able to stop its forward march, which terrorized California’s transportation authorities. The Salton Sea’s eastern shore is home to hundreds of mud pots, though only this one — known as the “Niland Geyser,” “moving mud spring,” and “Mundo” — moves. Scientists can’t figure out why: Some think that a series of earthquakes made the bedrock more permeable and allowed the mud to seep through. But there’s no conclusive link."

How to buy a house in Ireland for only $7

From Now I Know: "County Leitrim, Ireland, is situated in the northern part of the country. It’s a quiet, out of the way place but hardly isolated from the rest of the world; most parts of the county are only a 15- or 20-minute drive from a small Irish city. And if you want to move there, great news: there’s a house for sale, and if you act quickly, you may be able to buy it for only £5. But you’ll need to move quickly, because time is running out. Oh, and you’ll need to a good amount of luck to go with your seven bucks. The current owner of the home is a named Imelda Collins, and she’s lived there since 2022 — she bought the house back then for the equvialent of $150,000. Collins didn’t call up a real estate broker to help. Instead, she listed her house and all the furnishings (“excluding one sentimental item of furniture and personal wall decor”) on a British online raffle site called Raffall. If Collins sells 150,000 raffle tickets by 10 AM local time on May 22 — which, if you’re reading this story shortly after publication, is about 20 hours from now — one lucky ticket holder will win Collns’ house."

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.

He was the president but lived in a small house and drove an old Volkswagen Beetle

From the BBC: "During the more than 14 years he spent in prison during the 1970s and 1980s, he was tortured and spent most of that time in harsh conditions and isolation, until he was freed in 1985 when Uruguay returned to democracy. In 2005, he became minister in the first government of the Frente Amplio, the Uruguayan leftist coalition, before becoming Uruguay's president in 2010. While in office, Mujica rejected moving into the presidential residence (a mansion), as heads of state around the world usually do. Instead, he remained with his wife in their modest home, with no domestic help and little security. This combined with the fact that he always dressed casually, that he was often seen driving his light blue 1987 Volkswagen Beetle and gave away a large portion of his salary, led some to call him "the world's poorest president."

He pioneered buy-one-get-one-free, travelling salesmen and money-back guarantees

From the New York Times: "Today when most people think of Wedgwood, they think of bridal registries and those dusty-looking blue-and-white jasperware plates that no one knows what to do with. But things were once very different. Josiah Wedgwood was an unlikely hero. He was the 13th child of an impoverished potter; a childhood case of smallpox left Josiah with a bad leg that was later amputated, making it impossible for him to turn a potter’s wheel. But if he could not physically throw a pot, he could — and did — find new ways to get goods to market. He threw himself into various schemes to improve roads and canals. And, more fundamentally, he developed new ways of selling. Most, if not all, of the common techniques in 20th-century sales — direct mail, money-back guarantees, traveling salesmen, self-service, free delivery, buy one get one free, illustrated catalogues — came from Josiah Wedgwood."

This world arm-wrestling champion's forearm strength is unreal

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