A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
Mary Carleton, Counterfeit Princess
In early June of 1663, Mary Carleton was tried for bigamy in London’s Old Bailey. A figure of considerable public fascination, Mary had been “viewed” by an estimated five hundred visitors while in prison awaiting trial.1 Officially, she stood accused of having wed John Carleton in London while already married to John Steadman, a shoemaker, in Canterbury. (Over the course of the trial, the possible existence of a third husband, a Dover surgeon named Day, emerged.) Unofficially, she stood accused in the court of public opinion of a far more interesting cheat: impersonating a fabulously wealthy foreigner in order to lure the hapless Carleton — a lawyer’s clerk, eighteen years old — into marriage. Though Mary herself modestly claimed noble rather than royal birth, she became widely known as the German Princess.
The facts of Mary Carleton’s life are difficult to pin down.2 Its best-recorded episodes — her bigamous marriage and subsequent trial — are the subject of numerous conflicting accounts, while long stretches of her earlier and later life are poorly documented. She was born Mary Moders in Canterbury, probably in 1642. Her father was a musician, maybe a fiddler. She married Steadman, the shoemaker, in the mid-1650s and Day, the surgeon, several years after that. In 1663, she married Carleton, stood trial for bigamy, and was acquitted — Carleton’s side having been able to produce only a single, ineffectual witness. (Steadman reportedly would have testified, but wanted money for travel expenses.) Several years later, in 1671, she was sent to Jamaica for purloining a tankard. She returned to England illegally and resumed thieving; in 1673, she was tried, convicted, and hanged.
How England Misplaced Its First King
Æthelstan was the grandson of perhaps the most famous king of the early medieval period, Alfred the Great. Alfred was known for his battles with the Vikings, and for decisively defeating the Danes in the 9th Century. Through his tussles with the Danes, he was able to establish influence in parts of the former rival kingdom of Mercia, which stretched from the midlands to the east of England, expanding his kingdom up from Wessex, in the south of England.
“It’s Alfred’s son, Edward, Æthelstan’s father, who conquered East Anglia from the Danes,” says Sarah Foot, dean of Christ Church College and former regius professor of ecclesiastical history at the University of Oxford. Edward the Elder, as he was known, used a new form of warfare that created fortress towns to take and hold large swathes of enemy territory. “And Edward died as king all the way up to the River Humber [in East Yorkshire].” By then he had earned the title he inherited from Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons. Edward’s deeds set the stage for his son.
Æthelstan, born around the year 894AD, was next in this line of kings and continued the family tradition of expanding the kingdom.
Speaking Apartment
A Glossary of Basic Apartment Speak
Cozy: So small you will keep your clothes in a plastic box under the bed.
As is: A complete wreck. If you are lucky, the landlord will have removed the dead body.
Charming: A view of a scraggly tree, crooked floors, wobbly stairs.
Modern: Harvest-gold or avocado appliances from the sixties posing as retro chic.
Built-ins: Previous tenants added weird cabinets and shelves you can never remove.
Needs TLC: So did John Wayne Gacy.
OpenAI Lets Users Buy Stuff Directly Through ChatGPT
The San Francisco-based AI company said Monday that U.S.-based ChatGPT users will be able to buy goods from online marketplace Etsy’s domestic sellers, as well as some merchants on Shopify’s e-commerce platform. The service, called Instant Checkout, currently only supports single-item purchases.
OpenAI also unveiled an open-source technical standard for merchants to build integrations with ChatGPT, called Agentic Commerce Protocol, which the company hopes will draw more merchants onto its chatbot platform. The protocol allows merchants to make their products shoppable inside ChatGPT.
Amazon and Walmart, the nation’s two largest digital retailers, aren’t currently using the protocol, OpenAI said.
Meet the Arc Spacecraft: It Aims to Deliver Cargo Anywhere in the World in an Hour
A relatively new spacecraft company, Inversion, revealed its new “on demand” delivery vehicle Wednesday evening during a splashy ceremony at its factory in Los Angeles.
The company said it is building the Arc spacecraft to provide a capability to the US military to deliver as much as 500 pounds (225 kg) of supplies almost anywhere in the world, almost instantaneously.
“The nominal mission for us is pre-positioning Arcs on orbit, and having them stay up there for up to five years, able to be called upon and then autonomously go and land wherever and whenever they’re needed, being able to bring their cargo or effects to the desired location in under an hour,” said Justin Fiaschetti, co-founder and chief executive of Inversion, in an interview with Ars before the event.
The Off-Grid Gold Mine Leading the Way to 100% Wind and Solar Power
The Bellevue Gold mine in Western Australia, a major underground operation that extracts high-grade ore, is proving that it’s already possible for such facilities to run entirely on wind and solar power, according to the company that owns and manages it.
The remote mine is phasing down its use of thermal plants — specifically gas and diesel generators — after installing four wind turbines with a combined generating capacity of 24MW. That’s in addition to 27MW of on-site solar and 15MW/29MWh of battery storage.
Since the wind turbines were commissioned in June 2025, Bellevue Gold regularly operates on more than 90% renewables over 24-hour periods, says chairman Kevin Tomlinson. On some days, the diesel and gas plants have been completely switched off, with wind and solar — backed by batteries — covering 100% of demand.