Hope you're enjoying having extra time off because some bloke got given a secondhand hat 
Happy invoicing!
- I Could Have Killed Him Twice - ”When it was her turn to address the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons, the anguished old woman had to be assisted down the aisle and guided to a chair that had been placed directly in front of the four-man panel. Opening her mouth to speak, she instead dissolved into tears… Clasping her hands together and holding them outstretched in front of her face beseechingly, she wailed, ‘Oh, gentlemen, she is my child; mercy, mercy!’” The tale of Annie Cutler, who shot her unfaithful fiancé Henry Knight in April 1885.
- A New Idea for How to Assemble Life - ”If we want to understand complex constructions, such as ourselves, assembly theory says we must account for the entire history of how such entities came to be.” Sounds straightforward
- Hive Mind - Celia Bell on how she became a beekeeper: ”The bookstore drastically cut its hours and lost much of its staff, including me. My novel waited in limbo… For a few years before the pandemic, I’d entertained beekeeping as a fantasy life I might have. Some day in the future, I thought, perhaps when I was old, I’d learn to keep bees. Unemployed and in a national emergency, some day in the future felt like a very thin fiction. I joked that I was trying to acquire a useful skill for the end of the world.”
- The Art Nouveau Factory in Southfields - ”In Southfields, SW18, you can find a surprising and visually striking building. Today it’s private flats but it used to be a factory.”
- In India, A Nuanced View of How Elephants Make Decisions - ”Experts say that understanding how the giant mammals weigh risk and reward could help prevent clashes with people.” It’s always worth trying to understand your local elephants’ motivations
- Documenting brownstone colors - ”When I moved to Brooklyn from Barcelona in December 2021, the colors of brownstones quickly caught my eye… What I most enjoyed about them was the subtle shifts of color from one brownstone to the next. So I started documenting their colors.” Ruxandra Duru also found that studying the colours of people’s homes was a good way to make friends
- Pour One Out - ”The boozy story of how we decided alcohol was a health boon in the ’90s—and how it all fell apart.” If you want a cardiologist to advise you to drink red wine, better see one soon, as they’ll stop when they discover it isn’t actually good for you after all
- Onlytrains - ”Trainbot watches a piece of train track, detects trains, and stitches together images of them.” The piece of track in question is outside jo-m’s apartment; should a particular train catch your eye, you can view it as either the stitched image or an animated gif. This one went past their window just before I posted this
- The Search for the Lost ‘Jeopardy!’ Tapes Is Over. The Mystery Behind Them Endures. - ”In 1986, Barbara Lowe Vollick won five games of ‘Jeopardy!’ in a row. Her episodes were then taken out of circulation. What followed was a nearly 40-year hunt for the missing tapes—and a quest to find out what really happened between the show and its most enigmatic champion.” What is it with Americans and Jeopardy? You don’t get this kind of ongoing kerfuffle over old episodes of Bullseye
- Sailing boat rescued by the Götheborg - ”Imagine losing your rudder out at sea and sending out a distress call. And then the largest ocean-going wooden sailing ship in the world comes to your rescue.” That’s what happened to the yacht Corto off the coast of Brittany on April 25th
Happy invoicing!
Comment