How Poachers Stole Ten Percent of an Entire Tortoise Species

That was just the beginning. The poachers are stopped by the Thai government, the tortoises are saved, and then...they start dying:

The news of the seizure made headlines around the world, but what has not been widely reported until now is that within a few weeks of the rescue nearly half of the tortoises had died, a terrible blow toward efforts to keep this species from extinction. The remaining tortoises, which were destined for the illegal pet trade in Thailand and China before their rescue, are currently in a Thai wildlife rescue center while international organizations see what they can do to help keep the rest alive and healthy, or even eventually return them to Madagascar. Unfortunately, that might not be an easy task.

Given what humans do to each other, I'm not surprised by poaching and animal abuse. It just depresses the hell out of me.

Internet Hoax or Time Traveler?

I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the most fascinating thing I've read all morning:

This is our planet’s bleak future: a second Civil War splinters America into five factions, leaving the new capital based in Omaha. World War III breaks out in 2015, starting with Russia and the U.S. trading nukes and ending with three billion dead. Then, to top it all off, a computer bug delivers where Y2K sputtered, destroying our world as we know it. That is, unless an audacious time traveler successfully traverses the space-time continuum to change the course of future history.

In late 2000, that person signed onto the Internet.

A poster going by the screennames “TimeTravel_0” and “John Titor” on a variety of message boards, beginning with the forum at the Time Travel Institute, claimed he was a soldier sent from 2036, the year the computer virus wiped the world. His mission was to head back to 1975 in order to snatch-and-grab an IBM 5100 computer, which had the necessary equipment to fight the future virus. (His detour to the year 2000 was simply to get a little R&R while visiting his three-year-old self, ignoring every fabric-of-time paradox rule from time-travel stories.) Over the next four months, Titor responded to every question other posters had, describing future events in poetically-phrased ways, always submitted with a general disclaimer that alternate realities doexist, so his reality may not be our own. In between dire urgings to learn first aid and stop eating beef—Mad Cow was a serious threat in his reality—Titor provided a number of technical specs regarding how time travel worked, with overly complex algorithms and grainy, hard-to-make-out photos of his actual machine. (Which, yes, of course, was an automobile: a 1987 Chevy Suburban.) He even showed off his cool futuristic military insignia. On March 24, 2001, Titor offered his final piece of advice (“Bring a gas can with you when the car dies on the side of the road”), signed off forever, and returned home. He was never heard from again.

When you get the chance, read this. It's amazing.

The Best Interview You'll See All Year

Ten years ago, Amanda Berry was kidnapped while taking a ride home from work. She was seventeen. The next year, 14-year-old Gina DeJesus went missing while walking home from school. They were found, along with another woman, by Charles Ramsey and rescued. The whole story is too incredible to summarize, so you'll just have to watch his interview with local newscasters.

"I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man's arms."

Orchids are bizarre

I just discovered this 2009 piece on orchids by Michael Pollan. It's amazing:

The secret of their success? In a word, deception. Though some orchids do offer conventional food rewards to the insects and birds that carry their pollen from plant to plant, roughly a third of orchid species long ago figured out, unconsciously of course, that they can save on the expense of nectar and increase the odds of reproducing by evolving a clever deceit, whether that ruse be visual, aromatic, tactile, or all three at once. Some orchids lure bees with the promise of food by mimicking the appearance of nectar-producing flowers, while others, as in the case of a Dracula orchid, attract gnats by producing an array of nasty scents, from fungus and rotten meat to cat urine and baby diaper. (Believe me, I've sniffed them.) Some orchids promise shelter, deploying floral forms that mimic insect burrows or brood rooms. Others mimic male bees in flight, hoping to incite territorial combat that results in pollination.

But perhaps the most clever deceit of all is offered by those orchids that hold out the promise of sex. And not exactly normal sex. Really weird sex, in fact.

A Civil War Slideshow

These photographs from the American Civil War are harrowing:

If you're in Washington D.C., the Portrait Gallery has a wide collection of Civil War art and photography that's worth checking out.

"Did anyone actually read The Great Gatsby?"

The Great Gatsby is a biting indictment of wealth, social climbing, and the American Dream. Naturally, as Zachary Seward points out for Quartz, no one gets it:

Yet so many people seem enchanted enough by the decadence described in Fitzgerald’s book to ignore its fairly obvious message of condemnation. Gatsby parties can be found all over town. They are staples of spring on many Ivy League campuses and a frequent theme of galas in Manhattan. Just the other day, vacation rental startup Airbnb sent out invitations to a “Gatsby-inspired soiree” at a multi-million-dollar home on Long Island, seemingly oblivious to the novel’s undertones.

It’s like throwing a Lolita-themed children’s birthday party.

This misreading, in particular, makes me cringe:

And if there’s one line that neatly, almost overbearingly, conveys the novel’s jaundiced view of the American dream, it’s this one: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”

At Boston Latin School, however, the green light is just good old American ambition.

The origin of the phrase "come out of the closet"

It's a pretty recent metaphor, as far as language goes:

According to George Chauncey's comprehensive history of modern gay culture, Gay New York, the closet metaphor was not used by gay people until the 1960s. Before then, it doesn't appear anywhere "in the records of the gay movement or in the novels, diaries, or letters of gay men and lesbians." "Coming out," however, has long been used in the gay community, but it first meant something different than it does now. "A gay man's coming out originally referred to his being formally presented to the largest collective manifestation of prewar gay society, the enormous drag balls that were patterned on the debutante and masquerade balls of the dominant culture and were regularly held in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Baltimore, and other cities." The phrase "coming out" did not refer to coming out of hiding, but to joining into a society of peers. The phrase was borrowed from the world of debutante balls, where young women "came out" in being officially introduced to society.

Via The Week.