Happy 300th birthday to the city of Natchez, Mississippi! To celebrate, Mississippi Development Authority executive director Glenn McCullough Jr. noted on Twitter that Natchez had the most millionaires per capita of an U.S. city before the Civil War. That’s a lot of millionaires—where do you think they got all their money?
Disclosure: From roughly 2000 through 2008, half or more of my household income came from my wife’s direct employment with Bill or Hillary Clinton. Toward the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, she worked at the White House Domestic Policy Council; after that, she became a legislative aide working on health policy in the newly opened office of Hillary Clinton in the Senate; finally she worked for the Clinton Foundation, establishing its HIV/AIDS program in China.
On January 28, 1986, America watched on television as the space shuttle Challenger—carrying six astronauts and one schoolteacher—disappeared in a twisting cloud of smoke, nine miles above the launch pad it had just left. To a stunned nation, it appeared that seven lives had instantly been lost.
In December 1950, Woody Guthrie signed his name to the lease of a new apartment in Brooklyn. Even now, over half a century later, that uninspiring document prompts a double-take.
Among the revelations in Dark Money, Jane Mayer’s expansive new book on the Koch brothers and the rise of contemporary American conservatism, is that Fred Koch, the billionaire duo’s father, once helped build an oil refinery in Nazi Germany. The New York Times broke that item last week, but left out a key detail from the book: allied forces bombed the refinery during World War II.
Today, Roanoke, Va., mayor David Bowers acknowledged similarities between banning assistance to Syrian refugees based on their country of origin and the use of Japanese internment camps during World War II.
At the summer Consumer Electronics Show in 1991, Sony announced that it was jumping into the video game hardware market for the first time, partnering with Nintendo to release something called a “PlayStation.” The device never made it to market—for reasons I’ll explain shortly—but someone on reddit may have come across a very rare prototype.
On the morning of the Father of the Year Awards Luncheon, I ran out of bread enough to even make cinnamon toast for my children, and I ended up serving them some Chocolate Chex and the last apple in the house. Not that I was going there to win Father of the Year. I was merely going to watch.
A two-foot-wide, six-foot-deep sinkhole appeared on the surface of Dublin's Dame Street this week, stopping traffic on the busy thoroughfare. The reason, according to one historian, may have to do with 200-year-old politicians who plunged incredible depths in a quest to get their antique rocks off.
"O, Tom! Such a gas has Davy discovered... O, Tom! I have had some; it made me laugh and tingle in every toe and finger-tip. Davy has actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name. O, Tom! I am going for more this evening; it makes one strong and so happy, so gloriously happy! O, excellent air-bag!"
