Student says a Chinese agent tried to recruit her as a spy
From The Times: "The message from the stranger popped into my Instagram account on June 10, 2024. The sender was a man calling himself Charles Chen, who said he was an international student at Stanford. I checked his Instagram page. It featured photos of a young Chinese man with other young people at Stanford, in Newport Beach, California, and at other locations in the United States. I asked Charles where he was from. After a week of silence, he replied to say that he was from China. Then he asked if I spoke Chinese, and he posed the question in Mandarin. I’m studying East Asian affairs and I do speak Mandarin, but I had no idea how he could know this. Suddenly I felt on edge. I was beginning to suspect that Charles might be working for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and he could be trying to recruit me as a spy."
Archaeologists excavated the Tower of London and found dozens of skeletons
From Popular Mechanics: "A rare dig into the soil of the famed Tower of London — the first excavation at the site in a generation — yielded two skeletons from around 1500. As archaeologists dug deeper into the ground, they found roughly 20 more burials, including one group grave likely tied to the 1348 “Black Death” plague. The dig began as a trial excavation in 2019 to prepare the on-site Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula for a new elevator. The archaeologists discovered the remains of two skeletons. Subsequent excavations outside the chapel as deep as 10 feet below the surface revealed everything from a 14th-century Black Death group burial to three skeletons from the late 12th or early 13th centuries buried in coffins—an unusually expensive burial for that time. The Tower of London was built alongside the River Thames in the 1070s as a royal palace. It also served as a prison for high-status individuals (including King Henry VI)."
A tiny detail in a photograph of a French apartment led to a $4 million estate sale
From Sotheby's: "French designer Florent Jeanniard recalls how a client reached out with a simple question about a painting, unaware of the hidden treasures that surrounded it. "I received an email one day with a photograph of a painting. The client who sent the photo wanted to know if the work in question had any value or was interesting for an auction. On the right of the photo, there was a tiny detail. We immediately recognize the work of Jean Royère. I asked the clients to move back a little further. And there I saw a piece of coffee table sticking out, which also resembled a work by Ganyère. So I asked the clients to move back even further, and we discovered that in addition to the Basque table, there was a sofa, a pair of armchairs, a floor lamp, and side tables. Jean Roy had decorated not only the living room, but the entire house. He had decorated the library and the dining room. The client had absolutely no idea what he had. We sold a collection of twenty objects for a record price of over €3,500,000."
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 Czech inventor created assembly-line manufacturing 50 years before Henry Ford
From Work In Progress: "Czechoslovakia has been associated with bentwood furniture since the mid-nineteenth century, when bentwood chair factories appeared in the beechwood forests of Moravia. The man responsible for these factories looms large in the history of the chair. He transformed furniture-making, from a craft practiced by individual cabinetmakers in workshops, to an industry operating on a world scale. Fifty years before Henry Ford introduced the Model T automobile assembly line in Highland Park, he had already put in place the basic elements of mass production: division of labor, interchangeable parts, mechanization. As Ford would later do, he integrated his business vertically, buying forest land, laying railroad track, operating his own sawmills, and building his own machine saws, steam retorts, and iron molds. He even manufactured the bricks that were used to build the worker housing."
The aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb cost more than the entire Manhattan Project
From The BBC: "It was two years before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour dragged the United States into the war. But the US Army Air Corps was looking for a new bomber aircraft. What they were after was a "superbomber", capable of flying up to 2,000 miles (3,200km) at a time and at altitudes never achieved before. The aircraft they got would go on to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ultimately bring an end to World War Two. It would also pave the way for a civil aviation boom that led to the everyday air travel we have today. This is the story of how an aircraft that cost more than the entire Manhattan project – the B-29 Superfortress – changed the world. It was the most expensive and complex industrial project US industry had ever undertaken and would not be surpassed until the space programmes in the 1950s and 1960s. And it pushed aviation technology almost to the limit."
This Brazilian farmer was drunk so his cow helped him get home
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
