The true story of the actual first shot ever fired in the Civil War

It was the autumn of 1865 — a quiet, bitter autumn after four hollowing years of war — when James Gilmore received a manuscript from a ghost. Well, not a ghost exactly. There’d been rumors, of course, about what had become of William Parker. Some had him lynched in a dark woods. Others had him hacked to pieces in New York City. Still more had him living long enough to slaughter Confederates on Southern battlefields. But it had been nearly a decade and a half now since Parker vanished, and no one could ever truly prove what had become of him. The manuscript in James Gilmore’s hands revealed elements of this story never before shared: the outrageous adventures of Parker’s armed Black mutual defense organization; their alliance with various white neighbors; and finally, the daring narratives of Parker’s escapes, first from slavery and later from the enraged mobs and hastily deputized law enforcement officers. (via LitHub)

During World War I in war-torn Paris some brave women started a library

The Germans began firing on Paris again on the fifth of August 1918. Mary Josephine Booth was familiar with the sound of the air raid sirens by then. If they came at night, she would jump out of her bed at the Hotel Petrograd, dress, take what valuables she had, and if the shelling was especially fierce, retreat to the basement. But if the sirens came during the day, then Booth, clad in her olive-green uniform, would remain at her post in an ornate building across the street from the Palais de L’Élysée. “We had to keep working to get the library ready to open,” she would later write. Booth was one of hundreds of librarians who went to war alongside American troops during the First World War. In the summer of 1918, the 42-year-old woman from Illinois served with fellow recruits to the American Library Association’s Library War Service as they prepared to open a library in the war-scarred French capital. (via JSTOR Daily)

In 1980 peanut crops were infected by a fungus that may have led to the rise in peanut allergies

I spent most of 2024 in Davos, isolating gut bacteria in an anaerobic lab set up in the basement of the Swiss Institute for Allergy and Asthma Research. While I was there, one of my colleagues, Duygu, was researching peanut allergy, and she gave a talk where she cited a statistic that absolutely floored me. Before 1980, she said, there were a total of zero known fatalities from peanut allergy. The epidemiology of peanut allergy is interesting to begin with. It's not much of a problem in most of the world. Only in America—where roughly 1% of children are thought to be affected, and maybe a dozen people die annually from it—are schoolchildren forbidden from bringing a PB&J to lunch, for fear of endangering a classmate’s life. Aside from the incidence of allergy, though, there’s one other unique aspect of Americans’ relationship with peanuts. One glaringly obvious thing that sets us apart. Peanut butter. (via Eat Shit And Prosper)

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.

Why did an octopus decide to hitch a ride on a dolphin? Scientists aren't sure

It’s a sight you don’t see often: a common octopus apparently hitching a ride on the back of a Risso’s dolphin by clinging onto its fin. The photo was taken off the coast of the U.K. by Bill Coulson from the citizen science initiative Risso’s Dolphin Project. We don’t know what this unusual interaction means, but we do know that warming waters around this part of the coast of England are leading to a bloom in octopuses. While Risso’s dolphins usually feed on squid, they’re quite partial to octopus as well, and so the interaction captured here is unlikely to be a friendly one (don’t expect a Pixar adaptation). Dolphins usually spend their time in deeper waters further from the coast, but experts think the abundance of octopuses—a marine animal that lives much closer to the shore—might be tempting the Risso’s dolphins to new feeding grounds. (via Nautilus)

He became famous for throwing cream pies at politicians and celebrities

Noël Godin, a Belgian entertainer and anarchist who demonstrated his distaste for pomposity by hurling cream pies at executives, politicians and celebrities, a dessert-based form of protest that splattered Bill Gates, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jean-Luc Godard, among many others, died on Aug. 23. He was 80. A self-described “anarcho-confectioner,” Mr. Godin led the International Patisserie Brigade, a gang of custard commandos who referred to their assaults as entartements. They deployed pies with soft crusts to ensure that their caloric projectiles would only injure pride. “We use only the finest patisserie, ordered at the last minute from small local bakers,” Mr. Godin told The Observer, a British newspaper, in 1995. “Quality is everything. If things go wrong, we eat them.”Mr. Godin — “pie-eyed, pudding-faced and potbellied,” in one writer’s description — was a pain in the derrière most of his life, beginning in Catholic school when he complained to the priests about his lackluster sex life. (via the New York Times)

The opening sequence of the movie District 13 is an incredible parkour exercise

Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places 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 and Why Is This Interesting by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com