The Most Interesting Stories of 2024
I hope you all are having a restful start to the New Year. Here are a few stories that stood out to me in the past year. This is the sixteenth roundup — past editions can be view here: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.
5) The New York Times: A Victory Comes at Last for the World’s Worst Soccer Team
A brief and heartwarming sports moment — trivial but checked a few boxes of things I love.
Take a look at the men’s world soccer rankings. At the top, you will find the giants of the sport, Argentina, France and Spain.
Then descend, past good teams like the United States and Australia, past decent teams like Honduras and Armenia. Keep going, past Mongolia and Djibouti. Even past the tiny island nations like Guam and Anguilla. And at the very bottom, below all of them, you will find San Marino, ranked 210th and last.
When you are the worst team in soccer, you lose. A lot.
San Marino had not won a men’s soccer game since 2004. And that game was a friendly match. The team had been playing official competitive games since 1990 and had never won.
Until this week. San Marino beat Liechtenstein (ranked 199th) on Thursday, 1-0, finally getting a victory, which was played in San Marino before fewer than 1,000 fans.
“We had a great performance,” said Dante Rossi, 37, a defender for San Marino who had never before tasted the thrill of winning at this level. “To beat Liechtenstein has been an incredible joy. It is complicated to find the right words to describe the massive emotions we felt.”
4) University of California, Davis: Carnivorous Squirrels Documented in California
I, for one, welcome our new squirrel overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted photographer, I can be helpful in continuing to share their antics online.
A ground squirrel with cheeks stuffed with nuts, seeds or grains, is a common sight. But a new study provides the first evidence that California ground squirrels also hunt, kill and eat voles. The study, led by the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and the University of California, Davis, is the first to chronicle widespread carnivorous behavior among squirrels.
Published in the Journal of Ethology, the study fundamentally changes our understanding of ground squirrels. It suggests that what was considered a granivorous species actually is an opportunistic omnivore and more flexible in its diet than previously assumed.
3) Associated Press: Montana man gets 6 months in prison for cloning giant sheep and breeding it
Just when you think you scratched the surface of the rich tapestry of the human experience, you learn there are people out there illegally creating giant sheep for trophy hunting.
An 81-year-old Montana man was sentenced Monday to six months in federal prison for illegally using tissue and testicles from large sheep hunted in Central Asia and the U.S. to create hybrid sheep for captive trophy hunting in Texas and Minnesota.
U.S. District Court Judge Brian Morris said he struggled to come up with a sentence for Arthur “Jack” Schubarth of Vaughn, Montana. He said he weighed Schubarth’s age and lack of a criminal record with a sentence that would deter anyone else from trying to “change the genetic makeup of the creatures” on the earth. […]
“I will have to work the rest of my life to repair everything I’ve done,” Schubarth told the judge just before sentencing.
Schubarth’s attorney, Jason Holden, said cloning the giant Marco Polo sheep hunted in Kyrgyzstan in 2013 has ruined his client’s “life, reputation and family.”
“I think this has broken him,” Holden said.
2) Associated Press: The benefits of a four-day workweek according to a champion of the trend
Brief and thought provoking interview about rethinking the standard work week and the potential to increase productivity by allowing people to rest and recover.
Q: What kinds of work could potentially be dropped to increase productivity?
A: Meetings. We are addicted to meetings. It’s just gotten worse and worse since the pandemic. I think a lot of that comes from a culture of indecisiveness. There’s a sense of not wanting to make decisions, and therefore delaying the process or involving many people in the process so that everyone has a responsibility, and thus no one has responsibility. And that is not good when it comes to the greater issue of productivity.
1) The New York Times: Dragons and Sharks on a Beach Near You: The Story of the Great Lego Spill
An exploration of the many facets and cascading effects of some shipping containers lost at sea. There’s whimsy, community and nostalgia. There is also a deeper issue of environmental pollution — what is out there when we’re not charmed by the plastic shapes and colors.
On a miserable, drizzly day in late June, Hayley Hardstaff, a marine biologist, took a walk along Portwrinkle Beach in Cornwall, England, and discovered a dragon. It was a Lego piece — black, plastic and missing its upper jaw.
Ms. Hardstaff, who grew up in Cornwall, had a long history of finding Lego pieces. As a child there, she collected them from the beach, puzzled about why so many children were forgetting their toys.
By the time she went walking last June, she knew much more, and quickly recognized the scaly head and neck poking out of the sand, “its entire dragonhood on display.”