Damn Interesting View RSS

A Trail Gone Cold 21 Mar 2024 10:50 AM (last year)

Iceland is known to the rest of the world as the land of Vikings and volcanos, an island caught between continents at the extremities of the map. Remote and comparatively inhospitable, it was settled only as long ago as the 9th century, and has seen little additional in-migration since. Even today, more than 90 percent of Iceland’s 390,000 residents can trace their ancestry back to the earliest permanent inhabitants, a Nordic-Celtic mix. The tradition of the Norse sagas lives on in the form of careful record-keeping about ancestry—and a national passion for genealogy. In other words, it is not the place to stumble upon old family mysteries.

But growing up in the capital city of Reykjavík in the 1950s, neurologist Dr. Kári Stefánsson heard stories that left him curious. Stefánsson’s father had come from Djúpivogur, an eastern coastal town where everyone still spoke of a Black man who had moved there early in the 19th century. “Hans Jónatan”, they called him—a well-liked shopkeeper who had arrived on a ship, married a spirited woman from a local farm, and became a revered member of the community.

The local census did record a man by the name of Hans Jónatan, born in the Caribbean, who was working at the general store in Djúpivogur in the 19th century—but that was all. No images of the man had survived, and his time in Iceland was well before any other humans with African ancestry are known to have visited the island. If tiny, remote Djúpivogur did have a Black man arrive in the 19th century, the circumstances must have been unusual indeed.

It was an intriguing puzzle—and solid grounds for a scientific investigation. Given the amount of homogeneity in the baseline Icelandic population, the genetic signature of one relative newcomer with distinct ancestry might still stand out across a large sample of his descendants. Geneticists thus joined locals and history scholars, and they pieced together a story that bridged three continents.

Continue reading ▶

Breaking a Bit 4 Sep 2023 5:08 PM (last year)

It’s been a busy summer, and the large shortfall in donations last month has been demoralizing, so we’re taking a week off to rest and recuperate. The curated links section will be (mostly) silent, and behind the scenes we’ll be taking a brief break from our usual researching, writing, editing, illustrating, narrating, sound designing, coding, et cetera. We plan to return to normalcy on the 11th of September. (The word “normalcy” was not considered an acceptable alternative to “normality” until 14 May 1920, when then-presidential-candidate Warren G. Harding misused the mathematical term in a campaign speech, stating that America needed, “not nostrums, but normalcy.” He then integrated this error into his campaign slogan, “Return to Normalcy.” Also, the G in Warren G. Harding stood for “Gamaliel.”)

While we are away, on 06 September 2023, Damn Interesting will be turning 18 years old. To celebrate, here are the first emojis to ever appear in the body of a Damn Interesting post: 🎂🎉🎁

If you become bored while we are away, you might try a little mobile game we’ve been working on called Wordwhile. It can be played alone, or with a friend. If you enjoy games like Scrabble and Wordle, you may find this one ENJOYABLE (75 points).

Launch Wordwhile →

And, as always, there are lots of ways to explore our back-catalog.

View this post ▶

Giving the Bird the Bird 7 Aug 2023 11:57 AM (last year)

We’re not going to post things on Twitter X anymore. The new owner keeps doing awful stuff. If you have enjoyed our mostly-daily curated links via the aforementioned collapsing service, we invite you to bookmark our curated links page, or follow us a number of other ways.

Rather than linger any longer on this tedious topic, here are some home-grown dad jokes. If there is any order in this universe, the comments section will fill with more of the same.

Continue reading ▶

Journey to the Invisible Planet 13 Jun 2023 6:05 AM (last year)

In the late 17th century, natural philosopher Isaac Newton was deeply uneasy with a new scientific theory that was gaining currency in Europe: universal gravitation. In correspondence with a scientific contemporary, Newton complained that it was “an absurdity” to suppose that “one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum.” The scientist who proposed this preposterous theory was Isaac Newton. He first articulated the idea in his widely acclaimed magnum opus Principia, wherein he explained, “I have not yet been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity from phenomena and I feign no hypotheses […] It is enough that gravity does really exist and acts according to the laws I have explained.”

Newton proposed that celestial bodies were not the sole sources of gravity in the universe, rather all matter attracts all other matter with a force that corresponds to mass and diminishes rapidly with distance. He had been studying the motions of the six known planets–Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus–and by expanding upon the laws of planetary motion developed by Johannes Kepler about eight decades earlier, he arrived at an equation for gravitational force F that seemed to match decades of data:

Where m1 and m2 are the masses of the objects, r is the distance between their centers of mass, and G is the gravitational constant: ~0.0000000000667408. But G is only an approximation; humanity may never know the precise value because it is impossible to isolate any measuring apparatus from all of the gravity in the universe.

Fellow astronomers found that Newton’s theory seemed to be accurate–universal gravitation appeared to reliably forecast the sometimes irregular motion of the planets even more closely than Kepler’s laws. In 1705, Queen Anne knighted Isaac Newton to make him Sir Isaac Newton (though this honor was due to his work in politics, not for his considerable contributions to math or science).

In the century that followed, Newton’s universal gravitation performed flawlessly. Celestial bodies appeared to adhere to the elegant theory, and in scientific circles, it began to crystallize into a law of nature. But in the early 19th century, cracks began to appear. When astronomer Alexis Bouvard used Newton’s equations to carefully calculate future positions of Jupiter and Saturn, they proved spectacularly accurate. However, when he followed up in 1821 with astronomical tables for Uranus–the outermost known planet–subsequent observations revealed that the planet was crossing the sky substantially slower than projected. The fault was not in Bouvard’s math; Uranus appeared to be violating the law of universal gravitation.

Newton’s theory was again called into question in 1843 by a 32-year-old assistant astronomer at the Paris Observatory, Urbain Le Verrier. Le Verrier had been following the Uranus perturbations with great interest, while also compiling a painstaking record of the orbit of Mercury–the innermost known planet. He found that Mercury also departed from projections made by universal gravitation.

Was universal gravitation a flawed theory? Or might undiscovered planets lurk in extra-Uranian and intra-Mercurial space, disturbing the orbits of the known planets? Astronomers around the world scoured the skies, seeking out whatever was perturbing the solar system. The answer, it turned out, was more bizarre than they could have supposed.

Continue reading ▶

From Where the Sun Now Stands 22 May 2023 10:09 AM (last year)

An American Indian man on horseback stood outlined against a steely sky past midday on 05 October 1877. Winter was already settling into the prairies of what would soon become the state of Montana.

Five white men stood in the swaying grass on the other side of the field, watching the horse move closer. Four wore blue uniforms, another in civilian attire. One of the uniformed men was tall and stout, with bright blue eyes and a large, curling mustache. He watched the proceedings with an air of self-importance. The surrender of the man on horseback might have been inevitable, sure, but it was nevertheless a nice feather in his cap. Perhaps his superiors would finally grant him that promotion after this whole affair was over.

The other four men were more apprehensive. All of them were experienced in fighting American Indians on the frontier, but this opponent had been different. One man, with a full, dark beard and right arm missing below the elbow, looked at the approaching chief with grudging respect. The man had lost his arm in the American Civil War 15 years earlier, so he knew battle well. And in his opinion, the man across the field was a tactical genius, a “Red Napoleon.” Despite overwhelming odds, this Red Napoleon had wormed his way out of battle after battle, somehow always coming out on top.
Until now, that was. Now he was surrendering to the U.S. military.

Continue reading ▶

The Ancient Order of Bali 28 Mar 2023 9:37 AM (2 years ago)

In the 1970s, the Indonesian island of Bali went through a period of rapid change. Along the stunning beaches on the southern side of the island, tourism boomed. Parking lots were put up, together with swinging hot spots and hotels of various colours. Hip young travellers from North America, Europe, and Australasia had “discovered” the island and began exploring its awesome surfing breaks, drinking in the newly-built bars, and spending money. There were consequences, good and bad, for the Balinese people. Living standards increased—as did the island’s population. The rest of Indonesia experienced growth too, and the country soon needed more of a vital food staple: rice.

As developers paved paradise along the coast, in the hills and mountains of Bali’s interior the authorities implemented a program of policies dubbed Bimbingan Massal, or “Massive Guidance”, intended to increase rice production and modernise agriculture in line with the latest international thinking. Massive Guidance was a credit scheme funded by the Asian Development Bank, which strongly incentivised adoption of new Western-developed farming methods in the form of ‘technology packets’ containing fast growing and high-yielding rice varieties, artificial fertilisers, and pesticides. These innovations had already lifted millions out of poverty and hunger elsewhere in the world, as part of a global transition from traditional to high intensity farming practices—the so-called Green Revolution.

The authorities knew that Bali already boasted a remarkably bountiful landscape of traditional wet rice cultivation. Rice is semi-aquatic, and around 6,000 years ago, humans discovered that submerging the crops under several centimetres of water for large parts of the plant’s growing cycle kept weeds at bay, greatly improving production. But there was no reason—the experts figured—why Green Revolution methods couldn’t increase the island’s rice production yet further.

From 1970, the government urged Bali’s growers to dig deep into their new technology packets and repeatedly sow as much high-yield rice as possible as quickly as possible. For a few years, this approach bore rice. There were small but measurable increases in yields, sufficient to convince the authorities that the program showed promise, but maybe wasn’t quite massive enough.

In the middle of the decade, things started to go wrong. Plagues of insects and other pests attacked rice crops, often faster than the new pesticides could beat them back. And farmers in some areas experienced faltering irrigation flows and dry fields—something previously almost unknown on Bali’s verdant rice terraces.

In the midst of this emerging disaster, a young, long-haired anthropologist from America arrived on the island. When he realised the scale of the slow-motion catastrophe, he started asking some fundamental questions. Eventually, with the help of modern computing, he and his team of American and Balinese scientists would slowly reveal a never-before-seen organisation that had shaped the island for a thousand years—one which was now in danger of collapse.

Continue reading ▶

This is Dang Interesting 2 Jan 2023 1:26 PM (2 years ago)

Happy New Year! This has nothing to do with the new year.

We at this website know, reluctantly, that “d*mn” is not always a welcome word. Additionally, we are aware that we have a few articles sporting even saltier vocabularies (settle down, Colonel Sanders!). Countless school teachers have admonished us for our casual profanity, the use of which makes it difficult to share our otherwise engaging content with young, impressionable students. Innumerable parents had clucked their tongues at us for our uncouth lexicon. We want you to know that we heard your feedback, waited about 17 years, then created a less profane mirror site so teachers can share stuff with students or whatever. And here it is 👇👇👇

You can visit that site directly, or replace the “damn” with “dang” for any URL on our site. Do so, and 97.43228% of the profanity will be defenestrated like a flibbertigibbet. Hot damn, that’s couth!

View this post ▶

Lofty Ambitions 14 Dec 2022 11:19 AM (2 years ago)

One summer day in 1933, in a brief pocket of time between the two World Wars, a British man named Maurice Wilson clutched the stick of his tiny, open air biplane and watched his fuel gauge dwindle. He had only learned to fly two months earlier, but inexperience was not his biggest problem. His lengthy list of troubles included the angry British officials he had just left behind in Bahrain, the certainty of arrest if he turned left to land in Persia, the roiling waves of the Persian Gulf below, and the increasing likelihood that his fuel would run out before he reached a safe landing.

But Wilson pushed on, knuckles white. He would not turn back, and he had no intention of crashing into the Arabian Sea. He sought a larger goal, a quest he believed to be his God-given destiny: to crash his plane into Mount Everest.

Continue reading ▶

The Rube’s Dilemma 28 Oct 2022 9:26 AM (2 years ago)

It all started with a hat. A straw boater, to be precise, with a flat, round brim and brightly colored ribbon tied around the crown. Originally popularized by gondoliers in Venice, this jaunty accessory had reached the height of American couture by the turn of the 20th century. The boater became not just a style, but a closet staple, worn by everyone from politicians to athletes—at least between the months of May and September. Fashion of the era adhered to strict seasonal rules, and just as women could be shunned for wearing white after Labor Day, any man seen wearing a boater past some ill-defined moment in late September was liable to suffer the disdain of his more fastidious friends.

So it made perfect sense when, in September of 1905, George “Rube” Waddell set out to smash the straw hat of his friend, Andy Coakley. At the time, both men were professional baseball players for the Philadelphia Athletics, and they were traveling home by train with the rest of the team after a disappointing loss to the Boston Americans (who would eventually be known as the Red Sox.) Waddell wasn’t especially concerned with hat etiquette; he was just an oafish, playful man who would take any excuse for a physical prank. Coakley, however, was understandably irritated by the assault, and he swung his heavy suitcase at Waddell in self-defense, striking him in the left shoulder.

Or perhaps, as some reporters heard it, Coakley closed the train door to keep Waddell out, and Waddell slammed his shoulder against it repeatedly trying to break through. Possibly the blundering Rube simply slipped and fell all on his own. Most agreed it had happened at the station in Providence, Rhode Island, but maybe it was outside on the platform in New London, Connecticut. No one could get their story straight on how Rube Waddell had injured his shoulder, which was especially odd considering he was the Athletics’ star pitcher. The paychecks of more than a dozen teammates, trainers, and coaches—not to mention thousands of baseball gamblers—hinged directly upon the strength of Waddell’s left humeral ligaments, yet his sudden and complete inability to pitch was being justified with only vague rumors about suitcases and hats. Each reporter who asked was given a similar but never identical version of the same ludicrous story, leading some to suspect the worst: that Rube Waddell had never been injured at all.

Continue reading ▶

Devouring the Heart of Portugal 3 May 2022 10:10 AM (2 years ago)

On the morning of Thursday, 04 December 1924, a tall and well-dressed Dutch trader named Karel Marang strolled along Great Winchester Street in the City of London, among the bustling crowds of bankers and brokers of the business district, unaware that the parcel he carried held the power to upend an entire nation. The nation in peril was not his home in the Netherlands, nor was it the Brits’ among whom he walked. Rather, it was a country some 700 miles to the south: Portugal.

When Marang reached his destination—an unassuming, four-story, yellow brick office building—he opened the door. Inside, an expansive ground-floor office space was filled with rows of desks, workers on telephones, and the soft buzz of white-collar commerce. Marang had come to meet Sir William Alfred Waterlow, Knight Commander of the Civil Division of the Order of the British Empire. Sir William was also the joint managing director of this place of business: Waterlow & Sons Limited, engravers of fine currency, postage stamps, and other official documents. A gentleman seated at a small receptionist desk directed Marang to the staircase.

Marang ascended to find a spacious office occupied by Sir William—a towering specimen of British upper crust. Marang produced a bundle of documents: it included his calling card; a letter of introduction from an esteemed Dutch engraving firm; a diplomatic letter certifying that its carrier had power of attorney over the current dealings; and a wax-bound, notarized contract festooned with international consular stamps.

The contract was basic and boring—it authorized Waterlow & Sons to print a run of banknotes for the Bank of Portugal, something the firm had done before. Of course Sir William was happy to do additional business with his Portuguese clients. Later, however, he would learn that in sitting down with this innocuous-looking Dutch trader, he was entangling himself and his firm in a heist of history-making proportions.

Continue reading ▶

The Mount St. Helens Trespasser 28 Feb 2022 11:42 AM (3 years ago)

The Washington state deputy sheriff looked suspiciously at the motorcycle strapped to the back of the odd little French car. The motorcycle was a recently repaired Honda 90, sporting a fresh coat of grey spray paint. The driver, Robert Rogers, kept a neutral expression as the officer examined his pass for the Red Zone that now surrounded the volcano Mount St. Helens. Rogers knew everything was in order.

Normally, Rogers didn’t care much for rules or regulations. He was a trespasser. The 29-year-old regularly climbed Portland’s city bridges, radio towers, and high rises, often at night to avoid police. He’d also recently lost his job as a radio engineer, so work no longer interfered with his exploits. But the newly installed tight security around Mount St. Helens made compliance necessary.

The officer waved him through, and Rogers drove into the Red Zone. Even if his pass hadn’t worked, he would have found another way in. Rogers knew the terrain surrounding this mountain better than anyone.

Nothing was going to keep him from his grand plan: hiking into the newly formed Mount St. Helens crater. And he was going to do it on 18 May 1981—the anniversary of the day this mountain nearly took his life.

Continue reading ▶

Hunting For Kobyla 7 Feb 2022 9:19 AM (3 years ago)

On a January day in 1964, something remarkable happened: Simon Wiesenthal took the afternoon off. He parked himself at a table on the terrace of Tel Aviv’s Café Roval, soaking up the sunshine as if he wished to bottle it. The friend he’d come to meet was late, but Wiesenthal had no reason to complain.

He was still lounging with his drink and his reading when the loudspeaker crackled to life over the murmur of café chatter. There was a phone call for Mr. Wiesenthal, the disembodied voice announced.

When he rose to take the call (it was the friend; he had to cancel), many of Wiesenthal’s fellow café-goers stood up, too. Then they broke into applause. A spontaneous standing ovation might have startled the average person, but it wasn’t the first time crowds of strangers had risen to their feet in Simon Wiesenthal’s presence. Though when this happened back home in Vienna, it had sometimes been to spit at him.

Neither the love nor the hate fazed the 56-year-old though. Certain occupational hazards were to be expected when you were one of the world’s preeminent Nazi hunters.

Wiesenthal returned to his table to collect his things. When he got there, he found it occupied by three women who, he presumed, had pounced on the prime location. But the women weren’t there for his spot—they were there for him.

Continue reading ▶

The Unceasing Cessna Hacienda 26 Oct 2021 10:26 AM (3 years ago)

Warren “Doc” Bayley was a man of the people. When he and his wife Judy opened their Las Vegas resort in 1956, Bayley had no plans to compete with the flashier, corporate casinos at the center of the Strip. Instead, the Hacienda Hotel catered to families, as well as to locals who wanted a night out minus the tourists. When connoisseurs sneered, “You can either go to Las Vegas or to the Hacienda,” Bayley embraced the distinction with pride, and he didn’t even mind when the nickname “Hayseed Heaven” took hold. Hayseeds were hard-working folks who deserved a vacation, too, and his steady bookings proved it.

But margins were low, and Bayley was always on the lookout for new ways to drum up publicity for his so-called “low roller” operation. He didn’t care where the ideas came from. Staff at the Hacienda were considered family, and Bayley regularly asked the advice of maids, bellboys, cooks, and anyone else who might have something useful to offer. So when a slot machine mechanic and former Army pilot named Bob Timm suggested breaking a world record—specifically, the world record for the longest endurance flight in a piloted plane—Bayley was willing to listen.

Continue reading ▶

The Kingpin of Shanghai 26 Aug 2021 10:40 AM (3 years ago)

Respectable heads of state rarely admit to keeping company with gangsters. But in April 1927, about 15 years after the collapse of the last imperial dynasty, Chiang Kai-shek and China were at a crossroads. Chiang had followed a murky path to leadership of the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang. Although the Kuomintang was rivaled by an assortment of warlords who ruled the provinces as their personal fiefdoms, in Chiang’s mind the greatest obstacle between him and control of that vast and war-torn country was a young Communist Party which, he believed, would soon be nothing but lethal trouble.

So generalissimo Chiang turned to Du Yuesheng of the infamous Green Gang of Shanghai, a criminal brotherhood rooted in equal parts menace and murk. Du was the leader of this criminal enterprise, and the bloated, gleaming international city lived and died by his word. It was the power of death which most interested Chiang that spring. He wanted nothing less than complete power over all of China, and to get it, he was willing to trade the lives of thousands and allow the establishment of a vast narcotics empire. Others might have balked at trading the murder of a few thousand political opponents for this goal, but neither Du nor Chiang felt any such hesitation.

Continue reading ▶

To Hell With Facebook 12 Jul 2021 12:17 PM (3 years ago)

The earliest known version of the idiom “the straw that broke the camel’s back” was written by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury in 1677, though it was concerned with horses and feathers:

“The last Dictate of the Judgement, concerning the Good or Bad, that may follow on any Action, is not properly the whole Cause, but the last Part of it, and yet may be said to produce the Effect necessarily, in such Manner as the last Feather may be said to break a Horses Back, when there were so many laid on before as there want but that one to do it.”

For the past few years, we at Damn Interesting have been hearing from scores of long-time fans who were under the mistaken impression that we had ceased all operations years ago. These fans are typically delighted to hear that a) we are still writing and podcasting; and b) there is a wealth of new content since they last visited. When we ask them what caused the assumption of our demise, they invariably cite the fact that our posts disappeared from their Facebook news feeds.

This trend roughly coincides with Facebook’s introduction of “boosting” for pages; in this new model, according to the stats we can see, Facebook stopped showing our posts to approximately 94% of our followers, demanding a fee to “boost” each post into an ad, which would make it visible to more of our audience. We lost contact with tens of thousands of fans practically overnight. We don’t mind paying for a service if it is valuable, but we absolutely don’t want to reach our audience by buying ad space on Facebook. Yuck. But no other option is given to reach the many people who previously followed our posts, and who presumably want to continue to do so.

We established our Facebook page in 2008 as the fledgling social media site was gaining in currency, and we continued to maintain our page on the side, mostly as an afterthought. In the intervening years Facebook evolved from a dubious curiosity into a megacorporation that is firmly in the service of bad ideas. In a move that feels long overdue, we at Damn Interesting are abandoning all interactions and connections with Facebook.

Continue reading ▶

Capital, Punished 10 Jun 2021 10:42 AM (3 years ago)

Located 350 km (217 miles) southeast of Puerto Rico, the British island of Montserrat is sometimes called ‘The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean’ for its verdancy and early Irish settlers. However, far from a paradise, Montserrat also boasts an unfortunate history, and not just because of the British slave trade that brutally ensnared many ancestors of the present population. The island has been a magnet for natural disasters. An earthquake in 1843 caused widespread devastation, then major hurricanes pummelled Montserrat in 1899 and 1989.

In mid-1995, the volcano at the heart of the island began releasing steam and gas. On 25 June 1997, it started rumbling ominously and flinging enormous boulders miles into the air. On 4 August, the volcano let loose with a full-fledged eruption, and the government sent evacuation orders to hundreds of people living below it. Clouds of smoke, lava, and ash gushed out of the volcano. The pyroclastic flow enveloped the capital city of Plymouth and 20 smaller towns, burying them in an obstinate stew of geological ingredients and killing at least 19 people. The southern two-thirds of Montserrat was rendered uninhabitable and marked as an exclusion zone.

The eruption wiped out the island’s capital, the one airport, the one seaport, and most of the agriculture. Montserrat’s government took refuge in the remote northern town of Brades. The island’s population, which had reached about 12,000 by the mid-1990s, fell by more than half as locals fled, many becoming permanent residents or citizens of the United Kingdom. Tourism took a huge hit, both because conditions were much more hazardous and the island was much less accessible without an airport or seaport. A few extreme adventure-seekers were undeterred, but the volcano kept rumbling; a 2003 eruption set off a tsunami.

A new airport in northern Montserrat opened in 2005. With support from the British government (and Beatles producer George Martin, who had owned an internationally known recording studio on the island), Montserrat has been building a replacement capital and seaport at Little Bay. The volcano has been quiet since 2010. However, even as of 2021, the island’s population is only about 5,000. Most of the southern end of Montserrat remains off-limits or dangerous, or both. Plymouth is unsalvageable, but the abandoned town is still the legal capital of the island, even with a population of 0.

View this post ▶

The Traveler and His Baggage 3 Jun 2021 11:11 AM (3 years ago)

On 19 May 1943, a news report from Berlin deepened the already dreary gloom that clung to the people of Nazi-occupied Paris. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels proudly announced to the world that the German capital of Berlin was officially judenfrei–free of all Jews. As this news buzzed in the background on Nazi-controlled airwaves, a man named Yvan Dreyfus–a Jew residing in Paris–was carefully packing his luggage for a long, illegal journey. A close inspection of Dreyfus’ suitcase would have revealed a hidden compartment containing 200,000 francs in cash, a small stack of passport-sized photographs of himself, and a conspicuous absence of any documentation to identify the owner of the bag.

As Dreyfus stepped outside into the mid-morning, the once-bustling streets of Paris were hushed and tense. Three years prior, swathes of citizens had fled the French capital as the booms of German artillery grew louder in the distance. Millions of Parisians had crammed into cars, trucks, and trains en masse, often with no specific destinations other than ‘away.’ This left the city’s famous arrondissements sparsely populated. The lack of humans was not the only cause for the quiet–the German occupiers had enacted onerous gasoline rationing, and it was difficult or impossible for ordinary citizens to travel by automobile. On the occasion that a car or truck was seen driving in the city, it was usually full of bad news.

As he had been instructed, Dreyfus made his way to the address 25 Rue des Mathurins, and climbed a set of stairs to a decaying beauty parlor on the building’s second floor. There, he was scheduled to meet with the mysterious “Dr. Eugène.” According to confidential sources, this doctor was the head of an illegal escape network that smuggled Jews and other oppressed persons out of Nazi-occupied France. While Dreyfus was an excellent candidate for such a network, there were machinations afoot. Under prolonged torture by agents of the French Gestapo, Dreyfus had acquiesced to a deal. As he ascended the stairs toward the beauty parlor, French Gestapo agents followed at a discreet distance. Dreyfus was the bait in a Nazi snare.

Continue reading ▶

A Taste of Italy 14 May 2021 10:55 AM (3 years ago)

In the mid-1800s, Italy was consumed by two parallel fights: one to rid itself of Austrian domination (a holdover from the Holy Roman Empire) and the other for unification. At the time, Europe’s boot was a curious conglomeration of separate states, not all of which got along. Some were dominated by foreigners. One large section was ruled by the Pope, which Italians (who had been exposed to the secularist ideals of the French Revolution when Bonaparte invaded) were understandably none too keen on.

The Austrians, being as imperialistic as might be expected for an empire, reacted poorly to all this rabble-rousing and upheaval, and instituted a rule of firm Germanic discipline. Riots were put down, people were shot and occasionally tortured, and so on; the routine work of keeping an unruly oppressed population in its place.

As all of this was going on, curious graffiti began to spring up throughout Italy–graffiti that might not be entirely unexpected in the land that invented opera, but still unusual: large letters reading, ‘VIVA VERDI!’

Giuseppe Verdi was the new big thing in opera, immensely popular, not least because of his rousing patriotic choruses that were taken to heart by the revolutionaries. But this specific graffiti became so common that Austrian officials wondered whether this outpouring of musical enthusiasm was in some way subversive; after all, Austrians didn’t go around scrawling ‘Heil Schubert’ on the walls.

The Austrians were right to wonder–because in fact this graffiti had little to do with music. ‘Verdi’ was an acronym for ‘Vittorio Emmanuele, Rè d’Italia’–Emmanuele being the king of Piedmont, and chief candidate for king of a united Italy. The graffiti was shorthand for ‘Long live Victor-Emmanuel, King of Italy’. Victor-Emmanuel eventually did become king, thanks mainly to the machinations of his prime minister, an opera-loving gentleman by the name of Cavour.

Incidentally, Cavour, who had long been manoeuvering for a war with Austria, was so delighted when one was declared that he startled passers-by as he rushed to his office window and belted out Verdi’s aria ‘Di quella pira’ from Il Trovatore. As the aria is one of the greatest test pieces for any tenor, one can only hope that Cavour had a fine voice.

The notoriously grumpy Verdi, who fully supported the aims of those who had used his name for propaganda, became a deputy for the new Italian parliament when it was formed, but simply voted as he was told before giving up in disgust and returning to his farm–where, to the end of his days, while producing gorgeous and dramatic music, he sullenly insisted on giving his occupation as ‘Farmer’ on every census.

View this post ▶

Fifteen Years Forsaken 28 Apr 2021 8:25 AM (4 years ago)

Editor’s Note: This article contains quotations from contemporaneous accounts which might be offensive for today’s readers.

The moon was new on the night of 31 July 1761, and the wide expanse of the Indian Ocean uniformly black. But Captain Jean de Lafargue of the French cargo ship L’Utile foresaw no danger. True, there were some minor discrepancies among the maps available on board, but this part of the sea was clearly empty, other than the large numbers of birds the crew had seen flocking about all day, and he had no desire to reduce speed. He had already been at sea for more than a week; it could take more than three to sail from Madagascar to the Mascarene Islands, where the governor awaited his return with food and supplies. Threatened by the English fleet, the colonies there needed all he could bring.

Lafargue had his own additional reasons for pressing on. An enterprising fellow, he had taken the opportunity while in Madagascar to obtain some goods he planned to sell on his own account, which was why L’Utile‘s route was a bit of a detour from its obvious course back to the Mascarenes. Since Lafargue wasn’t supposed to be engaging in personal merchandising on this trip, he was making for the island of Rodrigues, where he could trade his cargo before heading on to his official destination of Île de France (known today as Mauritius). Rodrigues was almost 600 kilometres further east, but given the uncertain timeframes involved with sailing vessels, no one should be the wiser about his little side-trip–so long as he didn’t fall too far behind schedule.

It was just past 10:20 that night and Lafargue was in his cabin when two sharp bumps shook L’Utile. They were not very violent, but every sailor on board knew what they meant: L’Utile had just struck ground. They hardly had time to recover before a third, much harder jolt convulsed the vessel. Desperately, unable to see the obstacle, the crew tried to veer about, but all this did was expose the flanks of the ship to the current. Huge swells caught at it, and breakers crashed down on its deck. The waves that had seemed so calm all day had L’Utile in their grip, hammering it against the unknown shoal on which they had foundered.

In the hold, Lafargue’s 160 newly purchased slaves were screaming.

Continue reading ▶

Pushing the Envelope 14 Apr 2021 5:19 PM (4 years ago)

As is often the case with people in dangerous professions, the Apollo astronauts found that life insurance policies were prohibitively expensive. Rather than pay the exorbitant insurance fees, the astronauts devised a system to ensure their wives and children would be financially taken care of in the not-altogether-unlikely event of disaster.

Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins autographs were highly prized by space enthusiasts, so in the months leading up to the launch of Apollo 11, the crew spent much of their spare time autographing postage envelopes that were imprinted with Apollo images. The crew took 214 of these envelopes with them in the capsule. They entrusted the rest with an Earth-bound friend, who visited a Texas post office on launch day (16 July 1969) and again on the day Apollo 11 landed (20 July 1969) to affix a six-cent postage stamp and have them postmarked with the historic date.

The envelopes were distributed among the astronauts’ families, with instructions to sell them if the crew was unable to return. These would come to be known as the “insurance covers,” and the strategy was reused for subsequent Apollo missions.

Most of the covers were eventually given as gifts to family, friends, and associates. They can occasionally be found at space memorabilia auctions selling for anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000.

View this post ▶