Hayley Campbell

After a dispute between its creators, the Doves Type was left to lie in the Thames. A century later, it has finally resurfaced. This is the story of its rescue.

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The history of London can be found in pieces on its riverbed. The old pipes and fossilised horse bones wash up on the shore, and with them come the lead letters that printed that history in the newspapers.

The letters ended up there mostly out of laziness, building up piece by piece over the years that Fleet Street served as the epicentre of British journalism. A typesetter’s job was time-consuming: A page of newspaper was laid out one character at a time, the pieces were put back in their boxes the same way. When the typesetters crossed Blackfriars Bridge on their way home from work they’d toss a pocketful of type over the side rather than bother.

They’re still there. There are thousands of letters slowly rearranging themselves over the years and moods of the mud, like alphabet soup.

Newspaper type was common.

The Doves Type was not.

Read more at BUZZFEED.

Former British champion Nick Blackwell has quit boxing after a heavy loss. But fighters often don’t know how to quit. Sometimes, they just can’t.

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When Ronda Rousey lost her undefeated record to Holly Holm she contemplated suicide while slumped in the corner of her hospital room.

“I was like, ‘What am I any more if I’m not this?” she told Ellen DeGeneres three months later. “I was literally sitting there and thinking about killing myself and that exact second I’m like, ‘I’m nothing’, ‘What do I do any more?’, and ‘No one gives a shit about me any more without this.’”

The darkness of defeat is not so much about what happened as it is about the inability to imagine what comes next. If your loss was so devastating that you can’t see yourself ever winning again, what then? If the fog is so thick that you can’t see through it, you can choke on it.

Read more at BUZZFEED.

Chris Eubank Jr is out to prove he has more than just a name. After years of blood and sweat, it’s a fight he’s starting to win.

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The yellow shorts still have Gary O’Sullivan’s blood on them.

It’s mid-January, exactly a month since 26-year-old Chris Eubank Jr defeated the Irish boxer in the final for the WBA middleweight title. O’Sullivan’s corner pulled their fighter out of the ring after the seventh round.

Jr didn’t bleed that night.

In their high-speed back-and-forth, the Sky Sports commentators said that Eubank Jr had “that thing that his father had – you just can’t ignore him”. “There’s substance behind the hype,” they said, “just as it was with his father, of course.” “Shipped off to Vegas at 16,” says another. “His father said, ‘If you wanna do this — go and prove it.’”

His father, his father, his father.

As the victorious Eubank Jr posed in the middle of the ring – flexing his sweaty biceps, holding his gloves aloft, staring down the cameras with a snarl – his father ducked through the ropes. He planted his feet wide and spread the union jack behind his son as the flashes popped below, hiding himself. In the papers the next day, at the top corners of every photograph, you could just make out the fingers of the old boxer curled around the top.

Read more at BUZZFEED.

Fighting isn’t historically a sport for life’s winners. Pick a boxing story at random and it’ll start with someone with nothing to lose but something to prove. It’s a cliché, but clichés have their basis in truth; the married guy cheats on his wife because he’s bored, he’ll meet you in the corners of French restaurants just like the clichés go, nothing in the world is new. And sure as hearts break and he’ll never leave her, the boxing cliché starts badly and ends worse: in poverty, in lonely death, in pathetic attempts to drag a failing career back through the ropes in unheard-of towns for less money than anyone’s worth, in shaky middle-aged proclamations on breakfast TV about how it’s time for the comeback the fans have been waiting for. It’s why fighting makes for great movies and bad lives, it has all the tools to tear you apart: failure and success, blood and grit, fatal injury to body and soul. Redemption, maybe. This is another one of those stories, but you probably haven’t heard it unless you toured a cemetery in North London and saw the statue of the dog on the grave.

Read more at VICE.

Inside the big white tents in the gardens of the Honourable Artillery Company with the people who cared for the 52 victims.

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Carla Valentine wasn’t in London when the explosions happened, but she can tell you exactly what she was doing at the time. She was in a postmortem room in Liverpool, hosing down the recently dead. She was cleaning autopsy tools and listening to the radio as news reports changed by the minute: It was a collision between two trains, it was a power surge. By 11:10am it was confirmed as a coordinated terror attack and police commissioner Sir Ian Blair was appealing for calm. The underground shut down. The buses stopped running. Our mobile phones stopped working.

Twenty-four hours after the first explosion took place, a temporary mortuary was ready to receive the 52 victims. As giant white tents were unrolled in the gardens of the Honourable Artillery Company on City Road, hospitals across London readied 1,200 beds and waited.

Read more at BUZZFEED.

There are so many options, and so much booze.

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We don’t like to think about the practicalities of death. And yet, they are unavoidable. I know that after I’ve finished slowly killing myself with beer and hummus, someone is going to have to deal with my dead body.
They’ll probably like me much better if I come up with some vague plan before I go. So I decided to spend a weekend in the perfect place to do that: Britain’s leading event for the funeral industry, an hour away from London by train.

It’s called the Ideal Death Show.

Read more at BUZZFEED.

Caitlin Doughty talks DIY funerals, water cremation, and how to die on the internet.

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If you’re the kind of person whose late-night internet search history would sound bad if read aloud at a tribunal, you probably found Caitlin Doughty’s YouTube series Ask a Mortician by accident.

Whether you want to know if you can compost a dead body (yes), if you can send your friend off in a Viking funeral (illegal but fun), or if caskets explode from a build-up of putrefaction gas (oh, sure), you can just send your questions to Caitlin and she’ll answer them straight up, no bullshit.

I wanted to know about dying and the internet, DIY funerals, and how we do death differently now that we’re in the future.

Read more at BUZZFEED.

No family gathers as completely as they do when someone dies, but by then they’re no longer complete.

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On the train up to the double funeral of my dead grandparents, who died five days apart after 60-odd years of marriage, I turned 29. In the clichéd, melodramatic way of people in their late twenties, I had already been thinking about death and dying – living in what I thought was my own haggard and practically liquified corpse of a 28-year-old body – when everybody went and spoiled my self-obsessed wallow by actually dying.

Here’s something I learned about those heartwarming stories about the old couples married for a million years who then die within days of each other: It’s not a broken heart, it’s pneumonia. If The Notebook had some pneumonia in it, maybe I’d retract my earlier opinion that it was a shitty film and Jim Rockford deserved better.

The family dog died in January. The cat died in February. Somewhere in there a five-year relationship finally died, although it had been fading for a year, probably two. A month later my grandma and grandpa died in hospital beds, in separate wards, having passed out on their bedroom floor wearing scarves to keep them warm inside their already overheated house.

Read more at BUZZFEED.

“What I discovered was that getting help didn’t make me less creative.”

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When his second novel, Horns, was published in 2010, Joe Hill went on tour just like any successful author with a new novel would.

He did in-store readings wearing a pair of red plastic horns. His fans loved the goofiness of it, the uncool and relatable guy who just happened to write all those books they liked.

After the Horns events Hill would go back to his hotel room and tear the place apart looking for fibre optic cameras because he was convinced he was being spied on.

He did it in every room he stayed in.

Read more at BUZZFEED.

After a few months, you start to agree that maybe there is a stage of contemplation more in-depth and enlightening than standing in front of an open fridge at 5am eating cold pizza.

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In an interview with a biographer, Donald Trump was asked to reflect on the meaning of life. He said, “No, I don’t want to think about it. I don’t like to analyse myself because I might not like what I see.” Therapists should buy billboards, they should print T-shirts, they should hire planes to scrawl his words in the sky, because no one has ever given a more convincing argument in favour of therapy than Donald Trump avoiding himself. If you’re a person who isn’t strong enough to look in a mirror, you’re probably the one who needs to the most. What if you’re like Donald Trump?

I never thought about therapy. I don’t like to talk about feelings, so if there’s an episode of Seinfeld that sums up my thoughts on a situation I will tell you it’s like that episode of Seinfeld as a shorthand; that show has most things covered. But the thing about not talking about emotions is that stuff goes unsaid, whether it’s how you feel about a person, a place, a situation, or what you want to be. You become a pliable thing controlled by the rips and tides of other people’s feelings because you never say what yours are, so no one thinks they’re hurting you. You end up treading water because it’s fine as long as it’s fine, and then one day it’s not. And then what.

Read more at BUZZFEED.

We spoke to the author about his new novel, Here I Am, and becoming an internet joke.

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It’s 10 years since Jonathan Safran Foer’s last novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. In that time, he has won awards, taken up teaching, written a TV show for HBO, shelved a TV show for HBO, and started several books he didn’t finish. “I just didn’t have anything I wanted to write,“ he says. “Not badly enough or honestly enough to sustain a project over the amount of time it would take.” Here I Am is the book that made it through. It reads like an emotional audit, a postmortem on a divorce. Mostly it reads like a man looking inward.

Read more at BUZZFEED. 

British philosopher Jeremy Bentham was publicly dissected, then had his skeleton dressed in his own clothes and his mummified head screwed to his shoulders. Because why not.

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Q. DO YOU WANT TO BE BURIED OR CREMATED?

The question of what you want done with your dead body has more tick-box options than ever before. You can be composted with 30 others in a three-storey science fiction construction, donated whole to science or in live pieces to other people, liquified until you are just brown juice and weird ash, compressed into a diamond, or shot into space – the future of death is getting more complicated, just like everything else.

But in the early 19th century the choice was: buried. Cremation was illegal at the time – it didn’t become a thing people did legally until just prior to the start of the 20th century – so your choice was made for you. Unless you were British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who had a whole other plan entirely.

Read more at BUZZFEED.

There are 20,000 human skeletons packed neatly into boxes on a roundabout in London.

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Your skeleton is remodelling.

Everything that happens to you – if it happens for long enough – is carved into your bones. The lightness of vertebrae, the fusing of a neck, the long-ago snap of a femur – you can build a history of a person through the pieces left behind.

You can tell if a person lived a life of hardship or ease by their skeleton, and you can tell if they were rich or poor by where you found it. You can tell how old they were, if they liked to smoke a pipe.

You can tell if they were stressed.

You can tell what kind of shoes they liked to wear.

Get enough of these skeletons together in one place and you can tell the history of a whole city.

Read more at BUZZFEED.

When a poor Irish widow died in 1869 at the age of 28, she probably never imagined what would happen to her flesh.

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No one knows much about Mary Lynch apart from the fact that her thighs are wrapped around three medical books in The College of Physicians of Philadelphia’s Historical Medical Library.

They’re not the only books to be bound in human skin. We know of several notable examples: a French Bible, various anatomy texts bound with dissected cadavers, and a death-bed confession of a highwayman robber called James Allen who requested that the book be given to a man he once tried and failed to rob (he admired the guy’s bravery).
There are more. Some, like a copy of Marquis de Sade’s Justine et Juliette, are reportedly bound in breasts.

Beth Lander, librarian at the Historical Medical Library, told BuzzFeed: “The practice of using human skin to bind books seems to have occurred mostly in the 19th century. However, there are instances of books purported to have been bound in human skin dating back to the 15th century.”

There is no master list of anthropodermic books (meaning bound in human skin), so there’s no telling how many exist today. The Historical Medical Library has five, the largest confirmed collection in the United States. But why would they exist at all?

Read more at BUZZFEED.

“Everyone here is kind of depressed. I’m just lucky enough to be able to talk to people and get on stage and masturbate about it.”

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Kim Noble is both clinically depressed and currently sans therapist, which, as situations go, is not a great one.

His most recent therapist quit the profession entirely – broke up with him during the session, and then, as far as Kim can tell, disappeared off the planet. Vanished. His therapist before that died. He collapses in peals of laughter in a booth in the bar of the Soho Theatre, where his show You’re Not Alone is back for a five-week run. And so do I. You can’t help it. Kim’s laugh is infectious.

She died.

“I have a thing about endings too,” he said, “which made that last one all the more difficult.”

Read more at BUZZFEED.

He looks better than he smells, but that’s severed heads for you. 

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It’s not every day a guy slides into your DMs and invites you to meet a severed head.

Wednesday, however, was one of those days.

Months back, I wrote about Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher who willed his body to be publicly dissected by his friends. Decades before he died, he laid out plans for his skeleton to be fully articulated and dressed in his own clothes, with his mummified head screwed to his shoulders, so that he could still be wheeled out for meetings or parties or whatever after his death. He was so into this plan that carried his future glass eyeballs around in his pocket.

Read more at BUZZFEED.

You can base a more correct history of a species on the things they wanted to say but didn’t.

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There’s a horror story that no one has written yet that starts with the draft tweets of every human on earth being published by mistake. A glitch at Twitter HQ – caused by a lukewarm instant coffee in a polystyrene cup, knocked carelessly by an employee’s butt into a mainframe or whatever – pours billions of half-formed ideas into millions of Twitter timelines while we sleep. All the false starts, the half-sentences formed before you lost your train of thought or will to live, or stuffed your phone in your pocket; all the ones you wrote in the work toilet but didn’t send in case people noticed that you weren’t at your desk and were thus clearly shitting and tweeting at the same time; all the ones you typed at 3am in the dark, the timestamp universally agreed to be a hallmark of our most regrettable tweets; all the fully formed tweets that said what you really wanted to say – the ones where your thumb hovered over the Publish button but never pushed it; the ones where you brought Nazis into an argument unrelated to Hitler.

And in the story, we human beings wake up in our various time zones to see our real idiot selves smeared across the internet by our own undeniably bitter, angry hands. New Zealand is the first to realise that most people on earth are terrible, followed by Australia, Russia, Britain and, finally, America.

Read more at the New Statesman

Pre-Rocky, pre-fame, post-desperation: It’s The Party at Kitty & Stud’s and it’s quite a thing.

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There’s something to be said for the terrible jobs that one day fall off the bottom of our CV when we have to add in the better stuff on top.

They are our national service, the character-building shitheap of experiences you would, in hindsight, not do without. We’ve flipped burgers in dive restaurants, washed warm faeces off pub toilet walls, been the tethered goat barmaid in an S&M club for the over-fifties; we’ve babysat. Some of us have written ad copy for nasal sprays.

You have grit now. You’ve been through some stuff. You’re Paul Newman in The Colour of Money, you’re Rambo. Those hours you spent by a whirring silver dishwasher in the basement of a restaurant later shut down for rat infestation count for something.

So, given the desperate track record undoubtedly outlined in the early part of your CV: How much money would it have taken you to do a softcore porn film? Think about it. What’s the absolute minimum you would have accepted? Imagine this offer comes to you when you’ve got a soapy bucket of diluted diarrhoea looped over a Marigold that, if you’re honest, definitely has a hole in it. Is it £100,000? £12,000? Lower? The absolute lowest you would accept.

Is it…$200?

It was for Sylvester Stallone.

Read more at BUZZFEED.

As long as they’re cute enough.

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One of John Waters’ most popular quotes is the one about how if you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.

You know the one.

Since this is the best dating tip on the internet we figured he’d have others.

(What the hell else are you supposed to ask our most beloved filth elder — who is currently in London for a 50-year career retrospective at the BFI, who directed classics like Pink Flamingos, who filmed the infamous scene where Divine eats dog shit — other than some totally inane questions entirely unrelated to the movies he’s here to promote? Let’s bring everyone down to our level and talk about boys and the internet.)

I went to meet him down at the BFI.

Read more at BUZZFEED.

The former heavyweight champion spends his days tweeting about fights, potatoes, and Muhammad Ali.

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George Foreman jogs on to the stage dressed in a burgundy robe. He greets infomercial queen Nancy Nelson, throws a couple of joke punches, and takes off the robe to reveal an apron. The studio audience screams. We’re gonna be cooking some burgers today on the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine. We’re going to be measuring all the grease that isn’t going into our bodies and we’re going to collectively go “ooooooh”.

“When you do something and sign your name, that means you really believe in something, so this machine was designed with George Foreman and the American people in mind!” says George Foreman, third-personally. The lights bounce off his perfectly smooth dome. There is no bigger grin in the world than George Foreman’s at this moment, standing in front of an infomercial kitchen in the Year of our Lord 1996.

Read more at BUZZFEED.

Or, How I ended up in my pyjamas at 3pm awaiting the delivery of two frozen squirrels.

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"I don’t want to cause a weird fight or anything,” I said, “But someone’s shoved a frozen pizza on top of my rook. Obviously I can’t bring this up without alerting the house to the presence of dead rook in the freezer.”

“Sweetums. Treacle,” came the reply. “You cannot put a dead rook in the freezer and then not tell people it’s there.”

Prior to this conversation, I had rearranged the frozen pizzas, the ancient half-price steaks and the ice cubes with the breadcrumb dusting, and I had placed in the freezer the following items: two pigeons and one rook (dead). They nestled there wrapped in foil and orange Sainsbury’s bags next to the peas, and would stay there until the day when I would have time to stuff them with woodwool and cotton balls and replace their dead eyes with beads, because shitty amateur taxidermists like me do not actually purchase proper glass eyes. We cut corners. We get tired and rush the bit at the end. We make tiny monsters that we keep in our bedrooms that ensure we will never get laid again.

Read more at the NEW STATESMAN.