The Padres signed him but he hasn't played in 20 years

From Now I Know: "LaChappa is 41 years old right now. His three-year pro career topped out in the low minors more than two decades ago. But if prior history is any indicator, sometime in the next few weeks, the San Diego Padres will sign LaChappa to a minor league contract — just like they have every year since 1996. When the Padres drafted LaChappa in 1993, they had high hopes for the local-born left-handed pitching prospect. He was taking some practice throws off on the side when something went wrong; he clutched his chest and fell to the ground. He was having a heart attack, caused by an undiagnosed virus around his heart. LaChappa survived but would never be the same. At age 20, his career was over. It was unlikely that LaChappa would ever be able to work again, in any capacity. So, the Padres brought him back the next year, and have continued to do so every year, not only providing him with some much-needed cash but, more important, allowing him to maintain his medical insurance."

Authorities in Boston have busted a high-end brothel charging $600 an hour

From the Wall Street Journal: "Eager to gain access to an exclusive establishment near Harvard University, biotech executives, doctors, lawyers and politicians filled out applications and handed over IDs, work badges and personal references. This elite club was a high-end brothel charging up to $600 an hour for sexual encounters in luxury apartments in Cambridge, Mass. Now, that unusual trove of personal information is serving as evidence in a series of criminal hearings that have pulled back the curtain on upscale sex work. Dozens of prominent Boston-area men, who lost a legal battle for anonymity, are facing misdemeanor charges that have caused major public fallout. Cambridge City Councilor Paul Toner, among the alleged sex buyers, is confronting calls for his resignation and has been stripped of committee assignments. Others have left high-profile posts in business and medicine without explanation. Most have avoided the closely watched proceedings, dubbed “The Cambridge Brothel Hearings” by local media, where names—more than 30 so far—have emerged in batches."

He solved a mathematical proof thought to be unsolvable and won a $3 million prize

From Scientific American: "The Langlands program has been described by mathematician Edward Frankel as the “grand unified theory of mathematics.” Conceived by Robert Langlands in 1967, the program includes numerous conjectures that were intended to connect disparate mathematical realms: number theory and harmonic analysis. In the 1990s, a similar connection between geometry and harmonic analysis was noticed, and the geometric Langlands program was born. Decades later, in 2024, Dennis Gaitsgory of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, and eight of his colleagues achieved a breakthrough. In five scientific preprint papers, consisting of nearly 1,000 pages, they proved that a large class of geometric objects is related to quantities from calculus. Gaitsgory has now been awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, which includes a $3-million award, for this achievement."

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.

The UK mental hospital known as Bedlam was a tourist attraction in the 17th century

From Retrospect Journal: "In 1247, the Priory of the New Order of our Lady of Bethlehem was founded in London, providing alms for those in need, and was deemed a hospital from 1329 onwards. However, medieval hospitals didn’t entail medical expertise; they were predominantly sanctuaries for those with nowhere else to go. This hospital specialised, admitting permanently ‘insane’ patients from 1403, and in 1547 Henry VIII granted it to the city of London as a hospital for the mentally ill. Over the centuries, the name shortened, first to ‘Bethlem’ and then to ‘Bedlam’.  The name soon became a generic term for any mental institution. A key reason for Bedlam’s notoriety is the ornate building which it was relocated to in 1676. Designed to resemble the Palace of Versailles, this building was 165m long, with columns, turrets and formal gardens with tree-lined promenades. The asylum was open to visitors during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and its popularity rivalled that of St Paul’s Cathedral."

The Phantom Tollbooth was supposed to be a nonfiction book about cities

From Cabinet of Wonders: "Norton Juster, the author, initially received a grant from the Ford Foundation to write a book about cities aimed at children. But he was having trouble writing it and, as part of his procrastination, he ended up writing The Phantom Tollbooth. He recalled the origins of the book in an interview with the New Yorker: “I had come back from the service, and I went to work in an architectural office. I was really kind of bored with everything, and I think, I’ll do a little book on cities. The kind of book that will be interesting for kids. I applied to the Ford Foundation for a grant. Anyway, I couldn’t get it done, so I took a vacation with friends, at the beach, Fire Island. So I started work on a little story about a kid who didn’t know what to do with himself, and didn’t like to learn. It was Milo! When I finished the book, I felt very worried and very guilty. I thought the Ford Foundation was going to demand the money back. A long time later, I found that they were delighted about it.”

Rush singer Geddy Lee has one of the world's largest collections of baseball memorabilia

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