What does a butcher with a whip have to do with Christmas? A special Christmas edition of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter

They did what now? www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/s...

2025: Web pages vanished. Links broke. Public data disappeared. But the Internet Archive kept the receipts. From investigative reports to video features, these stories show why preserving the web became one of the year’s defining information battles. ➡️ blog.archive.org/2025/12/22/t... 🧵

She froze to death. Is her boyfriend to blame for leaving? A distant webcam captured the moments the couple’s hiking trip started to unravel.The pair, a boyfriend and girlfriend, were nearing the summit of Grossglockner, the tallest mountain in the Austrian Alps, when their lights appeared on its…

They won a £1-million lottery jackpot for the second time One lucky couple has beaten extraordinary odds to win £1m on the National Lottery — for the second time. Richard Davies, 49, and Faye Stevenson-Davies, 43, first scooped a seven-figure jackpot playing the EuroMillions Millionaire Maker in…

We should help teens with social media not ban them from it Blaming social media for teen mental health issues obscures the real issues, and solutions like Australia's could make things worse

HUGE NEWS from the new Epstein files: Records show that Maria Farmer, who worked for Epstein, filed a "child pornography" report to the FBI in 1996. The FBI has never before acknowledged that complaint. The case went nowhere, and mass abuse followed. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/u...

"Beachside luxury resorts. High-speed rail. AI-optimized smart grids. Welcome to 'Project Sunrise,' the Trump admiistration’s pitch to foreign governments and investors to turn Gaza’s rubble into a futuristic coastal destination."

Director James Cameron once did CPR on a drowned rat On The Abyss, a rat used to demonstrate the film’s oxygenated water technology drowned during filming. Faced with the prospect of a dead rat — and losing the production’s “No Animals Were Harmed” certification — Cameron performed CPR on the…

Read this by @mathewingram.com before banning social media for teens. tl;dr: Don't legislate based on Jon Haidt.

The inventor of Coca-Cola tried to market cocaine-infused wine In 1863, Angelo Mariani marketed a patent medicine called Vin Tonique Mariani à la Coca de Perou. Based on Bordeaux wine infused with three varietals of coca leaves in the bottle, le Vin Tonique Mariani was immediately applauded as a…

We should help teens with social media not ban them from it Blaming social media for teen mental health issues obscures the real issues, and solutions like Australia's could make things worse

Video evidence that moths like to drink moose tears Researchers have recorded, for the first time, images of moths drinking a moose’s tears. The intriguing interaction between the nocturnal insects and majestic mammals went down deep in the woods of Vermont, captured by trail cameras set in the…

Octopus eyes

The CIA lost a top-secret nuclear device at the top of the Himalayas The mission demanded the utmost secrecy. A team of American climbers, handpicked by the C.I.A. for their mountaineering skills — and their willingness to keep their mouths shut — were fighting their way up one of the highest…

Napoleon wrote a romantic novel about a former lover

Santa mental gymnastics

He turned office blocks into snail farms as a tax dodge It is a drizzly October afternoon and I am sitting in a rural Lancashire pub drinking pints of Moretti with London’s leading snail farmer and a convicted member of the Naples mafia. We’re discussing the best way to stop a mollusc orgy. The…

He created a fake epidemic that helped save a Polish town It began with a rumour. Years after the war ended, stories started circulating about a Polish doctor who had supposedly saved thousands of Jews from the gas chambers by inventing a false epidemic. Newspapers repeated it. A documentary crew…

The social web is dying. Is that a good thing? It would be hard to argue that social networks are empty, and yet it often seems as though no one is there any more, or at least no one we recognize and/or want to spend time around.

A ragtag group of artists have taken over Bombay Beach

A volcanic eruption may have led to the spread of the Black Death The infamous Black Death — a pandemic that killed as many as one third to one half of Europeans within just a few years — may have been aided in its devastation by an unknown volcanic eruption. That’s the hypothesis presented in…

How playing Santa Claus at Macy’s changed his life Santa Claus was nursing a beer at an uptown dive bar. The neighborhood was gentrifying, and management seemed eager to accommodate—there was scented soap in the bathroom and twenty-two-dollar lobster rolls. But the place couldn’t outrun the…

Mom is travelling the world

Self-driving cars are an unambiguous social good Self-driving cars are so much better than cars driven by human beings that it doesn't seem fair to even compare them. It's like arguing that toasters are better than jamming a piece of bread on a stick and holding it over a fire

Correction time Got more great corrections? Email them to me at [email protected]

Me now

That time Abraham Lincoln had a terrible blind date Abraham Lincoln's terrible blind date, why pork allergies and cat allergies are related and the Peloponnesian War officially ended in 1996

Swearing makes you stronger

I just find it hilarious that his whole cabinet is sloberring praise all over him with ridiculous hyperbole and he is falling asleep while they're doing it. You couldn't write comedy better than this. It's better than VEEP.

A startup says it has a process for turning mercury into gold A fusion energy start-up claims to have solved the millennia-old challenge of how to turn other metals into gold. Chrysopoeia, commonly known as alchemy, has been pursued by civilisations as far back as ancient Egypt. Now San…

Self-driving cars are an unambiguous social good Self-driving cars are so much better than cars driven by human beings that it doesn't seem fair to even compare them. It's like arguing that toasters are better than jamming a piece of bread on a stick and holding it over a fire

Thoreau on enjoying life

Build-A-Bear outperformed Nvidia

Being married

Mick Jagger was a pioneer in streaming video on the internet In the late 1990s, when most people just about had an email address and the smartphone with even one G, never mind five of them, was just a twinkle in a mad inventor’s eye, the internet was still regarded by many as the preserve of the…

"First, Trump targeted illegal immigrants. Then he went after legal immigrants. Now, he’s attacking naturalized Americans, citizens who were born elsewhere...He’s trying to turn white against nonwhite Americans...The U.S. government now openly stands for bigotry." open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa...

Fun trick: Try to get a German person to say the word squirrel If you are bored and there are German-speaking people around, try to get them to say the English word "squirrel." They may try valiantly to do so, but most will be unable -- for the simple reason that the word contains a number of…

Lead poisoning may have led to a generation of serial killers The Pacific Northwest is known for five things: lumber, aircraft, tech, coffee, and crime. What might account for the abrupt rise and equally abrupt fall, between the nineteen-sixties and the turn of the century, of the “golden age” of…

One of my favourite stories of the year If you didn't see the image at the top of this post, it appeared on the photo wires and in many newspapers and other media outlets following the brazen robbery of the Louvre in Paris, where a group of thieves stole jewellery and other artifacts worth about…

words, what do they mean www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

He thought he found gold but it was a 5 billion-year-old meteor In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay. He took it…

A story about Lee Marvin

Duvet

Idiots and demons

I guess books are okay… but nothing beats a good hand-illustrated manuscript, am I right? You know, by a monk who really knows his stuff.

Ah yes, Stephen Miller, née Stephen Standish Miller, a descendant of the Mayflower Standishes

They tried to raise an army and invade an island near Haiti Two Texas men wanted to create an island of sex slaves, Abraham Lincoln was a licensed bartender and 17th century aristocrats used this device to mask their flatulence

It’s a pyramid scheme

Cat for Christmas