WE’VE HAD TWELVE months of compiling excellent longreads every week for Sitdown Sunday – and now it’s time to pick the best of the bunch.
Here were the highlights from across 2024, month by month.
Hvaldimir the beluga whale was at the centre of a dispute over his welfare after he popped up off the coast of Hammerfest, Norway. Ferris Jabr writes about the ethical debate around whether humans should intervene in rehabilitating a trained whale.
(The New York Times, approx 27 mins reading time)
The military conscription of a beluga whale might sound like a conceit plucked from less-than-convincing spy fiction, but it is actually a well-documented practice. Since the 1960s, Russia and the United States have trained dolphins, seals and other marine mammals to assist their naval forces by tagging enemy divers, detecting mines and recovering items from the seafloor. Satellite photos of Russian naval bases near Murmansk, not far from the spot where Norwegian fishermen first found Hvaldimir, reveal the type of sea pens often used to hold belugas. Audun Rikardsen, a professor of marine biology at the Arctic University of Norway, told me that international contacts have since confirmed that Hvaldimir belonged to the navy.
Beatriz Flamini spent almost a year and a half in a Spanish cave to break a world record. Despite joking about the experience when she emerged, this profile explores the psychological impact of spending 500 days underground in isolation.
(The New Yorker, approx 33 mins reading time)
After graduating, Flamini taught aerobics in Madrid. She was admired for her charisma and commitment. “Everyone wanted me for their classes,” she says. “They fought over me.” By the time she turned forty, in 2013, she had a partner, a car, and a house. But she felt unsatisfied. She didn’t really care about financial stability, and, unlike most people she knew, she didn’t want children. She experienced an existential crisis. “You know you’re going to die—today, tomorrow, within fifty years,” Flamini told herself. “What is it that you want to do with your life before that happens?” The immediate answer, she remembers, was to “grab my knapsack and go and live in the mountains.”
This gripping piece about a teenager who fell to his death from a fifth-floor apartment in London and was discovered to have been posing as the son of a Russian oligarch will grip you from start to finish.
(The New Yorker, approx 65 mins reading time)
The morning Zac’s body was identified, the private investigator the Brettlers had hired, Clive Strong, visited Sharma at Riverwalk. Sharma, who was short, sharp-featured, and physically fit, liked to box, and told Strong that he’d just returned from a sparring session. According to Strong’s notes, Sharma said that Zac had presented himself as someone whose “father was an oligarch,” and had claimed that he’d clashed so much with his mother—who lived in Dubai, along with four of his siblings—that she’d barred him from their various luxury properties in London. He was therefore homeless, despite being fantastically rich. “I felt sorry for the young man,” Sharma told Strong. “I said that he could stay in my flat”—the Riverwalk apartment.
A fascinating tale of corruption, greed and those who enable it, centering on two Irish businessmen, a multi-million dollar gas deal in Nigeria, and the vulnerabilities of international arbitration.
(The New York Times, approx 24 mins reading time)
In June, Quinn opened his morning paper to an unwelcome twist. The oil-drilling company that Nigeria had promised would supply the wet gas had decided to keep it; the gas turned out to be useful for maintaining pressure inside the wells. Quinn might have picked up the phone and protested to his friends inside the government, but most of them were gone. A new president had recently come into office. Lukman had been replaced. In February 2011, Hitchcock sent a text message that suggested the company was in dire straits. “In view of the rapidly deteriorating situation here, I see no option but to liquidate some P.&I.D. assets,” he wrote. “With your approval, I propose to sell the Honda Civic.” Quinn emailed the new president, Goodluck Jonathan, but his appeal went nowhere.
In this piece, Sarah Zhang writes about how at-home DNA tests are revealing that “incest is more common than many think”.
(The Atlantic, approx 10 mins reading time)
He could not know the exact circumstances of his conception, and his DNA test alone could not determine whether her older brother or her father was responsible. But Steve could not imagine a consensual scenario, given her age. The bespectacled 14-year-old girl who disappeared from the hospital had remained frozen in time in his mind, even as he himself grew older, got married, became a stepdad. He felt protective of that young girl.
Opus Dei was designed to help ordinary Catholics become holy through everyday work, but in practice, women gave their lives to the organisation as domestic workers. By weaving together three women’s stories, Antonia Cundy investigates the order.
(Financial Times, approx 37 mins reading time)
Anne Marie moved towards a wood-panelled door in the corner. Inside, hardly larger than a coat cupboard, was a confessional, a small kneeler facing a lattice screen. Forty-six years earlier, this was where a priest first suggested that Anne Marie join Opus Dei. She was 15 and had come to Ballyglunin to take a catering course. But within a few months, she would commit to years of unpaid domestic service for one of the most powerful organisations in the Catholic Church.
An artificial intelligence programme that generates targets for assassination with little human oversight and an error rate of 10% is being used by the Israeli army in Gaza. Yuval Abraham reports on ‘Lavender’ as part of a joint investigation by Tel Aviv magazine +972 and Hebrew-language news site Local Call.
(+972 Magazine, approx 36 mins reading time)
During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
The daughter of the man who created the iconic car that appeared in Back to the Future wants to build a modern version. But someone else has trademarked the name.
(WIRED, approx 23 mins reading time)
One thing she insisted she didn’t want was to start a car company. It was a car company, after all, that had ruined her father. But then something happened that changed her mind. In April 2022, the Texas company that had given Guerra the cold shoulder announced it would soon reveal a new DeLorean. Kat kept her feelings about this to herself only briefly. First she drew attention to Guerra’s design, posting it on Instagram. (“A timeless classic given the treatment it deserves!”) Two days later, she made her feelings explicit: “@deloreanmotorcompany Is not John DeLorean’s Company,” she wrote. “He despised you.”
When a woman moved into an old house in Baltimore in the US state of Maryland, she found 67 love letters in a little black box in the wall. They were 100 years old, all but one were handwritten, addressed to a Mrs R. A. Spaeth and sent by someone named “R.” Untangling the mystery surrounding them revealed a scandal.
(Baltimore Banner, approx 12 mins reading time)
In the newsroom, we spread the letters across the table in a small office. Reporters came and went. Everyone wanted to help decipher juicy turn-of-the-century love letters. Patterns began to appear in the handwriting. He put the tails of his “g’s” on the wrong side, like “p’s.” He used “+” for “and.” What a sweet romance: an esteemed Hopkins scientist, whose research took him away from home, writing love letters back to his wife in Baltimore. Or so it seemed.
Orcas have been attacking sailboats in the Iberian Sea since 2020 and one man is making it his mission to stop them.
(Rolling Stone, approx 25 mins reading time)
He heard a crash. The boat shook, and Drion lost his balance. “What happened?” he shouted up to the others. There was banging on the hull from the outside. The crew looked over the side and saw black fins breaking the glassy surface. Five killer whales, each more than half the length of the boat, their glossy skin shining in the sunlight, were taking turns swimming into the back of the sailboat, ramming the rudder with their heads. With each crash, the boat jolted into a new direction. The crew shut down the electronics and hauled in the mainsail. Speeding off, they thought, could be an invitation to chase. The animals were faster. Better to stay put, quiet and still.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the secret police agency destroyed as many documents as they could. This piece looks at how archivists have spent the last three decades piecing them back together by hand, and how automation could play a role in speeding up the process.
(The New Yorker, approx 38 mins reading time)
The Stasi files offer an astonishingly granular picture of life in a dictatorship—how ordinary people act under suspicious eyes. Nearly three hundred thousand East Germans were working for the Stasi by the time the Wall fell, in 1989, including some two hundred thousand inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, or unofficial collaborators, like Genin. In a population of sixteen million, that was one spy for every fifty to sixty people. In the years since the files were made public, their revelations have derailed political campaigns, tarnished artistic legacies, and exonerated countless citizens who were wrongly accused or imprisoned. Yet some of the files that the Stasi most wanted to hide were never released. In the weeks before the Wall fell, agents destroyed as many documents as they could. Many were pulped, shredded, or burned, and lost forever. But between forty and fifty-five million pages were just torn up, and later stuffed in paper sacks.
John Rosengren writes about how a vigilante murder in the Minnesota town of Grand Marais divided the community. (Details in this may be distressing for some people to read)
(The Atavist, approx 46 mins reading time)
Larry once approached a man named Gary Nesgoda at a gas station and asked if he had kids. When Nesgoda said that he did, Larry showed him pictures of a fairy garden he’d built behind his house. There were miniature staircases and doors, and little figurines set amid tree roots. Larry insisted that Nesgoda, who had recently moved to Grand Marais, should bring his kids over to see it. “Everything he was telling me sounded pretty neat,” Nesgoda told me. Then, in the gas station parking lot, someone who’d overheard the conversation stopped Nesgoda. “Do not bring your children over there,” they warned. This was a common theme. “Larry was the boogeyman,” said Brian Larsen, editor and publisher of the Cook County News Herald, who is a father of four children. “You’d tell your kids to stay the heck away from him.”
In 2013, 20-year-old Emma Carey went skydiving for the first time. She fell 14,000 feet to the ground out of a helicopter after her parachute got tangled. Incredibly, she survived. This details the aftermath of the incident, including learning to walk again.
(ESPN, approx 25 mins reading time)
About 20 minutes in, it was go-time. Emma looks at Jemma, says “I love you” and then jumps out of her side of the helicopter with her instructor. Thirty seconds later, Jemma jumps from the other side. Jemma closes her eyes for the duration of her jump — she hates every second of it. Emma, on the other hand, loves it. She soars for the first half-minute, soaking in her first skydive. About 30 seconds in, she feels a tap on her shoulder, the signal from her instructor to cross her arms to brace for the jolt of her chute going off. She crosses her arms and then … nothing. She’s not slowing down. She feels a tug on her hair, and she tries to see what the instructor is doing behind her. He’s out cold, unconscious from the ropes attached to the chutes. She can see the chutes, giant chunks of red fabric, flailing around in bunched-up bundles. They’re not supposed to be bunched-up bundles.
In this profile of Robert F Kennedy Jr, Joe Hagan speaks to members of the Kennedy family and close friends who shared why they believe he should not have run to be US president.
(Note – this article contains an image of an animal carcass that some may find distressing.)
(Vanity Fair, approx 33 mins reading time)
Last year Robert Kennedy Jr. texted a photograph to a friend. In the photo RFK Jr. was posing, alongside an unidentified woman, with the barbecued remains of what appears to be a dog. Kennedy told the person, who was traveling to Asia, that he might enjoy a restaurant in Korea that served dog on the menu, suggesting Kennedy had sampled dog. The photo was taken in 2010, according to the digital file’s metadata—the same year he was diagnosed with a dead tapeworm in his brain. (A veterinarian who examined the photograph says the carcass is a canine, pointing to the 13 pairs of ribs, which include the tell-tale “floating rib” found in dogs.) The picture’s intent seems to have been comedic—Kennedy and his companion are pantomiming—but for the recipient it was disturbing evidence of Kennedy’s poor judgment and thoughtlessness, simultaneously mocking Korean culture, reveling in animal cruelty, and needlessly risking his reputation and that of his family.
A compelling read about a historian and his team who are risking their lives saving Ukrainian artworks from the frontline.
(The Guardian, approx 27 mins reading time)
Fear is a curious emotion. At times, it arrives without warning or logic, unstoppable and blinding. At others, when its presence might be a useful warning against foolhardiness, it flees altogether. For some, it may become a familiar companion, less and less regarded as time goes on. “Of course I get scared,” Marushchak told me. “Only stupid people don’t get scared.” But he gets less frightened than he used to. On one occasion, describing what it feels like when a shell falls near you, he spoke in almost dreamlike terms: “You almost don’t hear anything, and hardly understand anything. And then you raise your head and you see that the leaves have fallen down from the trees. It is summer, the trees are bare, and you are covered in a blanket of green leaves as you lie there on the ground.”
The start-up Texas crime lab has assisted in thousands of investigations and has been publicly credited with helping to solve nearly 350 cases, including murders, rapes and unidentified bodies. Its method could solve many more cases.
(Texas Monthly, approx 30 mins reading time)
When Beaumont detective Aaron Lewallen received Mittelman’s offer to assist with any unsolved crimes, he immediately thought of the Catherine Edwards murder. “This was Beaumont’s most high-profile homicide,” recalled Lewallen, a laconic 26-year veteran who had developed a specialty in cold cases. “With the original detectives ruling out so many of the people who were close to her in her life, it had really become a whodunit.” At Lewallen’s request, local officials agreed to pay Othram about $10,000 to conduct new DNA testing. A few weeks later, a FedEx courier dropped off a Styrofoam box at the lab’s headquarters. Inside, chilled by an ice pack, was a piece of floral-print fabric from Edwards’s comforter and a vaginal swab from the posthumous rape kit. Unless he was dead or in jail, the man who killed Edwards remained at large. Perhaps he was still in Beaumont. Perhaps he had moved away and started a new life. He had concealed his crime for nearly three decades; surely, he must have thought, the police had given up on the case. There was no way for him to know that in the early 2020s, a small group of detectives and scientists had dedicated themselves to unmasking him.
The Colombian drug lord’s private menagerie was dismantled after his death in 1993, but the hippos were thought too dangerous to move and left behind. They have been multiplying ever since, and officials are struggling to keep them under control.
(The Guardian, approx 20 mins reading time)
The presence of these beasts in the heart of South America, waddling at night down rural paths and staring into the headlights of jeeps and motorcycles, might be comical if it weren’t so deadly. In Africa, hippos are thought to kill about 500 people a year, making them among the most dangerous animals to humans, according to the BBC and other sources. And while, for now, violent encounters in Colombia have been limited, unsettling incidents are increasing. The beasts have attacked farmers and destroyed crops. Last year, a car struck and killed a hippo crossing a highway. (Hippos tend to spend daytime hours in the water and move around land at night, adding to a menacing sense of danger striking in the dark.) This wasn’t long after a hippo lumbered into the yard of a school, sending frightened teachers and children running for cover.
Italian priest Luigi Ciotti, who leads an anti-Mafia organisation, speaks to DT Max about how he gives women in the Mob new identities and helps them to start a new life.
(The New Yorker, approx 39 mins reading time)
Men in the Mob generally insure that they discuss their illegal business activities out of earshot of their families, so women such as L. have often never been direct witnesses to crimes—making them ineligible for the country’s witness-protection program. Because they cannot help the state, the state won’t help them. Yet L. was in imminent peril. Mafia wives who leave their families are considered traitors, and some are assassinated. In 2011, Maria Concetta Cacciola, a thirteen-year-old whose parents were involved with the ’Ndrangheta, was married off to an associate. She eventually fled Calabria for northern Italy, leaving behind her three children. Cacciola’s mother lured her home, using her kids as bait. Less than two weeks later, Cacciola’s parents called her to the basement, where there was a container of acid. Most likely, she was forced to drink it—one of the Mafia’s punishments for being a snitch. Cacciola was pronounced dead at a hospital; her father told the police that she had died by suicide.
The so-called ‘Patriot Wing’ of a jail in Washington DC holds a group of inmates convicted for their involvement in violence at the US Capitol, and they’re running it like a gang. Tess Owen spent a year speaking to one of them, and learned that the group are become more radical in prison.
(Intelligencer, approx 33 mins reading time)
Patriot Wingers tell me that many are in fact leaving the block more committed to the January 6 cause than ever. In August, I spoke with Brandon Fellows, 29, who during the attack had smoked a joint with his feet on the desk of Oregon senator Jeff Merkley. He’d been held in the wing for two years, and he was now living in a luxury apartment building in D.C., paid for in part by American Patriot Relief, one of the many organizations that bankroll the rioters. “The election was stolen,” he said, “and now, looking back, we had a right to overthrow the government. We still do, at this moment. And I wish it would happen, truthfully.” When I talked to Fellows again in early September — he’d just returned from a skydiving trip — he said, “I definitely am so much more for overthrowing the government after what they did to me. I’m totally down. Especially if Trump doesn’t get in. I want it to happen. I wasn’t onboard before, but now — fuck these guys.”
King Abdullah of the Saudi royal family kept four of his daughters imprisoned for years. In this piece, Heidi Blake speaks to a doctor who worked for the family about what he saw, and how he tried to free them.
(The New Yorker, approx 23 mins reading time)
Back at the royal clinic, Burdick reviewed the princesses’ charts and was dismayed to learn that they were being regularly dosed with a combination of Valium, Ativan, Xanax, and Ambien. “They’re chemically immobilizing them,” he recalled thinking. He learned that he would now be required to write the medical orders for these drugs. “I felt between a rock and a hard place,” he wrote. If he refused, he reasoned, he would likely be replaced by someone more pliable, and, even if he could stop the drugs, an abrupt withdrawal after years of chronic use would have dire consequences. “With the intention of buying time to learn more about the difficult situation these young ladies faced, I set aside my ethics,” he wrote.
Nigel Pickford, a self-taught shipwreck researcher based in England, is behind the discovery of dozens of shipwrecks, containing more than €185 million worth of recovered cargoes – and all without going to sea.
(The New Yorker, approx 34 mins reading time)
There is something almost dangerously tantalizing about an undiscovered shipwreck. It exists on the edge of the real, containing death and desire. Lost ships are lost knowledge, waiting to be regained. “It’s like popping the locks on an old suitcase and you lift the lid,” Bound told me. Bound grew up on the Falkland Islands in the nineteen-fifties. In 2022, he found the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton’s polar-exploration ship, under the ice of the Weddell Sea, off Antarctica. “On a shipwreck, everything, in theory, that was there on that ship when it went down is still there,” he said. “It’s all the product of one unpremeditated instant of time.”
Doctors are pushing the limits of science and human biology to save more extremely premature babies than ever before. But when so few survive, Sophie McBain asks ‘are we putting them through needless suffering?’
(The Guardian, approx 26 mins reading time)
Until then, her pregnancy had progressed smoothly. She was 37 years old, healthy and expecting twins: a boy and a girl. A routine ultrasound a few weeks earlier had suggested all was well. Smith and her husband, Jim Clack, had already decided to name their daughter Peggy. For their son they had drawn up a shortlist of names. In the waiting room at Homerton, Smith began to feel an ache in her lower back. When the registrar examined her, she told Smith that she was in labour and already 3cm dilated. The average pregnancy is about 40 weeks long, but Smith was just 23 weeks and four days pregnant. If the babies died, which was the most likely outcome, their deaths would be classified as a miscarriage rather than stillbirths.
Writer Patrick Fealey gives a powerful and harrowing firsthand account of what being homeless in America is like. An important, beautifully written read.
(Esquire, approx 43 mins reading time)
The definition of homeless is we have no home, no place to go. If “I think, therefore I am” is true, we are people who are. We are, and we stand on this ground. If you deny us ground, you are denying us our “I am.” Isn’t that negation of our existence? We are here and we are you and we are yours. Many of you could be where we are—on the street—but for some simple and not uncommon twist of fate. This is part of your rejection, this fear that it could be you. You deny that reality because it is too horrific to contemplate, therefore you must deny us. And the moneyed reject us because they know they create us, that we are a consequence of their impulse to accumulate more than they need, rooted in a fear of life and the death that comes with it. Nothing good comes of fear, only destruction, and America has become a society of fear, much of that fear cultivated to divide and control.
Caitlin Flanagan writes about the impact of Seamus Heaney and his poetry on her as a child.
(The Atlantic, approx 24 mins reading time)
You can’t jump people into Roman Catholicism after the age of reason; they have to “come to God” on their own, or be in some kind of trouble. We didn’t believe any of it, and not just because of what our parents had always told us. It didn’t sound plausible. We lay in our beds at night and fumed. At the baptism, Ellen and I would have to have water poured on our long hair, like a couple of idiots. We would have to say something about believing in God, and we would have to reject the devil and all his pomps. (Pomps : shows of magnificence, splendor. Enough said! Rejected!) We took our final lesson, and a rehearsal was staged. Someone made a fruitcake with marzipan icing. In Ireland, when a woman makes a fruitcake, there’s no turning back. We were fucked. But then—like a dream, like a magic fish bone—word arrived from Belfast that Seamus and Marie Heaney were coming down for the event, and that Seamus would write a poem. That changed everything for me. Anything the Heaneys were cool with, I was cool with. They were my idea of what a dazzling couple ought to be, and they were always, always kind to us, and we needed kindness.
(The Guardian, approx 27 mins reading time)
It was the week of the Italian Open in May, and as we watched a doubles match under the afternoon sun, Bernardes, who speaks softly and has a serene air, told me it had taken him a while to learn not to let the abuse get to him. “If you take all the things that happen on court personally, you cannot survive in this sort of job,” he told me later. “You will go crazy.” It is rare to hear tennis umpires speak so openly. Few roles in professional sport are more secretive. During tournaments, they can be seen up in the chair – but once the match is over, they are not allowed to explain their decisions in press conferences or on social media. Their code of conduct prohibits them from meeting journalists.
(VICE, approx 21 mins reading time)
By season four, The Simpsons had entered what many now consider to be its golden age (although, at the time there were already suggestions that it was losing its way). “Marge vs. the Monorail” (S4, E12), with its grand scale, silly asides and abundance of absurdist humour, represented a stark departure from the show’s established formula. While initial reactions were mixed, it’s now widely regarded as one of The Simpsons’ best-ever episodes. With a script by Conan O’Brien – then an energetic young comedy writer – and meticulous yet joyful direction by Rich Moore – who subsequently won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature with Zootopia – the result is a wild ride, as charming conman Lyle Lanley convinces Springfield to spend $3 million on a monorail through the power of song alone. Disaster ensues until Homer saves the day, with the help of Lard Lad Donuts.
(The New Yorker, approx mins reading time)
At first, the U.P.I. sports club assumed that the group had just been held up; there had been reports of a heavy snowstorm in the mountains. But, after several days passed, families of the group began placing frantic phone calls to the university and to the local bureau of the Communist Party, and, on February 20th, a search was launched. There were several search parties: student volunteers from U.P.I., prison guards from the Ivdel camp, Mansi hunters, local police; the military deployed planes and helicopters. On February 25th, the students found ski tracks, and the next day they discovered the skiers’ tent—above the tree line on a remote mountain that Soviet officials referred to as Height 1079 and that the Mansi called Kholat Syakhl, or Dead Mountain. There was no one inside.
(The New York Times, approx 35 mins reading time)
The day Sudan died, everything felt both monumental and ordinary. It was a Monday. Gray sky, light rain. On the horizon, the sun was struggling to make itself seen over the sharp double peaks of Mount Kenya. Little black-faced monkeys came skittering in over the fence to try to steal the morning carrots. Metal gates creaked and clanked. Men spoke in quiet Swahili. Sudan lay still in the dirt, thick legs folded under him, huge head tilted like a capsizing ship. His big front horn was blunt, scarred, worn. His breathing was harsh and ragged. All around him, for miles in every direction, the savannah teemed with life: warthogs, zebras, elephants, giraffes, leopards, lions, baboons — creatures doing what they had been doing for eons, hunting and feeding and scavenging, breathing and going and being. Until recently, Sudan had been a part of this pulse. But now he could hardly move. He was a giant stillness at the center of all the motion.
(The Atlantic, approx 38 mins reading time)
The affidavit related a story from a document titled “The Lost Gold Ingot Treasure,” which had been found in the archives at the Military History Institute, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The tale, in its barest bones, was this: In June 1863, a caravan of Union soldiers transporting a shipment of gold through the mountains became lost. Three men were sent to get help and eventually one returned with a rescue party, which located the group’s abandoned wagons but no men, no gold. Teams from the Pinkerton detective agency scoured the hills. In 1865, two and a half buried ingots were found, and, later, the bones of three to five human skeletons. The rest of the gold remains missing.
(The New Yorker, approx 45 mins reading time)
In fact, the thief was someone he knew quite well. For the previous few summers, Tesch had worked as an instructor at Jim Davis’s Vail Cross-Training Camp, which offered people the chance to enjoy a week in Vail, Colorado, training with athletes like the distance runner Frank Shorter, and the champion triathlete Scott (the Terminator) Molina. The instructors also included a young man named James Hogue, a miler who, according to the camp’s promotional literature, had earned a Ph.D. in bioengineering from Stanford University, where he was a professor. With his diffident manner and his youthful face, though, he looked less like a professor than like an undergraduate. His training methods were unorthodox. He drank a mixture of mustard and Perrier during races; he lit a cigarette after crossing the finish line, as the other runners looked on in horror. In the summer of ’87, Hogue started showing up in San Marcos, sleeping in his truck, helping Tesch out around the shop, and otherwise leading a life that might have seemed atypical for a Stanford professor.
(The New Yorker, approx 28 mins reading time)
An Icelandic shark dish, called hákarl, was the first assault on his stomach. “Eating it was like gnawing on three-week-old cheese from the garbage that had also been pissed on by every dog in the neighborhood,” he said. Next up was durian, a spiky, custard-like fruit from Southeast Asia that “smelled like socks at the bottom of a gym locker, drizzled with paint thinner.” But worst of all was surströmming, a fermented herring that is beloved in northern Sweden. De Meyer said that eating it was like taking a bite out of a corpse.
(Popular Mechanics, approx 17 mins reading time)
The Zodiac’s first cipher, included in the July 31 letter, had been solved within a week by an amateur husband-and-wife team—but it had only revealed more of the killer’s raving. The second, now known as “the 340” due to the number of characters in it, would prove a much more difficult challenge. It came with a letter for the Chronicle, reading in part: PS could you print this new cipher in your frunt page? I get aufully lonely when I am ignored, so lonely I could do my Thing !!!!!!
(ESPN, approx 14 mins reading time)
The low five had been a fixture of African-American culture since at least World War II. It might seem impossible to pinpoint when the low five ratcheted itself upright and evolved into the high five, but there are countless creation myths in circulation. Magic Johnson once suggested that he invented the high five at Michigan State. Others trace it to the women’s volleyball circuit in the 1960s. But the Sleets story quickly shot around the Internet and into local newspapers, displacing, or at least undermining, all other claims. Sleets was budging his way atop the high-five hierarchy.
(Wired Magazine, approx 27 mins reading time)
Over the past 10 years, four lawsuits have been filed over the Bahia emerald. Fourteen individuals or entities, plus the nation of Brazil, have claimed the rock is theirs. A house burned down. Three people filed for bankruptcy. One man alleges having been kidnapped and held hostage. Many of the men involved say that the emerald is hellspawn but they also can’t let it go. As Brian Brazeal, an anthropologist at California State University Chico, wrote in a paper entitled The Fetish and the Stone: A Moral Economy of Charlatans and Thieves, “Emeralds can take over the lives of well-meaning devotees and lead them down the road to perdition.”
(Wired, approx 27 mins reading time)
Press the cone icon on the screen of the Taylor C602 digital ice cream machine, he explains, then tap the buttons that show a snowflake and a milkshake to set the digits on the screen to 5, then 2, then 3, then 1. After that precise series of no fewer than 16 button presses, a menu magically unlocks. Only with this cheat code can you access the machine’s vital signs: everything from the viscosity setting for its milk and sugar ingredients to the temperature of the glycol flowing through its heating element to the meanings of its many sphinxlike error messages. “No one at McDonald’s or Taylor will explain why there’s a secret, undisclosed menu,” O’Sullivan wrote in one of the first, cryptic text messages I received from him earlier this year.
Note: The Journal generally selects stories that are not paywalled, but some might not be accessible if you have exceeded your free article limit on the site in question.
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