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3 stars
The Hardest-Working Art Thief in History | Atavist
22-minute read
The Social Register was a who’s who of America’s rich and powerful—the heirs of robber barons, scions of political dynasties, and descendants of Mayflower passengers. It was also the perfect hit list for the country’s hardest-working art thief.
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In 1976, the city books were consolidated into a single volume covering high society nationwide. It listed approximately 50,000 names. By the 1980s, being in the book still had low-key cultural cachet, particularly for direct descendants of Gilded Age gentry. Members could flip through the Social Register’s pages to learn the essentials about each other. What school did so-and-so attend? What yacht club did they belong to? Were they related to someone on the Mayflower? And, for the purposes of correspondence, what was their address and telephone number?
[...]
Over the course of my reporting, I came to believe that the ringleader of these crimes was in a class by himself. I doubt there’s such a thing as the greatest art thief of all time, but I don’t know of any burglar who worked so hard.
Pathological Lawyer: Inside the multimillion-dollar embezzlement case against attorney Singa Bui | Toronto Life
17-minute read
What happens when a real estate lawyer uses her firm’s trust account to finance her family’s lavish lifestyle? Inside the multimillion-dollar embezzlement case against Singa Bui
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The Fungs were surprised by Bui’s request. She was asking them to wire $2.155 million—the price of the house plus lawyer’s fees and taxes, minus the deposit they’d paid when their offer was accepted—in advance without even having met. Uncomfortable, they decide to wait until their virtual appointment with Bui to complete the transfer. They got an email from Bui the following day confirming receipt and expected to hear from her next on December 1. That morning, the Fungs waited for the call letting them know they could collect the keys. Instead, around 4 p.m., Ryan heard from their agent, who asked if they’d spoken with Bui. He had three clients closing with her that day, and it was radio silence on all fronts. Even more worrisome, the seller of the Fungs’ new home still hadn’t received the balance of the payment. Pushing down his rising panic, Ryan emailed Bui. Half an hour later, his phone rang and he finally exhaled, hopeful. This would be Bui explaining she had gotten her dates mixed up or had been held up with a different deal and would transfer the money to the seller right away. But it wasn’t Bui on the line.
2 stars
It was the worst flight of his life. Then he met his future wife | CNN
11-minute read
A simple but lovely story:
It was set to be the worst flight of Anesu Masube’s life.
The day before, he’d received the devastating news that his mother had passed away. Anesu was living in Washington, DC. His family lived 7,000 miles away in Zimbabwe. In the depths of grief, he had to try to get home.
In a daze, Anesu booked a flight. It was two days before Christmas, 2017. There were barely any seats.
A quest to uncovering the origins of pho | AAA
6-minute read
Despite traveling to Vietnam a half dozen times to write about the cuisine, until now I had overlooked phở as a subject, perhaps because of its ubiquity on every Vietnamese restaurant menu. But one day while enjoying a bowl of it in New York City, I thought: Phở is the national dish of Vietnam, devoured from Ha Long Bay to the Mekong Delta. But where did it actually originate?
I knew its roots were in northern Vietnam. I also knew that phở bắc—northern phở—is different from the phở I’d been eating most of my life. In the U.S., we’re usually served the southern Vietnamese version, whose broth is sweeter and more herbaceous, and the dish comes with a side of sprouts, Thai basil, cilantro, hoisin sauce, sriracha, and jalapeño. In the north, the broth lacks the same sweetness, and the side accompaniments are usually pickled garlic and sliced red hot peppers. I’d fallen hard for northern-style phở.
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Eventually, Cồ explained, people in Vân Cù—specifically, someone also with the last name of Cồ, the most common name in the town—began foraging for discarded bovine bones outside of French butcher shops. Soon, those bones found their way into a broth—along with thinly sliced beef, rice noodles, and spices.
This machine could keep a baby alive outside the womb. How will the world decide to use it? | The Guardian
9-minute read
Scientists worldwide are racing to buy more time for extremely premature babies like Beth’s. In 2017, researchers in Philadelphia unveiled an experimental lifeline: an artificial womb, engineered to gestate babies outside the human body. In their study’s photos, fetal lambs floated inside what looked like overgrown Ziploc bags, eyes closed and hearts pumping as if they had never left their mothers. That prototype was only tested on animals, but the technology is edging closer to human use.
In September 2023, the United States Food and Drug Administration convened an advisory committee to consider whether to greenlight the first clinical trials. If approved, the first candidates will be babies like Beth’s son, those born between 22 and 24 weeks of gestation, or less than two-thirds of the way to full term.
Saving the Venus Flytrap: How One Woman Rallied a Town Around Its Weirdest Attraction | Garden & Gun
10-minute read
I’m lying on my stomach in a ditch on the side of the road in Boiling Spring Lakes, North Carolina, watching a horror story play out in miniature. On the surface the scene looks innocent enough—a beautiful white blossom crowning a long, pale-green stalk. Follow the stem down, though, and things get strange. In place of normal leaves, what look like tiny pink and green mouths sit agape. Some are flush to the ground, others rise on oddly geometric stalks, and each is rimmed by a creamy set of what might be sweeping eyelashes or very long, white teeth.
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So Hanson went to the board of commissioners and petitioned them to designate the flytrap as the town plant. She succeeded. People’s ears perked up at the mention of the plant, and as word spread, so did pride. A former mayor phoned Hanson when she suspected someone was poaching them; Hanson got the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service involved. A friend called her when she saw a Department of Transportation worker mowing down blooming flytraps on the side of the roads in the springtime. Another meeting with the board of commissioners later, the town elected to take over all of its own mowing.
My Family Was Almost “Repatriated” to Mexico in the 1930s. I See It Happening Again. | In These Times
8-minute read
It was only after her death that I found out my flag-waving, lifelong East Chicagoan grandmother had left out a major detail: Sometime before the end of the summer of 1932, her parents had almost boarded a train with their oldest children to “voluntarily repatriate,” or “self-deport” to Mexico. As I learned, the political moment that birthed the repatriation movement bears some frightening parallels to our own.
The Quiet Scandal of Affirmative Action for Men | Yascha Mounk
6-minute read
If they were to admit applicants without considering their sex, the best schools in the country would end up with incoming classes that have an even greater predominance of women than they already do. So, largely unnoticed by the public, they have started to embrace a solution to this supposed problem that is simple, effective, and manifestly unjust: affirmative action for men.
The strangest letter of the alphabet | Dead Language Society
7-minute read
Yogh is descended from a variant form of the old insular ‘ᵹ.’ But, while the insular ‘ᵹ’ was thought of as the same letter as the Carolingian ‘g’ in Anglo-Saxon times, the yogh ‘ȝ’ of the 12th century was an entirely different letter from the Carolingian-derived ‘g.’ And, stranger still, ‘ȝ’ was used to write two completely different sounds in Middle English, the form of English spoken from around 1100–1450: the y-sound as in young or yesterday, and another sound that English has lost altogether.
The other sound that ‘ȝ’ once spelled is the “harsh” or “guttural” sound made in the back of the mouth, which you hear in Scots loch or German Bach. This sound is actually the reason for the most famous bit of English spelling chaos: the sometimes-silent, sometimes-not sequence ‘gh’ that you see in laugh, cough, night, and daughter. Maybe one day I’ll tell you that story too.
Human Capital, Not “Industrial Policy,” Explains East Asian Success | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter
17-minute read
Start Demagoguing Against the Old | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter
7-minute read
As usual with Hanania, inclusion does not imply endorsement...
There are two ways to look at East Asian economies. From the perspective of poor countries in the mid-twentieth century, they’ve massively overperformed. But from a human capital perspective, they are mostly underperformers.
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This is remarkable given how much poverty it was experiencing. The World Bank has China at less than $300 per head throughout almost the entirety of the decade. Countries that are this poor in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East have never performed nearly as well on standardized tests. Even if China’s IQ was 91 at the time, it was well above every other nation in the world at a similar level of development, except maybe North Korea. The World Bank gives China an adult literacy rate of 66% in 1982, below many sub-Saharan African nations today. And yet they were still doing well on IQ tests.
When studying public opinion, it’s shocking how much Americans love Social Security and Medicare. They’re not overwhelmingly in favor of all government programs that give people money or services. Rather, it is these two in particular that seem special.
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To me, there’s nobody less deserving of being the beneficiaries of the welfare state than the old. If someone grows up poor, on his eighteenth birthday you wouldn’t be inclined to blame him that much for his poverty. The older he gets, the longer he has had to work hard, acquire skills, save money, benefit from compound interest and the appreciation of assets, and even have children that may provide for him. Poverty becomes more blameworthy with age. And most people do avoid poverty when they’re older – I see no reason to bankrupt the country for the sake of those who don’t. Whether you take the perspective of helping people according to need or separating the deserving from the undeserving poor, in either case giveaways to the elderly are one of the worst things you could be spending money on.
Netflix and the Hollywood End Game | Stratechery
7-minute read
This is the lesson Hollywood studios have painfully learned over the last decade. As Netflix grew — and importantly, had a far more desirable stock multiple despite making inferior content — Hollywood studios wanted in on the game, and the multiple, and they were confident they would win because they had the content. Content is king, right? Well, it was, in a world of distribution limited by physical constraints; on the Internet, customer acquisition and churn mitigation in a world of infinite alternatives matters more, and that’s the advantage Netflix had, and that advantage has only grown.
What Is a Manifold? | Quanta
4-minute read
A manifold is a space that looks Euclidean when you zoom in on any one of its points. For instance, a circle is a one-dimensional manifold. Zoom in anywhere on it, and it will look like a straight line. An ant living on the circle will never know that it’s actually round. But zoom in on a figure eight, right at the point where it crosses itself, and it will never look like a straight line. The ant will realize at that intersection point that it’s not in a Euclidean space. A figure eight is therefore not a manifold.
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Manifolds are crucial to our understanding of the universe, for one. In his general theory of relativity, Einstein described space-time as a four-dimensional manifold, and gravity as that manifold’s curvature. And the three-dimensional space we see around us is also a manifold — one that, as manifolds do, appears Euclidean to those of us living within it, even though we’re still trying to figure out its global shape.
1 star
The Bloomer’s Paradox | Astral Codex Ten
7-minute read
None of this is logically contradictory. This is a real way the world could be: all crises are overreactions, except the crisis of overreaction to fake crises, which is worse than you can possibly imagine. The present is better than the past in every way, except that the past got the question of is-the-present-is-better-than-the-past right and the present doesn’t. Totally possible, nothing says it can’t happen.
But would the bloomers be equally charitable to other people making this claim for other pet causes?
What Took You So Long? | Bet On It
2-minute read
Now think about how bad these incentives are. Any villager who wants to get ahead knows that if he does, he will have to either give away most of what he earns, or become a pariah, an apostate, or a drunk. Despite the low level of formal taxation, the effective marginal tax rate in Oapan is probably above Swedish levels. Tyler offered me a rough guess of 80%! With incentives that bad, it doesn’t surprise me that rural Latin America remains impoverished – though the localized art boom has turned Oapan into the exception that proves the rule.
Journey to the egg: How sperm navigate the path to fertilization | Knowable Magazine
3-minute read
COMIC: Male cells must survive twisty passages, strong currents and immune attacks; millions enter, but only one can finish
Study finds humans were making fire 400,000 years ago, far earlier than once thought | AP News
2-minute read
The discovery was made at Barnham, a Paleolithic site in Suffolk that has been excavated for decades. A team led by the British Museum identified a patch of baked clay, flint hand axes fractured by intense heat and two fragments of iron pyrite, a mineral that produces sparks when struck against flint.
Researchers spent four years analyzing to rule out natural wildfires. Geochemical tests showed temperatures had exceeded 700 degrees Celsius (1,292 Fahrenheit), with evidence of repeated burning in the same location.
That pattern, they say, is consistent with a constructed hearth rather than a lightning strike.
Huge undersea wall dating from 5000 BC found in France | BBC News
2-minute read
The 120-metre (394ft) wall – the biggest underwater construction ever found in France – was either a fish-trap or a dyke for protection against rising sea-levels, the archaeologists believe.
When it was built on the Ile de Sein at Brittany’s western tip, the wall would have been on the shore-line – between the high and low tide marks.
Today it is under nine metres of water as the island has shrunk to a fraction of its former size.
Strap Rail | Construction Physics
3-minute read
One interesting example of the different railroad conditions in the US and Britain is a railroad technology that was briefly popular for early US railroads: the strap rail track. British railroads were built with solid iron rails which, while effective, were expensive. Strap rail, by contrast, was built by attaching a thin plate of iron to the top of a piece of timber. This greatly reduced the amount of iron required to build railroad track — while British track required 91 tons of iron per mile, strap rail required just 25 tons.
This style of construction was far cheaper than British iron rails, just $20,000-30,000 per mile, 1/6th to 1/9th the cost of British rail. Building strap rail substituted comparatively precious iron (which was in short supply in the early US) for wood, which was widely available. By 1840, it’s estimated that 2/3rds of the 3,000 miles of railway in the US was strap rail track.
Far more Americans say they’d like to live in the past than in the future | Pew Research Center
4-minute read
45% of U.S. adults say that if they could choose, they would live sometime in the past. That includes 25% who would live less than 50 years in the past and another 20% who would live more than 50 years in the past.
Why we have two nostrils instead of one big hole | Popular Science
3-minute read
When we breathe, one nostril is more closed than the other and so has a slower rate of airflow. That slower flow of air means that there’s more time for slowly-absorbing chemicals to dissolve into the mucus lining. Experiments suggest that people smell slowly absorbed chemicals more strongly through a resting, or more closed, nostril.
However, the more closed nostril is not as good at detecting quickly-dissolving odor chemicals. Meanwhile, the more open nostril’s faster airflow means that quickly-dissolving chemicals can reach more of the smell-detecting tissue in your nose and send more signals to the brain. So basically each nostril smells slightly differently.
A video featuring Magnus Carlsen trying to beat a very novice player at chess with increasingly unfair rules | Kottke
10-minute video
A video featuring Magnus Carlsen trying to beat a very novice player at chess with increasingly unfair rules (opponent gets two moves per turn, opponent starts with 23 queens, Magnus starts with 1 king and 23 pawns, etc.)
Unapproachable | The Pursuit of Happiness
3-minute read
It seems to me that it isn’t just the stars that are increasingly unapproachable, average people have moved in the same direction. Back in the 1960s, we’d sometimes go to a friend’s house and ring the doorbell to see if they were home. By the 1990s, that was considered kind of intrusive, you’d typically call them first. Younger people have told me that today even calling someone on the phone is often seen as invasive, you generally text them first. (When I first heard this, I found it hard to believe.) Perhaps by the 2050s people will be sending out emails: May I text you?
Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image | BBC News
2-minute read
Network Rail said it was made aware of the image which appeared to show major damage to Carlisle Bridge in Lancaster at 00:30 GMT and stopped rail services across the bridge while safety inspections were carried out.
Jiggle Cat | Kottke
1-minute read
This is a pretty good optical illusion.