June 2025
This newsletter is a collection of things I have found in the last month that I enjoyed, found interesting, or simply wanted to share.
You can follow me more closely at my personal website or if you or someone you know is looking to buy or sell a home, you can point them to my real estate website.
The Bone Collector
Carnivorous ‘Bone Collector’ Caterpillars Wear Corpses as Camouflage
Caterpillars are known for their fuzzy exterior and sometimes weird behavior. Some vibrate aggressively to scare predators; others create their own antifreeze to survive the cold. But a newly identified member of the offbeat caterpillar club might be the weirdest of all. Nicknamed the “bone collector,” it builds a disguise from insect cadavers it scrounges from a spiderweb, covering its body with these spider-meal leftovers—and occasionally engaging in cannibalism.
Five-Thirty-Six
Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive(…yet)
Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice—a spike in airborne lead—marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity this week.
Links
- An Inside Look at the Subway’s Archaic Signal System
- Slime Ball
- What animal is featured on the best wine bottles?
- I’m not your bro, buddy. I’m not your buddy, dude. I’m not your dude, fella. I’m not your fella, pal.
- A Conversation with Jony Ive
- Inside the living rooms of notable New Yorkers.
- 108 billion pixel scan of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring
- How good is “good”?
- Do your fingers wrinkle the same way every time you’re in the water too long?
Sign Off
Do not hesitate to reply to this month’s email to share links, wisdom, or thoughts.
Thanks for reading. Have a great month,
Clay
How kind of you to make your way down here.
A bit about me: I can be interested in anything, for better or worse. I love photography, travel, golf, and baseball. My latest pursuit is learning the guitar. I write a rad newsletter that I publish monthly.