It’s another wonderful year and, in keeping with tradition, here are a few stories that tickled me in 2025. See previous editions linked here: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

5) The Star Tribune: Minnesota’s ‘Queen of Walleye’ raises millions of fish in a DNR basement

Nice to see a spotlight on some quiet and diligent work happening behind something I took for granted — I didn’t even know those jobs were there:

With only an old fan to move the humid air, fungus spreads easily inside the state’s oldest fish hatchery, she explained, so she must perform the delicate task of separating more than 20,000 eggs.

By the end of this year, Furtner and her staff of just one other person will have raised about 42,000 muskies and 6 million walleye to stock Minnesota lakes. Described by Gov. Tim Walz as the “Queen of Walleye,” Furtner sometimes works at all hours to keep the old hatchery running.

4) Colossal: Dennis Lehtonen Documents a Pair of Immense Icebergs Paying a Visit to a Small Greenland Village

I used to love tilt-shift photography and this has a similar effect of messing with your expectations of scale — requires a click to fully understand and appreciate:

When he arrived in Innaarsuit, he heard about an incident in 2018 when the village of around 160 Inuit residents had to be fully evacuated due to a giant iceberg settling near the shore. Estimated to have been around 100 meters high, its presence threatened people’s safety due to the dangers of pieces breaking off and causing waves large enough to hit some of the coastal houses. While inherently a tense situation, it was also astonishing to see, and Lehtonen couldn’t help being curious “what it would look like to have a skyscraper made of ice on your backyard.”

3) Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends: The endless internal struggle of phone photography

This visual essay made me smile because it reminded me of my own visit to the Mona Lisa (crowds).

2) ESPN: How Dan Snyder views Commanders’ title run from afar: ‘He … hates it’

As a former football fan who grew up in DC and watched the championship team of my youth slowly fall apart, I can only say how much I enjoy a thoroughly reported and sourced investigation like this:

At the London dinner, Snyder, 60, was polite, if not subdued, and did things the associates had come to expect, such as ordering almost everything on the menu. Snyder said that he was enjoying a quiet existence, mostly in London. Life was better for his family, far from the controversies that had engulfed him and the team the past several years. Talk inevitably turned to the improving Commanders, already off to a strong start. When one associate returned to the United States, a colleague asked him the question that’s been on the minds of many fans and league executives:

What’s it like for Snyder, for years the most hated owner in sports, to watch the Commanders succeed without him?

1) The Bell: Magnet fishing is supposed to be a wholesome hobby. Why all the beef?

Just days into the new year and I was dredging up my Scottish slang dictionary just to make it through this article. What a treat:

Halfway across the bridge, just about visible in the biblical downpour, there’s something submerged in the water. Follow it upwards, and a man in a fluorescent jacket is leaning over the side, dangling a rope into the swirling current, sweeping it across the river bed in search of silt-buried treasure.

Stirling is an unlikely location for Glasgow Magnet Fishing (GMF), a ragtag, piratical group of friends bonded since the halcyon days of lockdown by one thing: a love of lobbing high-powered magnets on ropes into waterways to retrieve discarded metal objects. In recent years, they’ve grown in size — the Facebook group totals almost 7,700 members — and reputation, even producing merch. […]

“What’s that, a chibber, oan yer first throw an aw?” McGeachin shouts over to Glasgow Magnet Fishing OG, Paul Goody, a hulking joiner with a gentle nature. He wanders over to see. Goody shows him the 1954 military pocketknife. “Finders keepers, this one,” Goody says joyfully, hastening to assure me: “Any big blades we hand it into the police.”

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 viewed 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 I, as a trusted photographer, can help them continue sharing 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.”

Here’s the fifteenth edition of my annual roundup.

Previous selections are here: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

5) The New Yorker: When Trucks Fly

An exploration of the skill, culture and community around Monster Jam.

Eichelberger, in a truck named ThunderROARus, zoomed down the elevated dirt ramp and flew so far over the row of nine trucks that the vehicle rammed into a barrier at the edge of the field. Eichelberger was fine—he got out and saluted the crowd. Meents looked elated. I couldn’t help but feel a little underwhelmed. I’d seen a version of this a few times now—a big truck flying high and far. How quickly we desire more. This was Monster Jam’s trap: a never-before-seen trick can happen only once. Awe is a hard thing to maintain.

Maybe it was the premeditation. During the freestyle, a driver named Todd Leduc, who drove Megalodon, a truck that looks like a shark, took off for a ramp without warning and pulled the biggest backflip most people had ever seen. He went maybe fifty feet in the air. He seemed out of control. This wasn’t entirely true—when airborne, drivers can speed up their rotation by spinning the tires, or slow it down by pressing the brakes. “If we had wings, we’d fly out of the building,” Kenny told me. When Leduc reached his apex, I thought he would over-rotate and crash into the ground roof first. But he tapped the brakes, and slammed down flat on the tires. A guy in the stands turned shrill: “WHAT?!? HOLY MOTHERF****** S***!” This was what we’d come to see: we’d spent an entire day in the heat and the rain, a little bored, in the hope that a twelve-thousand-pound fibreglass shark might briefly ascend toward space. Who in the crowd could imagine what it felt like to be in Leduc’s seat?

4) Louisville Courier Journal: Louisville home filled with ‘explosive materials’ will be burned down after investigation

Not an uplifting tale, but one I could not look away from. A former chemist was arrested for hoarding dangerous chemicals in his home and the local government thought the “safest way to proceed” would be to burn everything down. [Fortunately the EPA intervened and carefully removed the chemicals instead of releasing them into the environment and community.]

Last week, Louisville Metro Police and federal agents investigated a Highview man’s home after being informed that he had homemade explosives. Now, city officials are taking additional action.

At a press conference Tuesday morning, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg declared a state of emergency as Metro Code Enforcement personnel prepare to demolish the home and its attached garage.

3) Read Max: True Life: For reasons I don’t fully understand I bought hundreds of Cold War-era military slides on eBay

An impeccable tale of one poor sap’s scanning odyssey in pursuit of America’s hidden military presentation history. It is worth viewing the full collection and I will tempt you to click with the solitary footnote:

The actual scanning process is elaborate and time-consuming as an occult rite. At first I had hoped the (very expensive) flatbed photo scanner at the local library, which could process 15 slides at a time and would cost me zero dollars to use, would be more than sufficient. This was foolish: I convinced myself the results were slightly blurry and unsuitable for my audience of completely imaginary people who cared about what I was up to. Instead, I opted to buy a used Plustek OpticFilm 7600i SE, a bread loaf-sized device made specifically for scanning mounted slides—one at a time. Before you even press a button, each requires a careful dusting with a brush, perhaps a puff of compressed air, and even a ginger microfiber rub-down. Although one archivist reassured me that I “won’t hurt the film physically unless you pour acid on it or light it on fire,” I handle each like a treasure. Once cleaned, the scanning software will, very, very slowly, turn the tiny photograph inside into a TIFF image file, a digital image format created back when some of these slides were. This required hours of carefully calibrating the scanning app’s settings, a process akin to communing with an angry spirit, sinking me into delirium as I tried to figure out whether I’m the first human in the history of the species to be able to tell the difference between a photo scanned at 3600 versus 4000 DPI. In search of answers, if not peace, I’ve scoured endless Reddit threads, long-forgotten early aughts message boards filled with Germans arguing about image sensors, memorized university library resources, and sat patiently through YouTube tutorials. But as tedious as this sounds, the tedium has only begun when you hit “scan.”

2) Bloomberg Businessweek: The Gambler Who Beat Roulette

I will be shocked if this isn’t turned into a feature film.

One spring evening, two men and a woman walked into the Ritz Club casino, an upmarket establishment in London’s West End. Security officers in a back room logged their entry and watched a grainy CCTV feed as the trio strolled past high gilded arches and oil paintings of gentlemen posing in hats. Casino workers greeted them with hushed reverence.

The security team paid particularly close attention to one of the three, their apparent leader. Niko Tosa, a Croatian with rimless glasses balanced on the narrow ridge of his nose, scanned the gaming floor, attentive as a hawk. He’d visited the Ritz half a dozen times over the previous two weeks, astounding staff with his knack for roulette and walking away with several thousand pounds each time. A manager would later say in a written statement that Tosa was the most successful player he’d witnessed in 25 years on the job. No one had any idea how Tosa did it. The casino inspected a wheel he’d played at for signs of tampering and found none.

1) Atmos Magazine: In the Dead of Night, a Deafening War

A wonderful deep dive into the brutal and beautiful evolutionary innovation of the 60 million year old war between bats and moths.

Corcoran, a biologist at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, just set the stage for one of nature’s oldest wars: bats versus moths. What’s to follow is a battle featuring echolocation, chemical defense, sonar jamming, stealth pursuit, and acoustic illusions, all piling on in an earsplitting, ultrasonic din—earsplitting, at least, if you have ultrasonic microphones to tune in.

“All this stuff is happening every night in everybody’s backyard,” said Dr. Nick Dowdy, a biologist at the Milwaukee Public Museum. “We just can’t hear it.”

Happy New Year! This is my fourteenth edition of my favorite stories from the previous year.

Previous selections are here: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

5) The New York Times: Love Triangle Challenges Reign of Japan’s Monkey Queen

A wonderful and brief window into some drama in a simian society.

​​The Japanese macaque, also known as the snow monkey, is a highly intelligent species native to Japan. It is well known for its beet-red bottom and affinity for soaking in hot springs.

While many animals, including bees, hyenas and elephants, live in female-led societies, a hostile takeover by a female “is very rare in Japanese macaque society, and only a few cases have been reported in the history of primatology,” Yu Kaigaishi, a research fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, said in an email.

4) The Atlantic: The Economic Principle That Helps Me Order at Restaurants

An overly academic analysis of the reasoning to order many plates to share.

People with high levels of openness might be more into sharing food, so that they can sample more dishes. That is definitely me when I go to a restaurant—personally, what I truly want, and I am admittedly a weirdo, is two to three bites of everything on the menu.

Paul Freedman, a historian at Yale and the author of Ten Restaurants That Changed America, told me that centuries ago, Chinese emperors would occasionally have banquets in which a couple hundred dishes would be served, and that at one abundant royal feast in 15th-century England, dozens of species of fish were served. Those preposterous spreads are basically my dream, but because I cannot live like a monarch of old, I will settle for sharing a far more modest number of dishes with my dining companions. (An important clarification: I am not arguing in favor of what restaurants call small plates, which are invariably expensive and insubstantial. I want normal-size plates, and I want to share them.)

3) The Washington Post: How not to talk with Africa about climate change

The president of Nigeria shares a critical perspective for global climate discussions.

The Western countries are unable to take politically difficult decisions that hurt domestically. Instead, they move the problem offshore, essentially dictating that the developing world must swallow the pill too bitter for their own voters’ palates. Africa didn’t cause the mess, yet we pay the price. At this year’s COP, that should be the starting point for all negotiations.

2) The New York Times Magazine: Could I Survive the ‘Quietest Place on Earth’?

Caity Weaver is one of my favorite writers and I’m glad she checked this out so I don’t have to.

In a leafy Minneapolis neighborhood under a thick cloak of ivy stands a modest concrete building. Contained within the building is silence exceeding the bounds of human perception. This hush is preserved in a small room, expensively engineered to be echoless. Certain people find the promise of such quiet irresistible; it entices them, like a soundless siren call, to visit the building at great personal cost. The room of containment, technically an “anechoic chamber,” is the quietest place on the planet — according to some. According to others, it’s more like the second-quietest. It is quieter than any place most people will ever go, unless they make a point of going to multiple anechoic chambers over the course of a lifetime.

What happens to people inside the windowless steel room is the subject of wild and terrible speculation. Public fascination with the room exploded 10 years ago, with an article on The Daily Mail’s website. “The Longest Anyone Can Bear Earth’s Quietest Place is 45 Minutes,” The Mail declared. The story left readers to extrapolate their own conclusions about why this was so from the short, haunting observations of the room’s soft-spoken proprietor, Steven J. Orfield, of Orfield Laboratories.

1) The Washington Post: Cutting-edge tech made this tiny country a major exporter of food

An article on the incredible agricultural technology in Netherlands was my favorite in 2017 and I just can’t help but be fascinated again.

The rallying cry in the Netherlands started two decades ago, as concern mounted about its ability to feed its 17 million people: Produce twice as much food using half as many resources.

The country, which is a bit bigger than Maryland, not only accomplished this feat but also has become the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural products by value behind the United States. Perhaps even more significant in the face of a warming planet: It is among the largest exporters of agricultural and food technology. The Dutch have pioneered cell-cultured meat, vertical farming, seed technology and robotics in milking and harvesting — spearheading innovations that focus on decreased water usage as well as reduced carbon and methane emissions.

Hello again and happy New Year!

My blog updates are now quite sparse since I have new responsibilities, but I’d like to at least continue one tradition: starting a new year with some stories that stuck with me from the old year.

Thank you for stopping by and you can read previous editions here: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

5) The Wall Street Journal: Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show

A maddening investigation showing the harmful impacts of social media design and Facebook’s refusal to address them — all based on internal research.

For the past three years, Facebook has been conducting studies into how its photo-sharing app affects its millions of young users. Repeatedly, the company’s researchers found that Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls.

“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues.

“Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another slide. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one presentation showed.

4) The New York Times: Peter Warner, 90, Seafarer Who Discovered Shipwrecked Boys, Dies

I started reading more obituaries in 2021 and this fellow sounds like quite a character. I also wasn’t familiar with the (incredibly positive!) true story that inspired Lord of the Flies.

Peter Raymond Warner was born on Feb. 22, 1931, in Melbourne, Australia, to Arthur George Warner and Ethel (Wakefield) Warner. Arthur Warner was one of the country’s wealthiest men, having built a manufacturing and media empire, and he expected his son to follow him in the family business.

But Peter was uninterested; he preferred boxing and sailing, and at 17 he ran away from home to join a ship’s crew. When he returned a year later, his father made him go to law school at the University of Melbourne.

He lasted six weeks. He ran away again, this time to sail for three years on Swedish and Norwegian ships. Quick with languages, he learned enough Swedish to pass the master mariner’s exam, allowing him to captain even the largest seagoing vessels.

3) The New Yorker: Could the Teen Magazine Rise Again?

An interesting and hopeful read about the future of structured content for teens with a focus on community and the challenge of fighting algorithms that teach kids what’s trending is true.

[…] instead of hearing misinformation from a friend, teens are listening to strangers in California with millions of followers (and perceived credibility) on TikTok. At such a formative age, young people “need some really solid guidance, and the last place they want to get it is their parents,” she said. “Who are they turning to? For my child, it scares the shit out of me who she’s turning to.” During Rubenstein’s Seventeen years, she and the staff “wanted to make sure everything in the magazine was right, that it made sense,” she said. “It went through a really serious vetting process. That is gone. These children do not have access to any vetting, you know? No one’s vetting their TikTok videos.” (See: the nutmeg challenge.)

2) The New York Times: Man Gets 4 Years in $126 Million Printer Toner Fraud

I’m not surprised fraud festered in the printer toner market, which is already known for ludicrous pricing, but this story stuck with me due to the scale of the situation and the puns.

In announcing the arrest of Mr. Michaels and 20 other people accused of being connected to the scheme in 2016, the Huntington Beach Police Department in California called it “Operation Tone It Down.” The authorities said at the time that Mr. Michaels had previously received court warnings about deceptive telemarketing practices.

TonerNews.com, a website devoted to writing about printing supplies, called Mr. Michaels “the California toner pirate godfather” in a post on Sunday. Mr. Michaels’s lawyer scoffed at the moniker.

1) The New York Times: Paris Teenager’s New Gig: Would-Be Queen of Italy. A Nation Shrugs.

This story has everything. Regal altercations, a fencing romance, murder from a yacht, an LA food truck and a thoroughly disinterested Italian public.

While Vittoria’s father in Monte Carlo and mother in Paris were as delighted as her grandparents in Gstaad about her ascension to the top of Italy’s would-be royal family, a rival branch of Savoias were not pleased. Not at all.

“Totally illegitimate,” said Prince Aimone di Savoia Aosta, a cousin and rival claimant, who works as an executive for the Pirelli tire company in Moscow.

And so began the latest chapter in an ongoing dynastic dispute between the pretenders to Italy’s pretend throne. There are bitter feelings, thrown punches, warring noble committees, dukedom politics and as of last month, Vittoria’s ascending social media status.

What there is not is an actual crown to fight over.

Happy New Year!

While 2020 was one of my sparsest years of blog post production, I’m determined to improve in 2021. In that spirit, I’m keeping up my annual tradition of kicking off the year with a selection of my favorite stories from the past year. Thanks for reading and you can check out previous editions here: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

5) U.S. Energy Information Administration: U.S. renewable energy consumption surpasses coal for the first time in over 130 years

I must admit I’m not a regular reader of EIA.gov, but I was encouraged and interested when I saw this news about coal’s continued expiration. It’s certainly worth clicking through to see the charts and full methodology.

In 2019, U.S. annual energy consumption from renewable sources exceeded coal consumption for the first time since before 1885, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Monthly Energy Review. This outcome mainly reflects the continued decline in the amount of coal used for electricity generation over the past decade as well as growth in renewable energy, mostly from wind and solar. Compared with 2018, coal consumption in the United States decreased nearly 15%, and total renewable energy consumption grew by 1%.

Historically, wood was the main source of U.S. energy until the mid-1800s and was the only commercial-scale renewable source of energy in the United States until the first hydropower plants began producing electricity in the 1880s. Coal was used in the early 1800s as fuel for steam-powered boats and trains and making steel, and it was later used to generate electricity in the 1880s. EIA’s earliest energy estimates began in 1635.

4) The New York Times: Cookie Monster Mural Puzzles Artist and Enrages Property Owner

I love a mysterious and whimsical prank so this story pushed all the right buttons for me.

The man said his name was Nate and he wanted Mr. Hawkins, a local artist, to paint an enormous Soviet-style mural of Cookie Monster — the voracious, pastry-loving “Sesame Street” creature — and three Russian words on a commercial building in Peoria, Ill.

When the job was done over Thanksgiving weekend, the man paid in full and Mr. Hawkins, 33, proudly displayed the mural on his Facebook page.

But Mr. Hawkins learned C can also be for Caper.

3) ProPublica: The Black American Amputation Epidemic

A grim and gripping investigation about the racial disparities in amputations.

TWO MAPS EXPLAIN why Fakorede has stayed in the Mississippi Delta. One shows America’s amputations from vascular disease. The second shows the enslaved population before the Civil War; he saw it at a plantation museum and was stunned by how closely they tracked. On his phone, he pulls up the images, showing doctors, or history buffs, or anyone who will listen. “Look familiar?” he asks, toggling between the maps. He watches the realization set in that amputations are a form of racial oppression, dating back to slavery.

2) The New York Times: Who Was ‘El Padrino,’ Godfather to Drug Cartel? Mexico’s Defense Chief, U.S. Says

An incredible story of corruption at the very top of government. It’s a story that continues to unfold and the latest developments are just as wild.

American law enforcement agents were listening in as Mexican cartel members chattered on a wiretap, talking about a powerful, shadowy figure known as El Padrino, or The Godfather.

Agents had been closing in on him for months, suspecting that this central figure in the drug trade was a high-ranking official in the Mexican military.

All of a sudden, one of the people under surveillance told his fellow cartel members that El Padrino happened to be on television at that very moment. The agents quickly checked to see who it was — and found it was the Mexican secretary of defense, Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, according to four American officials involved in the investigation.

1) The New York Times: He Was a Stick, She Was a Leaf; Together They Made History

My absolute favorite story of the year — a well-written and entertaining write-up of an easily-missed scientific breakthrough.

Even if someone could distinguish a leaf insect from its arboreal brethren, there is an almost zero chance the insect would be in the company of its mate, let alone in flagrante delicto. Whereas the winged males flit from tree to tree, the flightless females spend their entire lives high up in the canopy, out of reach and sight, swaying in the breeze as leaves will do. “By chance, one might be blown out of a tree,” Mr. Cumming said.

Here are a few of the articles from the past year that I found especially interesting. I’ve kept up this tradition for a while and you can catch up on previous editions here: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

5) The Guardian: The Aldi effect: how one discount supermarket transformed the way Britain shops

The brothers had always kept a low profile, but the success of their business did not go unnoticed. In December 1971, while preparing to drive home from work, Theo was kidnapped at gunpoint. His abductors were an unlikely pair: a convicted burglar nicknamed Diamond Paul and his lawyer, who had gambling debts. At first they were unsure that the ordinary looking man in the ill-fitting suit was really their target, and demanded to see Theo’s identification documents. The men kept him hidden in a wardrobe in Dusseldorf for 17 days, during which time Theo haggled over his ransom of DM7m (£1.5m at the time), for many years the highest ransom paid in Germany. […] Theo later tried, unsuccessfully, to have the ransom written off as a business expense for tax purposes.

Following the media coverage of his release, he never permitted himself to be photographed again. He travelled to his office in an armoured car by a different route each day, and when checking into a hotel, ascertained the best escape route before even going to his room. But Theo continued to put in long hours at the office, managing even the smallest details in his quest to save money. He wore pencils down to the nubs and turned off the light when entering an office if he judged that his staff could see well enough without it. He once told his board to look at the thickness of the paper used for photocopies. Outside consultants and media interviews were banned, considered unnecessary expenditures or distractions. Asceticism was a virtue in life and business, he believed. “People live more on what they do not eat,” he once said. He wanted Aldi to be a place where “people who don’t hate their money can safely go shopping”.

4) The New York Times: These 4 New Yorkers Are Experts in Living. What Do They Know That We Don’t?

[I]t has been left to them to invent life at their age, without the guideposts or role models of their earlier years. As the British novelist Penelope Lively wrote when she was 80: “Our experience is one unknown to most of humanity, over time. We are the pioneers.”

Having gotten old in an aging culture that still worships youth, they have done the unthinkable: gotten older.

“Did you ever meet anyone like me?” Ms. Moses asked one day at the Hebrew Home. “I’m special. A lot of people know me here. I don’t know them. They go, Hi, Helen.”

3) The Baffler: Consolation Prizes: The right’s bid to short-circuit inequality with cheap gizmos

The tendency for American capitalism to justify itself by the gadgets it is capable of making affordable is an old one. It was the basis of the notorious 1959 “kitchen debate” between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, which took place at an exhibition of American technological wizardry set up in the heart of Moscow. The American pavilion featured the latest in American time-saving household appliances, and the debate almost immediately took on a legendary character in the United States, where we told ourselves that Soviet citizens were entranced by our washing machines and Polaroid cameras. The Americans faked the automated kitchen, of course—there was a guy behind a two-way mirror making the proto-Roomba move and turning on the “automated” dishwasher, Joe Maxwell, one of the industrial designers responsible for the kitchen, told Gizmodo decades later—as part of the mission was to convince the Russians that things being marketed to middle-class Americans, including things that were years away from any sort of commercial viability, were commonplace in homes across the country.

2) The Atlantic: How a Stroke Turned a 63-Year-Old Into a Rap Legend

Dr. Sherman Hershfield woke up one morning and was surprised to find himself behind the wheel of his car. Somewhere between his Beverly Hills apartment and his practice in the San Fernando Valley, the silver-haired physician had blacked out. Somehow he’d avoided a crash, but this wasn’t the first time. “I didn’t know what was going on,” he admitted. […]

Doctors prescribed blood-thinning medication and forced Hershfield to quit driving, but he was still fit to practice medicine. Like many other survivors of stroke, he sometimes stuttered, and his speech became slurred. His personality also seemed to change. He suddenly became obsessed with reading and writing poetry. Soon Hershfield’s friends noticed another unusual side effect: He couldn’t stop speaking in rhyme. He finished everyday sentences with rhyming couplets, such as “Now I have to ride the bus. It’s enough to make me cuss.” And curiously, whenever he rhymed, his speech impediments disappeared.

1) The New York Times Magazine: There Is No Reason to Cross the U.S. by Train. But I Did It Anyway.

Contrary to multiple acquaintances’ declarations that I would encounter “some real weirdos” on the train, the first person I met on board my first sleeper car after boarding the train in Penn Station was a man in a sparkly cardigan and leather pants who breezily identified himself as “a prophet,” which is perhaps the world’s second-oldest profession. And forgive me if I find nothing “weird” about being gainfully employed under a supervisor with the kind of multinational name recognition God has.

As he doubtless expected, the prophet and I were in opposite Viewliner roomettes — private compartments Amtrak describes as “designed for one or two passengers,” although a roomette is both narrower and shorter than a standard porta potty. What Amtrak has managed to cram into this minuscule space is impressive: a fold-down sink, two cushioned benches that convert to a bed, a second premade bed that lowers from the ceiling, a tiny foldout table with an inset of alternating colored squares for checkers or chess, a coat hook, a luggage cubby, a large picture window and the largest variety of not-quite-matching shades of dark blue upholstery fabrics ever assembled. There is even a small metal toilet covered with a puce-colored lid, which invites the brainteaser: Is it more luxurious to have a private toilet inches away from your sleeping area, or a shared toilet elsewhere?

The prophet sat silently in his compartment with the curtains open.