The man that Vladimir Putin couldn't kill

From the New York Times: "Interpol had been looking for a disgraced finance executive for weeks when Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist, found him, hiding in Belarus. He identified the secret police agents behind one of the most high-profile assassination plots of all: the 2020 poisoning of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. That revelation put Grozev in President Vladimir Putin’s cross hairs. He wanted Grozev killed, and to make it happen the Kremlin turned to none other than the fugitive financier, who had been recruited by Russian intelligence. The fugitive enlisted a team to begin the surveillance. The members of that team are behind bars now. The financier lives in Moscow, where several times a week he makes visits to the headquarters of the Russian secret police. Grozev — still very much alive — imagines the man trying to explain to his supervisors why he failed in his mission."

He won the Nobel Prize for physics and then he changed his mind

From The Atlantic: "Adam Riess was 27 years old when he began the work that earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics, and just 41 when he received it. Earlier this year, Riess, who is now 55, pulled a graph-paper notebook off a bookshelf in his office at Johns Hopkins University so that I could see the yellowing page on which he’d made his famous calculations. He told me how these pen scratches led to a new theory of the universe. And then he told me why he now thinks that theory might be wrong. For nearly a century, astronomers have known that the universe is expanding, because the galaxies that we can see around us through telescopes are all rushing away. Riess studied how they moved. He very carefully measured the distance of each one from Earth, and when all the data came together, in 1998, the results surprised him. The galaxies were receding more quickly than expected. This “immediately suggested a profound conclusion,” he said.

Why the movie Charlie's Angels has been making birders mad for decades

From Slate: "if you’re a birder, you learn to accept that every bald eagle in every movie screeches like a red-tailed hawk. But then I watched the original movie adaptation of Charlie’s Angels, and I found myself staring down one of the greatest mysteries of recent cinema. That’s because the bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema — and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even  ornately wrong. It has haunted not just me but, as I’d later learn, the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century. So, naturally, being an all-in sort of person, I embarked upon a wild-goose chase to investigate how and why this monstrosity took flight. I talked to script doctors and scoured legal statutes. I interviewed leading ornithological experts."

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 got a robot cat for his rabbit and learned a lot about both pets and robots

From Nautilus: "Over the course of a morning, I filmed while various pets met the robot. I started with the pandemic rabbit we already had at home. It was utterly disinterested. I decided to expand my experiment to other pets and see how they interacted with the robot. My inclusion criteria were two: 1) Who do I know that lives close by and has a pet? 2) Do I know them well enough that I can ask them to let me film their pet with a robot for TikTok? These criteria led to a TikTok feed that included films of robot-animal interactions with two rabbits, three cats, and two dogs. Not that the robots were particularly interesting to the children—or most of the grown-ups who came in contact with them, if I’m honest. But they were at least intelligible as a robotic seal and cat. No one questioned which animal the robot was trying to look like. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the pets didn’t even recognize it as an animal."

A study says pesticides may be causing higher rates of Parkinson's near golf courses

From Jama: "Parkinson disease is a neurodegenerative disease likely caused by a complex interaction between environmental factors and genetic predisposition. Among the environmental risk factors, pesticide exposure has been linked to increased risk of PD. Golf courses are often treated with pesticides to maintain the aesthetic standards for putting greens and fairways, and in the US, pesticide application to golf courses can be up to 15 times higher compared with countries in Europe. Despite the possible risks, research on pesticide exposure from golf courses and PD remains sparse. For this reason, we conducted a population-based study using data from the Rochester Epidemiology Project to explore the association between incident PD and proximity to 139 golf courses within a study region in southern Minnesota and Western Wisconsin."

He built a robot to cut his hair

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