Yes, it's everyone's favorite time of the year -- time for the annual Ingram Christmas Letter! I know that you're as excited as I am 🙂 I've been doing this now for about a quarter of a century, I think. And yes, I know sometimes it feels like longer than that (imagine how I feel). I've been pulling together all the previous versions and publishing them as blog posts at 

And then he threw a party to eat it all.

Dubbed the “Child Assassin” by Swedish media, the unnamed minor was reportedly paid 250,000 Swedish crowns ($27,000) to travel to the city of Malmö and kill a certain person, but ended up shooting a 21-year-old man who was hanging out with some friends. It is unclear who ordered the killing and why, but authorities have reasons to believe that this wasn’t the 12-year-old’s first hit job.

On 25 April 1982, two teenage boys in the small town of Borden, Saskatchewan, Canada began playing the relatively new fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Today, 43 years later and more than 2,000 km away, Robert Wardhaugh's D&D campaign is still going strong. The Dungeon Master, who is today also a history professor at the University of Western Ontario, is the proud holder of the GWR title for the longest running D&D campaign (homebrew).

A special Christmas edition of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter

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 dark peak.Around midnight, the man said, his girlfriend was struck by sudden exhaustion and could not continue. He said the two made a contentious, if not uncommon, decision: He would leave her behind and continue alone to find help.Hours later, he was out of harm’s way, and the woman was dead.

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 June 2018. And now they have done it again by matching five main numbers and the bonus ball in the Lotto draw on 26 November.

Blaming social media for teen mental health issues obscures the real issues, and solutions like Australia's could make things worse

The Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff drafted blueprint could see the U.S. commit to roughly 20% of some reconstruction costs over 10 years.

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 rodent. The rat sprang back to life, and Cameron adopted “Beanie” as his pet. One can understand why a director like Cameron would go to extremes to protect his film’s reputation.

Australia recently became the first country in the world to ban kids under 16 from using social media — the result of a law that was passed last year but didn't take effect until this month — but it i...

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 an ideal stomach stimulant, an analgesic on the air passages and vocal chords, appetite suppressant, anti-depressant, and treatment against anemia. In 1884, pharmacist John S Pemberton launched Pemberton’s French Coca Wine in Atlanta, Georgia.

Blaming social media for teen mental health issues obscures the real issues, and solutions like Australia's could make things worse

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 state’s Green Mountain National Forest as part of a broader survey of moose across New England. Researchers in Vermont published the findings and the striking photographs in a recent issue of…

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 mountains in the Himalayas. Step by step, they trudged up the razor-toothed ridge, the wind slamming their faces, their crampons clinging precariously to the ice.

Clisson et Eugénie, also known in English as Clisson and Eugénie, is a romantic novella, written by Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon wrote Clisson et Eugénie in 1795, and it is widely acknowledged as being a fictionalised account of the doomed romance of a soldier and his lover, which paralleled Bonaparte's own relationship with Eugénie Désirée Clary. Clisson, a heroic revolutionary French soldier, but tired of war, meets and falls for Eugénie at a public bath.

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 farmer, a 79-year-old former shoe salesman called Terry Ball who has made and lost multiple fortunes, has been cheerfully telling me in great detail for several hours about how he was inspired by former Conservative minister Michael Gove to use snails to cheat local councils out of tens of millions of pounds in taxes.

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 went looking for it. A myth formed around the idea that one man and one clever medical trick had preserved a large Jewish population from certain death.

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.