They used to give Olympic medals for literature

From LitHub: "At the 1912 games in Stockholm, gold, silver and bronze medals were handed out in five arts categories: Architecture, Literature, Music, Painting, and Sculpture. All submitted art works had to be original and sports-themed, and, like their more athletic counterparts, the artists participating in the new “Pentathlon of the Muses” were supposed to be amateurs. The 1912 Olympic Arts Competition was little more than a sideshow, with only a few dozen submissions and a handful of awards given out (the very first Literature gold medal was awarded for the poem “Ode to Sport,” submitted by none other than Pierre de Coubertin himself under a pair of pseudonyms) but as the years rolled on, de Coubertin’s celebration of the arts grew in popularity."

Hurricane Debby sweeps cocaine worth $1 million onto Florida beach

From the New York Times: "Tropical Storm Debby’s strong winds and heavy rain have downed trees, submerged streets and drenched neighborhoods across Florida this week. The storm also heaved an unexpected type of debris onto one beach: blocks of cocaine worth about $1 million. Debby, which made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane with sustained winds of at least 74 miles per hour, blew 25 packages of cocaine onto a beach on the Florida Keys, according to Samuel Briggs II, the acting chief patrol agent for the U.S. Border Patrol in Miami. The drugs were discovered by a “good Samaritan,” who alerted the authorities, Briggs said. The cocaine blocks, which weighed about 70 pounds total, appeared to be wrapped in plastic and marked with a red and black symbol. Their street value, he added, was over $1 million."

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A question that has puzzled scientists for centuries: Do thunderstorms spoil milk?

From Atlas Obscura: "In 1858, John D. Caton, an Illinois Supreme Court Justice and amateur scientist, wrote a letter to Scientific American  magazine. Published under the eye-catching title “Lightning and Milk,” Caton’s letter detailed an experiment he had performed in an attempt to explain what was then a familiar phenomenon, saying: "It is well known to dairy men and housewives that a violent thunderstorm turns sweet into sour milk.” That it happened was accepted, but why remained a puzzle throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Many theories placed the blame on the electricity created by a thunderstorm. In 1800, Noah Webster hypothesized that lightning curdles milk by lowering the barometric pressure of the atmosphere. In 1857, just before Caton’s letter, writer Robert Evans Peterson suggested that lightning produces “a poison called nitric acid” that mixes into milk and curdles it."

Cassie Chadwick was an 1800s con artist who swindled banks out of millions

From Wikipedia: "Cassie Chadwick was the most well-known pseudonym used by Canadian con artist Elizabeth Bigley, who defrauded several American banks out of millions of dollars during the late 1800s and early 1900s by claiming to be an illegitimate daughter and heiress of the Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie. Newspaper accounts of the time described her as one of the greatest con artists in American history. She pulled off the scam in the Gilded Age of American history, during which time women were not allowed to vote or get loans from the banks, leading some historians to refer to her string of bank heists as one of the greatest in American history."

Stonehenge-like structure discovered in US lake 5,000 years older than original

From Indy100: "The site was discovered in 2007 by a team of archaeologists led by Mark Holley, a professor of underwater archaeology at Northwestern Michigan College. Holley and his colleagues were conducting a survey of the lake bed when they chanced upon a series of large stones, arranged in a circular pattern, just off the coast of Traverse City, Michigan. Holley later admitted that the discovery, made at a depth of about 40 feet (12.1m), was completely unexpected, and that he and his team were initially unsure of what they’d found. However, analysis soon suggested that the stones – some of which weighed up to 3,000lbs – had deliberately been arranged in a circular pattern by humans. The stonesare estimated to be around 10,000 years old, thereby making the formation one of the oldest ever discovered in North America."

Why barns in America are almost always painted red

From Now I Know: "The history of paint is long and complicated, but the stuff we buy in cans today has only been around since the late 1800s when Sherwin-Williams began selling ready-to-use paint. Before that, you basically had to make your own. Many years ago, choices for paints, sealers and other building materials did not exist. Farmers had to be resourceful in finding or making a paint that would protect and seal the wood on their barns. Hundreds of years ago, many farmers would seal their barns with linseed oil, which is an orange-colored oil derived from the seeds of the flax plant. Somewhere along the way, a farmer realized that rust kills off mold and fungi, so he added some rust to the linseed oil concoction. And that turned the linseed oil mix red."

Mongolian horse archery is amazing

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