John le Carré, Dead at 89, Defined the Modern Spy Novel

Another obituary.

In 1947, a 16-year-old David Cornwell left the British boarding school system where he’d spent many unhappy years and ended up in Switzerland, where he studied German at the University of Bern—and caught the attention of British intelligence. As the restless child of an estranged mother and a con-man father, and a precocious student of modern languages to boot, the young wayfarer was a natural recruitment target for the security services, which scooped him up in the late 1940s to be “a teenaged errand boy of British Intelligence,” as he put it in his 2016 memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel. Over the next 15 years, those little errands would continue and grow, furnishing Cornwell with the material that would fill the whopping 25 spy novels he wrote under the pen name John le Carré.

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Ted Scheinman — Smithsonian

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How the Trampoline Came to Be

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That connection, along with Nissen’s ceaseless promotional activities, propelled trampolining into the American consciousness during the post-war years and throughout the space era. Nissen jumped at the chance to awaken the world to its exercise benefits, which include cardio, strength, balance and range of motion, and he came up with plenty of photo ops for his invention, including jumping on one on the flattened top of a pyramid in Egypt and bouncing with a kangaroo in Central Park.

“The kangaroo was nasty,” Dian says. “It kept trying to kick my father. He would get close to it for the photos but then jump away quickly so he wouldn’t get hurt.”

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David Kindy — Smithsonian

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The Surprisingly Intolerant History of Milk

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But even with these deep cultural connections, milk held a peculiar status among early civilizations. The Greeks castigated barbarians for their gluttonous desire for dairy, and in Rome, milk was widely regarded as low-status food because it was something only farmers drank. Northern Europeans would earn similar ridicule for their love of reindeer milk, and Japanese Buddhists later rebuked Europeans as “butter stinkers.”

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Daniel Fernandez — Smithsonian

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How Mastiffs Became the World’s Top Dogs

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This is an interesting article about the mastiff. Apparently, they took an evolutionary shortcut to get adapted to the Tibetan plateau. Interesting.

As recent as 24,000 years ago the mastiffs of the Tibetan highlands bred with grey wolves, animals that were already well adapted to that demanding environment. The implications of the study, Wang says, might surprise Darwin, because it shows that survival of the fittest sometimes means borrowing a gene or two from another species.

The complete article

Emily Underwood – Smithsonian

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