Links for May

Whales, Suicide, Schooling, Tenure, Archaeology, Radicals & Riots

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Now, onto some items of interest from around the internet:

Whale Talk

I was reading my son a Ripley’s Believe It or Not book that contained not one but two accounts of a whaler surviving being swallowed by a sperm whale. One, James Bartley, supposedly spent a day in the whale’s belly before being found, comatose, by his crewmates when they flensed the creature.

Sadly, it appears that the story is bunk. Writer Ben Shattuck at Salon actually spent days searching through logbooks and records in the New Bedford library for any recorded swallowings, fatal or not. While he found several cases of whalers bitten and mangled by sperm whales, there was no single case of anyone getting swallowed.