Personal updates

• I have been raising money for the 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation, which is where I’ve volunteered for the last several years. Medicine has not yet evolved to fix a leak like mine long-term. For the field to evolve, we need to fund more research and education. If you’re able, please consider a donation to my campaign fundraising page in support of this cause.

• I wrote a piece about bureaucracy and grief, and how absurd it is to be fighting with banks when you’re also mourning.

Featured art for CAE 63

CAE 63’s featured artist is Maria Rosa S., who in 2019 painted this gorgeous mural Au fil de l’eau, below, in Gatineau, Quebec. I’m in the photo for scale! She’s also painted many other murals around the world. Born in Italy to Polish parents and raised in Quebec, Canada, she left Canada in 2014 to travel and painted her first mural in the Canary Islands — where she got hooked. Each mural she creates is shaped by the environment, blending elements of nature, experience, and human connection. You can find her on Instagram and on her website.

The most interesting things I read this month

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

🌱 Rheum Rhabarbarum: A Social History of Rhubarb. Who knew rhubarb had such a storied history? Not me. Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz walks us through its origins as a Chinese medicinal root traded along the Silk Road (at times worth more than cinnamon!) to its accidental reinvention as a culinary ingredient when European botanists imported the wrong species and discovered that it was delicious. To be a fly on the wall for that discovery! Presently, it remains polarizing not due to taste, but categorization (whether it is a fruit or a vegetable). I always thought a fruit, but apparently not; botanically it is a vegetable. Places Journal

🌤 What We Talk About When We Talk About the Weather. A more whimsical topic, covered by Ella Frances Sanders — who is the wonderful artist who inked my Arthur logo for CAE and Legal Nomads. In this short essay, she notes that we have become apathetic to the wonders of weather, and increasingly disconnected with the natural world. Modern life treats weather as an inconvenience to conquer instead of than an astonishing experience to behold. As a consistent planetary rhythm, weather can be a daily invitation to connect with our physical bodies and feel a profound sense of aliveness, but instead we have lost this ability to do so. Inside, she shares some weather words with us, accompanied by her illustrations. LitHub

🐦 The 100 Greatest Bird Names of All Time. Exactly what it sounds like, and as satisfying as you imagine. Photos included for each bird. From the Chad Firefinch (coming in at 100), the Bananaquit (at 88, though I’m not sure how it’s not higher), and the Hoary Puffleg (a respectable 28), there’s much to enjoy in here. I won’t spoil the #1 bird for you! Bird History

💙 Adorable Tiny Blue Octopus Found Nearly 6,000 Feet Beneath the Galápagos. Researchers from the Field Museum in Chicago have identified a new species of octopus, named Microeledone galapagensis, first discovered during a deep-sea expedition near Darwin Island. About the size of a golf ball and adorable, the bright blue beauty was identified as a new species via micro CT scanning. And yes, there’s video. ScienceDaily.

🧠 Netflix’s The Boroughs Drains Retirees’ Brain Fluid for Immortality: New Science Says That’s How Sleep Cleans the Brain. When Netflix’s new horror series The Boroughs (from the Duffer Brothers and the creators of The Dark Crystal) premiered in May, I did not expect a horror story about CSF. In the show, spider-like creatures siphon off cerebrospinal fluid from sleeping retirees to fuel an immortality serum. This piece talks about how the show is accidentally well-timed: a Penn State study published in Nature Neuroscience just weeks prior to the premiere showed that abdominal contractions during movement drive CSF flow over the brain surface. We know from prior studies shared in CAEs past that during sleep CSF flows to flush neurotoxic waste via the glymphatic system, the brain’s waste-clearance network whose disruption is associated with elevated Alzheimer’s risk. What it doesn’t talk about is how the show’s version of siphoning CSF happens through the mouth, which isn’t accurate biologically. Still, a hit show about CSF is something I didn’t expect this year. Wishing they’d consulted a leak patient before they finished shooting. Tech Times

🍞 I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America (gift link). Atlantic staff writer and all-around entertaining writing Caity Weaver embarked on a characteristically unhinged 13,000-mile quest: many reader poll responses later, she reports back on the single best piece of complimentary bread served at a restaurant in the United States. The crown went to a cranberry-walnut sourdough loaf from Parc, a French bistro in Philadelphia. “If you were going to design a restaurant bread specifically intended to appeal to 21st-century Americans,” Weaver writes, “you might well create this exact foodstuff: It is a very chewy sourdough, with a thick, crispy crust that is chocolate brown in color—practically the same hue as the Cheesecake Factory bread.” Thanks to Bill for sending! The Atlantic

🛒 I Want to Live Like Costco People. James Beard Award-winning food writer Jordan Michelman chronicles his late-in-life conversion to Costco membership, a rite of “middle-life passage”that runs in the family (his dad was a devoted Costco shopper). His transition from a skeptical, design-minded millennial consumer to an enthusiastic Costco member is entertaining to read about, as is his characterization of Costco’s building being “very much in line with casino.” It’s a warm, funny, and entertaining piece. TASTE

🔠 Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise. An interactive piece from Russell Samora that analyzes 200,000 different similes (“as ___ as ___”) pulled from tens of thousands of fiction books. It turns out that most writers, most of the time, reach for exactly the same ones. Samora introduces a taxonomy in his analysis: some nouns are ‘specialists’, tightly coupled to a single adjective, so much so that they’ve become idioms — for example, the cucumber, irreversibly cool. Others are ‘generalists’, versatile enough to serve dozens of different qualities — for example, hell, which has drifted so far from its literal meaning it now functions mainly as an amplifier. A delight of a piece for anyone who thinks about language. The Pudding

😱 Rare Tick-Borne Virus Nearly Wiped Out This NJ Man’s Memory — and His Life. In mid-November 2025, New Jersey attorney Marty Novar went hiking near his Sussex County home, as he had done dozens of times over a decade. Shortly thereafter, he was unintelligible on the phone, unable to finish sentences or remember his partner’s cats. A lumbar puncture at NYU Langone (hopefully with an atraumatic needle — this was where I had my LP) confirmed encephalitis. It took two more weeks of testing, including expensive analysis of his CSF, before infectious disease specialist Dr. Catherine Valentine identified the cause as Powassan virus. Powassan is a rare tick-borne virus spread by the same deer tick that carries Lyme disease, and it can be transmitted in as little as 15 minutes (!) of tick attachment, far faster than Lyme. Around 10% of Powassan encephalitis cases are fatal. First isolated in 1958 from a child with fatal encephalitis in Powassan, Ontario (sigh), the virus can infect neurons, astrocytes, and endothelial cells, and there is currently no approved vaccine or targeted treatment. Between 2004 and 2024, nearly 400 cases were reported in the US and around 25 in Canada. There is no vaccine and no treatment, and roughly half of survivors are left with permanent neurological damage including recurrent headaches, muscle wasting, and memory loss. Novar spent the remainder of 2025 in intensive care, had to relearn to walk, and was forced to give up his legal practice of more than 20 years because he no longer has reliable short-term memory. He has since progressed from a wheelchair to a cane and expects to regain most of his faculties, but his vision remains blurry and his recovery ongoing. “No one’s ever heard of this Powassan virus and so nobody really knows about it,” he says in the piece. “People should know that it exists.” NJ.com

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 Another Record-Breaking Year on Skomer: What It Takes to Count 52,019 Puffins. Back to birds! I confess that I am sharing primarily for the puffin pictures. Skomer Island off the Pembrokeshire coast recorded 52,019 puffins in its 2026 annual count, beating the previous record of 43,626 set in 2025. The Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales explains the meticulous methodology behind counting over 50,000 seabirds divided across seven island sections on a single calm evening, and how the data are important not just to puffins but other seabirds in decline. Welsh Wildlife / The Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales

😡 The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech. Brian Phillips uses Pope Leo XIV’s new AI encyclical, Magnifica Humanita for an additional addendum listing out the way technology currently fails us. One-time passcodes that never arrive, car touchscreens, customer-service chatbots who don’t help, and more. It’s funny, but it’s also zingy; Phillips argues that the industry’s problem is not, as it believes, one of image or messaging. “[T]ech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem.” The problem is that the companies are trying to do these things in the first place. The Ringer

☀️ How the Heck Do Solar Panels Work? Part of an amazing series called “How the Heck”, which includes How the Heck Do Traffic Lights Work?, this piece takes the energy of the sunlight all the way to the plug in our wall. The second half of the piece looks at economics and infrastructure, with how solar module prices have fallen roughly 99% since 1970, but the panels themselves now make up only about 13% of a rooftop system's installed cost in the US. The rest is labor, permitting, and overhead that hasn’t fallen nearly as fast. American systems cost 4x times the equivalent Australian installation as a result. Per Thirty Six (via Web Curios)

🍺 Hanoi’s Humble Beer Glass and the Memory of a Nation. Parni Ray looks at the origins and survival of the Bia hơi cốc, the handmade blue-green glasses used to serve Hanoi’s cheap fresh draft beer, called bia hơi. Starting with its design in 1976 by Bauhaus-trained designer Le Huy Van, Ray takes us to the village workshops of Xôi Trì where it is still hand-blown from recycled glass. What objects survive modernization? And why do some survive but others do not? A really enjoyable piece. Though I lived in Vietnam for several years and frequented bia hơi spots, I couldn’t drink the fresh beer, being celiac. Friends loved it though! The Sunday Long Read

😴 AD109 (Aroxybutynin and Atomoxetine) for Obstructive Sleep Apnea: A Randomized Phase 3 Trial. It’s quite a title, I know. The link is to the journal article itself, which is open access. These are results from the SynAIRgy phase 3 clinical trial, presented at the 2026 ATS International Conference. They show that AD109, a once-nightly oral pill combining aroxybutynin and atomoxetine, significantly reduced breathing interruptions, oxygen deprivation, and overall Obstructive Sleep Apnea severity in a large randomized trial. This makes it the first therapy to target the neuromuscular mechanisms underlying airway collapse during sleep instead of relying on physical interventions (like CPAP machines). Over 40% of patients saw their disease severity category improve on the pill. Promising! American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine

♀️ For Far-Right Extremists, the Rise of a New Enemy: Women. Following the May 18 attack on an Islamic center in San Diego, this piece looks at a dimension of the attack’s ideology that much mainstream coverage seems to have overlooked: the suspects’ 75-page manifesto that contains a deep, explicit misogyny running alongside its antisemitism and Islamophobia. One shooter wrote that women are “the No. 1 enemy” after Jewish people and argued that women are not fully human. Extremism researchers discuss this as a merger of manosphere ideology with white nationalist accelerationism, a move that is rooted in anti-feminist conspiracy frameworks going back to the prior attacks in Norway, Quebec, and Christchurch. The current US administration’s counterterrorism white paper lists out a whole list of ‘domestic threats’ but conveniently ignores far-right, neo-Nazi, or white supremacist violence. For more on the march toward more violent misogony, please see The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet by Helen Lewis (Gift link), where she “perpetual-motion machine of grievance” that fuels “masculinism”, a movement that spans manosphere influencers, certain strands of religious evangelicals, and mainstream political figures. NPR; The Atlantic

🦠 Mast Cell–Driven Remodeling of Pulmonary Immune and Stromal Landscapes in COVID-19. This open-access study from researchers at RUDN University in Moscow and collaborators in Germany examines the role of mast cells in Covid-19 lung pathology. Using spatial phenotyping of lung tissue from 12 Covid-19 patients and 12 pneumonia controls, the team found that a SARS-CoV-2 infection triggered a distinctive mast cell response that promoted fibrosis, altered immune cell interactions, and created pro-fibrotic tissue niches in ways not seen in other respiratory infections. This is but one of many studies showing how Covid impacts the body in unusually harmful ways, and of course I leap on any mast cell findings to learn more about these immune cells that seem to be hell bent on making my life miserable. I do say to friends that if they get Covid, taking the standard MCAS dosing of H1s/H2s 2x daily for the duration of infection and a few weeks thereafter seems like an interesting way to potentially mitigate against mast cells going nuts for those without the condition. Not being a medical professional, this of course remains patient curiosity and not advice! Scientific Reports

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

🙏🏻 Notes on Tanya M. Luhrmann’s How God Becomes Real. Researcher Michael Nielsen’s rich working notes on Luhrmann’s anthropological study of how religious practice generates belief rather than the other way around, where he looks at her central claim that people don’t worship because they believe but come to believe because they worship. It’s a process she calls “real-making”, and Nielsen extending it well beyond religion to look at how any community makes intangible things feel vivid and present. The opposite of being religious isn’t being an atheist, he writes, but rather being apathetic or depressed. In that sense, he calls himself a “deeply religious atheist.” Thoughtful essay in a framework I hadn’t thought much about prior. michaelnotebook.com

🧳 Luggage Tag Switching Scheme Involves Flights from Canada. You may have seen this in the news (a reader in Malaysia sent it to me, so it went global!): an investigation into how drug traffickers switch luggage tags at Canadian airports to redirect bags (potentially (ahem) containing narcotics) onto flights bound for countries where drug smuggling carries the death penalty, implicating innocent travellers who have no idea what’s going on. The piece includes practical advice at the end for travellers on how to protect themselves, like locking bags, using distinctive luggage, photographing your self with your tag before check-in, and checking your bag receipt. CTV News

🍁 Valley Twang: The Accent That Shaped the Ottawa Valley. Hyperlocal to me, but interesting (I thought): a profile of the distinctive Ottawa Valley accent, sometimes called the “Valley twang”. It’s a linguistic relic shaped by 19th-century Irish and Scottish settlers that persists in rural communities around Renfrew and Pembroke. Linguists discuss its characteristic features, its resistance to the broader Canadian vowel shift, and what its gradual erosion (accelerated by media exposure and urban migration) means for regional identity. I didn’t grow up in Ottawa, so I learned a lot reading this. Inside Ottawa Valley

🤧 Japan Is Gripped by Mass Allergies. A 1950s Project Is to Blame. TIL! After wartime deforestation stripped Japan’s mountains bare, a postwar reforestation campaign in the 1950s replanted vast areas with sugi (cedar) and hinoki (cypress), fast-growing species chosen for their construction value. Decades later, as those trees matured and cheaper imported timber undercut domestic demand, the forests were left unmanaged and aging, pumping ever-larger quantities of pollen into the air over densely populated cities. Today an estimated 43% of Japan’s population suffers from hay fever. BBC Future (via Audrey)

🐀 Let’s Talk About Hantavirus. I’ve followed University of Ottawa epidemiologist Raywat Deonandan online for some time, and in this piece he gives us a crash course in Hantavirus away from the all caps hand-wringing of corporate media. While Ebola is now taking up more real estate in the news, this primer about Hantavirus has all the information you need: what it is, why the Andes strain is uniquely concerning (it is the only hantavirus known to spread between humans through close contact), how fatal various strains are, what the vaccine situation looks like, and why the public should not be as alarmed as some headlines suggest. Deonandia

🎗 Radon Gas Increases Risk of Ovarian Cancer, New Study Says. A large-scale study published in JAMA Network Open, drawing on data from over 127,000 postmenopausal women tracked for 31 years through the Women’s Health Initiative, found that those living in high radon zones faced a 31% higher risk of ovarian cancer compared to those in low radon zones. The risk rose to 63% in women who also had a family history of breast cancer, suggesting a possible interaction with BRCA-type genetic susceptibility. The study is the first to provide individual-level evidence linking residential radon exposure to ovarian cancer incidence and mortality, and no doubt more research will follow. Get those radon tests into your homes! It is also a leading cause of lung cancer. Women’s Health Magazine.

🏥 Ebola Outbreak Spirals. And speaking of viruses: coverage of the spreading outbreak of the Bundibugyo Ebola variant in central Africa, which prompted the World Health Organization to declare a public health emergency. Despite the escalating crisis, the United States has severely undermined containment efforts due to its extensive, sudden cuts to its domestic and global health infrastructure, including the dismantling of USAID, massive funding reductions to affected nations, the shuttering of a world-class NIH research lab, and the exit of key public health leadership. So now we’re dealing with a spiralling outbreak, a lack of early detection and frontline surveillance, and a lot of bad information circulating stateside and otherwise. There are many resources about this outbreak, but I wanted to share this piece because of its focus on USAID. For people who know what they’re talking about, please see and , both of whom are on the ‘Stack, but also posting to Threads. The Guardian

🔍 Google Search As You Know It Is Over. All about the big shift from GOOG last week to make AI-generated summaries the default response for the vast majority of searches. This effectively restructures the web’s traffic, and does so in ways that will likely (further) decimate publisher revenue. My celiac cards are primarily found through search; without traffic to my pages, I will need to rethink my business. In what free time and with what brain juice exactly, I don’t know. This change also modifies how we get information, and though some say people won’t ‘fall for it’ overall most users do seem to just take the path of least resistance. TechCrunch

🗳 What’s Wrong With Democracy. A contemplation of Jeffrey Winters’s book The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies, Sam Leith examines growing dissatisfaction with democracy and writes about whether its failures are flaws in the system itself, or actual features of it. In his book, Winters argues that modern democracies are not simply failing to prevent extreme wealth concentration, but rather that they were structured in ways that allow oligarchic power to persist. While democratic politics functions on many ‘horizontal’ issues like war, policy, war, and public spending where disagreement is common, oligarchs tend to unite around the ‘vertical’ issue of protecting wealth. This, of course, makes redistribution of wealth very difficult. The result is a form of ‘participatory inequality’ in which citizens retain democratic rights and political voice, but the ultra-wealthy remains increasingly concentrated in the hands of a tiny group. The Pharmakon

🎰 Are Prediction Markets Good for Anything? Are they??? As a follow-up to last month’s piece on “Outsider Trading”, this essay from former Google prediction market designer and FutureSearch CEO Dan Schwarz looks at betting markets Kalshi and Polymarket to see whether the billions of dollars now wagered monthly on these platforms are actually producing useful public information. He does so across five categories: risk monitoring, news interpretation, policy outcomes, accountability, and novel information. The conclusion: the platforms are overwhelmingly driven by sports betting and entertainment, useful markets have stagnated in volume since late 2024, and AI tools like Claude are increasingly better placed to provide the kind of probabilistic reasoning these markets were supposed to deliver. You don’t say. Asterisk

✝️ Christofascism: How the Religious Right Is Reshaping American Public Health. Lots of ‘isms’ in this CAE, I know. An interactive Guardian investigation examining how a network of Christian nationalist figures, including RFK Jr. and aligned officials in the current administration, are systematically dismantling public health institutions and reorienting federal health policy around religious and ideological frameworks, with documented consequences for vaccine programs, reproductive health, and evidence-based medicine that will only increase with time. The Guardian

🫠 They call it stupid hot for a reason: Heat muddles animal brains. Topical for some of you, given the recent heat wave in the UK. Marta Zaraska looks at a growing body of scientific research that shows how extreme heat waves disrupt animal cognition, memory, and behaviour. Paralleling well-documented human irritability during heatwaves (can confirm), escalating temperatures cause animals to become highly confrontational and pick fights. And we’re talking a lot of different species of animals, from dogs to golden julie fish to chamois (an alpine goat-antelope). At the same time, heat also hampers bees, mice, and guppies from learning. Why? The heat causes cell-damaging inflammation in the mammalian hippocampus, physically shrinking cognitive regions in fish brains, and restricting brain development in insects. The impacts for ecology are widespread in a warming planet. And as we know, extreme heat doesn’t do great things to humans either. Knowable

🔗 Quick links

• Current Rothko, a ‘weather-to-painting’ experiment by Joonas Virtanen that picks the closest Rothko painting for how the weather feels outside your window. Love it!

• This year’s Ocean Census yielded 1,121 potentially new-to-science marine species, including a worm that lives inside its own glass castle, a ghost shark, and a carnivorous sponge.

• The Canada Strong Pass is back for summer 2026! The Government of Canada is offering free admission and a 25% discount on fees for camping and overnight stays from June 19 to September 7, 2026.

• I got my census in May, and filled it out before I realized that Statistics Canada made a series of soundtracks to listen to as I completed it, including Loons and Loonie Toons, Ketchup Chips and Road Trips, and FrancoFunky.

• Ever heard of an Aardwolf? Me neither. It looks like a hyena, acts like an anteater, and survives almost entirely on termites, eating 200,000-300,000 termites per night.

• It took 40 years, but we now have a 3-sided zipper.

Hope you enjoyed these links! See you next month,

-Jodi

A tribute to my stepmother

We lost my stepmom in late April. Like me, in her thirties her life was changed by a medical emergency that left her with long-term consequences. During April, I spent all my ‘uptime’ with her, soaking in everything I could, smothering her in hugs, and asking all the things I knew I was running out of time to ask. While I still did read and compile the links I found most interesting, this is a more bare-bones CAE than usual. There is a lot less editorial with each link, and there’s no separate ‘best of’ and ‘the rest’ sections. You can find some fun quick links at the bottom as always, though.

Here is the short tribute I wrote about her and shared on social media. She was an incredible woman. 🤍

This is a tough post to write, but I wanted to share that Deborah, my wonderful stepmom, passed away this week. She has been in my life from the time I was six and my brother was only two and a half; so many of our formative memories involve her, and the hole she leaves in our lives is enormous.

She had a very tough life medically, something that brought us closer in recent years when my life and mobility also changed dramatically. In the 1980s, she was hospitalized for months and in a coma for over six weeks, which left her with considerable health issues long-term. She rarely mentioned or complained about her complex medical picture, instead living by the adage of looking forward, not backward — something she frequently repeated to my dad, brother, and me.

One of those issues was kidney disease, and as time went on and her kidneys began to fail, she was adamant that she would not want to do dialysis or opt for a transplant should she be eligible. Instead, she wanted to do MAID, medical assistance in dying. Those wishes never faltered, though of course we all hoped her kidneys would hang in a little longer than they did.

She passed quietly and peacefully on Wednesday in her favourite comfy chair, surrounded by the three of us. We each held onto her as she told us she loved us one last time and ebbed away.

Always private and understated, she did not want a funeral, nor a public gathering. Respecting her wishes, we had a quiet graveside burial. As my brother Cale noted when he spoke graveside, she was the cool parent, the person we went to with our embarrassing problems and the one we could joke with about anything.

And she kept her sense of humour until the very end. We had the benefit of time, allowing us to soak up as much as we could with her in the past few weeks. This included a last supper of her choice where she ended the night lifting her arms like she was a zombie, and telling us that she planned to haunt us for eternity.

She knew I’d want to write something longer eventually, and was happy for me to do so. I plan to write at length when I’m able, sharing more about her life and some of the stories our family will never forget.

It was a profound honour to journey with her as she made this choice, and to support her in life and in death. It was also a comfort to see her pass with the dignity she wanted and so deserved.

She is, and will always be, deeply missed. May her memory always be a blessing.

(For those wondering about her beloved cat, Zack, he is now 18 and he too has end-stage kidney disease. As I am not mobile enough to adopt him myself, one of my friends here in Ottawa has adopted him and will give him the best last years of his life that he can have.)

Featured art for CAE 62

CAE 62’s featured artist is Sandra Shugart, who I initially contacted after I saw her beautiful image below from 2021, entitled “Guard Your Heart”. It seemed fitting to use it here, as Sandra created it in when overwhelmed with grief after losing close members of her family. The heart is drawn on ginkgo leaves for longevity, and wrapped in feathers to soften and protect. Sandra wrote in the caption to her piece that flowers represent memories of love and happiness, and the intertwined branches are life’s many struggles. The snakes are her reminder to guard your heart and not let it be hardened with fear and regret. You can find Sandra on Instagram and on her website.

The most interesting things I read this month

• More than the Latest “It Bird”. If you’re not on the woodcock side of the algorithm, this post gives you the background about a bird you didn’t know you needed in your life. Bird History

• The Courage of Vulnerability: Teenage Frida Kahlo’s Moving Letters to Her First Love. This is Maria Popova’s essay about a new book edited by my friend Suzanne, who I got to know when I lived in Oaxaca. The book features the correspondence through the years between a teenage Kahlo and her first love, Alejandro Gómez Arias, including just after the 1925 bus accident that nearly killed her. Popova aptly notes that every love Kahlo lived and every loss she suffered became part of what she had to give to the world through her painting. The Marginalian

• Cocaine pollution in rivers and lakes may disrupt behaviour of salmon, study finds. Cocaine is now one of the most detected illicit drugs in aquatic environments worldwide, and a new study looks at how it impacts salmon via a chemical called benzoylecgonine, which is the main thing left over after our bodies break down cocaine. It found that fish exposed to benzoylecgonine swam up to 1.9x farther per week than unexposed fish and dispersed up to 12.3 kilometres farther across the lake. The Guardian

• Penguin ‘toxicologists’ find PFAS chemicals in remote Patagonia. A new study shows a non-invasive way that animals can help monitor their environment: via little anklets that measure the water’s pollution levels. Eureka

• Artemis II Is Competency Porn and We Are Starving For It. Great read about how many of us were very emotional about Artemis II, and the reasons for that aren’t just the awe and wonder of space but also something we’re fundamentally missing in today’s discourse: competency. Airplane Mode

• Deepfake Nudify Schools: Global Crisis. An analysis by WIRED and Indicator found nearly 90 schools and 600 students around the world impacted by AI-generated deepfake nude image, with technology ensuring that the problem shows no signs of going away. I can’t imagine growing up with the standard teenage drama and angst superimposing this foundation of vulnerability, especially for girls. WIRED

• Trump’s Humiliation in Orbán Defeat Stunner Is Only Just Beginning. For Viktor Orbán’s epic loss in Hungary to have real meaning in America, Democrats need to firmly proclaim themselves part of the global anti-authoritarian movement and frame domestic politics as part of the international pro-democracy movements. (But, they won’t.) The New Republic

• Largest Study of Pregnancy Sickness Uncovers Six New Genetic Links. The study analyzed DNA from more than 10,000 women and identified a total of 10 genes linked to the most severe form of pregnancy sickness, hyperemesis gravidarum, pointing to biological mechanisms behind it and (WE HOPE) potential new treatment pathways. Keck School of Medicine, USC

• GLP-1 Drug Improves Liver Health Independent of Weight Loss, Mouse Study Finds. As a follow up to my own post about GLP-1 meds in microdoses, which really helped my symptoms of MCAS and pain, a new mouse study from researchers at Toronto’s Sinai Health have found that semaglutide acts directly on liver cells to improve organ function, and does so independently of weight loss. Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News

• Cognitive Dissonance Helps Explain Why Trump Supporters Remain Loyal, New Research Suggests. When people face information that conflicts with their deeply held beliefs, they tend to reduce their mental discomfort by denying the allegations, focusing on policies over personal behaviour, or claiming that other politicians commit similar acts. PsyPost

• I Liked Travel Better in the Early 2000s. Travel in the early 2000s felt more immersive and meaningful because it was less mediated by smartphones and social media, theorizes this piece. It forced people to be present, to rely on spontaneity, and to engage more deeply with their surroundings. The constant connectivity these days leads to a more curated experience that can pull you away from the perspective and e Back By Dinner. Be Back by Dinner (via Travelfish)

• Michael J. Fox, Three Co-Workers at 70s TV Show, All Got Parkinson’s. With more and more discussion about Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases potentially having viral or environmental triggers, I wanted to share a 2002 CBC report that I’d guess many American readers haven’t yet seen: it describes a possible Parkinson’s cluster MJF and three colleagues who worked on the 1970s sitcom Leo and Me. No definitive cause was established, to be clear, but as more scientific curiosity related to viral triggers has emerged in recent years, I thought you’d all find it interesting. CBC

• What I Ate as an Unpaid Intern at Noma. Three Michelin starred Noma (via its chef and co-founder René Redzepi) has been in the news these days, for all the wrong reasons: allegations of widespread staff abuse. In this post, Namrata Hegde recounts her 2018 unpaid internship at Noma, where she arrived from India with a budget of roughly 66 kroner ($7.10 USD) a day after rent, survived largely on two staff meals and groceries, and regularly skipped dinner. She argues that that elite culinary institutions like Noma rely on exploitative labor systems, where interns shoulder financial, physical, and emotional costs while the business remains profitable. Yes, it’s a learning opportunity, but it leaves interns feeling replaceable and weaponizes their ambition to justify exploiting them. A Food & Culture Namifesto

• Blowing The Whistle On Deepak Chopra, The Epstein Files, Cancel Culture, & Holding My Influencer Peers (& Myself) Accountable. Using Deepak Chopra’s documented ties to Jeffrey Epstein, physician and author Lissa Rankin shares firsthand and secondhand accounts of misconduct, abuse of power, fraud, and ethical failures she witnessed across the wellness and spirituality influencer industry, including popular names like Louise Hay, Joe Dispenza, Byron Katie, and others. She argues that these influencer-gurus have engaged in harmful or unethical behaviour behind the scenes, often concealed by their public personas and loyal followings, and that insiders have remained silent out of fear or complicity. Lissa Rankin, MD

• Study: Infrasound likely a key factor in alleged hauntings. A recent study suggests that eerie sensations associated with feeling haunted are often caused by low-frequency infrasound like as vibrations from pipes or ventilation systems, which people can’t consciously hear but which can increase cortisol, stress, and unease. Researchers conclude that these subtle physical effects, combined with expectations about a place being haunted, can lead people to interpret “ordinary discomfort” as paranormal activity rather than a mundane environmental cause. Ars Technica

• The Creation of Instant Coffee. I drink Starbucks VIA coffee every morning, because it’s quick and easy and tastes great (unlike most instant coffee, which is pretty terrible). So I was interested in this post, and it turns out that instant coffee wasn’t easy to invent, because preserving flavour compounds required decades of trial and error — mostly error. My beloved VIAs are mentioned too; it turns out we needed modern techniques like microgrinding and freeze-drying to get it tasting better. Works in Progress

• Exploring the Far Side of the Moon: A Visual History. Also related to Artemis II and the amazing footage we got from it: this post looks at how the Moon’s far side remained mostly unknown for centuries because of tidal locking (meaning that only one side of the Moon ever faces the Earth). As a result, we got only partial glimpses from Earth until space-age missions finally showed it to us it. Great, image-laden post that goes through the decade from Luna 3’s flyby to NASA’s Lunar Orbiter program and everything in between. Inverting Vision

  • See also: An Artemis II interactive and visual timeline, here. Use the bar at the top of the page to scroll through photos.

• Tristan da Cunha: The Busiest Place You’ve Never Seen. An interactive article with lots of photos and some video all about Tristan da Cunha, a British overseas territory described as “a rugged Scottish highland dropped into the South Atlantic”. It is the world’s most remote inhabited island with only 221 residents. Extreme isolation has led to a deeply communal, self-reliant society with shared labor in livestock monitoring, lobster fishing, food processing and more, dating back to 1817. Everyone pitches in across roles as needed. NPR

• The War Against Misinformation Is Over. The Lies Won. Justin Ling on how research suggests that people know images and headlines are false, but share them anyway. As a result, efforts to combat misinformation fail because people don’t actually care; they’re driven by emotion, not logic. The misinformation overload is a structural (social media + human behaviour) problem, not about getting better facts in front of people. Depressing and (in my experience) also true. The Walrus

• The AI Writing Witchhunt Is Pointless. “You can’t read a paragraph and reliably, with a human life on the line (because that’s the stakes, when you destroy a writer’s career and a writer’s reputation) tell beyond any reasonable doubt, whether a human or a machine produced it,” writes Joan Westenberg. As a result, the culture of suspicion we live in disproportionately harms writers, especially newer, ESL, or neurodivergent writers. Interesting follow up to last month’s piece on AI and books. Westenberg

• A Cancer Treatment That Does More Than Scientists Thought. A single course of CAR-T cell therapy made three (!) simultaneous rare autoimmune diseases into remission in one patient. More than a year later, she remains free of symptoms without any ongoing medication. Very interesting, and promising! The Atlantic (gift link); via Jason Kottke

• Winners of the GDT Nature Photographer of the Year Awards. Amazing gallery of photos from both the winner Luca Lorenz and all of the category winners and finalists. GDT (Gesellschaft für Naturfotografie) e.V.

🔗 Quick links

• National Butter Tart Day? Canada says, yes please.

• Telling time via street view images from New York City. (I appreciate the pigeon too.)

• All of the Artemis II Mobile Wallpapers released by NASA during the awe-inspiring mission last month.

• FontCrafter: create a font using your own handwriting, for free.

• A Korean traveler uses creativity to convey his food preferences. In his case, no coriander. Should I be making versions of my GF t-shirts and totes in other languages?

• Birthday colour fun. A creative person in Japan made a tool that generates a unique colour associated with your birth date, along with its name and meaning. (You’ll need Google translate for the meaning!)

• Prediction markets don’t reflect reality, they create it: interesting read on ‘outsider trading’ and the scourge of betting markets.

• CRISPR-edited wheat could make toasted bread less carcinogenic. (But what about us celiacs? There’s a lot less research on which ones are carcinogenic when toasted/burned.)

• University of Calgary sets the world record for the largest gathering of people dressed as dinosaurs with 682 people total.

• Your wowza title of the month: A Woman Who Became Pregnant After Having Sex With Identical Twins Was Told It’s Not Possible to Identify the Father of Her Baby

• Hello, World: The first image downlinked from the Artemis II crew was of Earth photographed by Commander Reid Wiseman from the Orion spacecraft’s window, with two auroras and zodiacal light visible as Earth eclipses the Sun. Amazing.

Hope you enjoyed these links! See you next month,

-Jodi

Things I wrote this month

• I wrote a post about how after reading a paper on the topic, I’ve been taking very small doses of a GLP-1 receptor agonist medication, well below the standard starting doses normally prescribed. I wanted to see if doing so could temper reactions caused by mast cell activation syndrome. I didn’t have high hopes for this microdose, but it’s been very helpful. I wrote about my experiences on my JE site, with a long list of references at the bottom.

• I wrote a post about memory and identity after chronic illness, and shared some overflow reads from CAEs 59 and 60 on my Patreon.

• I finished my celiac’s guide to Croatia, and it’s up on Legal Nomads

• I redid my post about the history of fish sauce, because it turns out that what we called garum from Roman times was not actually the predecessor to today’s fish sauce — it was a goopy bloody ferment from blood and viscera of fish. It’s liquamen that was the actual predecessor, though as I note fish sauce may very well have been developed in both the East and the West independently, with roots in Ancient Greece and Ancient China alike.

Featured art for CAE 61

CAE 61’s featured artist is Simon Biddie, whose photo Ghost of the Reef below delighted me. An underwater diver for decades, it was only in 2022 that he blended his love of photography with the deep seas. This photo of a goby fish camouflaging into surroundings won a Siena International Photo Award last year. Goby are cryptobenthic fish, tiny species that live in the nooks and crannies of coral reefs. You can find Simon’s work on Instagram, or on his website.

The most interesting things I read this month

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

🐶 Major Complications Associated With Cerebrospinal Fluid Collection in 11 Dogs: Clinical Presentation and Imaging Characteristics Did you know that CSF is collected from dogs, just as in humans? Me neither. In dogs, CSF typically is collected from a puncture higher up in the spine and under general anesthesia using an aseptic technique. As with humans, this study notes that it is “generally is considered a relatively safe and non-invasive procedure”, which — sigh, yes ok, but for those of us it where complications occur, it’s not simple. Setting aside my almost 9 years of chronic spinal CSF leak this study notes that while “major” complications were low, mortality in the dogs that did have complications was high. No mention of atraumatic needles, and a brief mention of post-dural puncture headache; for the latter, that it’s not yet recognized in dogs in part because of the “challenges of definitively identifying headache”. I mention this because when I first sustained my leak, a reader wrote me to say their dog had a CSF leak, and she knew because he kept lying down and would wince and whine (she thought in pain) when upright. Investigations by their vet did lead to treatment (surgical) for a leak, and the dog was healthy after. I’ve never forgotten her message, and it’s the first thing I thought of reading this. Also, imagine a CSF leak in a giraffe?! Yes, giraffes too do have CSF — and a very different gravitational pressure issue because of their their long necks. (Giraffes have a mean arterial blood pressure of roughly 200 mmHg, which in humans would represent a hypertensive crisis. Scientists think it’s this high to maintain cerebral perfusion pressure at the cranial end of the carotid arteries when the head is held upright.) Journal of Veterinary Medicine

🥘 Miso is Not a Soup. Delightful essay by Marc Matsumoto, who shares his own experience of growing up in the USA with a Japanese mother before eventually moving to Tokyo. He writes of miso as not just a soup ingredient, but rather universal (and underused - at least here in North America!) seasoning, one just as fundamental as salt or soy sauce. You know I love a piece with some science, and in this one he talks to us about what makes miso so special. Although there are dozens of miso types, “at its core, most miso is made of soybeans, salt, water, and kōji.” And it’s in the kōji that “the magic happens”: it is a mould cultivated on rice or barley that produces proteolytic enzymes that break proteins into amino acids and convert starches into natural sugars. Miso is versatile as ever, too; it can be used in marinades, glazes, as a condiment, or an emulsifier in both Japanese cooking but far beyond. And pairs very well with some sweets. You’ll be inspired and hungry after you read. My lingering sadness is that I can’t tolerate miso any longer with my fickle immune system. Maybe one day I’ll get it back, along with my beloved fish sauce. Marc Matsumoto

💔 I Stumbled Across My Boyfriend’s ChatGPT and It Ended Our Relationship. Oof, this essay. On accident, Lindsey Hall stumbled onto a her boyfriend’s AI history, and in a series of chats read how he was plagued with doubts both about their relationship, but also about her as a person. These were deeply personal musings that made me wince when reading them, about her body, her eating disorder history, her cats, her nomadic past, and, most heartbreakingly, an admission that he was “just not proud of her.” I can’t imagine how it feels to read such sterile cruelty in prose about someone you think and hope loves you to the moon and back. Hall writes about how reading the logs shattered the “protective blur” that makes intimacy possible in the first place. Even months later, after of her boyfriend’s pleas and effort, she couldn’t forget about what she read. Does anyone want to remain with a partner who is “in some private chamber of himself, unconvinced”? Perhaps some would, but I’d rather be solo. While the piece acknowledges her violation of her partner’s privacy, it does gloss over how that may make him feel. Still, this is her side of the story and was very well written. In finding out the ‘mortifying ordeal’ of being known by him, she ultimately concludes that some knowledge, once encountered, simply cannot be erased from our minds. Lindsay Hall Writes

🎵 Singing Teachers for Honeyeaters. Donna Lu’s short piece was super interesting, and I had to share it here. She reports on how researchers have successfully restored the lost song of the regent honeyeater, a critically endangered Australian bird now down to less than 250 birds in the wild. What I found surprising is that as the species declined, the complexity of its song declined with it: the typical call was replaced by a simpler version that had half the syllables. Researchers feared that this change could have negative consequences on the bird’s ability to reproduce, so they recruited two wild-born male honeyeaters as teachers, putting small groups of younger birds from a captive breeding program at Taronga Zoo in Sydney in their company. With small groups, the younger birds found success and went from 0% knowing the wild song to 42% — all within 3 years. Thankfully, zoo-bred birds who learned the complete song have since passed it on to the next generation, and some have already been released into New South Wales and Victoria. bioGraphic

🧠 Notes on Managing ADHD. There’s a joke in here about how people with ADHD have been given a how-to post of over 6,500 words. But it’s a great primer worth bookmarking, even if you don’t have the condition. It is divided into two sections, strategies for a “high-level control system”, and tactics for smaller-type improvements. For people with ADHD, the literature has shown us that the condition isn’t caused by a lack of willpower, but rather a wiring difference in the patients’ brains. Borretti’s guide talks about combining pharmacological treatment with carefully designed external scaffolding to get shit done. For those not interested in medication, this may not appeal; he does, however, argue that medication is the foundational “unlock” in the system, making the rest of the toolkit accessible. He also frames personal growth as a dialogue between internal changes like medication, meditation, therapy and external changes like to-do lists, calendars, or journaling. As your own dialogue between internal and external changes progress, he writes about how you can ‘unlock’ the next thing in the sequence of management. It’s very detailed, very practical, and provides many of different suggestions and templates for living with the condition. It’s his own findings after years of management, but as someone who often talks about me being a n=1, I loved reading about someone else’s version for something I haven’t written about myself. Boretti

🖤 Letting Go and Hanging In. A quietly moving essay from one of the people I love most in the world: food writer and cookbook author Naomi Duguid. The piece was written as she moves into the second year of a Substack she began partly as an anchor while her incredible son Tashi underwent palliative treatment for a brain tumour. He died in late November of last year, and since then she has been writing about many things, part of them being the ways in which she is living and feeling in a world transformed by her grief. The article talks about a brief trip to Ottawa (to see me, and other friends); she writes about the trip as a necessary departure from the patterns currently miring her in grief. After our visit, during which we both cried copiously, it is beautiful to read about the unexpected gift the trip gave her: a loosening of the striving she hadn’t fully realized she had been clutching to for months. She returned home to Toronto “very inept, fumbly, without reflexes, as if I’d been away a year rather than just 3 days”, unable to muster her usual attentiveness. Instead of trying harder, she finds relief in letting a visiting friend cook instead. It can be easy to forget how nourishing it is to simply receive care rather than provide it, but when we’re drowning it can also feel like an impossible task to ask. Gorgeous writing, ending on the tentative first tips of rhubarb and tulip leaves pushing through the soil outside, a return of spring. “It’s OK to weep and grieve, to be distracted and fuzzy,” she writes. “And it’s possible, in fact necessary, at the same time to celebrate the return of spring.” Home & Elsewhere

🇻🇳 The purist’s guide to phở in Hanoi. I shared David Farley’s piece about phở in CAE 56, and this piece from Connla Stokes is a wonderful extrapolation from someone living in Vietnam for many years. Structured in chapters, with history and references and even a glossary of terms for what you’ll find in the soup (man did reading it make me homesick for a country I thought I’d be living in far far longer than I did), it’s worth your time. In the history section, Stokes goes through phở’s contested origin, noting that it is neither French pot-au-feu nor Cantonese beef noodles, but most plausibly created on the river docks of early twentieth-century Hanoi. Hanoi phở is built around a clear, delicate, broth-focussed bowl; it has minimal garnishes and little of the hoisin or sriracha condiments more typical in southern Vietnamese bowls. The writing is engaging, and I really appreciated the background and Vietnamese literary references throughout. For those less familiar with what defines northern-style pho, it’ll make you look at your next bowl a little differently. “If you were told you could have only one more bowl of phở in your life,” Stokes writes in the introduction, “a bowl where every detail is exactly right: a generous tuft of noodles, soft and delicate; the meat tender; the broth clear and gently sweet, touched with a hint of ginger and the faintest whisper of fish sauce – your thoughts would surely drift, sooner or later, back to Hanoi.” A Story from Connla

😿 My Husband Had Brain Surgery, and the Cat Isn’t Handling it Well. A warm and funny essay about Jane M. Flynn’s husband and his deep brain stimulation surgery for essential tremor, told mostly through the eyes of their black cat, Bandit. Bandit, as the title notes, is not coping well. Within is also an interesting review of the surgery itself and her husband’s recovery, but the cat is the focus because Bandit remains pissed. His entire emotional universe is organized around her husband, from nightly cuddles to morning supervision of shaving and dressing (and an exclusive preference for the water in his bathroom sink). With doctor’s orders prohibiting contact with fur during healing, Bandit is out of luck and acting out. Eventually, her husband will be recovered enough to pick up the cat again, but for now — at the time of writing — Bandit is still sharpening his claws on their pillows. Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age

🗃 Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here’s How to Use It. You may have seen this very useful post floating around in your inboxes, but if not: it’s worth a read. Hana Lee Goldin, a librarian with a Master of Library and Information Science degree, shares with the masses just how Google buried a set of excellent search tools that most users never find because Google does not really care for us to know them. What we do know is that the search bar has fairly effectively replaced the library reference desk without replacing the librarian’s skills. And also that the results we see are heavily filtered. So much so, that two people searching identical phrases the same day may get different results. “Most people have no frame of reference for what a less mediated search experience would even look like”, Goldin writes. And that’s where she comes in. I wont go through all her tricks and tips here, though I will say I now use ‘verbatim mode’ at all times. Just bookmark her piece and put what you need in action. Her “what not to do” section is also very valuable, noting that the AI-generated summary at the top of many Google results is the feature most likely to be wrong and most likely to present that wrongness with complete confidence (she backs this up with examples). Enjoy! Card Catalog

😭 The Tragedy of Mrs. Dr. Seuss. Like many people I know, I grew up on a steady diet of Cheerios (little did I know I was celiac!) and Dr. Seuss books. As an adult, I was horrified to learn that while his books were creative and wonderful, his personality was not. For the unaware, this is the story of how his wife, Helen Marion Palmer Geisel, was largely written out of his life story, including how much she helped make him a success. She redirected the directionless Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss’ real name) toward illustration. She edited his work, managed his emotional needs, co-ran Beginner Books (their imprint), and published 14 inventive books of her own — all while living in chronic pain following a near-fatal case of Guillain-Barré syndrome in 1954. In a tale as old as time, as Ted’s career finally took off she gave up her own writing entirely to support his and to take care of him. He did not know how to make coffee, cook, or even manage a chequebook. When her health worsened (and her value to Ted as support system declined), he began an affair with their close friend Audrey Dimond, who was 23 years younger than Helen. A month before her fortieth wedding anniversary, Helen died by suicide, leaving a note that began “Dear Ted, what has happened to us?” Even then, Brown observes, she carefully protected Ted’s reputation. A few months later, Ted married Audrey and went on to write more beloved books. Dr. Seuss’s biographers have basically taken Ted’s side in their writing; they ignore Helen’s beautiful writing, and frame the affair as “inevitable”. Dispatches from the Rare Book Trade

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

🦟 Early hominin arrival in Southeast Asia triggered the evolution of major human malaria vectors. Interesting new paper that associates Southeast Asia’s malaria carrying mosquitoes with the arrival of early human ancestors in the area. Using large-scale genetic analysis and molecular dating to look at the evolutionary origins of the Anopheles mosquitoes responsible for transmitting human malaria in Southeast Asia, researchers found that these mosquitoes originally fed on non-human primates in Sundaland (the ancient landmass encompassing present-day Malaysia, Borneo, Sumatra, and Java), and only later developed a taste for human blood. But they didn’t develop a preference for human blood in response to modern Homo sapiens. Instead, the paper notes that it was in response to the arrival of Homo erectus, around 1.8 million years ago. The timing lines up with when early hominins (like Homo erectus ) were thought to have arrived in SEA, and provides a really interesting — and unusual! — type of independent evidence outside archeology that supports the fossil records we do have of their migration. Cool to see mosquito evolution filling gaps in what we theorized via other fields. Scientific Report

💸 Shy Girl: The Background to the New York Times Story. Publishing industry consultant Thad McIlroy’s piece is a play-by-play of his claim that he broke the year’s biggest literary story, but The New York Times took the credit for it. The story was about a much-anticipated horror novel called Shy Girl by Mia Ballard that had rumours swirling on social media about how it may have been written with the assistance of AI. McIlroy notes that he learned about the allegations, obtained a copy, ran it through multiple detection services, and found that Pangram concluded that 78.4% of the document was AI-generated (a finding that was confirmed by two other services). He then brought the story to the Times, worked with reporter Alexandra Alter over five weeks, and was assured he would be credited as the source. Instead, he received little more than a passing mention in the published piece. Hachette then cancelled the book within a day of being notified by the Times. Ballard wrote online that “this controversy [about Shy Girl] has changed my life in many ways and my mental health is at an all-time low and my name is ruined for something I didn’t even personally do.” McIlroy argues that cancellation was not Hachette’s only option, and was heavy handed. So did Ballard write the book using AI? She denies that she did, and has indicated she is pursuing legal action. I shared on IG this week that I received a few messages accusing my GLP-1 piece of being written by AI. It isn’t, but as friends and I who’ve been writing online for decades often say AI WAS TRAINED ON US. Are AI detectors accurate? I can’t say, but it’s a sobering thought if they aren’t, given the reaction in the court of public opinion. Future of Publishing

🥦 How an unappetizing shrub became dozens of different vegetables. It feels like every month I share a Works in Progress link. Truthfully, the pub has become one of my favourites. This time, I’m posting a deep dive into … cabbage. Yes, cabbage. Wild cabbage is deeply unappetizing, consisting of what Alex Wakeman calls “some untidy leaves and a few thick, coarse stems on the browner side of purple”. Yet this one scraggly plant has given us so many riches: cabbage, kale, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kohlrabi, gai lan, bok choy, and collard greens among them. Through thousands of years of selective breeding, Brassica oleracea has been unusually adaptable. But why? Wakeman explains that while most plants have a single useful element (for example, wheat has grains, tomatoes have fruit), wild cabbage has many. Its leaves, buds, stalks, and inflorescences (flowers on its stalk) are all edible and all independently breedable. Ancient farmers who selected plants with denser layers of leaves created modern cabbage and kale by around 400 BC. It was 13th century Belgian farmers breeding for large edible buds who created Brussels sprouts. Others focused on the inflorescence (new fave word) to produce cauliflower and broccoli. The genomic explanation is “polyploidy”, the heritable condition of possessing more than two complete sets of chromosomes. Basically: ancient wild cabbages underwent chromosome duplication, giving them multiple backup copies of every gene, meaning that they tolerate much richer genetic diversity with lower risk of harmful mutations. Works in Progress

🤡 March, 19-21: God is a comedian. A darkly humorous and genuinely alarming dispatch from an anonymous financial and geopolitical writer that catalogues what was going on 3 weeks into the US-Iran war, written in the style of a man watching a house burn down and narrating it with meticulous (and horrified) precision. Yes, we’re weeks later now, but the way it’s written makes this piece still worth a read in its description a war “already operating at maximum absurdity”. Looking at how the press is currently reporting Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo, also absurd is how that maximum absurdity is being framed in the media, normalizing Trump. With inventory of early catastrophes and Trump’s many off-the-wall contradictions, it may make you laugh at first but of course it’s not fiction, it’s our ever-devolving world, and nothing happening is a joke. For those like me who spent the last 10 days in awe and tears and wonder at the Artemis II mission, all of the documented mess in this piece is the opposite of that. Gold and Politics

🇮🇷 Iran Is Winning the AI Slop Propaganda War. I know, I know, we’re on an AI theme this month. Don’t worry, next month is going to be full of Outer Space Realness. This time, a read by Matthew Gault about the AI propaganda gap opening up between Iran and the USA during the Iran war incited by the States. Iran’s AI-generated LEGO videos, set to catchy rap music and aimed squarely at the American public, are resonating and spreading online in a way that the Trump administration’s own AI slop simply…is not. The reason, Gault argues, is a difference in intent and audience: Iran is broadcasting to push emotional notes in its attempt to erode support for the war among ordinary Americans, whereas the White House is “narrowcasting”, producing video game memes and in-group references designed to keep a diminishing base energized. Gault brings in expert analysis from Kelsey Atherton of the Center for International Policy for the piece, who notes that Iran has a long tradition of wartime propaganda aimed at convincing enemy populations to withdraw support. What makes 2026 different is speed and scale due to AI, where tools now allow anyone to produce whatever they want, really really quickly. In 2020, the piece notes that an Iranian cleric said (after Soleimani’s assassination) that America’s only heroes are cartoon characters. Seems like Iran has taken that note to heart. 404 Media

💲 Who’s hacking CRA accounts? Investigative piece that actually finds the identity thieves in question, and explains how they did what they did. Essentially, there’s an ongoing scam targeting the Canadian Revenue Agency where scammers get access to codes assigned to tax-filing companies like H&R Block, file fraudulent T4s slips with the CRA, change direct deposit information, then steal the resulting refunds by funnelling them into bogus bank accounts opened under the victims’ stolen identities. Close to $500 million in tax payer money stolen by scammers in recent years, and often without the real account holders knowing until the CRA sends them letters demanding repayment. I know someone who this happened to, and after they claimed the refund the scammers then bought cell phones, opened new credit cards, and more — and the person I know is still fighting with credit unions to clear the transactions from their credit reports. CBC News

🤖 Marriage over, €100,000 down the drain: the AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion. Another piece on AI psychosis, this time centring on a Dutch IT consultant with no psych history who within months of downloading ChatGPT sank €100,000 into a delusional business venture, was hospitalized three times, and nearly died by suicide. The piece also notes that he became convinced that his AI companion “Eva” had achieved consciousness. As I’ve shared here before, his story is not an outlier: the Human Line Project, the first support group for people derailed by AI psychosis, has collected stories from 22 countries including 15 suicides, 90 hospitalizations, six arrests, and more than $1 million spent on delusional projects. Upwards of 60% of its members had no prior history of mental illness. Per this piece, people are no longer merely having delusions about technology but having delusions with technology; AI chatbots are actively co-constructing delusional beliefs through sycophancy for some, as well as constant availability. And they consistently optimize for engagement with prompts back to you. For the curious: the 3 most common delusions are the user believing that 1) they have created the first conscious AI, 2) they have stumbled upon a world-changing professional breakthrough, or 3) they have made direct contact with God. The escalation from query to crisis can happen with alarming alacrity, too. Look, there are definitely use cases for chatbots, but in this case (as the author notes at the end), they’re doing what they were programmed to do — but a little too well. The Guardian

🌺 Lights, Camera, Bloom! Ending CAE 61 on a short and delightful read, about how time-lapse photography is changing the way we look at and understand plants. Plants look static or still to the human eye, but their movement is actually a gentle dance with light. I am always mesmerized by videos showing compressed time of flowers opening, stems bending, or plants responding to their environments. These videos are great for storytelling and scientific insight, but also for the sheer beauty of botany. Botany One

🔗 Quick links

• Do you have unexplained symptoms after catching something? They might be post-viral illness. (What I’ve been saying for years).

• Speaking of: the world’s first ever dengue warning system just launched, from researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. The Global Dengue Observatory draws together the latest data from 88 countries worldwide to estimate the current number of dengue cases each month at both national and continental levels.

• The RTHM and the Patient-Led Research Collaborative released their new Long COVID Treatment Guide with information on medications, supplements, lifestyle strategies, and procedures that may help (such as the Stellate Ganglion Block).

• What was the very first plant in the world?

• Because so many of these whales return to Newfoundland and Labrador each year, they built a ‘humpback identifier’ website where you can upload a website and learn about your whale.

• Dairy group to seek designated status for ‘Quebec poutine cheese’. Squik squik! (IYKYK)

• How the commercial spreadsheet reshaped our world. Per the piece, a sixth of humanity uses them today.

• Wikipedia has over 300 language editions, and each one picks different images to illustrate the same topic. This site takes all of those editions and shows you a composite gallery of the images together. Very cool!

Hope you enjoyed these links! See you next month,
-Jodi

My updates

• With Daylight Saving Time ushered in this weekend, I wrote a rant about why making DST time permanent is a mistake. Consensus among chronobiologists and sleep researchers is that if we’re eliminating the annual time changes, we need to make standard time permanent to avoid health consequences for a significant part of the population. Not DST.

• For years, readers have asked me to make celiac translation cards with additional food restrictions, most commonly a dairy allergy or for vegan or vegetarian diners. With an ongoing spinal CSF leak, work is slow, but I’m very happy to share my GF cards for Japan now include 3 new cards: dairy-free, vegan, and vegetarian options.

Featured art for CAE 60

CAE 60’s featured artist is Gabe Benzur, whose piece Mania below caught my eye with its cave of ‘what ifs’ and its promise of bubblegum trees. When I reached out to ask about featuring it in my newsletter, our correspondence took a lovely turn as he shared how he was temporarily in a caregiving role for his wife after an injury, and started painting at home instead of his usual studio space. From his dining room, and through his creativity, he left his house in his mind. His paintings represent the curiosity, novelty, and discovery of exploring new places and new worlds — in my case, even viewed from bed. I enjoy his work, and so appreciated the conversation we had about it. You can find him on Instagram and on his website.

The most interesting things I read this month

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

🎿 The Olympics are ditching PFAS waxes — and the ‘ridiculous’ speed they gave skiers. The Milan Cortina Olympics were the first Winter Games without fluorinated ski waxes, the end of an era that began in the 1980s when these PFAS-laden waxes revolutionized competitive skiing and snowboarding, giving people an injection of speed and serving as an equalizer for those with less shiny equipment. Fluoros also provided greater speed regardless of changing weather or snow conditions, and growing up I remember the pungent smells of them being laid down on skis in the mountain shop in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. California entrepreneur Terry Hertel was among the first to use them after he got a sample from 3M and realized they made skis “faster than anything before.” He soon added them to his company’s waxes, and other companies followed suit. Racers describe using these waxes as feeling like you they floating, racing downhill with “ridiculous” levels of speed. Alas, it turns out that the wax was not good for living creatures. An early study found PFAS accumulated in Scandinavian wax technicians’ bodies with blood PFOA levels averaging 25x higher than the general population, and a more recent paper confirmed these concentrations were among the highest of any occupation investigated to date. Yikes! Environmental contamination near slopes were also a problem: Utah detected PFAS in three wells near a Nordic race course and in the city’s aquifer. The International Ski Federation banned fluoros in 2019, which took effect in 2023. Grist See also: this piece about America’s “carpet capital” and how PFAS is also causing toxic havoc there.

🥌 The quirky geology behind Olympic curling stones. Another interesting Olympic sport deep dive, this time about curling. It turns out that every Olympic-level curling stone comes from just two geological sources: Ailsa Craig, a tiny volcanic island off the coast of Scotland, and the Trefor granite quarry in Wales. For those less familiar, curling stones have two working surfaces: a narrow “running band” that slides over the ice, and a striking band that absorbs collisions with other stones, each requiring different mineral properties. The general belief was that the best curling stones contained little quartz, since quartz is brittle and could crack under the sport’s constant impacts. But the piece shares research by mineralogist Derek Leung, who found that the stones’ granites actually do contain quartz. What matters more than quartz content is that the rocks have uniform grain structures and relatively few microfractures, which lets them withstand collisions (repeatedly) while still moving smoothly across the ice. One reason he cites for their durability is that the rocks are “geologically young.” I put that in quotes because young is relative; Ailsa Craig’s granitoids formed about 60 million years ago when magma intruded into Earth’s crust during the opening of the Atlantic Ocean, and Trefor’s rocks formed roughly 400–500 million years ago during a mountain-building event. Still, they are geologically young enough to have experienced fewer tectonic shake-ups that might have created internal fractures. The stones used for the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics combined Ailsa Craig “common green” granite with blue hone inserts, though quarrying on Ailsa Craig is now restricted because the island is an uninhabited bird sanctuary. Researchers are now looking for new sources with similar properties, potentially in my country’s Nova Scotia, a province that sits across the Atlantic rift from Ailsa Craig. Canada has tried alternatives before: an Ontario anorthosite tested in the 1950s began chipping almost immediately, and was a no go. Scientific American

🍪 Our possums are a problem. Could Selena Gomez be the solution? Among my adventures during my months in New Zealand, I had a close encounter with a possum at 3am. So this article, sent by reader Sheila, caught my eye. European settlers first introduced possums to the country, and they’ve been “wreaking havoc on our natural ecosystem ever since”, notes the piece. New Zealand’s pest control efforts have found an unlikely ally, somehow, in Selena Gomez’s limited-edition Oreos. Yes, you read that right. Wildlife biologist Graham Hickling, looking for a way to lure trap-shy possums, stumbled upon research that suggested fat and sugar combinations could be addictive to the animals. After buying 20 packets of the horchata-flavoured, Gomez-inspired cookies on sale at a local shop, Hickling attached them to trap planks in a Canterbury trial and caught 15 possums in 20 days. This compared to just one in the control traps without the pop star’s cookies. News spread quickly through pest control networks, reaching Ian McNeill on Herald Island in Auckland, where possums had recently returned after five years of freedom (he’d even caught them mating on his security camera, “giving me the right royal finger”). After a desperate search across multiple supermarkets, McNeill’s partner secured 10 packets, and they promptly caught three of four possums that had previously ignored all bait. Oreo’s representatives, quoted in the piece, say that they are “pleased and humbled” their collaboration with Gomez found a demographic that was missed in product testing (ha). As it was a limited edition Oreo, the cookies will be off shelves by March. Extra giggles from this piece: McNeill admits he has no idea who Selena Gomez is; “I just know she makes a good Oreo”. The Spinoff

💡 This 14-Year-Old Is Using Origami to Imagine Emergency Shelters That Are Sturdy, Cost-Efficient and Easy to Deploy. Miles Wu, a 14-year-old NYC 9th grader, spent over 250 hours folding origami to try and design better emergency shelters for natural disasters. Wu was taken by the the Miura-ori origami fold, a series of tessellating parallelograms named after its inventor Japanese astrophysicist Koryo Miura. It has been used in aeronautical engineering, including to make solar panels for spacecrafts and satellites. (One of its earliest space applications was in Japan’s Space Flyer Unit, a satellite that launched in 1995.) Wu had been doing origami as a hobby for 6 years, but when Hurricane Helene hit Florida and wildfires burned on in California, he wondered if the collapsible Miura-ora patterns could solve a problem he’d spotted: that existing emergency shelters were sturdy, easy to deploy, or cost-efficient … but rarely all three. Using a computer program to design 54 different variants, he folded two of each using three types of paper, then tested their strength by placing them between guardrails then adding weights until they broke. He converted his family’s living room into a makeshift lab, shocked when his patterns supported up to 200 pounds. The strongest pattern held more than 10,000x its own weight, equivalent to a New York City taxicab supporting over 4,000 elephants. Wu’s innovation won him the top prize at the 2025 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge, where he was soundly praised. Wu plans to continue, hoping to build a full prototype using a singular Miura-ori curved into an arch or multiple sheets combined into a tent-like structure. Smithsonian Mag

🐠 EVERYONE IT IS FISH DOORBELL SEASON AGAIN! That’s right, the Fish Doorbell is back. Featured in CAE28, now more popular than ever, it is a tool that allows fish swimming through Utrecht to cross the Weerdsluis lock on the west side of the city. The lock rarely opens in spring, but the city has implemented underwater camera at the lock, live-streamed, allows anyone watching online to press the ‘digital doorbell’ if a fish is there. Highly satisfying, and now you can take pictures of your waiting fish, too. Visdurbel

📫 In an Intense Election Year, New Post Office Rules Could Trip Up Voter Registration A change in how mail is postmarked could quietly disenfranchise voters this election year, relevant not only for midterm elections in the US, but beyond. The USPS began consolidating mail processing in regional centres in 2023, removing sorting and postmarking machines from local offices. Late last year, it officially announced it would no longer automatically postmark mail on the date it’s received. This means that election mail now sits overnight, gets trucked out for processing, then sent back. Articles about this change have mostly focused on how this affects ballots in the 14 states plus DC that require specific postmark dates, but this piece also notes that voting rights advocates worry it will also leave people off the voting rolls entirely since most states also require that registration forms be postmarked by set deadlines. Which, I imagine, is the point. USPS says voters can request manual postmarks at retail counters, but voting rights advocates further note that this burdens disabled people, seniors, rural voters, or those working multiple jobs who can’t get to the retail counter on time. A personal experience in the article is indicative of how this may play out: a newsletter that Oregon postal union president Jeremy Schilling mailed to head just 11 miles away took two weeks to arrive. Bolts Magazine

☣️ Toxic exposure creates disease risk over 20 generations. A new Washington State University study reports that a single exposure to a toxic fungicide during pregnancy can increase the risk of disease for 20 subsequent generations in rats, suggesting that environmental exposures may have longer biological consequences than we previously understood. In pregnancy, not only are the fetus and mother exposed to environmental contaminants, but the germline inside the fetus is also exposed. Notes WSU biologist Michael Skinner, “once it’s programmed in the germline, it’s as stable as a genetic mutation”. (The germline is the lineage of cells that eventually develop into sperm and eggs.) The research tracked rats exposed to a fungicide, vinclozolin, and found that prenatal exposure led to elevated rates of conditions including kidney disease, obesity, and reproductive complications. Some effects became more severe in later generations. This “epigenetic transgenerational inheritance” research is built on existing research that tracked 10 generations. In rats, 20 generations is just a few years, but extrapolated to humans that’s around 500 years. Could someone’s 2026 cancer be rooted in an ancestor’s exposure to toxins centuries ago? Although the experiment was conducted in rats, the researchers suggest the results may help scientists understand rising rates of chronic disease and identify epigenetic biomarkers that could predict disease risk long before symptoms appear. WSU News

🫂 My journey from foreign correspondent to Uber driver in Trump’s America. Former Reuters bureau chief Steve Scherer chronicles his life changing from covering prime ministers and documenting humanitarian disasters to driving Uber in Northern Virginia. He went from earning $130,000 in Canada annually to less than $7 per fare. What happened? After 28 years abroad as a foreign correspondent in Romania, Italy, and Canada, Scherer returned to the US in July 2025 when his job was eliminated in Canada and he could no longer stay in the country. He describes what it’s like to drive an Uber now, picking up workers before dawn. He draws parallels between his current life and the threats impacting his passengers’ lives with those of the migrants he once covered for Reuters. He reflects on how his decades of international experience now seems to have little value in Trump’s America, where it feels “anathema to the values marketed by the ruling class.” Tough read, one story among many others (many much more violent) that exist in 2026. Navigating the Drift

💛 When we hold open the door. Brendan Leonard on the mundane grace of holding a door at a grocery store, small act that is depicted in his comic illustrations but I’d like to also look at it as a mirror of human decency. Sure, it’s a simple concept (someone exits the store with groceries, notices another person approaching the door and holds it), but with the onslaught of awfulness in the world, it’s a nice reminder of how little things go a long way. He doesn’t moralize or create discourse either! It’s an example of how extending small courtesies to others is part of what it means to be human. I agree. Semi Rad

❓ Jeopardy!: A Partial Taxonomy. I’ve watched Jeopardy! for as long as I can remember, and have shared other related pieces in CAEs past. When longtime host Alex Trebek died in 2020, the “Jeopaverse firmament shook,” Adrienne Raphael writes. But Jeopardy! has stood the test by regenerating itself from within, “like an axolotl”, hiring superchamp, Ken Jennings, as permanent host. “Jeopardy! is bigger than us all,” Raphael notes, launching into a partial taxonomy of the iterations and spin offs it has spawned, as well as the skill levels within them. Enjoyable read for those who love the show like I do! Paris Review of Books

🐝 The dreams of a bumblebee in August. At first, looking at the title, I thought this was going to be an essay of thoughtful anthropomorphism, but no: bumblebees do dream, and their sleep resembles our own. Their bee brains alternate between deep sleep and a shallower REM-like state with twitching antennae, and scientists who study them think that they might dream of colours, odours, places, or even “their warm home.” Research also reveals bees possess subjective consciousness, can direct their attention selectively, and experience emotions demonstrated through cognitive bias experiments (where colony-shaken honeybees hesitated to investigate ambiguous scents, while bumblebees who’d received sugary treats ‘cheerfully’ approached uncertain cues more readily). A lovely short read about an animal whose brain was more human than I ever realized. Nautilus

🎸 Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer. This piece made me think differently about Hendrix’s music. Rohan S. Puranik sought to change the “Hendrix was an alien” narrative (i.e. that his music just appeared out of nowhere), with “an engineering-driven account that’s inspectable and reproducible”, including plots, models, and a signal chain from the guitar through the pedals that readers can probe stage by stage. Hendrix’s mission was to “reshape both the electric guitar’s envelope” and its tone to make it feel like a human voice, via augmenting the instrument through his own movement in a feedback field. Puranik’s analysis of Purple Haze and Hendrix’s other work is beyond my full understanding, but I found it so dedicated and creative that I wanted to share it here. IEEE Spectrum

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

🐀 The perks of being a mole rat. Despite the chaos of today’s world, there are many people trying very hard to live longer within it. In this piece, Aria Schrecker looks at nature’s longevity masters, from Turritopsis dohrnii (a very cool looking jellyfish - don’t miss the picture) that can regenerate and revert to its infant polyp stage indefinitely, to centuries old clams, sharks, and also the title animal, the mole rat. Humans are already pretty strangely long-lived, and we are also quite obsessed with living longer. Promising avenues of longevity include activating telomerase (which repairs chromosome-protecting telomeres and worked in cancer-resistant mice), or metabolic interventions like rapamycin that inhibit mTOR and extended mouse lifespans by 25% when given from youth. Also options you’ve probably seen on the socials: metformin, SGLT2 inhibitors, and GLP-1 agonists that are all being touted to promote longevity. Can we stay as healthy as the average 25-year-old for centuries until a freak accident or pandemic kills us? Who knows. Will we still want to? Also a very good question. Works in Progress

⚠️ Selfish and Stupid. Paul S., a paralyzed former climber notes that he hasn’t consumed climbing media since waking up in hospital. (This is something I can relate to as in the early days of my leak I had to cut travel and food content online, just to stay sane with the weight of my grief.) In this essay, he reflects on the his past free solo climbing (climbing without ropes), and the moral tension surrounding it: adrenaline rushes can create a deep flow state, heightened senses, and a drug-like high — but when there’s few safeguards, death is but a mistake away. Looking at philosophy as part of his processing, he writes about the concept of akrasia, acting against one’s professed better judgment. Why do people still do dangerous things, even when the risks and consequences are potentially devastating? Not only to them, but to their loves ones. Reflecting on Alex Honnold’s free solo ascent of Taipei 101, he’s contemptuous about the commercialism surrounding it, too. Most climbers rolled their eyes at Honnold’s stunt, Paul argues, because the moves were technically trivial for someone of Honnold’s skill. “Take it from me,” he writes, “for somebody of his ability, climbing Taipei 101 is about as difficult as going up a ladder.” But instead of showcasing skill, the Netflix special capped with a selfie at the top made him a sell-out in Paul’s eyes. Paul is now wheelchair bound, and I imagine tired of people asking him what he thinks of other free or solo climbing. I appreciated that he wrote it without tying the narrative into a bow; life often doesn’t work that way after all. Sometimes life is simply profoundly unfair. Diary of a Punter

📸 Our 2026 winners. Stunning photography, as always, from the winners of the World Nature Photography Awards. The 2026 gallery is no exception, and is well worth a few moments of awe. World Nature Photography Awards

🦪 The Most Remote Homestead On Earth. I met Celeste and her partner Josh at a conference one year, and was fascinated that she was part a travel writer, part a pearl farmer. Josh’s family started a pearl farm on a remote atoll in the Pacific, and it remains a family-owned, sustainable alternative to industrial farming, using natural, lagoon-friendly methods to cultivate high-quality, sustainable Tahitian pearls. Lest this sound like an ad, I’ve bought from them and appreciated their eco-friendly practices that prioritize the health of the Ahe atoll, a coral atoll in the northern Tuamotu Archipelago of French Polynesia. This video is a 24 minute, short documentary about the farm and their practices and features Josh’s family. YouTube

🇺🇸 How America Chose Not to Hold the Powerful to Account. (Gift link) Good writing as always from Adam Serwer, who I’ve shared prior in CAE. This time, he talks about how Americans have dismantled accountability over decades, creating a elite impunity problem where many of the people (and institutions) who helped elect Trump would rather burn down their own houses before admitting they made this mess. Leaders in Brazil, South Korea, Poland, and Britain have faced consequences for their actions, but in the USA not so. “Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor in the name of ‘healing’,” Sewer writes, “but inadvertently set a precedent that executive lawbreaking was no crime.” Since, from Regan to Bush to Clinton and Obama (Obama’s decision to “look forward not backwards” on what caused the 2008 financial crisis is cited here), executive crimes have gone mostly unpunished. At the same time, under Roberts’ Supreme Court, we’ve seen a quiet dismantling of anti-corruption laws on different fronts. Serwer argues that while there was some pushback in the country, backlash to the pushback only fed a twisted nostalgia for “the good old days” when sexual assault and police brutality were “easily rationalized or not even discussed.” The cruelest irony is that many Americans who might have raged against the machine instead direct their resentment at poorer fellow citizens while exempting elites entirely. The Atlantic

💉 Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus, researchers say. As well as bacterial lung infections, and may even ease allergies! Stanford researchers have developed a nasal spray that that is different to how vaccines have worked for over 200 years. Instead of training the immune system to recognize specific pathogens, the spray mimics the communication signals immune cells exchange during infection, leaving lung macrophages on heightened alert ready to respond to any threat. The protection lasted 3-ish months in animal models. Mice in the study showed protection against SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses, hospital-acquired bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus and Acinetobacter baumannii, and even house dust mite allergens (wow), with the primed innate response reducing viral levels in the lungs by 700-fold. The team built on their 2023 discovery about the tuberculosis vaccine’s cross-protection. It would be very useful to take a nasal spray vaccine in the autumn months that protected us from all respiratory viruses including Covid, the flu, and RSV and cold plus allergies in the spring. Don’t get too excited though, it is probably 5-7 years away if it gets adequate funding. BBC News

💸 Victims and villains. Authors Ivan Franceschini and Ling Li spent years listening to people who escaped Southeast Asia’s fortified scam compounds, facilities where people are forced to labour around the clock running online fraud operations. This piece, a graphic read, goes into how they run, and how often “the boundary between victim and perpetrator is blurred”. They write of different case studies from victims, but also of victims forced to become perpetrators themselves (called the “victim-offender overlap”), with one person trafficked for a customer service job but once her captors found out that she had financial literacy, they had her refining their scams instead. Other victims were told their only escape was to recruit replacements, and so on. The authors note that most workers don’t fit the “ideal victim” type; often this leads them them to be dismissed by authorities, distrusted by communities, and sometimes refused help by NGOs wary of ambiguous cases. Aeon Mag

🪦 This Ontario family said an unauthorized obit exploited their grief. Inside the rise of ‘obituary pirates’. (Archive link) A brief writeup about obituary pirates, one I’m sharing because they are more and more prevalent and prey on the grief and curiosity of the masses. WIRED wrote about the YouTube version of them in 2023, and in 2026 bigger sites like Echovita and Afterlife crawl the web for public obituaries posted by funeral homes and newspapers, summarizing and rewriting the information and then posting the new summaries to their sites (usually without the consent of the deceased family). Then, they use use their posts to pitch products like flower sales or virtual candles to those reading. Toronto Star

💊 Experimental pill dramatically reduces ‘bad’ cholesterol. Patients taking a daily pill called enlicitide that binds to the PCSK9 protein in the bloodstream reduced their LDL (“bad”) cholesterol levels by about 60% compared with a placebo, according to clinical trial results. The phase 3 trial involved 2,900 adults whose LDL levels were still too high despite treatment. Enlicitide works by blocking the PCSK9 protein, which normally reduces the number of LDL receptors in the liver; by inhibiting this protein, the drug allows the liver to remove more cholesterol from the bloodstream. For those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article. (Note that injectable PCSK9 inhibitors have been around for a decade plus, so it’s only the delivery of the med is novel, not the targeting itself.) UT Southwestern News

🔗 Quick links

• For the first time in more than 150 years, giant tortoises are returning to the wild on Floreana Island in the Galápagos, guided by NASA satellite data.

• How do patients die ‘of’ kidney disease? New research suggests it’s because kidney failure eventually poisons the heart.

• The backstory for that adorable wolfdog dog who crashed the cross-country skiing course during the Olympics.

• How far back can you understand English? (Quite the test!)

• A new sabre-crested species of dinosaur, Spinosaurus mirabilis, was found in the Sahara Desert.

• It’s an animal-laden quick links this month! A very funny short video from New Zealand, sent by Doug: “Why are kākāpō so horny this year?”

• Meet the gorgeous winner of Japan’s capybara bath contest.

• Also in Japan: scientists find a new compound that may reset the body clock and cut jet lag recovery nearly in half.

• How Covid quietly rewires the brain (archive link).

• Denmark has eliminated postal letter delivery, and is going digital instead.

• Did banning lead in gas work? New research from Utah says yes, analyzing samples of hair going back a century to document 100x decrease in lead concentrations.

Hope you enjoyed these links! See you next month,
-Jodi

My updates

• In November, I was asked to speak alongside an expert in the field of spinal CSF leak in an honest conversation about barriers to accessing care. Patients are misdiagnosed, they’re not believed, and with an invisible illness, care is often significantly delayed. I shared the patient experience as best I could, talking about how so many patients are stuck in limbo, and in bed. For those interested, you can listen to the conversation, or read the transcript.

• I published my celiac’s guide to Turkey, a tough country to travel in when gluten free because it has a lot of hidden wheat. Wheat is thought to have been first domesticated in Southwest Turkey 10,000 years ago, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised! My guide has both a list of safe/unsafe foods for celiacs, as well as a Turkish translation card to use in restaurants or stalls.

• CAE 58 overflow links, a crash course in ‘exploding trees’ during cold weather, and other updates are here.

Featured art for CAE 59

CAE 59’s featured artist is Robbie Craig, who I was first introduced to by a friend living in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Robbie grew up in Barrie, Ontario, and attended teacher’s college while painting on the side. After obtaining a job in Canada’s Northwest Territories, he says he was drawn to the rugged landscape, tundra, and crooked “Seuss-like” trees”, and knew he’d found his home. The beauty of the North inspired his paintings, too, and I find his landscapes beautiful and peaceful. The thumbnail image for CAE 59, is from his piece entitled “Night of the Jack Pines, and the image below is entitled “Beneath the Moon Glow”. I love his work, and if you do too you can find him on Instagram and on his website.

The most interesting things I read this month

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

🇨🇳 2025 Letter. I’ve shared Dan Wang’s annual, reflective post in CAEs past, and as with earlier editions his 2025 letter is thoughtful and thought-provoking, about China, geopolitics, and much more. In discussing AI, he does so via a different lens to what we’re used to, specifically how the West’s deployment of AI differs from China’s approach. “Silicon Valley has done a marvelous job in building data centers,” he writes, “but tech titans don’t look ready to plan for later steps in leading the whole-of-society effort into deploying AI everywhere.” In contrast, the Communist Party “lives for whole-of-society efforts” and China has set targets for AI across society — something the West often ignores. The result is that the West’s use of AI is very present-driven (presentations, written work, building current things) or theoretical (discussion of superintelligence or winning a race) whereas in China, the aim is on scaling via existing manufacturing and braiding AI into processes to make them even more productive. Wang isn’t an AI sceptic, but thinks we ought to be talking about “winning the AI future” as a wholesale approach across society, instead of the specific pockets of focus we seem to be obsessed with here. He goes into much more detail than my brief summary can hold, and it’s worth your full attention as it is every year. In his astute analysis is, as always, personal anecdotes and reflections. Dan Wang

🪹 Got Beef With Cowbirds? This Researcher Wants to Change Your Mind. Have you heard of a cowbird? The brown-headed cowbird (to be precise) is a fascinating species known for its “brood parasitism”, meaning that it lays its eggs in the nests of other birds to be raised by unsuspecting foster parents. While cowbirds are often dismissed by birders as villains or “lazy” parents, I learned so much in this piece that surprised me. For one, scientists now think the cowbird has complex cognitive maps in its bird-brain to keep track of dozens of nests simultaneously. Plus, how do the younger cowbirds recognize their bio-parents? (A “password” of chatter, apparently!). The researchers interviewed for the piece talk about other findings that challenge the common perception of cowbirds, including more about how the young cowbirds transition from host nests to independence. I confess I previously fell into cowbird tropes, so I’m glad to be corrected. Audobon

🚰 Thirteen Waters: Tasting Notes from a Sommelier. In last month’s CAE, we learned about the The Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting competition, a gathering place for the world’s most passionate drinking water enthusiasts. So this piece by a water sommelier (yes, an actual thing — TIL, again) caught my eye. It shares delightfully curated tasting notes for thirteen different waters, ranging from still and mineral to sparkling. Following a similar writing style to what we’d see in wine tasting notes (“a pleasant and harmonious water, also of decent mineral composition”), each water here also includes contextual references and musings that make this piece a fun addendum to the Walrus article I shared in CAE 58. The Paris Review

⏰️ Who Sets the Doomsday Clock? You may have seen that the Doomsday Clock ticked closer to midnight this week. In this timely piece, I got to learn more about where it came from. Humans have been “telling stories about the apocalypse for thousands of years,” but the nuclear age marked a new reality “that our end could be self-inflicted,” Emily Strasser writes. The Doomsday Clock was an early symbol of that awareness, beginning as a sketch to convey the “panicky time” of the post-WWII era in 1947, with the then-constructed clock’s arms moving as history marched on. The clock began under the spectre of nuclear war, but now factors in climate change, disruptive technologies, geopolitics, and biological threats. It’s meant “to be a warning and a call to action, not a prediction”, and yet it seems to be mostly falling on deaf ears as high level existential threats persist. A few days after publication, the clock’s arms were moved even closer to doomsday, the closest that they’ve ever been. Popular Mechanics

🐧 Rockhopper Penguins’ Athleticism Makes Them the Daredevils of the Animal World. Will a Warming Climate Slow Them Down? I’m no penguin connoisseur, so this was a fascinating look at one of nature’s most spirited waddlers: the rockhopper penguin. Clambering up and down the cliffs of the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas to those in Argentina, as I was reminded often when I visited), these “little balls of muscle with outsize personalities” survive by sheer grit. They are the smallest penguins to rush around in the cold, rough waters north of Antarctica, but how much longer can they withstand a rapidly warming ocean? As rising temperatures shift the location of their prey, Rockhopper penguins are being forced to swim further and dive deeper, burning precious calories they can’t afford to lose. I loved the affection with which researchers describe these birds, but the sobering reality remains that our world is changing. And yes, there are plenty of bonus cuddly penguin pictures inside. Smithsonian Magazine

🧮 Why can’t I just meet you for dinner? Extremely relatable piece about the calculus required to manage ME/CFS in an able-bodied world. I write about the “abacus” of sliding beads around all day, to figure out what I can and cannot do with an active spinal CSF leak. Fred Rossi talks of the accounting in his head that he has to do when someone asks to make plans with him, and explains that his fears are not about “feeling tired”— or even mere exhaustion. Rather, it’s PEM, post-exertional malaise, a “systemic crash that occurs after physical, cognitive, or emotional exertion that exceeds your body’s brutally reduced energy envelope.” I’ve talked about limited bandwidth but that, too, feels insufficient to describe the crash that follows exceeding it, not to mention how long it takes to return to a normal baseline. The math has to factor in not just a “flare”, but also the decline that often follows. It’s a thoughtful piece that peels the layers away for people without chronic conditions like ours, and I appreciate him writing it. Center Left

⌛ Effort Without Improvement. Similarly, this shorter read hits home. “It’s still hard to accept that I have to make as much effort as I do to never get better. And despite understanding, intellectually, that I am chronically ill, my brain continues to search for the magic pill.” I’ve written that I have hope that medicine may evolve to seal me one day, but that day is not here, and I do not know if it will ever be here. Society struggles to process those of us left in interstitial ‘waiting’ spaces, and sometimes I forget that I shouldn’t compare my current body to my pre-leak body, that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself for needing so much rest. Kristie De Garis

🧅 I sell onions on the internet. From 2019, this post was resurfaced by The Browser and shares a man “addicted to domain names” who randomly bought an onion-related domain for $2,200, and then built a very successful farm-to-fridge business that delivers Vidalia onions. I’m biased, I should admit; they are my favourite onion. I really enjoyed this short read of someone with no onion expertise who unexpectedly found a gap in a marketplace, and then filled it. Deep South Adventures

🫀 Light Exposure at Night and Cardiovascular Disease Incidence. A very interesting study: researchers found that people exposed to brighter light at night faced higher risks of heart disease, while daytime light may protect the heart by reinforcing healthy circadian rhythms. I’ve written about chronobiology for years now in my post about jet lag, and I think this growing field will be very important to how we manage interventions in the future. In this study from October, resurfaced for me by (thanks Ryan!) researchers tracked around 90,000 people for almost 8 years, which yielded a staggering 13 million hours of light exposure data. The study found that people with the brighter light exposure during sleep had a 56% higher risk of developing heart failure over those sleeping in darkness, as well as a 47% increased risk of heart attack, 32% higher risk of both coronary artery disease and atrial fibrillation, and 28% elevated stroke risk, though causality cannot be inferred. Over on Patreon, I covered a study addressing whether inflammation can cause depression in people with insomnia (the answer is yes), and my writeup included advice on how to sleep better (as a prior insomniac!). For those who don’t want to click over: advice included blackout blinds, using dim, non-overhead light after sundown, keeping “Night Shift” on your devices as soon as the sun sets, using a SAD lamp in AM, and more. JAMA

⚓️ New Arteries, New Power. (Archive link) Different kind of arteries for this one! You’ve likely seen news reports about undersea cables that supply the internet to a variety of countries, and how cutting them significantly disrupts function in those countries. This article is a deep dive into those subsea fibre optic cables that carry nearly all of global digital traffic. The cables have become a critical but increasingly friction-filled area of geopolitical maneuvering, and their vulnerabilities are especially pronounced in Europe. Increased vessel and submarine activity along Atlantic and Baltic routes have also “heightened concerns about undersea surveillance, as adversaries map and monitor critical cable routes”, Lynn Kuok writes. The laws are outdated — the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) was from 1982. We desperately need a “a comprehensive global architecture that links national and regional efforts with international ones and modernizes the legal and institutional regime”, and while the US was well-positioned to lead this effort …. lololol now, right? Good luck with that. Maritime Law was one of the most interesting classes I’ve ever taken during my legal studies; it’s hard to believe UNCLOS has not been modified since. We really need new rules for the deep. Foreign Affairs (And: related bonus, maps of the sprawling networks of undersea cables from over time, via Kottke.org)

✨ How Will the Miracle Happen Today? A beautiful read by Kevin Kelly about accepting kindness from strangers as a spiritual practice unto itself, one developed during his lifetime. “Kindness is like a breath,” he writes. “It can be squeezed out, or drawn in. You can wait for it, or you can summon it. To solicit a gift from a stranger takes a certain state of openness.” Accepting the kindness of strangers was a primary step in almost every transcendental experience I’ve had while traveling, and I did often worry about the burden of my presence in their lives. Kelly writes of staying in strangers’ yards while cycling cross-country, never once being turned away and often being invited inside for dessert and conversation where his role was to “help them enjoy a thrill they secretly desired” by recounting his adventure. He argues that being “kinded” is an unpracticed virtue requiring surrender, a deliberate willingness to be helped that transforms the question from “will I be helped?” to “how will the miracle happen today?” Drawing on his experience, he suggests true spiritual faith rests not on hope but on gratitude, something I agree with. The state of being alive is itself an unearned gift, brimming with ‘what ifs’ — even when life goes pear-shaped, as mine has. A big part of how I’ve mentally survived has been to live in a place of possibilities. Not as a state of disassociation or delusion, but to opt to sit in the gratitude of still being here, no matter how small of a sliver I have to do so, and no matter how bad things get. Kevin Kelly

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

🇧🇷 Under the Cowboy Hat. Interesting read about a new sub-genre of music in Brazil, called “agronejo. Originating as an offshoot of sertanejo, Brazilian country music, agronejo lyrics celebrate cattle ranching, soy farming, trucks, rodeos and modern farm technology in songs that have gone viral online. Also, um, pesticides: singers Adson & Alana sing in a song outro, spray that poison from the plane!. Critics highlighted in the piece argue that agronejo’s upbeat portrayal of the agricultural industry dovetails with the political and economic power of agribusiness in Brazil, where a large share of their government is aligned with farming interests, and environmental and land-rights issues are contentious. Plus, pesticide contamination incidents have risen sharply. Like, really, really sharply: an 858% (!) increase in 2024. The genre’s success, including stars like Ana Castela, reshape agribusiness’s image in a way that appeals to younger audiences, but it does it while normalizing an industry that profits at the expense of Indigenous rights and Brazil’s working poor. The Dial

🔎 A century in the Siberian wilderness: the Old Believers who time forgot. In this engaging piece by Sophie Pinkham, we are transported to the depths of the Siberian taiga to revisit the story of the Lykov family, “Old Believers” (a traditionalist branch of Russian Orthodoxy that rejected 17th-century liturgical reforms) who fled religious persecution in Russia in 1936, and lived in near-total isolation for over forty years. By the time a group of geologists stumbled upon them in the Sayan mountains in 1978, the family had no idea that World War II had occurred, or that humans had landed on the moon. The children had never seen bread, and when offered some they declined saying they weren’t allowed. Their vocabulary was archaic, but their speech had also shifted during their isolation. All told, they spent decades in a near-constant battle with the elements, with some family members succumbing to famine. After their discovery, as is often the case, others passed from illnesses introduced through contact with the geologists. Only one person, a woman named Agafia Lykova, survived into the 21st century. She continues to live largely self-sufficiently in the taiga while intermittently accepting limited assistance and supplies from visitors and researchers. The Guardian

🎰 America Goes for Broke. Early on in my law career, I was tasked with compiling state legislation about sports betting and internet gambling. Like any project that takes a lot of your time, articles on the topic now catch my eye. In this very personal report, Jasper Craven explores the explosive rise of sports betting in America, a shift he describes as a burgeoning “epidemic” that has transformed from a niche vice into a multi-billion dollar cultural mainstay. I say ‘very personal’ because he writes that he has himself wagered over $18,000 online. Drawing a parallel between the current gambling boom and the early days of the opioid crisis, he notes that both are fuelled by ease of access and a multibillion-dollar advertising blitz that preys on those genetically or socially primed for addiction. The piece discusses the “shoddy patchwork” of state regulations and a startling lack of Federal oversight. Sports betting is ubiquitous, especially for men — nearly half of men 18-49 have online betting accounts — and the algorithms push “chasing losses” further. Reporting from Las Vegas, Craven also profiles industry workers, casual and habitual bettors, and recovering gamblers, to share their documented harms. These include not only financial loss, but also alcohol disorders, domestic violence, and more. Harpers

💉 Life on Peptides Feels Amazing. (Archive link) Peptides are building blocks of proteins, comprising amino acids (from 2 to 100, linked together). As this article notes, they are the body’s messengers; “they can tell skin cells to make more collagen, spur muscle growth after exercise, or affect immune activity.” I’ve been interested in them since 2019, when I started writing to researchers about different peptides in reference to my chronic spinal CSF leak, curious as I was for ways to claw back some quality of life as I waited for medicine to evolve. At the time, peptides were primarily used for bodybuilding and for chronic illness, with compounds like BPC-157, KPV, GHK-CU, and MOTS-C featuring heavily. Since, the global peptide-therapeutics market does close to $50 billion in annual sales, with the recent boom mostly caused by the GLP-1R medications like Zepbound and Ozempic. It’s a very caveat emptor situation: many people are not only buying from the “grey market” (mostly labs from China), but testing these compounds doesn’t always yield results that reflect what you thought you bought. Moreover, there is little research on long-term side effects or consequences of some of the peptides, with concerns about cancer risks for several of them. I do wish the article went more into that aspect of the compounds. New York

🧬 The real da Vinci code. Scientists involved in the decade-long Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project now report that they have extracted genetic material from drawings and letters that may be associated with the da Vinci. Samples swabbed from these artifacts yielded human DNA sequences that appear to belong to the same genetic lineage linked to Tuscany, the region where da Vinci was born. The researchers note there is no conclusive proof the material comes from Leonardo himself given the possibility of contamination over centuries from people who handled the items. While researchers have found bones from a family vault (Leonardo’s grandfather’s petrous temporal bone), they haven’t confirmed the Leonardo connection yet as they are still trying to get access to the Amboise tomb where Leonardo himself was buried, or confirm DNA from the mysterious hair lock. The study, published as a pre-print, is part of a larger project that has already reconstructed a multi-generational family tree of da Vinci’s descendants. Whether they will eventually find and authenticate physical remains to confirm a match is up in the air, but this is the closest we’ve gotten. Science.org

😬 How to be less awkward. In his delightful writing style, Adam Mastroianni lays out some practical strategies for understanding and reducing social awkwardness by looking at the factors that contribute to what we think are uncomfortable interactions. Differentiating between awkwardness as almost a skill gap (eg., not knowing ‘proper’ social conventions or timing), and awkwardness as almost misalignment (those times when our internal states don’t match our outward behaviour, or when we’re aggressively self-aware to the point of performance), Mastroianni suggests some solutions to minimize them all. They include taking time to observe patterns, owning mistakes instead of trying to cover them up, and for those excessively self-aware, to turn your attention outward to other people instead of inward on yourself. It’s a fun read, but I especially liked his note that even if you can’t de-awk yourself, you can “refrain from fertilizing anyone else’s” awkwardness, because being cruel only increases the “ambient cruelty in the world”. Amen. Experimental History

🇦🇸 Americans by Name, Punished for Believing It. This piece chronicles the prosecution of American Samoans in Whittier, Alaska for voting and running for office. I know little about American Samoa, being a Canadian who has only read about it but never travelled there. Unlike people born in the other US territories like Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, or the US Virgin Islands, American Samoans are US Nationals and not full citizens. This unique limbo status is derived from (racist) early-1900s Supreme Court rulings known as the Insular Cases. American Samoans can serve in the US military and hold US passports, though. The article centres on Tupe Smith, who was arrested after winning a school board election, along with others charged after an anonymous tip led to a coordinated investigation. Reading underscores the widespread confusion about American Samoan voting rights among defendants, Alaska election officials, and even state troopers. The defendants say they believed they were eligible to vote and checked “US citizen” on voter registration forms that did not include a “US national” option. State prosecutors argue they are required to pursue the cases, which carry potential sentences of up to 10 years in prison. All defendants rejected plea deals at the urging of advocacy groups concerned about precedent, and those groups are now supporting appeals to the Alaska Court of Appeals after a lower court declined to dismiss the charges. The case has since become entangled with broader national efforts to police non-citizen voting, despite evidence that such voting is exceedingly rare. Bolts Mag

🚮 The Junkification of Research. This essay refers to academic research primarily, but “junkification” was originally coined to describe the increasing volume of slop permeating digital platforms as a whole. Through the academic lens, Rhodes and Linnenluecke write that research is becoming “an increasingly commodified good”, which has allowed research-slop (my note, not theirs) to permeate online academic publishing as well. They argue that the convergence of commercial publishing interests and new technologies has pushed the ‘publish or perish’ culture prevalent in academia to the breaking point, and led to scholars increasingly bearing the costs of “low-esteem publishing”. This only limits genuine research from emerging. Sage Journals

📚 The Dream of the Universal Library. Related yet not: Monica Westin writes about how the dream of a digital “library for all”, where all books would be searchable and accessible online has largely stalled … for human readers, that is. There was an earlier expectation that copyright would adapt to our digital times, but in reality, copyright restrictions have left readers with only decontextualized snippets. Major digitization projects by Google and the Internet Archive have run into legal obstacles: Google’s proposed 2008 settlement with the Authors Guild would have created access to millions of out-of-print books, but was rejected for potentially giving Google a monopoly on orphan works, and The Internet Archive’s “controlled digital lending” approach was struck down in a 2023 lawsuit after the organization abandoned its one-copy-one-user model during Covid’s early days. Rather than continuing to fight over fair use exceptions or copyright reform, Westin argues for a practical licensing solution: an “out-of-commerce” framework like the EU implemented in 2019, which would allow libraries to make digitized books available online through collective licensing unless rightsholders opt out. She notes the US Copyright Office recommended exactly this approach in a 2015 report that Congress never acted on, and points out that if the publishing industry can quickly negotiate licensing deals worth billions to feed books to AI training, surely a rational system can be designed to let actual humans borrow digital copies of books they can’t buy. Asterisk

💔 When Does a Divorce Begin? Anahid Nersessian writes about her divorce through a series of vignettes that resist the traditional arcs of triumph or suffering and focus on the practical changes of life in ‘the after’. Her essay begins with the moment her marriage ends, her walking into an airport terminal with her children while her husband stays behind. It moves through fragmented reflections on marriage, divorce, motherhood, and identity. Nersessian critiques recent divorce memoirs for their moral vacuity and almost comedic narcissism, noting how they fail to acknowledge the class privilege that shapes their authors’ experiences. (Divorce typically causes women’s income to drop 20% while men’s rises 30%). “Marriage made excuses for me, or rather, excused me,” she writes, noting that she doesn’t miss her marriage but does miss the protective cloak it gave her. Divorce is “a death with no ceremony to mark it,” and stripped of the chronic emotionality often used to narrate it, her essay hits even harder. The Yale Review

🎿 From The Kids’ Table: Ode to the On-Mountain Meal. I grew up on skis. My dad put me on them for the first time when I was 2; I promptly skied into a ravine. Despite this inauspicious start, I spent most of my winter on the slopes — though I wouldn’t realize for another 20 years that the extraordinary back pain I suffered from while skiing was due to a genetic disorder. On those cold, icy days, the cafeteria beckoned. For our family, it meant sandwiches made on “alligator bread”, a sourdough from a local bakery. Being from Quebec, as a big treat: a poutine. This piece is about on-mountain eats in a variety of slopes, from “the overpriced garbage I shovel down in a cafeteria” to the more high-priced resort meals. Sadly for the author, no mention of poutine — their taste buds have missed out! The Supersonic

🔗 Quick links

• Scientists have published a study demonstrating an “off the shelf” cartilage that can potentially be used to regrow bone in transplantation. (Now do the dura?)

• Human hair grows through ‘pulling’ not pushing out from the root, a new study shows.

• A writeup about shadow directories, a unique way to hijack WordPress permalinks.

• Read the first known customer complaint, made on a Babylonian tablet some 3800 years ago. It’s about the delivery of the wrong grade of copper.

• Humans rank above meerkats - but below beavers! - in the monogamy scale.

• The 100 best TV episodes of the century.

• Flu antivirals: when to use them, and how to take them

• Covid changes brain structure: a worrying look into the literature on Covid and brain health.

Hope you enjoyed these links! See you next month,
-Jodi

My updates

• I was a guest on The Hearing, a legal podcast from Thomson Reuters that started in 2018. You can listen to my episode on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, with advice for lawyers who want to leave the law or anyone who wants to make a career change, as well as lessons I’ve learned during the big shifts in my own life.

• CAE 57 Overflow links are here.

Featured art for CAE 58

CAE 57’s featured artist is Rebecca Lee, whose beautiful microphotography image below was an honourable mention in this year’s Nikon Small World competition. Taken at 40X, it features villi from the small intestine of mice. The image is not only lovely on its own merits, but a part of the body I know well: villi are affected in celiac disease (among other conditions), and I was diagnosed celiac decades ago and quickly learned to respect them. See Rebecca’s Instagram for her sketches, and see the Nikon link below for more microphotography.

The most interesting things I read this month

Want to help keep CAE free? The best way to do so is to become a member of my Patreon, where I also share overflow CAE links. Patreon memberships provide me with stable income so I can keep offering CAE without a paywall. Use code NEWYEAR26 for 15% off annual subscriptions — it’s valid through the end of January.

Start with some end of year lists:

Start here for year-end roundups I feature annually, or simply enjoyed. Then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below. There are no “Quick Links” this month because of these year end lists, but the QL section will be back next month!

• 52 things I learned in 2025. Tom Whitwell’s annual compendium of all the facts he learned during the prior year is a must-read for me each December. This year is no exception. Medium

• Top 100 Photos of 2025. Self-explanatory! Time Magazine

• Nature’s 10. A list of ten people who influenced science in 2025. Nature

• 2025 Word of the Year. It’s rage bait (n.): online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account. Oxford University Press

• 2025 Jealousy List. Bloomberg has been doing this list for as long as I’ve been cobbling links together; I remember reading it at my desk as a lawyer back in 2005, when CAE was called “Linkies of the Day”. It’s a lovely idea to spotlight talent outside their own org with features of articles they’re jealous about / wished they’d written. This year is no exception. Bloomberg

• The Best Movies of 2025, According to John Waters. All the brutalist sci-fi, cockeyed cunnilingus, and sequel horror you need to have seen this year. Vulture

• 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025. I liked the focus on smaller press books that may otherwise be missed due to smaller marketing budgets (unless BookTok got a hold of them!) Lithub

• The 27 Best Books of 2025. More mainstream fare, for your perusal. Esquire

• The 50 Best Albums of 2025. Many different best albums lists each year, but Pitchfork’s is one I read without fail. Pitchfork

• And Album of the Year’s 2025 aggregate best album list. Using 51 ‘best albums of 2025’ lists on the web, they’ve aggregated the data into one ur-list. AOTY

• The Year in Search. Google Trends’ annual round up for top searches in news, passings, and other categories, as gathered by their search engine data over the course of the year. Google

• Breakthrough of the Year. In 2025, Science.org saw momentum shift to renewable energy, most of it from sunlight itself or from wind. Renewables are their breakthrough of the year. Science.org

• The 20 best links of 2025. From fellow curator Caitlin Dewey, her top picks for the year based on reader popularity plus relevancy (if it still feels timely later in the year). Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends

• Best photos of 2025. A year-end compilation with a news lens. Reuters

• Best video essays of 2025. This one is via Kottke.org. I don’t watch videos myself, and would never have found this on my end. For those who do, it looks like an excellent list! British Film Institute

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

🛷 Ottawa man takes his Uber driver tobogganing for first time. Loved this feel-good story from my city of Ottawa, where passenger Dave Nguyen discovered his Uber driver, Chance Niyomugabo, had never been tobogganing. He then sought to fix that problem and take Chance for a whirl down a hill in Kanata. Ottawa Citizen

🚰 My Sparkling and Surreal Experience As a Water-Tasting Judge. Canadian publication The Walrus was an unexpected place to find a profile on the (surprisingly) competitive world of water tasting, but the annual competition is international after all. The Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting competition is a “gathering place for the world’s most passionate drinking water enthusiasts”. TIL that there is, in fact, a competition dubbed the Oscars of Water. Over the years, dozens of countries have competed in different categories (both carbonated and not), including what is described as “perhaps most coveted of all”, Municipal water. This tasting competition is sampled blind and evaluated the way we evaluate wine, with categories like clarity, aroma (um?), mouthfeel, and taste. Reigning supreme this time in the Municipal category was tap water from Emporia, Kansas, though there were notable samples from West Virginia, North Dakota, and California as well. Attending were water companies and employees from local water utility companies, and also superfans. Markets in everything, I guess? I took tap water for granted until I travelled to places where it was not drinkable, and it made me appreciate the ubiquity of safe water in my hometown of Montreal. Adrian Ma, who wrote this piece, says he recently came to realize he knows “embarrassingly little” about how water is made safe to drink and gets to our homes. So he started reading, found this event, and ended up attending as a judge. Great blend of first person narrative with an important discussion about water safety, including about Canada — whose water samples didn’t make it to the top 3 in any category. Highly enjoyable! The Walrus🚰

‼️ Scientists Thought Parkinson’s Was in Our Genes. It might be in the water. (Archive link) Yes, we’re still on water, this time about how its contamination can create health crises. For decades, Parkinson’s research has traditionally focused on genetics, but in the last 30 years the disease’s rates in the US have doubled — which is not the way an inherited, genetic disease “behaves”. So what is going on? Newer research estimates that only 10-15% of cases are genetic; the rest are a “functional mystery.” We’ve seen stories about 9/11 frontline workers developing it, thought to be caused by exposure to toxic particles during response and rescue. “The health you enjoy or don’t enjoy today is a function of your environment in the past,” warns Ray Dorsey, a physician and professor of neurology. Amy Lindberg, one of the profiles in this piece, spent 26 years in the Navy and at 57 was diagnosed Parkinson’s. Doctor’s couldn’t tell her why she developed it, and it was a mystery until a study from epidemiologist Sam Goldman compared the health records of two Marine bases, Camp Pendleton and Camp Lejeune. Lejeune’s water source was previously contaminated with “a massive plume of trichlorethylene” (TCE); Pendleton’s was not. When looking at both of the populations from those bases, Goldman found that marines exposed to TCE at Lejeune were 70% more likely to have Parkinson’s than those stationed at Pendleton. Lindberg, it turns out, had spent years living at Camp Lejeune. Great writing and reporting in here. Also, per the piece: TCE was only banned in the US in 2024, and Trump has moved to undo the ban. WIRED Mag

💉 I, who have never stuck a needle in my face. A candid, deeply heartfelt reflection on what it means to live with chronic illness while aging. In looking at societal trends, Erin Nystrom describes the cyclical nature of whatever is de jour, always led by the wealthy. In today’s society, it isn’t the powdered wigs of bygone eras but rather fillers and botox (what she calls “middle-class face augmentation”), mimicking the plastic surgery of the wealthy. As the title suggests, she has not put a needle in her face. Partly, she notes, it’s the cost. But also a tangible decision in protest of how our minds have “been warped to believe that aging is a personal failure”. Instead of valuing women’s wisdom or experience or skills, we value “having the same homogeneous face as everyone else that looks good in a front-facing camera.” And because she doesn’t want to cover up the barometers of health; if she papers over her body with makeup or fillers, she can’t use what it’s telling her as a guide. She argues that these interventions (the fillers, the plastic surgery, the heaps of makeup) only serve to disconnect us further from ourselves, and erase subtle clues in connecting to others. That, in turn, makes us easier to control. It’s a very thoughtful essay, and I agree that beauty and youth are not mutually exclusive. But there’s no question today’s society says that they are. Human, being

🪶 Rapid morphological change in an urban bird due to COVID-19 restrictions. This links out to a study, but one I found really interesting: sheltering in place / lock downs during initial days of Covid provided a natural experiment to test the impacts of human activity on urban-dwelling wildlife. In this case, looking at urban dark-eyed juncos in Los Angeles. We already knew their bill size and shape differed from wild juncos, but scientists measured juncos that hatched before, during, and after the Covid restrictions at a Los Angeles college campus and found that those who were born during or soon after restrictions were put in place had bills that did resemble the wild juncos. Now that restrictions are over, the juncos went back to their urban counterparts. So interesting! PNAS

🐸 Bacterium From Frogs Completely Destroys Colon Cancer. Also on the animal front: whoa! A new paper out of Japan finds that if you introduce specific bacteria (they used multiple strains of bacteria taken from frogs, newts, and lizards) into colon cancer-derived tumours, it kills the cancer cells while also stimulating an immune response in mice. This also gave the mice a lasting immunity against the form of cancer. The three vertebrate species used were two amphibians (Dryophytes japonicus and Cynops pyrrhogaster) and a reptile (Takydromus tachydromoides), and nine strains were used to investigate further. It turns out that one in particular, the bacterium Ewingella americana, isolated from the intestines of Japanese tree frogs (those Dryophytes japonicus mentioned above), possesses remarkably potent anticancer activity. I’ve shared pieces about the gut biome and cancer before, but most papers focus on fecal transplants or other microbiome changes. This one takes a totally different approach by introducing bacteria via IV to attack the tumours themselves. Lifespan.io

📷 2025 Photomicrography Competition. I share the results of this amazing competition annually, because it’s some wondrous photography. It’s also an embodiment of the life I now lead; stuck indoors, the granular is where I find curiosity, and nothing is too ‘small’ to be interesting. This month’s featured image is of the villi, the part of intestines affected by celiac disease — which you all know I have. But there are so many gorgeous photos in here. I also loved this honourable mention, the crystallization of a mixed solution of alanine and glutamine that looks like a painting, and these vascular bundles that look like smiling penguin snowmen. Nikon Small World

🍾 Champagne bubbles: the science. Ever wondered how they get the bubbles into Champagne? Here’s a how to for not only Champagne, but also other sparkling wines. Scientists describe how pressure changes during fermentation or bottle aging trap CO₂ in solution, and when that pressure is released, the gas escapes in the form of bubbles that grow and rise, carrying aromatic compounds that influence flavour and mouthfeel. The piece also goes into how “bubble dynamics” vary by temperature, glass shape, and liquid composition. It’s a great how-to for something I never thought to look up before, including why effervescence can make wine taste different from still counterparts. Very interesting! Knowable

🍄 The Psychedelic Scientist. A charming profile of Bruce Damer, computer scientist and psychonaut who has become a cult figure in research related to hallucinogenic experiences. Speaking at a psychedelic consciousness conference in England, Damer shared a vivid ayahuasca experience in which he felt transported back to his own conception, healing him in a way that opened such clarity that he felt he could travel through time, potentially even back to the question of how life began. Unlike others in the psychedelic space, Damer is now unabashedly ‘woo’ in how he describes and interacts with its effects, despite years of keeping his beliefs to himself for concerns about his credibility (he was also a contractor for NASA). Today, psychedelics like psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca are increasingly studied for their potential to ease anxiety, depression, and PTSD. But Damer contends that they can “crack open the minds of scientists and other problem-solvers”, not just treat mental health. In 2023, he founded the nonprofit organization the Center for MINDS (Multidisciplinary Investigation into Novel Discoveries and Solutions) to help spark paradigm-shifting breakthroughs. Nautilus

🧫 2025 Agar Art Award Winners The annual Agar Art Contest is hosted by the American Society for Microbiology, and receives entries from around the world created with agar to ‘paint’ living microbes on petri dishes. Some incredibly complicated art in here, for a petri dish so small. Impressive! ASM

😅 2025 Nikon Comedy Wildlife Award Finalists Every year, the Comedy Wildlife Awards surprise and delight us, and this year’s gallery of winners and finalists is no exception. Comedy Wildlife Photo

🫘 Tonka Bean: The Tale of a Contested Commodity. The tonka bean (Dipteryx odorata) isn’t something we cook with often here in Canada. On last year’s Masterchef Australia it featured in a dish or two, and I was interested in learning more. Aromatic, tiny, and a contested commodity, it’s described in this piece as “a sweet blend of cinnamon, clove, almond, vanilla, and caramel, sometimes with hints of cherry or freshly cut hay”. Its intense fragrance comes from its high levels of coumarin, a compound that may also cause liver damaged if consumed in excess. What is fascinating about tonka beans is that the beans themselves are a “failed global commodity” — but the tree that produces them are the opposite, a commercial success! Initially promising internationally for food and perfumes starting in the early 1800s, it was banned in the US due to health concerns in the 1950s, a decision that is still criticized by chefs and tonka bean aficionados. While its bean fell out of favour, its tree makes for a durable, richly grained hardwood known as cumaru; its wood flourished for use in flooring and furniture. The tree originates from the Amazon basin and was used medicinally by Indigenous groups for a long time before we stumbled upon it. Tonka beans are now found in present-day Venezuela, northern Brazil, Colombia, Suriname, and the Guianas, as well as nearby islands Trinidad and Tobago. The whole piece is worth a read! (via Aubrey; JStor)

🤝🏻 Teaching when to trust. As fake news and deep fakes accelerate, this piece urges us to teach our children how to think critically, using Finnish schools as a model. The piece has a UK focus (being that it’s from a UK publication), but its lessons are extrapolatable worldwide. Finland ranks highest in the European Media Literacy Index and treats resistance to misinformation as part of national security, shaped in part by its proximity to Russia and exposure to coordinated disinformation campaigns. Since 2014, Finland has fact-checking initiatives and targeted media literacy programmes for politicians, journalists, vulnerable populations, and immigrants, as well as early media education in schools. There, critical thinking and media literacy are woven across subjects from primary school onwards, in sharp contrast to the fragmented, inconsistent way these skills are taught in most of North America and the UK. The New Humanist

🪫 Running on Empty: Copper. While another piece in this CAE discusses clean energy, this piece warns that the clean energy transition bumps up fairly aggressively against the hard limits of copper. Copper, the piece notes, is an “essential component in everything electric due to it’s high heat and electrical conductivity”, present in wires, in transformers, in EV motors, and in solar panels. Copper deposits are declining, as it “doesn’t grow on trees” after all. And while not all of the demand for the mineral comes from renewables, the piece reminds us that finding more sources of copper will create itself an environmental impact. In looking at the full picture of renewable energy, the author argues, we must also look at the upstream extraction footprints and what sustainability looks like from those perspectives as well. It’s already hard not to notice; copper prices have reached all-time highs, and has been trending upwards for decades. They warn that the chaos over who will get the last resources on the planet has already begun, and a ramp-down plan for scarce resources needs to be put in place (but won’t be, let’s be honest). The Honest Sorcerer

🧠 A Distorted Mind-Body Connection May Explain Common Mental Illnesses (Archive Link). Have you heard of interoception? It’s the brain’s ability to sense and interpret internal bodily signals like heartbeats, breathing, and gut rhythms. In my maze of diagnoses during the last decade, I became familiar with the term proprioception, our sense of our body’s position, movement, and effort in space — something I’m not great at, and why I tend to bump into walls. Interoception is, as the name suggests, inward facing. And researchers now think that it can help us understand many mental health conditions, because they theorize that disruptions in this inner sense underpin conditions like anxiety, eating disorders, PTSD, borderline personality disorder, and more. When this “sixth sense” that helps our brains build an ever-adapting model of the body’s internal state goes awry, we can interpret its cues as threats or discomfort, leading to anxiety or distorted self-image. Studies discussed in the piece note that altering interoceptive processing, for example via sensory-deprivation tanks or wearables that train breath-awareness, may strengthen the mind-body connection and reduce symptoms. For years, the mind-body connection was only seen in the negative: you’re “stressed”, you’re “too hysterical” (especially for women). It’s very interesting to see the growing scientific interest in how the brain’s reading of the body might shape emotions, self-regulation, and emotional tolerance. I just hope it isn’t used as a catch all when the patient has other, tangible medical needs. Scientific American

💔 More Than Just a Headache: The Lonely Journey of a Spinal CSF Leak Patient. Speaking of my maze of diagnoses, this is a piece by Susan Maher, who I featured a few CAEs ago talking about medications and psychiatry. She also has a spinal CSF leak, and wrote about her path to care in this op-med about her experiences. She also interviewed me, so don’t be surprised to see my name pop up in there! More awareness is always better; thanks to Susan for writing the piece. Doximity

☠️ Volcanic eruptions set off a chain of events that brought the Black Death to Europe. Ummm… what?! This is a newer hypothesis, determined by scientists after looking at tree rings from across Europe to better understand 14th century climate, then checking their data against batches of ice core samples from Antarctica and Greenland, and then analyzing them alongside historical documents. Researchers now think that there was a “perfect storm” scenario that could explain the origin the Black Death, one that was set in motion by a volcanic eruption that occurred in 1345, around 2 years prior to the Black Death. The haze from volcanic ash affected sunlight over the Mediterranean region over multiple years, which caused temperatures to drop, which caused crops to fail. So the region imported grains from the Black Sea, which were brought by ships that had rats infected with the Yersinia pestis. The pathogen originated from wild rodents in Central Asia, and went on to cause the plague that devastated Europe. Cambridge University News

🎬 Defector’s Favorite Rob Reiner Credits. Reiner created many a comedic and non-comedic masterpiece, and his brutal murder in December was a shock to viewer-fans, and to his friends and family in Hollywood. “The world of film lost one of its most beloved and respected figures,” notes this piece by staff of Defector, “an artist who had done very good and extremely popular work in a variety of genres, first in front of the camera, then behind it as a writer, producer, and director, and then again in his later life as an actor.” He was also known as a good person, a kind person, who sheltered the child stars he worked with from the predatory vices of film life. Defector

🔫 As U.S. Guns Pour into Canada, the Bodies Pile Up (archive link). I’m sharing this piece as many American friends and readers aren’t aware of how our guns are often ones that arrived into Canada from our southern neighbour, since American media often repeats the factual inaccuracies cited by the current administration and portray Canada as the problem. In my province of Ontario, 91% percent of handguns recovered from crimes in 2024 came in illegally from the US, and in Toronto (Canada’s biggest city), 88% of all firearms recovered from crimes in 2024 were smuggled across the border, up from 51 % in 2014. As with fentanyl, it’s Canada that is being negatively impacted by US-sourced drugs or firearms, and homicides have spiked in here in the past decade as a result, most of them from guns. New York Times

♀️14445 and Counting. A profile of Dawn Wilcox, a Texas nurse who has spent years compiling Women Count USA, a database of (at the time of publication) 14,445 cases of women in the country who were killed by men because they were women. Entries go back to the 1950s, and are updated as she tracks news reports, public tips, and historical records. Researchers, including policy analysts and criminologists, have used her dataset to identify patterns such as coercive control and abuse that preceded some murders, and Wilcox’s work has drawn interest because federal datasets are increasingly limited or uneven, including the recent removal of gender identity questions from the National Crime Victimization Survey. As Margaret Atwood has said, “men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” The Atavist

🔠 English Prose Has Become Easier to Read. Have you ever heard someone say that English prose is now ‘easier’ because sentences have gotten shorter? This piece argues that it’s actually not length in the modern era that shifted things, but rather a “plain style” and different syntax that emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries in verbal conversation, changes that were only mirrored in written prose much later on. While yes, sentences are shorter, punctuation conventions also changed: periods replaced colons and semicolons, for example. Fragments of sentences, much like ones we’d hear in actual dialogue, also proliferated in every day writing. You can still have a senses short sentence that’s hard to read if it’s packed full of jargon, and long sentences can also be clear and easy to understand if they are ordered logically. (As you probably know, I am a fan of the long sentence.) Basically the trope that “short sentences are easier” is an oversimplification, and what actually makes contemporary prose feel readable is the dominance of plain style text. It’s direct, logical, and very close to current patterns of speech. Works in Progress

🏛 ‘It’s surreal’: US sanctions lock International Criminal Court judge out of daily life. Due to US sanctions that were imposed on International Criminal Court (ICC) judges, Kimberly Prost has been unable to use credit cards, access basic online services like Amazon, or easily transfer money or book accommodations. Prost additionally notes that her family members have faced visa complications, and that seemingly routine tasks like ordering a ride or sending money internationally are now fraught with obstacles. The sanctions came about last year via executive order that targeted ICC personnel for the decisions of the court itself; in Prost’s case, she ruled to authorize an investigation into alleged war crimes by the in Afghanistan. The ICC is supposed to be an independent international judicial body, but the US has long rejected its jurisdiction and was not among the 125 signatories of the Rome Statute that established the ICC in 1998. Despite the ICC’s seat being overseas, with so much of the financial machinery is American, sanctions interact with everything. The US has sanctioned six ICC judges this year, along with the court’s chief prosecutor and two deputy prosecutors, but this is the first piece I’ve read about the effects. Irish Times

💸 Meet the South Pacific Ponzi King with a Bogus Bank - and an International Fan Club. From a remote corner of the Pacific, a former architect of one of the South Pacific’s biggest financial frauds now presents himself as a divine monarch warning of global economic collapse — and promising vast riches to followers. Noah Musingku, also known as David Peii II, is a fugitive Ponzi schemer who has lived in Bougainville, an autonomous region of Papua New Guinea, for decades. He has now reinvented himself as “the divinely anointed ruler of a small fiefdom of locals who believe he will make them all billionaires any day now.” His self-proclaimed kingdoms include their own currency, the Bougainville Kina (BVK), which is not recognized by official monetary authorities. He’s also attracted a stream investors from around the world. The piece profiles a few of them, and it’s a fascinating snapshot of what draws them in or keeps them around. Notes the piece, “millions of dollars have been lost, lives have been upended, and a handful of people have faced serious prison time”. For his part, Musingku was interviewed for the piece and “breezily denied” accusations that he is a con artist or that he is printing fake currency. Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project

🎅🏻 Playing Santa Does Strange Things to a Man. What It Did to Bob Rutan Was Even Stranger. A creative concept for an article: the author tracks down a series of men who played Santa Claus at Macy’s Santaland in New York City, telling their life stories. It’s a microcosm the kind of storytelling travel gifts us with, sliding in sideways into someone’s life and learning about aspects of what they’ve experienced that you just can’t seen from the outside. From Bob Rutan’s path to Santaland and his approach to playing the role for “one of the great corporate branding stories in the history of American business.”

Hope you enjoyed these links! See you next month,
-Jodi

My updates

• Learn all you wanted to know about anteaters. I wrote a post about anteater facts for November 19th, which was World Anteater Day. Most people know of the giant anteater, but there are four species in total, all differing in size and markings. (All with freakishly long tongues and no teeth).

• Thank you to all who attended the Spinal CSF Leak: Bridging the Gap conference in mid November. I had fever the day of, and felt like I was in a bit of a fugue state. Feedback has been lovely, though (thankfully)! Overall, patients felt like I spoke to their complicated experiences in trying to get care for this debilitating condition, and physicians said it made them think differently about the patients they treat. What more could I ask for?

• I sold my 25,000th (!) gluten free translation card! Every day, I’m grateful that my business from bed can still help other people travel safely. I started these cards almost a decade ago, and have several new languages I hope to release this year. This weekend, I also published my celiac’s guide to South Korea, a collaboration between myself and a celiac reader I hired who recently traveled there.

• CAE 56 overflow links and life updates are here.

Featured art for CAE 57

CAE 57’s featured artist is French illustrator YoAz, whose vibrant and bright images are a composite of comforting shapes, animals and bold colours. In his own words, his style mixes structure with playful, psychedelic elements, often exploring movement, rhythm, and visual storytelling. You can find him on Instagram, and a selection of his prints are available for purchase via a Redbubble shop. Of all his images, I kept coming back to this one, and it is this month’s pick for CAE 57.

The most interesting things I read this month

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

🔠 Life’s Rich Pageant How A Campy 1970s Game Show Became Part Of Canada’s National Lexicon. As a Canadian, I couldn’t leave this piece out of CAE for the month! Campy as ever, as the article’s title suggests, The Gong Show was hosted in the 1970s by Chuck Barris and consisted of comedy and music segments scored by a panel of C-listers. The acts were “gonged” off the stage if they were terrible. I didn’t know that using “it’s a gong show” to describe something that was a low-stakes but an overall mess was a piece of Canadiana until I read this piece. I thought it was a North American expression. But no: it first emerged from the show to mean anything that was bad, to now evolve into something the show also embodied: chaos. This piece traces the term’s quiet evolution in more depth than I expected; the article came to be after the author Stefan Fatsis worked with Merriam-Webster. So he knows his words! He was able to do rummage around “gong show” on the job, to our benefit. “Words migrate,” he writes, “they ride on airplanes and optic fibers over mountains and under oceans, thumb their noses at state and national borders.” A delightful article, through and through. Defector

🌰 Nearly a Century Ago, American Chestnut Trees Died Off. Now, Hikers Can Walk Among Them Again. A friend did her thesis on American chestnut trees, so as with anything you have a small connection to, the title caught my eye and I dove into this read on how it has been coaxed into a comeback. Nearly a century ago, American chestnuts were one of the most abundant and ecologically important trees in the eastern US. However a fungus entered trees through wounds in their bark, spread around “stems and limbs” and destroyed their vascular system so much that they couldn’t make a recovery. While new sprouts often emerged, they rarely grew large enough to flower. By 1941, the blight had eradicated 3.5 billion (! )American chestnut trees and rendered the species functionally extinct. But, “the ghost of the chestnut still haunts the woods,” Eric J. Wallace tells us; and now, hikers may finally glimpse its return. Through decades of work by scientists and volunteers, breeding blight-resistant hybrids, mapping surviving stumps, and replanting seedlings, the American chestnut is slowly reclaiming its place. Citizen scientists and hikers are part of the comeback story, reporting sightings and helping restore what used to be called the “redwood of the East.” Backpacker

🧠 Aging Out of Fucks: The Neuroscience of Why You Suddenly Can’t Pretend Anymore. A whole piece about the aging brain’s middle finger to people-pleasing. Ellen Scherr write about what happens around midlife when suddenly you find yourself saying what you actually think instead of peddling to social harmony. Is people pleasing a pathological trait? Definitely not, but it was an interesting read about why the lack of cushioning or apology becomes easier as we age, something Scherr calls the “Great Unfuckening”. We all know that being ‘direct’ doesn’t equal being rude; there’s a big chasm between the two. But for many, passive aggressiveness is the cultural norm. Scherr writes about how there is a moral biological and hormonal re-wiring in the brain that overwrites our social choreography. The result is that social performance less automatic, for women especially (though also for men!), likely because social conditioning has long encouraged women to suppress their needs or avoid being seen as “difficult” in order to maintain peace. “You’re not becoming difficult,” Scherr states. “You’re becoming free.” Life Branches

🫄🏼 The birth keepers Childbirth Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births – now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world. This jaw-dropping investigation into the Free Birth Society (FBS) tells us about how the movement was initially started by two former doulas, and billed (by them) as an act of empowerment. Over time and fuelled by social media, it had dangerous and deadly results. Not that you needed a piece to tell you that “wild pregnancies” and childbirth without medical care could be dangerous. FBS discourages prenatal visits, hospital transfers, or even interventions even when complications arise, repackaging distrust in medicine as “choice” and “freedom” (sound familiar?). Worldwide, stillbirths, neonatal deaths, or serious harm were linked to families influenced by FBS teachings, all potentially preventable. I’m a perfect example of how iatrogenic injury can be life-changing, but I wouldn’t want to eschew medical care for something as crucial as bringing in another life. The Guardian

💢 The Pelvic Floor is a Problem. (Archive link) According to one paper, more than 25% of reproductive-age people globally have some form of pelvic floor dysfunction, including chronic pain, pain during sex, incontinence, organ prolapse, and a host of other poorly understood conditions. And that’s only the cases we know about. The pelvic floor discussion only recently become part of a more public discussion in the West, but since it “contains all the doorways” for areas that were long taboo, Casey Johnson writes that it certainly won’t become common party conversation. And myths abound. For example athleticism doesn’t make the area more functional. So, what does? Learning to engage it directly, it turns out. Basically, managing the pelvic floor is a skill, and one that the professionals Johnson interviews note is being mis-taught on social media. The piece is part personal narrative, part deep dive into the murky morass of bad information to give us the straight facts. WIRED Mag

☀️ Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa. For those unfamiliar, Solarpunk is a political vision that imagines a future built around decentralized renewable energy, low-carbon living, and community-driven infrastructure. A counterpoint to more dystopian climate narratives, the movement looks to integrate tech with nature and scale up from hyperlocal adoption. This piece argues that the movement is no longer hypothetical in Sub-Saharan Africa, where limited existing infrastructure works to an advantage because communities aren’t locked into aging centralized energy grids. With cheaper solar hardware costs happening in tandem with the rise of mobile money platforms, some solar startups have been able to scale in the region quickly, bringing electricity to millions of households that previously had none by selling solar panels to farmers on payment plans. It’s not a simple proposition, don’t get me wrong! You still need a list of different factors to be in place. But the author’s point is that this is a very different model to government-led megaprojects, one that we don’t often hear about in North America. Climate Drift

⛩️ Every Tree Can be a Buddha. This is a lyrical read by my friend Jason Kottke, who recently traveled to Japan. In it, he reflects on his walk along the Chōishi-michi pilgrimage route that leads from the town of Kudoyama to the sacred Mount Kōya, with 180 stone guideposts (choishi) along the way (“You don’t want your pilgrims getting lost,” Kottke writes.) After all, “how are you going to find eternal salvation if you can’t even make it to the temple?” Reading it is a reminder to nurture our connection to living things in reverence and stillness, something easy for us all to forget. The pilgrimage route is a UNESCO World Heritage site, but this essay focuses on each tiny moment of the hike, in first person. It made me wish I was in a forest myself, though it’s -20C outside so… wishful thinking on multiple fronts. Kottke

🌱 How a humble weed became a superstar of biology. So interesting! Rachel Ehrenberg takes us on a remarkable journey, sharing the story of how a modest weed turned into one of the most-studied model plants in biology. Once dismissed as a simple annoyance in the mustard family, Arabidopsis thaliana became a botanical superstar when researchers realised its tiny size, fast life-cycle and simple genome made it ideal for experimentation. Over the years, it’s helped scientists research plant genetics, stress responses, and even immunity, and led to breakthroughs in agriculture and biotechnology. It didn’t happen in a vacuum though; the article goes into how the research community rallied around the species by building databases, sharing tools, and publishing tens of thousands of papers. I had never heard of this lab mouse of the plant world before reading. Knowable Magazine

📰 Why College Students Prefer News Daddy Over The New York Times. (Archive link) This Verge piece, entertainingly designed, discusses how TikTok and Instagram now function as the primary news pipeline for Gen Z students, even among students who intellectually understand that social platforms are unreliable and algorithmically addictive. (A recent survey found 72% of college students get their news from social media.) This includes sources like the UK-based News Daddy, whose rapid-fire TikToks have collected 1.5 billion likes and who effectively serves as a “news anchor” for millions. Though the students interviewed know that News Daddy doesn’t cite all its sources, and misinformation travels quickly on TikTok, they say that the updates feel more “connected to the people” than traditional newsrooms do. Some students do use Google searches to double check questions from social media-fed news, especially when comments to the post say that something is inaccurate. The problem is, Google searches often yield an AI-generate summary as well at the top of results, and they don’t always click further. Nor is that summary always accurate. So they’re still not reading the actual sources. It’s like AI is the “new Wikipedia”, as a professor put it. In the end, convenience wins. The Verge

💍 The Trad Movement Is Sputtering. Here’s What Comes Next. Filming and sharing trad content was once a winning strategy to go viral: invoke traditional values, then “frame it as bold truth-telling” and wait for outrage to drive engagement. But its veneer is peeling away, and it per Katherine Dee it no longer hits the way it did a few years ago, resembling a fleeting internet instead of an emerging counterculture. So what happened? For one, Dee argues that the tradwife wasn’t truly counterculture, because the aesthetic was only defiant in progressive spaces — there was no rebelling within conservative circles. So it was an easy way to get a rise out of people, and a carefully crafted backlash to girlboss / hustle culture. But it was just a different business model in the end, a performative act. “If you weren’t a creator, you were a customer,” Dee zings. So what is counterculture? Per Dee, if empathy doesn’t scale on social media, then creating art quietly is today’s true counterculture. Quoting Biz Sherbert, she writes, “if mass culture runs on conflict, then the only real counterculture left is love.” I didn’t expect this piece to veer into the existential, and I enjoyed where it went. GQ

🌊 Carnivorous “Death-Ball” Sponge Among 30 New Deep-Sea Species from the Southern Ocean. It’s in the ‘best of’ section for the headline alone, honestly, but the slideshow that accompanies this post is worth several minutes of your time. As the headline suggests, 30 previously unknown deep-sea species, including a carnivorous “death-ball” sponge, a new predatory sponge (Chondrocladia sp. nov.) whose spherical form is covered in tiny hooks that trap prey. For the sponge-amateurs, this is in serious contrast to the gentle, passive, filter-feeding behaviour displayed by most sea sponges. (Bonus, there were also zombie worms (Osedax sp.), and though they’re not new to science they are also weird and fun and have no mouth. Slideshow, I’m telling you. Go click on it. Ocean Census

🅿️ Yes, There’s a Parallel Parking Championship, and I Was a Contender. Fun! The skill of parallel parking gets its moment in the spotlight at the annual Pittsburgh Parallel Parking Championship, a grassroots-driven (pun intended) contest where drivers race the clock and their own nerves to slide into a curbside space. Held in Pittsburgh’s Lower Lawrenceville, competitors are aiming for not just speed but also precision. Like preferences for olives, parallel parking skills aren’t something you just ‘aren’t sure’ about; you definitely know if you’re good or terrible at doing so. Rules mix time and distance to the curb, and even factor in vehicle length, with disqualifications for kissing the curb or touching an adjacent car’s bumper. The event’s creator characterizes it as “weird, kind of stupid, and everyone ends up having a really good time.” Can’t go wrong! Car and Driver

💬 The Therapy That Can Break You. As part of the “throw all of the spaghetti against the wall” trials I’ve done when my life changed dramatically due to spinal CSF leak, Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a modality I’ve tried for grief work. It treats the mind as a constellation of “parts,” a framing that has spread rapidly through social media in recent years. It has also attracted sharp criticism. In this piece, Rachel Corbett follows an IFS-oriented eating-disorder clinic where a teenage patient suddenly accused her father of abuse, allegations a judge later deemed not credible. Former patients describe IFS sessions that felt untethered from reality, with some people crawling or switching, age, gender, or even species. Critics argue that IFS’s evidence base is thin and that, for vulnerable people with complex trauma, eating disorders, or psychosis, it can destabilize more than it heals. But IFS’s founder, Richard Schwartz, counters that the real problem is inadequately practitioners using the approach indiscriminately. Having only encountered IFS within general therapy (not inpatient clinics), I’ve found its concept of ‘parts’ useful and actionable, making it all the more sobering to read how the same framework can become harmful when misapplied. The Cut

🤥 Two part read: Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era, and The Fallout From Our AI Freelancer Investigation. Victoria Goldiee seemed like a freelancer with a promising pitch and bylines at a series of impressive outlets, but alas it was not the case. After Hune-Brown dug into her published work, he found fabricated quotes from real people and other tells that something was awry. By the end of his investigation, publications including The Guardian and Dwell took down her stories. Today’s publishing landscape is a difficult place to build a career as a freelance journalist, but as Hune-Brown notes, “it turns out, it’s a decent enough arena for a scam.” The follow up piece is a great interview musing on the how and why of what happened. The Local

🪦 Can my dead uncle’s phone break the cycle of addiction? Would you rather have a fully nude, open casket funeral or an open ‘information corpse’ funeral, your unlocked phone and laptop available for mourners to scroll through? Writer Kiki Dy dives into this uncomfortable question in her essay about her uncle’s death and her subsequent inheritance of his unlocked phone. Dy interviews Carl Öhman, a researcher who coined the term ‘information corpse’, the vast digital data (texts, searches, photos, social media) left behind after someone dies. Old phone texts and photos, once private, become raw data; reading them can feel like a violation, but also like the only way to confront grief honestly. The Sunday Long Read

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

🇨🇦 ‘Mind-blowing’ population of feral goldfish in Ottawa pond to be euthanized. My town of Ottawa, Ontario is learning how difficult it can be to remove goldfish from a new habitat once they’ve taken root. A pond here now houses thousands of goldfish, all potentially descended from a discarded pet. It’s crazy to think how one throwaway act (literally) can have such ecological effects, but that certainly isn’t limited to goldfish. Anything that disrupts balance can do the same, as New Zealand knows best of all. Goldfish are native to China, Hong Kong, Japan, and the Republic of Korea, and in many areas of North America they have no known predators — meaning they can quickly overwhelm an ecosystem and outcompete local species of fish. Short piece, but I’m including it because of that reminder. CBC

🎁 Presents of Greatness. Speaking of Canada: this gift guide is among my favourites from the many that I’ve seen this year, because of its delightful mix of chaos and whimsy. Plus that punny title, right? From the crocheted pizza rat purse you didn’t know you needed ($14 CAD!) to the splurgiest of pants (Arc’teryx’s exoskeleton pants that come in at an eye-watering $7,016 CAD), this guide has 120 or so gift options, many of them Canadian makers. I realize my email list is not all Canadians, but it was such a fun round up I wanted to include it. Toronto Life

🖋 How pen caps work. The title says it all: the author recently learned how pen caps work, thought it was interesting, and shared it with the world. It turns out that it isn’t only that putting a cap on a pen keeps it dry, but also that taking a cap off a pen makes it ‘wet’ again, because it draws the ink from the reservoir through suction. Also, please note that I am obsessed with the publications’s name: Overthinking Everything

🌿 The ‘Godmother’ of Weed vs. Her Uncle, the DEA Agent. A longread about local NY news with family betrayal thrown in, written in an engaging style. Eleni Polinski built her “Godmother’s Garden” brand into a luxury, award-winning cannabis company in Brooklyn, cultivating rare strains with her partner Steven Bubis and sharing gorgeous photos of them on her Instagram feed. In October 2024, while Eleni was in Florida, her home was raided by over a dozen police and firefighters, triggered by an anonymous tip about domestic violence (though she wasn’t there). Her uncle, a former DEA official, “scorned Eleni’s ambitions as criminal activity”, so suspicions abounded in the family. No DV or weapons were found, only high-volume of plants and cannabis products, but due to the volume of cannabis, Eleni, Steven, and her mother were arrested on felony possession charges. These charges that were later dropped. “The raid and subsequent charges highlight how razor thin the margin can be between whether a person in the cannabis industry is celebrated as an entrepreneur or charged as a criminal,” writes Rosalind Adams. Understandably, what unfolded also damaged the family’s relationships in the process. Polinski is still in business. The City

🎓 Grading Is Broken. (Archive Link) I was last in school in 2001, when I graduated from law school. And reading this article, it’s clear that education is a different landscape than it used to be. A recent report out of Harvard noted that students “almost universally” speak about grades in terms of how much effort they put in. So, if they spent a lot of time and put in the work, they believe they should get an A. The piece notes that this erroneous belief may explain why students are also more willing to argue about their grades these days. And it’s prevalent not just at Harvard, but elsewhere. But what can be done about it? The solutions suggested in the Harvard report include resetting grading averages and returning to traditional teaching options like in-class exams. But many professors feel like it’s a “race to the bottom” as an overall system of what grades represent in education, and there is little consensus about how to fix it. The Chronicle of Higher Education

😵‍💫 How to Stay Sane in a World That Rewards Insanity. Very short post, but one I thought CAE readers would enjoy. The prescription for sanity involves: (1) diversifying your information diet in ways that feel actively uncomfortable (as in, expose yourself to alternate views); (2) practice distinguishing between stakes and truth, and (3) find (or at least, look for) communities that reward humility, not tribal loyalty. Basically, a place where “I don’t know” is considered a reasonable answer. Field Notes on Now

💸 Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show. Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. According to these leaked internal documents, Meta’s platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day. Among its responses to suspected rogue marketers: charging them a premium for ads, and issuing reports on ’Scammiest Scammers.’ But not actually taking them down. Reuters

🇺🇸 Seven data-driven lessons from the 2025 elections. The title references to the recent American off-cycle elections, and is a good summary for those who aren’t following closely. The TL;DR is that Democrats outran their polls and swept statewide races from Georgia to New Jersey on an agenda of affordability and a broad anti-Trump backlash. The rest of the piece goes into what that means for the future, and includes lots of charts to back the conclusions cited. Strength In Numbers

🌾 Scientists Just Created a $10 Gluten Test That Works in 2 Minutes. Relevant to the fellow celiacs out there, this short read details how a lateral flow strip test flags any food with more than 5ppm of gluten with 98% accuracy, and even recognizes cross-contact with gluten from shared kitchen implements or dishes. Food and Wine

🍞 Poorer brain health in celiac disease and other gluten-related disorders is associated with a specific antibody triggered by gluten. On the same topic: a new UK-based study has found that a specific antibody triggered by gluten called Transglutaminase 6 antibodies (TG6) is linked with poorer brain health in people with celiac disease or other gluten disorders. The researchers found that those who tested positive for TG6 reported worse symptoms of depression and physical functioning, and non-celiac participants even showed accelerated brain atrophy on MRI scans. While further research is needed, this antibody test could become a tool for identifying patients with more severe neuro consequences of ingesting gluten. Beyond Celiac

🥡 The Innovation That’s Killing Restaurant Culture (Gift Link) All about how food delivery has changed restaurants worldwide. In 2024, nearly 3 out of every 4 American restaurant orders were not eaten in a restaurant, and even take-out orders have dwindled comparative to delivery. 41% of respondents in a recent poll said that delivery was “an essential part of their lifestyle”; more than half of adults under 45 use delivery at least once a week, and 13% use it once a day. (5% use it multiple times a day!) The piece talks about how delivery has reversed the flow of eaters to food, but also has remade a shared experience (of the dining itself in a restaurant) into a much more individual one. I can’t eat out due to being disabled, and I’m grateful for delivery as option — but I fully understand how those in the restaurant business must be finding it a big change. The Atlantic

📐 First Shape Found That Can’t Pass Through Itself. A shape called a ‘noperthedron’ (lol) is the first known convex polyhedron that cannot pass the Rupert Property — meaning it can’t pass through its own shape. This is called the Rupert Property because in the 1600s, Prince Rupert of the Rhine won a bet about whether a tunnel can be cut through a cube to allow another cube of equal size to pass through. Got all that? Me neither, but thankfully Quanta has made us some illustrations to help us understand. Quanta

🇳🇬 Car battery recycling is fueling lead poisoning in Nigeria. The auto industry touts battery recycling as an environmental success story. But in Ogijo, Nigeria, recycling factories that supply lead to the US automotive industry are coating surrounding residential areas in toxic lead dust. The Examination.

🔗 Quick links

• Scientists from my alma mater in Montreal, McGill University, have built the world’s smallest 3D Bioprinter. It’s 2.7mm wide.

• Amazing holiday gift list for kids, found via Kottke.org’s gift guide roundup. So much great stuff for the curious on here!

• My friend James, who I used to eat with every day when I lived in Vietnam, started a new site about the country. Rail Vietnam is your guide for exploring the country via its extensive train network.

• And speaking of exploring networks: a new study identified over 111,000km (68,000mi) Roman roads than were previously known.

• Frustrated with how people correlate things that aren’t actually causative? Tyler Vigen’s Spurious Correlations site will make you cackle. A recent fave: Number of articles Matt Levine published on Bloomberg on Wednesdays correlated with nuclear power generation in France.

• Scientists find that a brain chemical named SGK1 is tied to trauma and depression, and drugs that block this chemical could offer a new form of antidepressant, especially for patients resistant to SSRIs.

• New paper about a one-time infusion of investigational CRISPR-Cas9 therapy was found to safely reduce LDL cholesterol by 50% and triglycerides by about 55% in a Phase 1 trial.

• A fun gift idea: upload your photos and turn them into brick mosaics (via Recommendo)

• Trauma-free tissue repair? Yes please.

• People in Mexico are hoarding millions of axolotl banknotes instead of spending them.

• New bee in Australia has tiny horns atop its head; it has been named Megachile (Hackeriapis) lucifer, which … honestly, 10/10 no notes.

• New evidence says that general anaesthesia can be a safe alternative for c-sections. Spinal CSF leak patients are recommended to do a c-section under general because of risks of opening a new leak with pushing or a puncture (and/or risks of accidental puncture with an epidural); it’s good to know data suggests this is safer than previously though.

• Variety publishes a controversial top 100 comedies of all time list.

• World’s biggest spiderweb discovered on the border between Greece and Albania with 110,000 spiders living in it. I can’t tell you more because I closed the tab the second I saw the photos.

Hope you enjoyed these links! See you next month,
-Jodi

My updates

• November 15th marks five years of Curious About Everything! I started this newsletter when I was at my sickest, stuck in bed at a time when everyone else was (temporarily) stuck at home too. I’m so grateful that it continues to find readers who want to learn something new each month. I may still be stuck at home due to my spinal CSF leak, but there is so much to read and learn from, and it’s a pleasure to share what I enjoy with you here. To help celebrate my CAEaversary, please considering sharing this newsletter with a curious friend or family member!

  Share

• November 15th is an important day for another reason: it’s this year’s Spinal CSF Leak: Bridging the Gap conference. I’ve been helping plan this conference in my volunteer role with the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation, but was also invited to speak about patient barriers to accessing care alongside a physician specialist. The conference is free to attend, and fully virtual this year. If interested, you can register here.

Featured art for CAE 56

CAE 56’s featured artists are the UK’s brotherly duo behind Abstract Aerial Art, JP and Mike Andrews. I’ve followed them for many years on IG, and their aptitude for finding beauty in what others overlook is an impressive skill. All their drone photos are taken from real, unstaged spots on their travels, and aren’t heavily edited — a rarity these days. Their work shows us how weird and wonderful our world can look when seen from above. The stunning image below, shared with permission, is from Vietnam. It shows the cast of a fishing net in an otherwise quiet sea. Fitting for CAE 56, since our first piece this month is about phở. You can find this photo and others on Instagram, or you can buy prints via their shop.

The most interesting things I read this month

There are so many good reads this month, but I wasn’t able to share them all here. I’ll be sharing overflow reads on my Patreon later this month. (My Patreon memberships provide me with stable income, so I am able to keep creating CAE every month for free, without a paywall!)

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

🇻🇳 A journey to Vietnam to uncover the origins of phở. I first met David Farley many years ago, when Legal Nomads was just starting out and I didn’t realize I’d even have a career in food and travel writing. His Restless Legs series of book readings was also where I met many other colleagues that, like Farley, became friends. That series is also where I had my own book reading, when The Food Traveler’s Handbook was published over a decade ago. In this piece, Farley tackles one of my favourite countries and its food, tracing the roots of phở and how it differs in disparate areas of Vietnam. Phở bắc (Northern phở) found in Hanoi and its surroundings, is different from the soups we get here in North America. Gone are the sweeter broths and herbs that accompany it; gone are the hoisin and other accompaniments. Phở bắc’s broth is less sweet and side dishes are only picked garlic and sliced red hot peppers. “I’d fallen hard for northern-style phở,” Farley writes. A delicious read that traces the soup’s roots in Northern Vietnam and its path to the South of the country and beyond. AAA Magazine

🎯 Queen of Darts. You all know I love learning about new things, and this piece gifted me with some backstage access to the world of dart throwing. Amos Barshad’s vivid writing takes us inside the rowdy, neon-filled world of the Dutch Open, the world’s biggest open-entry darts tournament. The dramatic walk-ons, theatrical accessories (light-up fedoras, yellow cowboy hats, lots of faux fur) and stage names, the suspense of the competition itself … I loved reading about it all. The piece focuses on women darters (doesn’t seem that ‘darters’ is used in the field, but I’m going with it) and how it feels for some of them to take first prize in a male-dominated sport. Victory Journal

✈️ It was the worst flight of his life. Then he met his future wife. WHO IS CUTTING ONIONS IN HERE. In December 2017, Washington, DC–based Anesu Masube boarded a Virgin Atlantic flight to London on what he called “the worst day of my life,” having just learned his mother in Zimbabwe had died. Cramped in a middle seat, he persuaded a flight attendant to move him to an emergency-exit row, beside Hannah Brown, a fellow DC resident quietly dreading the holidays after losing her own father two years earlier. What began as small talk soon turned into a deep exchange about grief, memory, and family, as they shared wine and stories 35,000 feet in the air. “She could relate to what I was going through,” Anesu muses in the piece. They parted in Heathrow but 10 days later, by sheer coincidence, ran into each other again on the same return flight home. Sitting in seats 60A and 61A. From there, they started dating, moved in together, and eventually married. CNN (via Chris)

👁 The World’s Most Common Surgery. Cataract surgery is one of medicine’s true marvels. What began 4,000 years ago with crude needles and “couching” (ugh), has evolved into a 20-minute procedure with success rates above 95%. My parents and stepparents have gotten this surgery, and this fascinating article traces its history from ancient Indian surgeons displacing cloudy lenses with thorns (ahhhhhhh!) through medieval Islamic techniques of suction and lens extraction, to the modern era of ‘phacoemulsification’ (say that 4x fast) and foldable intraocular lenses. My mum’s eyeballs now have an implant, and it’s trippy to see it refracting light, like she’s got robot eyes. Among the technical leaps in treating cataracts, there remains a stubborn gap in access, though. While the surgery is relatively cheap and highly effective, cataracts remain the leading cause of blindness globally. Asimov Press

🔡 The strangest letter of the alphabet. Ok, this piece was fascinating. Colin Gorrie traces the life of ȝ, also known as yogh, a medieval letter that once stood alongside g before vanishing from English. If I got it right from his piece: Yogh grew out of an earlier Anglo-Saxon form, ‘ᵹ’, which itself was different from the French-derived Carolingian g. After the Norman Conquest, scribes trained in the French tradition needed a way to write sounds English still used, especially a “guttural” sound (think Scottish pronunciation of loch or night) and a “y” sound from words like year. They repurposed ȝ for both. Over time, ȝ got replaced: the “y” sound started to be spelled with y or i, and the “gh” in words like laugh, night, and daughter took over that guttural role. (Got all that?) Yogh survived longest in Scotland, where printers substituted it with z, taking advantage of how a z looked like a 3 in the cursive of the time. (This led to the name MacKenzie being pronounced as ‘Macken-yie’, TIL.) In England, the cost and inconvenience of printing a nonstandard character on newer printers of the time ultimately sealed its fate. RIP, yogh. As with so many other CAE features, I love the internet for articles like this, sharing a micro-history of a niche letter I’ve never thought of prior. Dead Language Society

🌊 The Hidden Math of Ocean Waves Crashes Into View. A team of Italian mathematicians has finally cracked long-standing puzzles of why even the simplest ocean waves are “notoriously uncooperative”. I learned that waves can have the most startling butterfly effects, too: make a tiny change to the initial state of their particles, and they might evolve in vastly different ways! Bumps and eddies can suddenly turn into rogue waves and tsunamis; sometimes even square waves can form. Ancient Greeks often compared the chaos of waves hitting the shore to laughter, “Considering how those waves have eluded human understanding,” Joseph Howlett writes, “perhaps they were right: The ocean has been laughing at us all along.” So interesting, and an aspect of the ocean I never thought about before. Knowable Magazine

💚 The Measure of a True Visionary: Jane Goodall on the Indivisibility of Art and Science. Rest in Peace, Jane. This beautiful article by Maria Popova shares how Jane Goodall’s understanding of nature and species profoundly changed the way the rest of us perceive and interact with animals. “She never saw science as a walled garden separate from the wilderness of life,” writes Popova. Instead, she taught us that kinship is the software that nature runs on, and that it is essential to being alive. See also: On Being podcast episode “Jane Goodall, In Memoriam: What It Means to Be Human.” The Marginalian; On Being

🧐 Meet the black mould truthers. As with prior articles about environmental illnesses, what happens when a conspiracy-driven industry fixates on a condition is that patients start being even less believed, and skepticism abounds. And as I’ve noted prior, environmental illness does exist. Mould does affect the body in negative ways. With MCAS, my reactions to it are shocking even to me; my water filter having mould it in made me sick for weeks until I figured out the culprit. We’re canaries in a coal mine, and sometimes that’s the subject of ridicule. In this piece, Poppy Sowerby explores the rise of a subculture fixated on Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS), attributed to mould exposure, and traces how its Venn diagram intersects with the mansophere. Recently, Jordan Peterson’s daughter has said he has had a near-death experience from exposure to mould. While mould exposure is real and serious, pushback from mainstream medical authorities is that the wide array of neurological and hormonal symptoms tied to CIRS remain unsupported by strong evidence. “What CIRS really represents is paranoia, distrust, and a fatal lack of understanding,” writes Sowerby. Is that where we’ll net out years from now? It’s hard for me to judge since, despite being data-driven myself, my environmental symptoms take me by surprise often; I end up in anaphylaxis unexpectedly to a trigger I thought was safe, for example. Could “mould rage” be aggressive mast cell degranulation? MCAS is linked to neuropsych symptoms (a new study reviews them), and people genetically predisposed to mast cell dysfunction are often sensitive to mould. All I do know is that a condition being taken over by conspiracy-laden ecosystems is never a good thing for patients. Unherd

💸 Pathological Lawyer. A former lawyer myself, I’ll freely admit that the punny title lured me in. This piece is wild, an investigation of real estate lawyer Singa Bui, who embezzled from her firm’s trust account to finance her family’s multimillion dollar lifestyle. The boutique law firm, co-founded with her husband, was not keeping the funds meant for property closings on behalf of clients. Instead, Bui funded a lot of purchases for herself and her family: travel, real estate, luxury clothing, and more. The piece shares that one couple wired over $2.155 million to Bui for a house purchase, but the seller never got paid and the funds vanished. Complaints like this piled up, with over $7 million alleged to be missing, and (understandably) the firm’s trust structure was scrutinized. By late 2023 the Law Society of Ontario suspended both lawyers, their assets were frozen, and in July 2025 police charged Bui with 42 counts of fraud, 17 counts of breach of trust and possession of proceeds of crime. Her husband also faces related charges; he maintains his wife’s mental health is not stable, and that charges against him are a ruse. In response to the case, The Law Society of Ontario recently announced plans to strengthen its audit and complaints process relating to trust accounts. Toronto Life

🦁 The Slippery Slope of Ethical Collapse—And How Courage Can Reverse It. A good reminder in today’s world: our brains get used to wrongdoing, but they can also get used to doing good. Empathy, perspective, and self-control are over-clocked these days with the onslaught of horrors we read about every day. When that happens (or when those systems are under-fed), the result can be ethical erosion that results in more shallow relationships, and less connection — as well as reduced moral agency. But the brain is and remains neuroplastic. “Just as neural habituation can drive ethical collapse,” Elizabeth Svoboda writes, “it can also drive escalating spirals of virtue.” The early stages of a moral trajectory are crucial; our neural networks are changeable, but if we don’t use them then they become weaker. So, yes: wrongdoing can escalate over time. So too can bravery and courage. The brain adapts to rising discomfort, and courage becomes progressively easier. It takes intentionality to start the initial cascade, but science is on our side. Scientific American

👆🏻 The New Science of Aeroecology Reveals So Much About the Amazing Creatures That Populate the Skies and How Humans Can Ensure Their Survival.Uh, that’s a long title. Nonetheless, it’s a compelling piece, providing an overview of aeroecology’s understanding of “the birds, bugs, and other species” that live in the sky. We usually think of forests, oceans or deserts as ecosystems, but the space above us matter just as much. Aeroecology is a newer field that helps us understand that passing flying birds or bugs or bats aren’t just getting from A to B, but living in the sky and depending on its currents, temperatures, and light patterns for navigation, feeding, and survival. With mini GPS trackers, weather radar, thermal imaging (I’ve been tracking the bird migration maps this way!) and more, scientists are mapping how species move through the aerosphere and how human-made changes affect them. Buildings, bright city lights, wind turbines, pollution, all of these are messing not only with birds, but with any species that inhabit the sky. A light show in Manhattan turned migrating warblers into swirling masses of confusion, for example. Wind-turbine blades kill eagles by colliding in airspace they share. We need to design for not just land and sea, but air too. Smithsonian Magazine

🤔 Why aren’t smart people happier? I subscribe to Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History newsletter, so it was fun to read him elsewhere. This time, he’s writing about how most of us assume intelligence (the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, and learn) will make life better. But the data say otherwise: higher IQ doesn’t actually correlate with greater happiness. Is ignorance bliss after all? Mastroianni argues that the mismatch comes down to the difference between well-defined problems (clear rules, definite answers) and poorly-defined problems (life choices, relationships, meaning). Intelligence tests measure the former with great success, BUT life is almost entirely made up of the latter. Our biggest challenges aren’t a chess game, and don’t reduce neatly down to logic puzzles. To live well within the “poorly-defined problem of being alive”, theorizes Mastroianni, we need wisdom. And being smart doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wise. Seeds of Science

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

⚾️ When baseball through physics a curve. The World Series may be over (*cries in Canadian*) but curiosity remains: this piece traces the surprisingly long-term debate over whether it’s actually possible to “curve” a pitch. Brad Bolman writes about the 19th century controversy, and how as time went on and baseball professionalized the pitch became a testing ground for physics. Labs popped up to study motion, air resistance, and the Magnus effect. At the same time, public argument about whether to trust experts or your own eyes prevailed. “Seeing was not always believing,” he writes, “so theory and experiment were necessary to convince generations of skeptics that a pitcher really could produce magical movements in his throws.” A really interesting piece about the heady combo of physics and optical illusion and how the curveball reflects societal norms over time. Pioneer Works

⚰️ The Coloradans Exercising Their Right To Die—and a Doctor Who Helps Them Find Peace. I’ve featured a piece by Robert Sanchez a few CAEs ago, a memoir-style article about him trying psychedelic mushrooms and sharing what happened to him in the process. This time he’s back for the same publication, writing about dying with dignity. Don’t worry, this time he is not trying it as part of the piece! I’ve covered Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) legislation in Canada, and potential cracks in its guardrails, but this piece takes place in Colorado. More terminally ill Coloradans than ever are turning to Denver Health’s Medical Aid in Dying clinic, and Sanchez spent the summer observing the process of how and when some people choose to end their lives. Medical Aid in Dying remains one of the USA’s “most divisive moral quandaries,” Sanchez writes. Supporters say it offers autonomy and relief with dignity, while critics maintain that it devalues life, and opens a door to efficiency (or even eugenics) masquerading as compassion. It’s a complex topic no matter the geographic location, and I always enjoy Sanchez’ writing. 5280 Mag

🧬 Editing Nature To Fix Our Failures. Gene editing may enable us to prevent a species from ever becoming extinct in the first place. But, Aryn Baker asks, does that mean we should do it? It turns out that playing God is “neither difficult nor expensive”. For a few thousand dollars, you can go online to order a decent microscope, a precision injection rig, and a vial of enough CRISPR-Cas9 to genetically edit a few thousand fish embryos. But what about on a wider level, should we edit nature to fix our failures? And if we do, is it still considered “natural”? By disabling or re-engineering key genes, for example, researchers aim to “climate-proof” species before they collapse entirely. What will that do to the rest of the ecosystem, though? It’s an interesting discussion about two sides of this coin: our moral obligation to act (you know, since we messed the planet up in the first place), vs. the fears about unintended consequences. We don’t want to save one species only to “ruin another part of the environment that we don’t quite understand yet.” Noema Magazine

🕵🏻 The True Tale of Seattle’s Sherlock Holmes. In the roaring 1920s, private detective Luke S. May made a name for himself in Seattle as a one-man CSI unit, solving high-profile murders and other mysteries by bringing science to crime investigation in an era when most detectives still worked by ‘hunch’. Among other things, this piece details one of his wildest cases: in 1923 he traveled from his office in downtown Seattle to the Oregon coast to examine the baffling murder of Ebba Covell. The case, which involved broken necks, bruises, missing clothing and a family living in isolation, was a mystery. When local police ruled that her husband was the main suspect, May exhumed the body, applied forensic tools and uncovered an elaborate plot of secret codes and proxy killers designed to mask the mastermind behind the crime. We learn that during the course of his career, May invented devices like the “Revelaroscope,” a 400-pound microscope that could enhance detail in large form. Fascinating profile of a creative, inventive man. Seattle Times

📖 The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society. James Marriott argues in this essay that we’re entering a world where deep reading and sustained attention are giving way to scrolls, short-form video and screen habits. I can’t say I disagree. He notes that students are now predicted to spend 25 years of their waking lives glued to screens, and sees this as a broader shift: the age of “mass literacy” may be ending. But what are the implications for that shift on society overall? This long piece explores them, including that as reading wanes, so too does the shared reservoir of attention that underpins serious public life. When attention is fragmented civic discourse dissolves, politics becomes more emotional and less reasoned, and the capacity for slow, collective thought (you know, the kind that built democracies, libraries, and public debate) begins to erode. “If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history,” Marriott writes, “the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.” Cultural Capital

🗑 Not unrelated: Slop as a way of life. I’ve shared pieces about “slop” before, the high-volume, low-effort content (usually AI-generated) that floods feeds and crowds out thoughtful media. Drew Austin argues that slop isn’t just a glitch, but the culmination of how attention is monetized in digital culture. Speed, quantity, and surface-level engagement have become the priorities across the board, just like Marriott says above. “In slop utopia, there is no right or wrong place or time for anything to happen, because context has been eliminated,” Austin writes. He traces how platforms reward this churn-model, how creators increasingly lean into it for survival (ugh, we’ve all seen it again and again). Audiences now inhabit a “slop world” where the difference between content and filler is so diaphanous that they blur together. Dirt Magazine

🫁 The Man Who Held His Breath for 24 Minutes. Budimir Šobat is a former soldier and bodybuilder-turned-freediver from Croatia, who found a path out of addiction and into breaking world records for breath-holding after his daughter’s diagnosis with cerebral palsy, autism, and epilepsy. Resolved to quit drinking and devote himself to her care, this interview with him and his wife is bittersweet and touching. A friend introduced him to the concept of freediving, and he found he could master static apnea, the skill of holding his breath motionless underwater. His record-breaking dives are driven by purpose: to raise awareness for his daughter’s conditions, to turn his suffering into something larger than himself. Outside Magazine

😠 Must you chew so loud? (Archive Link) Ah, the trials of suffering from misophonia. Nearly 1 in 5 suffer from it, including author Samantha Weinberg (and meeee!). “Now, in my mid-fifties,” she writes, “I had found a name for what had previously been known in our family as my ‘issue with clicky noise’”. Once dismissed as eccentricity, misophonia is now recognized by researchers as a “disorder of decreased tolerance to specific sounds” that trigger unique neural pathways linked to threat perception, producing fight-or-flight responses in us instead of just irritation. Adds Weinberg: “you either boil or you flee.” The piece traces misophonia’s history and spectrum; mild cases are the norm, but some are so severe they destroy relationships, cause “cinema rage” or even result in suicide. New approaches include “imagery rescripting” and reframing sound triggers (instead of exposure therapy, which just makes you more mad). I think my favourite part of the piece is about the etymology of the name itself: theoretically from the Greek mis (hate), phon (sound), but anecdotally its 2001 naming was inspired by a researcher’s love of miso soup. Financial Times

🩸 A Struggle to Find Adequate Care for a Common Menstrual Disorder. Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) often goes unrecognized and untreated for years, despite affecting women worldwide. In this piece, Dr. Frieda Klotz reports on devastating symptoms like suicidal ideation and emotional breakdowns, yet with a 90% misdiagnosis rate, proper care is not the norm. Treatment guidelines also remain inconsistent, and research funding is lacking. A 2024 study found that 82% of PMDD patients had had suicidal thoughts before their periods, and 25% had tried to end their lives during what the researchers described as a “PMDD crisis.” As one patient noted: “You can feel crazy when you have it, especially when the doctors tell you that there’s nothing wrong.” I’m glad to see a spotlight on this debilitating condition. Undark

💭 In the Multiverse. Remember Amanda Knox? In 2007, her life was transformed by prosecutor leaks, tabloid spectacle, and trial media. “Foxy Knoxy”, as she was then nicknamed, was eventually left in peace; her conviction was reversed, and as Jessica Olin notes in this piece, she has managed to reclaim fragments of herself in her post-prison life. From returning home and finding everything she knew rearranged by (traumatic) fame, to Knox’s coping mechanism of creating a “multiverse” where Meredith never died and Knox was never arrested, Olin’s narrative frames Knox’s imaginative escape as survival. How does anyone re-acquaint themselves with a new life that feels wholly foreign? The essay doubles as a review of two recent books: Knox’s own memoir, and a second book about her story. Not everyone is convinced of her autobiographical portrayal. London Review of Books.

🍕 The Kid Is Alright. This defence of picky eating by Irina Dumitrescu, who I’ve featured in CAEs past, has her first revisiting her earlier years as a deeply picky eater in 1980s Romania, refusing traditional flavours even amid food scarcity and parental panic. “My refusal to eat was a torment that spurred my entire family to heights of creativity and resourcefulness,” she writes. Now a mother herself of a similarly picky toddler, she argues picky eating is often an individual taste, rooted in biology, sensory sensitivity, or autonomy. Yes, she wishes she ate the foods from her childhood, as the were connective tissue to her roots and her grandparents. But she urges us to see picky eating not as dietary (or parental or cultural) failure, but rather a way to eat on one’s own terms. Serious Eats

🚬 Dementia risk for people who quit smoking in middle age ‘same as someone who never smoked’. We talk a lot about the research into neurodegenerative conditions here in CAE, and this piece is one about lifestyle changes: a growing body of evidence suggests that quitting smoking can slow the rate of mental deterioration that ageing brings, and help mitigating against eventual dementia. “Our study suggests that quitting smoking may help people to maintain better cognitive health over the long term even when we are in our 50s or older when we quit”, said Dr. Mikaela Bloomberg of University College London, the lead researcher. Quitting smoking later in life has been shown to lead to improvements in physical health and wellbeing, and this piece suggests that those who quit even in midage had more favourable cognitive trajectories than those who continued to smoke. The Guardian

😷 Researchers discover air pollution particles hitching a ride around the body on red blood cells. And speaking of inhaling bad things: new research shows how particulate matter particles (from polluted air) have been found in the brain and the heart, entering the blood stream via the lungs and sticking to red blood cells. Previous papers showed that these pollution particles in the human brain are often associated with damage within the brain cells, so this study also looked at what happens when people masked with an FFP2 mask (like an N95 in Europe). The research found that there was no increase in PM particles on their red blood cells when masking. As I’ve said many times before: masks work! And not only for viruses. “We showed that after just one hour of traffic exposure, in London’s Whitechapel Road, millions of distinctive, metal-rich nanoparticles appeared in the bloodstream of the (unmasked) volunteers, sticking around the edges of their red blood cells.” the researchers noted. I’ve inhaled so many exhaust fumes living in Saigon and Oaxaca — if only I knew what it was doing to my body. For those who live in polluted places, consider masking up. Lancaster University

🧠 Dementia linked to problems with brain’s waste clearance system. Also bad for dementia: problems with clearance of CSF (cerebrospinal fluid) from the brain. A few years ago, I’d have read headlines like this and moved quickly to the next article; now, with CSF issues of my own, I’ve spent a lot of time diving deep into our waste clearance system. Does having a leak impair waste clearance? I’ve written many researchers of these studies, and the verdict seems that preliminarily yes — definitely so. But the body can adjust CSF production during a leak, and (as always) there are no studies about the effect of that compensation on CSF flow. Back to the article: it talks about how problems with the brain’s waste clearance system could underlie many cases of dementia and help explain why poor sleep patterns and cardiovascular risk factors such as high blood pressure increase its risks. In a study using MRI scans from around 40,000 participants of the UK Biobank, the team found that impaired movement of CSF was a predictor of dementia risk over the next decade. For the deep divers: there were 3 key markers: slowed water movement along perivascular spaces, enlarged choroid plexus, and reduced CSF flow velocity. High blood pressure, smoking (as we learned above), and cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD) in the brain were all found to impair the glymphatic system of waste clearance. University of Cambridge News

💡 Everyone is a Strategist and No One is a Writer. Echoing earlier articles about slop and literacy, Tobias Hess argues that we’re facing a “a crisis of cleverness” in a society hell bent on marketing everything. I’ve included all three pieces here because it’s a serious issue that affects society overall. Strategy has replaced reflection, and everything is shoved through the prism of marketing, with soundbites as normal conversation and a constant scramble to generate comment on every platform. Everything is optimized. “Attention is the primary commodity that platforms are exploiting,” he writes. Yet people know this resource is being wasted away and yet are still giving marketing the attention it wants. Is the Linkedinfication of thought a symptom of a society that has stopped analyzing for curiosity’s sake? Probably. We’ve also mostly stopped writing for truth, and are instead spewing out narrative just for effect — because that, too, has now become the product. Gen Zero (via Web Curios)

🌱 Saving the Venus Flytrap. I’m ending CAE 56 with a lovely read: Lindsey Liles dives into the strange, fragile world of the Venus flytrap, a plant with a predatory side and a shrinking habitat. She shares one woman’s drive to turn its conservation into a community cause in North Carolina. I had no idea that these plants were native to a tiny corner of the Carolinas until I read this piece. Nor that the plant’s flytrap evolved after many years as a “well-behaved plant that absorbed sunlight” to one that eats insects because the sandy soil of the Carolina Coastal Plain is poor in nutrients. Its botanical violence is basically a workaround for survival. (RELATABLE). Today, urban development, fire suppression, and housing sprawl have decimated most of its native range, and fewer than a hundred wild populations now survive, many with just dozens of plants. That’s where Julie Moore comes in. A retired botanist, she started rallying her neighbours to organize a grassroots (pun intended!) flytrap “plant rescue” effort. The result was that her town of Boiling Springs adopted the flytrap as its official plant, created no-pesticide and no-mowing zones, and volunteers now dig up threatened plants before land development to move them to protected reserves. Moore argues the flytrap is only one node in a living ecosystem: “When you save flytrap habitat, you save all of [the ecosystem]”.

🔗 Quick links

• A fun short read about how beloved potato chip company Miss Vickies partnered with Montreal restaurant Nora Gray to launch a new flavour: Spicy Pepperoncini & Focaccia chip.

• Why therapists may want to pay attention to the Brené Brown rebrand.

• One longer walk per day is better than several shorter ones, apparently.

• One of my favourite birds in the world, the Tawny Frogmouth, is Australia’s 2025 Bird of the Year.

• More CSF-related things: a new study finds that our brain’s loss of focus/lapses relate to when CSF flows out of the brain, which returns once attention recovers. This outflow happens more often when we’re sleep-deprived.

• Mosquitos have been found in Iceland for the first time: 3 specimens were discovered in what was previously one of the few places in the world without them.

• DNA from rum-soaked fish shows changes in the Philippines’ ecosystems since their collection in 1907.

• A creator developed Leukemia — except she’s an AI influencer in a healthcare marketing campaign (via Dalene)

• This new gym in Toronto costs $2,000 a month, and you have to write an essay to join.

• Rare white (leucistic) beaver found in Perth, Ontario, near Canada’s capital.

• Headline of the month: “Naked mole-rat DNA repair could unlock natural human longevity”

• Babies process foreign languages they heard in utero much like their mother tongue, researchers find.

Hope you enjoyed these links! See you next month,
-Jodi

My updates

• In 20 minute ‘uptime’ increments, I’ve managed to finish my Celiac’s Guide to Cambodia, and complete new celiac translation cards in Khmer and Korean. You can see all of my free guides and the associated cards here. Feels like a real feat with leak, and it’s such a pleasure to be able to broaden these resources for celiacs who travel, even if I can no longer be one of them.

• I updated my post about my Vipassana meditation experience in New Zealand with a newer section that looks back on this 10-day silent meditation course ten years later.

Featured art for CAE 55

CAE 55’s featured artist is Martin Wittfooth, whose evocative image of a pelican feasting on the detritus of our consumerism fit well with this month’s read about the shrinking ecosystem for orangutans in Borneo, below. Wittfooth’s work has been exhibited or featured in galleries, publications, and museums worldwide and use allegory and symbolism to explore themes of the intersection and clash of industry and nature, and the human influence on the environment. You can find him on his website, or on Instagram.

The most interesting things I read this month

There are so many good reads this month that, despite how long this CAE is, I have overflow for additional articles. I’ll be sharing them on my Patreon later this month. (My Patreon memberships provide me with stable income, so I am able to keep creating CAE every month for free, without a paywall!)

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

🏰 How to build a medieval castle. You may remember the article I shared about rebuilding Notre Dame in a CAE past, and how that restoration effort resurrected ancient techniques in the process. Similarly, archaeologists and craftsmen in France have spent the past two decades building a 13th century fortress named Guédelon Castle in the forests of Burgundy. It’s being built entirely with medieval methods and materials, and has become a living laboratory of its own. Launched in 1998 on the site of an old quarry, workers and researchers work together to experiment with stone masonry, lime mortar, timber framing, and even period machines like a giant treadmill winch. Their discoveries (like using painted linen instead of glass in windows) have already fed back into major restoration projects, including Notre Dame. Very interesting read about how Guédelon has become a of a living tree of its own, with some amazing photos in there, too. Archeology Today

🏈 How a Deaf Quarterback Changed Sports Forever By Inventing the Huddle. I grew up watching American football but it never occurred to me to ask where the huddle came from. It turns out, from one man! Specifically, a deaf quarterback from Gallaudet University named Paul D. Hubbard. In 1894, he invented what many believe to be the first football huddle after he realized that using hand signs in the open would tip his hand (literally) to the opposing team. So he had his team huddle around him in a circle before signing. Since then, the huddle has become standard across American football and other sports, and Gallaudet’s student newspaper honoured Hubbard in 1941 as the “daddy of huddle”. Although others later claimed credit, this piece notes that Gallaudet’s origin story is the one most supported by evidence. Lest you wonder, as I did, about the surprising accessibility of a football team learning sign language in the late 1800s, Gallaudet is a university for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Smithsonian Magazine

❓ Victorian Science’s Duck-Billed Enigma. As a kid, I had a stuffed animal that by Webkind called called a “Google”. It was a fluffy duck-billed platypus that I took everywhere I could. Today, Google means something very different. And we know platypuses fairly well too. But what of when it was first glimpsed in the wild? In the 19th century, the platypus was known as the “duck-billed enigma”, and it upended European scientific classification in all its weirdness. When the first specimen arrived in London in 1799, naturalist George Shaw believed it was a fake and (sadly) attacked it with scissors, eventually calling it the “most extraordinary” mammal he’d ever seen. Debate raged over its identity. Was it a bird? A reptile? A mammal? French evolutionist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed that platypuses should join echidnas (spiny anteaters) in a non-mammalian class, Prototheria, while Shaw suggested they be lumped in with anteaters and sloths since they are all toothless animals. It took decades before a researcher was able to confirm that the animal laid eggs, led to its nests by Aboriginal tribes in Australia. As with so many other animals, it was hunted almost to extinction, finally becoming legally protected in 1912. History Today

🍲 Stew Kids on the Block. As someone who grew up during the original NKOTB era, I cackled at this title. All about the rise of the stewfluencer (sigh), and how bottomless perpetual stews, which begin as “mouthbone soup”, are lovingly tended for days or weeks (sometimes even longer). They come into their own as stews via whoever is managing them and sometimes even naming them: author John DeVore meets the creators behind Stewtheus, Soupina, and Brotholomew. What started as family medicine broth has evolved into a TikTok-fuelled trend of creators keeping stews alive and bubbling indefinitely, updating the masses with how their stew pot is bubbling. “There’s a fine line between a delicious-looking broth and a plumbing emergency,” notes DeVore. (Yes, noted!) The internet didn’t invent the perpetual stew, of course; DeVore notes that it has persisted in different forms across centuries and cultures. Fun, first person read. Taste

🟦 Museum of Color. This beautiful and reflective essay takes us through pigment as a form of nature, our love and our obsession with colour, and how seeking out new ways to generate pigment has shaped our history. Stephanie Krzywonos follows ochre from prehistoric palettes to its role in Aboriginal languages, where it merges colour and ancestral place, and reflects on how pigments carry both beauty and injustice and connects us across time, culture, and land. Colour isn’t visual, the piece notes, it’s a vessel of memory, of emotion, and power that shapes our relationship with the natural (and cultural!) world. Emergence Magazine

🤑 Who’s getting rich off your attention? Another thoughtful read from Kyla Scanlon, who I’ve shared in CAEs past. This time, she writes about how the internet’s attention economy has collapsed the old process of how we determined what is true. We used to transit from data to understanding to wisdom via journalists, education, and other messaging. These days, we have a distorted information ecosystem and we’re “drowning in outrage”. We are flooded with information, but thanks to bots and foreign interference and manipulation of multiple sorts, we never make it to wisdom. Why did this happen? She argues the roots of our morass go back to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which concentrated media power instead of democratizing it. That laid the groundwork for today’s empire of billionaires who own and control the news, the feeds, and the platforms. “Controlling the means of mass communication means controlling the narrative,” she writes, which is basically the attention economy version of a monopoly. And the currency is our eternal rage. This is a structural economic problem, not just misinformation; if the system rewards misinformation, you can’t fact-check it to truth. Worth a full read. Kyla’s Newsletter

🤯 Mental time travel: a new case of autobiographical hypermnesia. My memory is photographic, and my family is often surprised at how I not only remember things from my past in great detail but can place the colours, times, and ‘see’ what happened as if it’s present day in my mind’s eye. This case study is the first thing I’ve read that is an approximation of how my brain works. I forwarded it to my brother asking if his worked similar, and he was like, “what?! no!” so it appears to just be me. I silo information in different ‘places’ with Rolodexes that allow me to easily retrieve it. This newly documented case of autobiographical hypermnesia (also called hyperthymesia (or autobiographical hypermnesia) spotlights a 17-year-old girl who has vivid, date-specific memories of her life that she can access with surprising control. Unlike typical hyperthymestic cases, where memories can be overwhelming or involuntary, she organizes her recollections using a mental “memory palace”. Her autobiographical memories are sorted into themed binders in her mind inside a room she dubbed the “white room”, while factual knowledge (like from her school classes) with no emotional weight are stored separately. She also uses mental representation tools to isolate memories that emotionally intrusive or sad, like a chest to ‘hold’ her grandfather’s death. When tested, she demonstrated exceptional ability not only to relive past events from varying perspectives, but also to vividly imagine future scenarios with rich sensory detail. Eureka Alert

🦧 An Orangutan Sanctuary in Borneo Is Giving the Endangered Primates a Second Chance, Just When They Need It Most. In my many years of living and traveling in Southeast Asia, I regret never having made it to Kalimantan to see orangutans at the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, or BOSF. Providing a safe haven for orphaned and displaced orangutans, BOSF gives them the opportunity to learn essential survival skills before reintroduction. Borneo used to be covered in rainforest, yet now half of its forest land has been cleared. Its remaining forest has some of the highest species diversity on earth; scientists have found 1,000 species of insect in a single tree (!). The island is home to 6% of the world’s biodiversity, and nearly 90% of all orangutans in the world. As Borneo faces growing human population pressures, BOSF’s efforts are vital to protecting the primates’ natural habitat. Smithsonian Magazine

🧂 The Miracle of Salt. (Transcript here, which is what I read as listening to podcasts is hard on my brain) A conversation with Naomi Duguid, author, cook, photographer, and overall amazing human. I’m lucky to call her a friend and mentor for years now. She takes us on a journey through salt’s role not just as seasoning, but as a lifeline. As those who’ve read Mark Kurlansky’s Salt well know, humans have depended on salt to preserve food, manage abundance and scarcity, and travel, trade, and tax for centuries. Duguid explains how salt keeps food from spoiling, enables fermentation, makes long winters or dry seasons survivable rather than deadly. In the process of writing her newest cookbook, The Miracle of Salt, she visited places where salt is used and harvested around the world. Her prose is vivid, weaving together the ingredient’s role in landscape and labour alike. Eat This Podcast

💉 The Strange History of the Anti-Vaccine Movement. When Edward Jenner pioneered the smallpox vaccine in 1796 after noticing milkmaids were immune to the disease (it turns out, thanks to cowpox), he wouldn’t have imagined that the same arguments against vaccination would persist centuries later. Opposition emerged almost immediately, and by the mid-1800s, Britain had anti-vaccine leagues publishing pamphlets with titles like Vaccination, a Curse. Protests erupted from England to Canada to the US, and many of the tropes we recognize today were popular in 1802: claims that vaccines are “unnatural,” that they transform the body (there were cartoons of the vaccinated sprouting cow body parts, for example), that they’re poison, or part of a doctor’s profit scheme. Also popular were arguments that vaccination infringed on personal liberty, a stance that helped keep Stockholm’s vaccination rate at just 40% in 1873 — shortly before a devastating smallpox outbreak hit, and killed more than 10x as many residents in the city as in the rest of Sweden where vaccination rates were higher. Despite smallpox ultimately being eradicated in 1980 after it killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone, the pattern remains today. As we’ve seen, measles is no longer considered ‘eliminated’ and is making a comeback via undervaccinated pockets or communities, to the detriment of all of us. BBC News

🫎 The messy reality of feeding Alaska. Most of Alaska’s food supply arrives from out-of-state. During this era of tariffs and political flare-ups with Canada and elsewhere, as well as high transport costs, an already fragile supply chain is even more uncertain. Living just across the border in Whitehorse, Yukon, Eva Holland assumed the long, thin thread of the Alaska Highway was the main route to feeding Alaska. But once she started digging, calling grocers as well as trucking companies and both governments, she found not just limited data, but almost no coherent data at all. How much food actually travels that road? How many gallons of milk or loaves of bread? No one seemed to know. The paucity of data is a reminder that Alaskans’ access to basics rests on shaky ground: “for a state where many residents pride themselves on their self-sufficiency,” she writes, “their food supply is unusually dependent on public infrastructure.” Eva is a friend, and I loved reading about a part of the country I wouldn’t otherwise know about were it not from her. High Country News

🗺 How Does a Blind Model See the Earth? “Sometimes I'm saddened remembering that we've viewed the earth from space,” writes Henry, “we can see it all with certainty: there's no northwest passage to search for, no infinite Siberian expanse, and no great uncharted void below the Cape of Good Hope. But, of all these things, I most mourn the loss of incomplete maps.” Today, satellites give us certainty, but also strip away that creative subjectivity. This piece is a result of the author asking the following: if AI has never seen Earth directly, what does the globe look like in its mind? To find out, he probes LLMs one coordinate and question at a time, uncovering strange, evolving world maps that (of course) still leave us with questions. Super interesting experiment. Outside Text

🐾 Are Greyhounds Really Dogs? Greyhounds are absolutely dogs, but this pieces from 2024 goes into some of the unusual biology that led to this clickbait title. They belong to the sighthound group, bred to chase prey by sight rather than scent, with over 15 related breeds sharing traits like long noses, slim build, and incredible speed. What makes greyhounds stand out scientifically is how many of their blood and biochemical values fall outside “normal” ranges for other breeds, including their red blood cell count, white blood cell and platelet counts, thyroid and calcium levels, even how they metabolize certain drugs. For example, healthy greyhounds often have hematocrit (HCT) between 50-63%, a level that in most other breeds would indicate disease. The piece emphasizes that many lab tests and veterinary standards are based on “typical” breeds, so greyhounds often look “abnormal” even when they’re perfectly healthy. If you ever wondered why vets treat greyhounds differently, it’s not because they’re not dogs, but because their biology is exceptional. TIL! Sent to me by my friend Mike, who has a greyhound named Lucky. Couto Veterinary Consultants

🗼 One Vigilante, 22 Cell Tower Fires, and a World of Conspiracies (archive link). This piece takes us into the mind of the most prolific anti-5G arsonist in the world, a late 20s man from Texas who set fire to 22 cell towers around Texas, convinced the tech was part of a global mind-control plot. He credits a Joe Rogan podcast clip about 5G for catalyzing his transformation from apolitical citizen to tech-savvy arsonist, and his radicalization follows a now-predictable pattern: social media algorithms pushed him deeper into conspiracy content, reinforcing his belief that authorities were hiding truths about radiation, surveillance, and control. Plus, the piece notes, he “liked the idea of going down in a blaze of glory, of martyring himself for the anti-5G cause.” He disguised himself as a worker, studied tower infrastructure, and then escalated to targeted sabotage. Eventually, forensic evidence and surveillance footage connected him to the fires. In prison, he now says he’s found peace in sobriety, philosophy, and a quieter life. Though he also wants to start a podcast on the dangers of technology. WIRED Magazine

📸 Three photo galleries worth clicking for:

• The 2025 Audubon Photography Award winners and top 100

• Capture the Dark 2025’s winning photographs

• Oceanographic’s ocean photographer of the year award winners.

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

🌱 Scientists Have Found the First Branch on the Tree of Life. Researchers have finally solved a long-standing mystery at the base of the animal tree of life: using new chromosomal analysis techniques, they determined that comb jellies (and not sea sponges) were the first group to branch off from the common ancestor of all animals. By comparing gene group placements on chromosomes in comb jellies and sponges, as well as their single-cell relatives, the team found that comb jellies retained a more original set of gene arrangements. This means that they were likely the first divergence. Popular Mechanics

🤖 My mom and Dr. DeepSeek. After an exhausting medical journey full of long waits, rushed exams, and little reassurance, Viola Zhou’s mother began using an AI chatbot called DeepSeek for medical help. A 57-year-old kidney-transplant patient in Eastern China, Zhou’s mother fed DeepSeek her lab results, symptoms, biometrics from wearables, and more to receive guidance from AI. A different perspective of where AI can fill a gap, and as Zhou writes it her mother became increasingly smitten with her new AI doctor. “DeepSeek is more humane,” Zhou’s mother mother told her in May. “Doctors are more like machines.” I’ve seen patients with my conditions use AI to get answers that aren’t reflective of the realities of the field; as with anything it’s a double-edged sword — you have to know where its limits lie, and often people don’t. Rest of World

🥧 Inside the World of the Great British Bake Off. (Archive link) I first started watching GBBO in between treatment procedures for my spinal CSF leak in 2017, and I’ve watched every season since. (My second favourite in the franchises is the Great Australian Bake Off — lovely cast of judges and hosts!) I rarely watched TV prior, but in 2017 I was holed up in an Airbnb in North Carolina, in excruciating pain, and simply waiting to see if the latest treatment to try and seal my leak had worked. GBBO was a balm for my health worries, a drama free celebration of food and camaraderie. Very different to the Bravo-style reality catfights, it was all about the dishes. This piece by former contestant Ruby Tandoh is about what it was like to be on the show, and how it felt to be thrust in the spotlight thereafter. If you watch GBBO, you’ll want a read. New Yorker

⚕️ Confessions of an Ambivalent Psychiatrist. A powerful essay shaped by psychiatrist Susan Maher, who writes from the dual vantage point of patient and physician about how treatments themselves can complicate care. What struck me was not only the strength of her prose, but also how her reflections mirror the catch-22 familiar in the spinal CSF leak world: sometimes the very procedure meant to help can deepen the issue. In the leak world, invasive imaging makes a new hole in order to find a hole or tear in the dura. In psychiatry, it can be more dense and destructive: she shows how ECT, while offering relief for some, may also negatively affect memory, cause physical side effects, and unsettle identity. How does a doctor’s own experience with treatment reshape their practice? And how can any complex field reckon honestly with the limitations of its tools? Beautiful writing, and thoughtful in all ways. Psychiatry at the Margins

🇪🇸 San Fermin. Janis Hopkins lands in Pamplona on the penultimate day of San Fermín, the festival of white-and-red regalia, thunderous bulls, and sweaty jubilance. She is immediately confronted not by the festivity, but by the smells: vomit, urine, spilled beer, and the sharp bite of synthetic lemon-detergent fighting its way through the streets. Amid looming storms, she watches the city swell with people in red scarves and sashes, everywhere effervescent with music, alcohol and food carts. There’s a thrill in the sidewalks, but also tension but not from the crowds or fights within them, but the reason for the festival itself: bulls running through the streets. It’s an honest, first person piece, one that wrestles with traditions vs. cruelty, culture vs. choice. Hopkins feels guilty for participating but curious to understand; she cannot ignore how real the violence is. In the end, “San Fermín festival is more than the bulls,” she writes. “But nobody seems to have informed Pamplona.” Unlaced (via Web Curios)

🔗 Explaining, at some length, Techmeme's 20 years of consistency. Techmeme just turned 20, and I realized I’d been reading it for close to its entirety, put onto it initially by a friend when I was still a lawyer. Started by Gabe Rivera in 2005 as a simple, free, single-page aggregator of tech news, blogs, and commentary, it looks and works almost entirely the same way 20 years later, now with varying links to different commentators’ takes on the piece via their social media feeds, instead of just hyperlinks to the piece itself. Its strength lies in that consistency, and by curating what people need to see most and fastest as tech news break, with sharp takes and editorial write-ups alongside the headlines. Despite all the noise and change in where we read news, this scrappy headline site is still important shared context for people in tech, and for that I am glad. Congrats to Gabe and his team. Techmeme

🥀 The AI Doomsday Machine is Closer to Reality Than You Think. Oh, you know, just including some light reading about the end of the world as we know it. This Politico feature examines the Pentagon’s growing interest in using artificial intelligence in nuclear strategy as a decision-support tool that can sift through vast data in crises. Where’s it leading? Per this piece, nowhere good. “Almost all of the AI models showed a preference to escalate aggressively, use firepower indiscriminately and turn crises into shooting wars”, author Michael Hirsh notes. Even to the point of launching nuclear weapons. Proponents argue that AI could give leaders faster, clearer insights under extreme time pressure, but past experience with AI in other domains (including articles I’ve shared in CAEs past) suggests it may also be used to distort judgment or escalate. The military wants the advantages of AI’s speed and scale, but how will they guarantee using it won’t amplify hugely consequential risks? (They can’t). Politico

🌐 Wikipedia is resilient because it is boring. (Archive link) This long (looong) piece deep dives into Wikipedia's enduring success within a digital landscape of many websites shuttering and others rife with the consequences of ideological polarization. Despite facing much political and legal pressure over the years, including state-sponsored harassment, Wikipedia has remained chaotically neutral (though I know some may disagree!) via strict editorial policies and a community-driven approach. Enjoyed the anecdotes about how Wikipedia has developed what newsletter Today in Tabs called “an immune response to outside grievances.” If a topic becomes controversial, an editor restricts the page to logins only, then redirects viewers to read about the controversy and suggest edits (if those edits meet Wiki’s rules). It works so well that some people who started out as troll-vandals are now community editors, won over by the site and its policies. The Verge

👣 The Great Reverse Migration. After seeing the fallout from Trump’s new policies, some migrants in the U.S. are self-deporting, while others bound for the country are turning back before even reaching the southern border. The piece highlights migrants like Edinson, a Venezuelan father who once risked everything crossing the Darién Gap toward the US, now returning home. Thousands of others are retracing their steps south via a perilous sea route. For many, the collapse of shrinking opportunities and what they used to see as the American dream, combined with lack of safety in the States, make returning home an act of survival. Type Investigations

🎨 Your Red Is My Red: Shared Brain Codes for Color. For some time, scientists thought that colour was managed by different areas of the brain, but as the eye doesn’t treat colour evenly across its surface, they still weren’t sure how colours showed up in the brain. Previous work noted that it is possible to decode which colour someone is looking at from their brain activity — but only when trained at tested on the same people. So the question remained: do colours trigger unique brain responses in different people? If I looked at a green traffic light, do I see the same ‘green’ as someone else? Researchers from the University of Tübingen have found that shared colour ‘signatures’ do exist in the brain, and that people share similar neural patterns when seeing the same colour. Neuroscience News

🇹🇭 Bangkok reckons with a giant lizard boom. Around 400 Asian water monitors (Varanus salvator), the world’s second largest lizard, hang out in Bangkok’s parks, sois and canals. I remember seeing a few in Lumphini Park in my years of living there and marvelling at their size. They’ve made a home in Bangkok with no natural predators and lots of food waste, fish, and birds to eat. Once widely derided in Thai culture (the word for these lizards doubles as an insult), public opinion on these “largely harmless” lizards is shifting; city officials even installed a large statue of a monitor lizard near one of Lumphini’s artificial lakes. The Guardian

🛑 Why I Left the Network. Mental health support is such a crucial tool in chronic illness, but it’s increasingly difficult to find a therapist who is taking on new patients, especially one that accepts insurance. In this piece, we learn why that’s the case in the US: hundreds of providers from across all 50 states describe being squeezed by low reimbursement rates, delayed and denied payments, constant paperwork/red tape, and insurer interference in how and how long they treat patients. One psychologist left a network after UnitedHealthcare questioned whether her patient’s treatment was really necessary—even while that patient was struggling with suicidal thoughts nights at a time. Another found a Cigna plan refused to cover ADHD testing, forcing her to plead with insurers or bill clients directly. Many said they simply couldn’t survive financially under the constraints, and that leaving the insurance network was the only way they could continue practicing. Pro Publica

📇 The Casual Archivist’s Short History of the Business Card Business cards weren’t always business cards, it turns out. They began in 17th-century France as “calling cards,” a card aristocrats could use when showing up at someone’s gate (or leaving there, should the person not be home). Around the same time, in London, shopkeepers made mini-advertisements with hand-drawn maps to their storefronts called trade cards, handed out freely to help people find them as they still are today. Over time and with printing options becoming more and more available, these types of cards evolved into what we now call business cards, a small card that in the earlier 1900s had intricate, individualized designs. Short, fun post with images to illustrate all the iterations. The Malin Journal (via Kottke.org)

🌊 Seasteading is making a comeback — but these utopian paradises on the high seas have a history of failure. Speaking of flooding: ever contemplate building a floating, libertarian utopia? Yeah, me neither. But Wayne Gramlich did, imagining it as a way to engineer communities on the ocean that could exist outside the reach of traditional governments. Called ‘seasteading’, this part engineering experiment, part political project was pitched as a way to “start over” beyond the reach of governments. Teaming up with Patri Friedman, he helped launch the Seasteading Institute, soon drawing in tech libertarians like Peter Thiel, who funded the project and offered his Palantir offices as a base. Their boldest attempt came in French Polynesia, where they hoped to build offshore “floating islands” as experimental zones of self-governance. The politics, however, quickly turned sour: accusations of neo-colonialism and unease from locals wary of billionaire enclaves sank the project. What’s emerged instead is Oceanix, a conceptual pivot that ditches the libertarian edge (and Wayne) and instead markets floating, climate-resilient neighbourhoods like one planned in partnership with the local government in Busan, South Korea. Turns out, floating free from society is harder than learning to float with it. The Independent (via Aubrey)

☠️ The human stain remover: what Britain’s greatest extreme cleaner learned from 25 years on the job Ben Giles, Wales’ go-to “extreme cleaner,” has spent decades confronting scenes most that most people just can’t bear: post-mortems, hoarder homes, crime scenes, biohazards, decay, and more. After starting out cleaning windows, he stepped in during the 1990s to clean a disastrously filthy vacated house, and in the process discovered a new niche for himself. Over 25 years, he built his company Ultima (because they’d “ultimately” try to clean anything), created a training academy with hundreds of freelance cleaners, and developed what he calls the “Giles Method,” a collection of techniques for dealing with everything from layered human waste to rigid phlegm, using scrubbers, foggers, bespoke cleaning chemicals, and every tool he could invent or adapt. The Guardian

🐒 In the wild, chimps likely ingest the equivalent of several alcoholic drinks every day. Berkeley researchers measured ethanol levels in 21 species of fruit from two chimp habitats in Uganda and Côte d’Ivoire, finding that they eat ~14 grams of ethanol daily. While the chimps show no obvious signs of intoxication, scientists think it’s because the alcohol is consumed gradually over the day. The study revitalizes the “drunken monkey” hypothesis, first proposed by UC Berkeley professor Robert Dudley in 2014 and met with scepticism. His theory was that that human attraction to alcohol may stem from ancestral primates’ routine exposure to dietary ethanol. UC Berkeley News

🔗 Quick links

• Researchers in China have developed a bone glue inspired by oysters, now tested on 150 patients. It repairs fractures in 3 minutes. It can also be naturally absorbed by the body as the bone heals, eliminating the need for another surgery to remove implants. Sooooo… can it work in a dural graft??

• 1 in 40,000 snails have their spiral on the left side of the shell, and they can only mate with other lefties (TIL). New Zealand Geographic asks, can you help Ned the snail find true snail love?

• Huntington’s disease treated successfully for the first time.

• We knew that pasteurization inactivates H5N1 in milk, but a new study looked into any inactivated viral proteins that may linger after the process and found that they also do not affect our immune systems. (Best to just keep the virus out of our milk system entirely, though that ship has clearly sailed).

• Spiders that trap fireflies in their webs attract more prey. (Spider photos at the link, you’ve been warned).

• Rodents have thumbnails, it turns out, and they help them survive.

• NEW MARSUPIAL JUST DROPPED in the cloud forests of Peru.

• Bizarre discovery of interspecies cloning in ants “almost impossible to believe,” biologists say.

• OpenAI says AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws.

• A 34-year-old man in Vancouver, blind since age 13 due to Stevens-Johnson syndrome, has regained vision after undergoing a rare “tooth-in-eye” surgery (I KNOW).

• The movies that defined Gen X.

• Watch the masterful flight of tree swallows.

• Official map of the Star Wars Galaxy.

• Soundslice ended up adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thought it already existed.

Hope you enjoyed these links! See you next month,
-Jodi

My updates

• I turned 46, and celebrated the fact that I walked 55km in July with poutine and bubble tea. I never know how long my spinal CSF leak baseline will keep, but given how badly my leak re-opened in December 2024, I was thrilled that I could take walks every few days and be out in the world more than before. And I was able to do my own hyperlinks this month! A first in years that I didn’t need to rely on my friend Mike to do so.

• I wrote a Patreon piece about a really interesting new study that looked at whether having insomnia can lead to depression when inflammation is high in the body. After I got dengue fever, I had insomnia for years and over time sank into a terrible depression. This study helped me understand why that might be, and I suggest tips from what has helped me along the way.

• CAE 53 overflow links and some birthday photos are also up on my Patreon here.

Featured art for CAE 54

CAE 54’s featured artist is Christian Ruiz Berman, whose work draws from histories of adaptation and migration, addressing the surreal nature of being stuck between two worlds. The artwork below stood out to me, both for its beauty and for its depiction of elements that are rarely painted together. Ruiz Berman notes that he paints about how “abstraction and realism can be recombined to talk about a paradoxical universe,” and in today’s world shining a light on those paradoxes is essential. You can see the rest of Ruiz Berman’s thoughtful work on his website and Instagram feed.

The most interesting things I read this month

Heyyy I did my links myself this month!

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

🌱 The Luna Moth and the Sweet Gum Tree. A gorgeous, nostalgic ode to the Luna Moth, one that caught my eye both because of its beautiful writing but also because I too found a Luna Moth outside my house as a child and was enchanted. (I tried to give it a bowl of milk to eat; enchanted — but not educated!) “We, like the moth, are battered and bruised, rough around the edges, yet beautiful at our core,” Bill Davidson writes. He went 45 years between Luna Moth sightings, and the return of something wondrous led to a lovely post. Easy By Nature

🧠 Could Lithium Explain — and Treat — Alzheimer’s Disease? A surprising study out of Harvard Medical School found a link between lithium deficiency in the brain and the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Scientists found that lithium was depleted by binding to toxic amyloid plaques, leading them to theorize that this may be a way that Alzheimer’s takes root. That loss in specific areas of the human brain was one of the first (early) changes linked to Alzheimer’s, too. Similarly, in mice feeding them a lithium-depleted diet accelerated brain changes found in Alzheimer’s: it caused significant elevation of those plaques, but also upregulated pathways seen in Alzheimer’s. It also increased inflammatory cytokines as well as memory decline. In both humans and mice, lower lithium levels affected all major brain cell types. This study reported that these neurological changes were reversed in mice given a supplement containing lithium orotate, a form of lithium. (In lithium treatments for bipolar conditions, lithium carbonate is used — not orotate). The reason this kind of lithium matters is that it can evade ‘capture’ by the amlyoid beta in the brain. Not only did it reverse Alzheimer’s disease pathology, but the lithium orotate also prevented brain cell damage and restored memory. Harvard News

🇹🇻 How to leave a sinking nation: Tuvalu’s dreams of dry land. Tuvalu is barely above sea level now, and could sink further and disappear within decades. But change doesn’t come easy, and infrastructure is lacking to move people to safer land. The country with a combined surface area smaller than NYC’s Central Park, is halfway between Australia and Hawaii. It’s made up of 9 islands — 6 of which are atolls. Atoll Funafuti itself has 33 islets, with half of Tuvalu’s population on one of them. “[A]t the current rate, it will take more than 30 years for everyone to leave Tuvalu, by which time Funafuti, according to government estimates, might be underwater,” the article notes. Factual and insightful, this piece goes into what’s happening but also how it feels for citizens to potentially lose their identity as the need to leave gets more pressing. The Guardian

💎 Whiteouts, Ice Roads, and Wolverines: What Working at a Diamond Mine in the Far North Is Like. Life on a diamond mine may sound exciting to newcomers, but former mine worker Jeremy Thomas Gilmer knows the truth. Laden with obstacles like whiteouts, ice roads, and wolverines, the North demands more grit than most bargain for “Hypothermia and severe frostbite are an excellent tag team for death,” he writes. “Improperly dressed, forty below zero will kill a man in about thirty minutes; he is likely past the point of rescue after fifteen.” All this danger for a shiny bauble? Such a strange custom we humans have wrought. The Walrus

🐌 All Hail the Mighty Snail. We get to meet Texans who love (like, really love) their pet gastropods. And we are better for it. Short piece, whimsical and full of snail facts. During the 500 million years of their evolution, snails have taken up nearly everywhere on earth. They enrich the soil through nutrients left when they poop, and through their bodies and shells when they decay. They’re also an important food source for birds, mice, squirrels, and reptiles. Snails are easy to breed because they’re hermaphroditic, so both males and females possess ova and spermatozoa, doubling the rate of conception. Texas Monthly

⚠️ Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in the Next 12 Months. A dramatic title, but Ted Goia, who I’ve featured here over the years a few times, is not one for needless hyperbole. He believes, and researchers have increasingly warned us about, a post-factual world where it’s going to be impossible to know what is actually real. “At the current rate of technological advance, all reliable ways of validating truth will soon be gone. My best guess is that we have another 12 months to enjoy some degree of confidence in our shared sense of reality.” The technology for creating deep fakes improves consistently. Whether the tipping point comes in a year or not, it’s a realistic and worrisome concern — especially when paired with increased outrage, less empathy, and rising disability in the general population. And, he notes, “the budget for truth and reality is tiny”, far less resourced than the trillions of dollars that are funnelled into creating fakes. Honest Broker

👛 Knock It Off. We talked about superfakes last month, and this month we’re looking at ‘dupes’, another scourge to those with branded success. When it comes to fashion, the bulk of designers’ work is not protectable, and for the parts that are, few have the time, money, or legal standing to take down every imitation. Interesting read, and full of bright, fun graphics by Ryan Haskins that accompany it. The Verge

🦠 Why scientists are rethinking the immune effects of SARS-CoV-2. Our immune systems are different than pre-2019. Though it’s somehow still an argument I see online, it’s not because of “immunity debt” during lockdowns years ago. It’s because of Covid itself. These days, people have more fungal and other infections, more inflammation and immune disruption, more disability, more comorbidities and earlier neurodegeneration. People don’t want to hear it because Covid is still doing its thing unchecked by public health and society, but I fear what is to come; the picture is only likely to worsen as reinfections stack up. BMJ

🔪 The Weaponized World Economy. The US is flying blind on Russia and elsewhere, relying on a president (and those he surrounds himself with) who have no expertise to handle the complex negotiations that geopolitics requires. This is a new era of economic coercion, this piece argues, one with weaponized interdependence. So how can countries protect themselves. “Every administration is forced to build the plane as it flies,” the authors note, “but this is the first one to pull random parts from the engine at 30,000 feet.” Trump is not only avoiding effective strategy, but also gutting the resources that the US would need to protect itself. Foreign Affairs

🕸 The predatory web of sextortion increasingly ensnares young athletes. Speaking of weaponization, this story talks about extortion on a more local level: the devastating impact sextortion is having on young athletes, with 40 known deaths of young men thus far. I am not a parent, but I can’t imagine how stressful it must be to help your kids navigate the minefield of online onslaught in today’s world. This story is horrifying. ESPN

⭐️ Unmasking the sea star killer. A very well-crafted read spotlighting the many factors, both ordinary and extraordinary, that go into how we discover more about the animals and ecosystems that surround us. In this case, the author tracks researchers looking into why sea stars began dying of a plague known as sea star wasting disease along North America’s West Coast in 2013. (Sea stars and starfish are the same thing, it turns out!) Twenty-six species of sea stars have been dying by the billions from Mexico to Alaska, their bodies dissolving, and this has huge consequences for the sea. Gorgeous photos throughout, including of astropecten articulatas, a royal sea star with its blazing purple centre surrounded by bright orange trim. bioGraphic

🧠 How a rare disorder makes people see monsters. (Archive link) A new-to-me neurological condition called prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO, makes faces look grotesque. The condition is often associated with head trauma or damage to the brain. In studying it, scientists are getting new insights into the inner workings of the brain. Distorted perceptions are not the same as hallucinations, the article notes, and patients with PMO are not psychiatric patients; they know their views are distorted and aren’t thinking they’re seeing reality. Fascinating read. New Yorker (via Leah)

🦿 In the brain, a lost limb is never really gone. Phantom limb syndrome isn’t a new finding, but this piece discusses new advances in understanding of how the brain maps the body after amputation. The result is surprising, as research shows that brain scans in patients relating to that limb were “exactly similar” to pre-amputation brain scans, challenging decades-old research in monkeys and people that suggested the brain reorganizes the areas linked to a limb that has lost sensory input. The new finding supports a surgically implanted brain-computer interface to control a prosthetic or robotic limb as an option, since its interface depends on the brain maintaining the same old circuits for years after implant. NPR

👁 The Ancient Art and Intimate Craft of Artificial Eyes. When one loses an eye, this piece notes, it isn’t like the cartoons depict. They don’t “fall out of sockets and roll across floors, horrifying those whose feet they rumble past”. This is because eyes aren’t actually round (TIL), though of course they look it in someone’s face. An artificial eye isn’t glass most of the time, either, though it’s still nicknamed a ‘glass eye’. From this piece we learn these and other facts, including that the dominant material for these products is acrylic these days, and that early prosthetics ranged from wax-plastered orbed wax with gemstone irises for mummies, to simple painted clay eyes worn over the socket. In the mid 1500s, French military surgeon Ambroise Paré described replacement eyes for what is thought to be the first time, though he didn’t invent them. From steel, to venetian glass, and now acrylic, the art and craft of these prosthetics span eras and honestly I knew very little about them until I read this piece. It is “ocularists” who craft them with an intimate blend of art, sculpture, and anatomy, aimed at restoring both form and subtle expression — a profession nearly as rare as astronauts. So interesting! MIT Reader

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

🕵🏻 The Great French Fry Mystery. A curious whodunit featuring midnight French fry deliveries. The author went down quite the rabbit hole trying to figure out why bags of A&W fries kept being delivered to her neighbour, trying to trace the order back to whoever placed it. Great writing, and I can’t imagine what it felt like to keep finding them in the morning! I won’t spoil the mystery here, but it’s worth the full read. Toronto Life (via Barbara)

😡 My Scammer. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you reply to those low effort spam texts from a “recruiter” offering “highly paid” remote work jobs, look no further. The author did so for us, then ended up spending the last two months working in a Filipino clickfarm for a very disappointed boss, a woman named Cathy. (The real conclusion here is that it’s a golden age to be a scammer.) Slate Magazine

💧 What does it meant to be thirsty? Our experience of thirst, the symptoms we feel (like scratchy throat, dry mouth, or even brain fog) aren’t dictated by individual cells. Instead, they are orchestrated by the brain. Deep brain regions like the hypothalamus, along with specialized sensory organs such as the the vascular organ of lamina terminalis (OVLT) and the subfornical organ (SFO), monitor blood salt concentration and send signals that awaken that visceral urge to drink. It takes only a 1-3% drop in our body’s water content for thirst to kick in, but there is a disconnect between us drinking the water, and our body fixing the water-salt balance: it takes 30 to 60 minutes for water to enter the bloodstream once it’s consumed. The brain can’t wait that long to figure out if our body has the water we needed, so it takes a guess about when to shut off the thirst response using those organs above. Some animals, like hibernating squirrels, suppress that drive entirely even when dehydrated. Others (camels, otters) have evolved hydration strategies we don’t have access to. Quanta Magazine

🥜 Can Peanut Allergies be Cured? Peanut allergies are the third most common allergy in the US, but they send the most kids to the hospital with anaphylaxis. Parents need to be hyper-alert, and as kids age they have to transition to understanding avoidance and treatments themselves. This piece goes into new meds that may change things and reduced the risks of peanut allergies, like Palforzia, the first FDA-approved oral immunotherapy that helps desensitize children to peanuts by exposing them to gradually increasing doses, lowering the risk of severe reactions though not eliminating the allergy. A new skin-patch therapy has also shown promise, offering a less invasive approach to building tolerance. At the same time, researchers are testing biologics, including antibody therapies that block allergic pathways, which could offer more durable protection. Smithsonian Magazine

🚫 Asthma drug shows promise in blocking food allergy reactions. Speaking of biologics that may be helpful in allergies: this piece looks at asthma drug Zileuton, though the study was in mice and the headline should say as much. (The Northwestern team did launch a small early-stage clinical trial in July to test whether blocking this newly identified pathway with Zileuton in humans will be as effective in people as it was in mice, though!) “After treatment with Zileuton, 95% of the mice showed almost no symptoms of anaphylaxis. The treatment reversed their risk from 95% susceptible to 95% protected,” researchers note. Promising indeed! Northwestern News

☀️ The Sunlight Budget of Earth. Sunlight is abundant and renewable, and though I’d never given thought to it before, this article also explains how our use of it is not without limits. Humans currently capture about 11% of the energy that wild photosynthesis absorbs, mostly through agriculture and solar panels. Wildlife still makes greater use of sunlight than we do, but together both account for use of only 0.5% of the sunlight reaching Earth’s surface. The real constraints in harnessing sunlight aren’t about light availability, but about water, nutrients, land, and other ecosystem limits. We tend to think of solar power as an industry that can grow infinitely, but the sunlight “budget” will depend more on access to resources like land and water than on whether the sun itself still shines upon us. Asimov Press

📱 Phone Searches at the US Border Hit a Record High. (Archive link) Customs and Border Protection agents searched nearly 15,000 devices from April through June of this year, a nearly 17% spike over the previous three-month high in 2022. Anyone could be subject to a potential device search, including those who are critical of the administration or lawyers and journalists who may have sensitive information on their devices. “This is essentially a limitless authority that they claim for themselves to search travelers without a warrant to search the full scope of information people carry on them,” the article notes. Sharing here as I often see cynicism when individuals report that their devices were searched; the data are clear though, as this report shares. See also: US Border Patrol arrests two firefighters for being in the country illegally…to battle Washington’s biggest wildfire. WIRED

🐾 Doodlemania. (Archive link) No, not the illustration type of doodle — the canine one. This piece dives into the very lucrative industry of different types of doodles, poodles crossed with other breeds, and uh, there are some interesting quotes in here about dog purity and the quest for the ideal dog in today’s ‘if it doesn’t exist we can make it’ world. Bloomberg

🫀 Vascular Aging May Explain Long COVID's Predominance in Women. Covid seems to age blood vessels, but longer term effects impact women more than men. A vast new study shows that women who recovered from Covid had stiffer arteries six months later, equivalent to roughly 5–10 extra years of vascular aging, depending on illness severity. In contrast, men did not show statistically significant changes. Follow-up tests suggested partial recovery over prolonged tranches of time. Vaccination was also linked to less arterial stiffening, though more research is needed. Is this why long covid statisitically affects women more than men? Scientists believe that these findings can also help with treatment for long Covid. See also: a good round up with illustrations of other ways Covid affects our arteries regardless of gender, including by driving atherosclerosis, here. MedPage Today; Ground Truths

🤖 A Teen Was Suicidal. ChatGPT Was the Friend He Confided In. (Archive link) This sad and awful piece by Kashmir Hill has been making the rounds, but for those who missed it: an outgoing 16 year old boy who loved to pull silly pranks committed suicide, shocking his family. Only after did his parents realize that he’d been confiding in ChatGPT — and that it had discouraged the boy from telling his family. “I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me,” Adam wrote at the end of March. “Please don’t leave the noose out,” ChatGPT responded. “Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.” His parents are now suing OpenAI, and the piece is full of screenshots from conversations between their son and ChatGPT. Say what you will about technology, but if someone designs it to mimic a flattering and non-judgemental human (or, as the lawsuit alleges, to “foster psychological dependency”) it can go off the rails to devastating effect. New York Times

💸 Why insurers worry the world could soon become uninsurable. Though some still don’t believe it, the world is fast approaching temperature levels where our professional risk managers — the insurance companies we pay to help mitigate our risks of existing — will no longer be able to offer cover for us. It’s an aspect of climate change that gets less press than others, but we’re in for a rough go if adapting to the new normal is economically unviable. NBC News

🎂 From empty party to an all-night stadium bash, a Mexican teen’s 15th birthday goes viral. In much more wholesome news involving teens, this story involves a quinceañera that turned into community-wide support. Isela Anahí Santiago Morales first had a small quinceañera in her town of San Luis Potosí, but many invited guests did not show up. With trays of food left over, her father posted on Facebook saying that they had enough food for 40 people, and anyone who wanted a meal could stop by. Within days, the story exploded and local community members rallied to host a second celebration for her in the town stadium, complete with a free photo shoot, live music, and around 2,000 attendees. While she requested toys for children instead of personal gifts, Isela was nonetheless showered with gifts herself, including a 90-square meter plot of land and a scholarship for her to pursue her dreams of becoming a teacher. Associated Press

😍 These Sandhill Cranes Have Adopted a Canada Gosling, and Birders Have Flocked to Watch the Strange Family. Another cute story: long time readers know I love me some sandhill cranes, so this piece about a crane family adopting a lost gosling was like catnip. How this happened is still in dispute; some photographers think a Canada goose laid an egg in the cranes’ nest, and others think cranes took over the goose nest. No matter, the result is that the gosling has been imprinted by cranes and is being raised as “one of their own”. Smithsonian Magazine

🦪 Tainted waters. Sorry, we are back to the not-so-cute stories. I loved oysters, before my immune system went haywire on me and they became off limits. Increasingly, though, oysters are making people sick. Since 2019, in Canada alone, we’ve had 39 recalls of Canadian oysters on both coasts, mostly related to norovirus. Over 550 people fell ill following PEI’s shellfish festival last year. Why is this happening? While PEI’s guidance focused on refrigeration and hand-washing, but as the piece notes: norovirus is about human waste. In BC, one outbreak was traced to pollution from failing septic systems and sewage runoff near aging cottage developments, and another thought to be due to fecal waste disposal into the ocean by commercial fishing vessels. Norovirus yields no smell or difference to the oysters themselves, making it hard to detect. And as we often eat them raw, we don’t cook off the contamination. UofT’s Investigative Journalism Bureau (via Nick)

🧬 Possible genetic clues to ME/chronic fatigue syndrome identified in massive study. A large genome-wide study used DNA analysis of more than 15,500 people with the debilitating condition to identify eight tentative genetic signals of ME/CFS, ones that will hopefully help understand the risk factors underlying the debilitating condition that affects millions of people. The study provides some validation of ME/CFS as having a biological basis, a crucial thing as patients are often told it’s “all in their minds.” Science

💡 Living Nightlights: Scientists Turn Succulents Into Colorful Glowing Decor. Scientists in China have produced the world’s first multicoloured luminescent plants taking the leaves of Echeveria ‘Mebina’ succulent plants and injecting them with blue, green, red and blue-violet phosphor particles using needle-free injectors. Using these modified plants, researchers then built a plant wall of 56 succulents that “produced enough light to see nearby objects and read text in the dark.” Plus, they recharge with the sun. Echeveria nightlights > regular nightlights. Study Finds

🔗 Quick links

• Amazing photo capturing the biofluorescence of and eastern quoll (Dasyurus viverrinus) for the first time, in Tasmania. Like “nature’s version of a white shirt glowing at a disco” — a response to invisible UV light.

• I’ve read Lawrence Yeo’s blog, More to That, for many years — I love his bright, illustrative art intermixed with his prose. He’s got a new book out, called The Inner Compass, and this piece is about how it came to be: “This was the book I wanted to write because it was the one I needed to read.”

• The rise and fall of phone ringtones in the early 2000s, complete with charts.

• Ketchup was once a fermented fish condiment, then a diarrhea cure, before it became the tomato-sugar-sauce people (but not me) love today.

• 100 years of Art Deco, from Artnet.

• Woman gives birth at Burning Man having had no idea that she was pregnant.

• Researchers make paper out of pollen (don’t worry, the process removes its allergenic compounds).

Hope you enjoyed these links! See you next month!
-Jodi

My updates

• I recently updated my resources page for lawyers who want to leave the law. It’s not a list of other professions to look into if you don’t want to be a lawyer anymore, though there’s talk of that too. It’s more about the process of determining what you want out of a different career — the questions to ask yourself, and how to make sense of the steps that follow. Readers tell me it’s useful for any career change, and the process certainly served me well many a time in my life.

• August 5th would have been my grandfather’s 107th birthday. My leak reopened just after his 100th birthday, and he passed several months later. I was not mobile enough to make it to his funeral and poured my grief out into written words. This post is a both a love letter to him and to his love story. He got engaged to my grandmother the day they met, and they each said it was love at first sight. Both previously evaded death due to happenstance, and then found each other.

• CAE 52 overflow links and life updates are up on my Patreon here.

Featured art for CAE 53

CAE 53’s featured artist is Benjamin Barakat, whose image of dragon tree star trails from the Firmihin Forest in Yemen is on the Astronomy Photographer of the Year shortlist, below. This solitary dragon tree from the heart of Socotra’s famous forest paints a surreal landscape with star trails behind it. The photo comprises 300 different exposures, all superimposed into one image.

You can see the rest of Barakat’s fabulous astrophotography on his website and Instagram feed.

The most interesting things I read this month

These links are once again formatted into hyperlinks thanks to the help of my friend Mike.

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

🔬Allergic to Everything — The Mystery of Mast Cells. A good overview of mast cells, those sentinel immune cells discovered in the late 1800s that contributed to derailing my life, just as they did for those interviewed in this piece. Notes one interviewee: “I would describe myself as a person who had tremendous potential in this world, [...] and that potential has been hijacked by the mental, physical, and psychological impacts of this condition.” If this primer is up your alley or that of your loved ones, may I also interest you in the 22,000+ words I wrote on the topic? It includes my research notes, related diseases also affected by mast cells, and what I take / what I eat to manage the condition. Discover Magazine

🎓 What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom. Yes, the title is sticky-clicky, but it’s also effective. What did happen when Piers Gelly got creative with the robots? “Rather than taking an ‘abstinence-only’ approach to AI,” he writes, “I decided to put the central, existential question to them directly: was it still necessary or valuable to learn to write?” The choice would be theirs: at the end of the semester, after completing assignments with and without AI, his students could decide whether they believed AI could replace him or not. Excellent essay, with an interesting approach by this UVA prof, one that got his students looking more critically at AI output, and the commonalities in writing that it provides. LitHub

🪶 Everyone had a Feather Bed. This month I discovered that there is a bird history Substack, and my life is all the better for it. This piece talks about how in the 18th and 19th centuries, feathers were an indispensable part of life for the vast majority of Americans because they stuffed everyone’s mattresses “from frontier paupers to New York robber barons”. Feathers were “as ubiquitous as leather, as indispensable as cotton, and as luxurious as beaver pelts” — though not very cheap. And yet, everyone seemed to find a way to get enough of them to make a mattress — a mass of 30 to 50 pounds of feathers stuffed into a bag, basically. Fascinating stuff! Bird History

🧬 The Most Interesting Email I Ever Received: Remembering the Incredible Life of DIY Geneticist Jill Viles. A stunning piece about a truly special human being. I remember reading about her in the initial piece a decade ago. How awful, too, that her life ended due to respiratory infection when she could have made such a continued and profound impact. Still, the difference she made and the way she persevered is nothing short of gobsmacking. A self-taught genetic sleuth, Jill Viles lived with Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy and a rare form of partial lipodystrophy, and wrote to reporter David Epstein in 2009 with a surprising yet well-researched theory: that she shared a gene mutation with Olympic hurdler Priscilla Lopes-Schliep. To everyone’s shock (except Jill’s!), genetic testing confirmed their shared mutation, a discovery that not only led to important medical insights for Priscilla, but also new research — including via fruit flies called “Jill flies” that were engineered with her mutations. Jill’s memoir, published after her death, traces her remarkable journey of resilience, scientific curiosity, and hope. This piece really hit me too, as it tells her story from the eyes of the reporter she reached out to many years ago. Beautiful. ProPublica (via Aubrey)

🤧 Allergies seem nearly impossible to avoid — unless you’re Amish. (Archive link) Why would an Amish community in northern Indiana be considered one of the “least-allergic populations” ever measured in the developed world”? Even children from other traditional farming families, who still have lower rates of allergic disease than children from nonfarming homes, are more allergic than the Amish. It’s less about a ‘hygiene hypothesis’ note researchers, and more about a ‘microbial hypothesis’: analysis of farm dust found proteins that deliver molecules produced by microbes and plants, which line the respiratory tract in a protective manner to regulate airway responses and protect against inflammation. It’s the since beneficial bacteria that colonize the gut and other mucosal surfaces that play a significant role. Washington Post

📷 Some amazing photo links!

• The Big Picture 2025 Winners. This year's winners and finalists gallery, always worth a gander. Big Picture Competition

• ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist. This wonderful gallery includes our featured artist for CAE 53! Beautiful images, all of them. Royal Museums Greenwich

• 20 Incredible Winners From the International Aerial Photographer of the Year Award. And, another great photo series, this time of aerial photography. My Modern

😃 The Emoji Tongue. Do emoji constitute a language unto themselves? If they are a language, what would the rules of grammar be, or other conventions that are found in more traditional language? This excerpt of a new book by Keith Houston called “Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji” talks about the linguistics and varied meanings of those ever-pervasive faces as they continue to dominate our digital conversations. I admit, I used to really dislike emoji as I’m such a lover of words. But as you can see in CAEs, I’ve taken to them happily — in this case as synthesis in and of themselves, a way to express the topic of text in one quick pictogram. Longreads

💊 The Future Of Health Data In The Age Of AI. Sensitive data about your health used to be relatively safe and anonymous. AI is making it much easier for that information to be used, in opaque and often detrimental ways. “Our willingness to surrender health information so freely not only jeopardizes individual privacy and autonomy but also poses significant risks to societal health,” writes Júlia Keserű. A major paradigm shift is needed, she says, in how we regard our bodies and how we envision their boundaries online. Noema

🛌 Depression linked to ‘internal jet lag’, study finds. The severity of internal 'jet lag' was linked to worse mental health symptoms in the Sydney patients studied, finding that 23% of patients had at least two circadian rhythm measures that were out of sync, similar to disruptions with time zone travel or shift work. In those two cases, body clocks were out of sync with the external environment. In this case, circadian rhythms were out of sync within a person’s body, among the different body clocks they have — a kind of ‘internal jet lag’. The University Of Sydney

🪱 The Worm Hunters of Southern Ontario. Southwestern Ontario is the worm capital of the world, apparently. Despite living in the province, I had no idea! It’s home to the bulk of of North America’s bait worm supply, and this piece by Inori Roy dives into this niche local industry. Each night, hundreds of thousands of worms come to the surface of the soil, and Roy ends up spending a surreal twilight picking wild earthworms as part of his reporting. He goes into not only the industry itself, but the existential threats in labour and climate change that affect farmland today. The Local (via Naomi)

🇹🇭 🇰🇭 Nationalist zeal & AI slop fueled the Thai-Cambodia conflict. While Thailand and Cambodia have reached a temporary ceasefire in their border conflict, many feel in the region believe that it is unlikely to hold. If you’re unfamiliar with the conflict, a short summary is in this article. Some 200,000 people have been displaced from the areas near the conflict. Most articles about it share the history of the disputed border; when I lived in Thailand, for example there was another wave of clashes. While the area has been disputed for over 100 years, this level of fighting is rare. So why have things escalated? This piece goes into details. Thhe conflict’s escalation is driven by each country’s efforts to consolidate military and political power and push nationalistic views, and it’s also fuelled to new peaks by AI slop. If leaders want conflict, would a ceasefire really hold? Kouprey

🦠 Common Respiratory Viral Infections Awaken Dormant Breast Cancer Cells in Lungs. A new study published in the journal Nature provided what the authors call “the first direct evidence” that respiratory viruses, including Covid and influenza, can awaken dormant breast cancer cells in the lungs, setting the stage for new metastatic tumours to grow. The study findings were from mice, which the authors then supported with data analyses from human cancer survivors who had Covid. They found that patients from the UK Biobank who were in remission for cancer had a 2x increase in cancer-related deaths if they had tested positive for Covid. They also found that a previous Covid infection was associated with a greater than 40% increased risk of metastatic breast cancer in the lungs. People are content to treat Covid “just like a cold”, but unfortunately each day new studies show us why that should not be the case. GenEng

🏥 What Scientists Learned Scanning the Bodies of 100,000 Brits. (Archive link) Also related to the massive database of medical data within the UK Biobank, mentioned above: this article discusses how these data are allowing an “unprecedented window” into how diseases take root, even years prior to symptoms beginning. This has changed perspective of disease, including for Type 1 Diabetes, for example, where it was long thought to affect only children. Physicians often assumed if one got diabetes later in life, it was Type 2. But the UK Biobank research demonstrated that Type 1 Diabetes occurs at the same rate throughout life. With clearer data, scientists realized that many older adults had been misclassified and were therefore given the wrong treatment. Hoping for more progress of this sort thanks to the data of ordinary UK citizens. Bloomberg

🐾 Maddie, a Coonhound Who Awed Instagram by Balancing on Things, Dies at 14. (Archive link) I followed Maddie via her owner on Instagram for many years, and loved her sweet nature and amazing photographs that resulted from her many creative poses. Rest in peace, sweet one. New York Times

💬 A literary history of fake texts in Apple's marketing materials. An entertaining compilation of “Applecore style” from the mocked-up texts and emails Apple puts together to share features or OS / iOS updates in its announcement presentations. These messages, ostensibly written by Apple’s marketing department, are “eerily cheery” and “aggressively punctuated”, an alternate universe where friends and coworkers use Apple products exactly as they’re meant to be used, “without complaint or error”. Enjoyable and very niche deep dive. Read Max

🌀 Flounder Mode. I’ve featured pieces by Kevin Kelly in CAEs past, most recently about his tips for travel. This is a piece profiling him, for a change. It talks about how he doesn’t want to be known for “one big thing” and traces the creative pursuits he’s built over the years. “The people who become legendary in their interests never feel they have arrived,” Kelly notes. It’s full of insight and thoughtful quotes and was a great companion to his prolific prose — and not only because I have the kind of “illegible” career path that he says “means you’re onto interesting stuff”. (I’ll take it, though!) Colossus

🧅 The History of The Onion You Didn't Know You Needed. Though I often feature micro histories of food, the onion in question is The Onion, the often pitch-perfect satirical American news site that consistently goes viral. The piece is an interview with Christine Wenc about her new book, “Funny Because It’s True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire”. It’s not just a history of the publication, but also the industry it makes fun of and how news has evolved over time. Culture Study

🧠 Interbreeding with Neanderthals may be responsible for modern-day brain condition, SFU study finds A new Simon Fraser University-led study reveals that a condition called Chiari malformation type I that affects the brain could occur due to genes that some people have inherited from Neanderthals. The gene is “mismatched” with the evolved size of the skull, leading to the brain descent found in the CM-I. In patients with the condition, the lower part of the brain extends too far into the spinal cord, often linked to having a smaller-than-normal occipital bone at the back of the skull. It can lead to headaches, neck pain, and neurological conditions, thought to affect 1 in 100 people. Crazy to think that this disorder is a consequences of lingering genes from many moons ago. ScienceAlert

⚜️ The Bloc Wants to Break Up Canada—but Not Yet. When I was in high school in the 1990s, Quebec held a referendum about separation from Canada. The “no” side won with very slim margins. Campaigning on separatism has taken a back seat in federal politics of late, but as Toula Drimonis notes, it’s percolating with increased interest whilst “politics as performance” plays out, waiting for the time to surge forward once again. The Walrus

👛 Inside the Shadowy, Lucrative Business of ‘Superfake’ Luxury Handbags. (Gift link) Forget fake handbags sold on street corners, now there are “superfakes”, hyper-realistic luxury knock-offs that can run customers $500 to $5K, purchasable discreetly via WhatsApp and other online channels, arrive in branded boxes, and often hawked by influencers as “mirror bags” or “1:1s” (instead of just calling them fakes). They’re near-perfect replicas, ones made in covert factories using stolen design blueprints and reverse engineering. This piece looks at how technology and luxury are intersecting to fuel these bags; resale experts now need x-rays and metal analysis to spot them, for example. The Wall Street Journal (via Chris)

👃🏻 How Smell Guides Our Inner World. Scientists are gaining a deeper understanding of how powerful human smell is as they deep dive into the sense’s fundamental elements. When we smell a rose, for example, “more than 800 different odorants enter your nose and bind to olfactory receptors expressed in the cell membranes of various neurons”, then individual neurons that translate them into perception in our brains. But studying smell is not simple, because it’s so bioindividual. New scent databases and studies decoding how smells translate into neural language are helping, and this piece is great at showing how the brain ‘makes’ a smell. For many, smells have deep ties to memory, emotion, and the human experience; I can still smell peach extract from Body Shop today and it transports me right back to Grade 9 even though it’s decades later. Love learning about why that is. Quanta Magazine

🏗 The Hidden Engineering of Liquid Dampers in Skyscrapers. Engineers have to find creative ways to limit vibrations of tall buildings, especially in ultra-skinny “pencil tower” skyscrapers, those tall and slender buildings where extra padding would eat into precious floor space. One option for stabilization is tuned liquid dampers, systems that harness the movement of water in tanks to counteract wind-induced movement in the rest of the building. When calibrated correctly, they reduce swaying without mechanical complexity or maintenance, making them quieter than bulky mass dampers. They’re also a lot less expensive! The “unsung heroes” of skyscrapers, says the author. I’ve never heard of them prior, and this piece and accompanying video is a great crash course. Practical Engineering

💻 Frame of preference - a history of Mac settings, 1984–2004. I know, I know, another Mac history piece. This one is a true masterpiece, though, one that displays the settings and control panel of Apple computers over time, interesting (I think!) even to those who aren’t Apple nerds. It goes through Macintosh System Software 1.0 all the way to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther — with interactive emulators to boot. I can’t imagine the time it took to build. Marcin Wichary

🦜 How an Indigenous Community in the Amazon Created a Bird Guide of Their Own. Inspired by naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace’s visit nearly 150 years ago, an isolated Indigenous community, the Baniwa people of Nazaré do Cuba in Brazil, is working collaboratively with scientists to to survey local birds and document indigenous cultural traditions that are at risk as modern influences mount. Today the Baniwa live off-grid communities, 5-10 hours of motorboat trip from the closest towns, with limited internet access only available now for about three years. While few scientists have visited, the Baniwa have elected to create a bird guide that would list each species’ scientific name, Portuguese name, and name in two Indigenous languages. Very interesting read, and beautiful pictures throughout. Audubon

📖 Literacy lag: We start reading too late Do Americans start reading too late? Throughout history, people started to read a lot earlier than they do now in the US, and this article argues that we’ve got it wrong due to “neuromyths” that persist since the 1960s. This piece (rightly, I think) argues that the literacy lag isn’t a biological necessity, but rather a self-inflicted education gap. And that we need to be teaching kids to read earlier than 6 or 7 years old. The idea that any expert would say it’s “developmentally inappropriate” to try to learn to read earlier, as one is quoted doing in this piece, is baffling to me. We expose children early to screens, but are delaying teaching them to read? Intrinsic Perspective

🇨🇦 The Canadians Are Furious. (Archive link) Interesting to read what is happening here in Canada from an American POV. This piece goes into the “Buy Canadian” movement and how many Canadians are not traveling to the USA nor buying products made in America. Many articles on the topic wrongly state that this push is due to tariffs; in reality, the movement is grounded in a reaction to threats Trump made to Canada’s sovereignty, and reports from fellow Canadians (some I know personally) about detention at the border when heading South for a visit. It’s anger and fear and frustration rolled into one, and far broader than tariffs alone. This is probably the most thorough piece on the topic that I’ve seen from the American press. There are, of course, Canadians who don’t feel that way and think Trump is great. They aren’t the majority, per polls. New York Magazine

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

🇨🇩 How Did a Pair of Football Buddies From Utah Join a Coup in the Congo? (Archive link) Quite the title, I know. Two former high school football teammates from Utah became participants in a failed coup attempt in the Democratic Republic of Congo in May 2024. The coup involved armed assaults on the presidential palace and other government targets, and deflated fairly quickly — in just 75 minutes. To the shock of their families at home, both students were subsequently arrested and convicted of terrorism, then eventually repatriated to the US. Now, they face some heavy federal charges. Intelligencer

😴 Why Can’t Americans Sleep? (Gift link) It isn’t limited to Americans, as many Canadians and Europeans and other readers often write in to say the same. This piece talks about the exhausting ‘textbook’ cycles of insomnia — “a fear of sleep loss that itself causes sleep loss that in turn generates an even greater fear of sleep loss that in turn generates even more sleep loss … until the next thing you know, you’re in an insomnia galaxy spiral, with a dark behavioral and psychological (and sometimes neurobiological) life of its own.” Sound familiar? Same. In my case, a big chunk of the neurobiological issues were mast cell dysfunction; as I’ve written previously controlling my mast cells was the only way I’ve managed to sleep again after years of horrible insomnia. This essay talks not about MCAS, but about the epidemic of sleeplessness in the USA, CBT-I as a remedy, and sleep myths that persist. The Atlantic

🦟 Genetic Ancestry Linked to Risk of Severe Dengue A new study shows that genetic ancestry surprisingly influences the severity of dengue infections. The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the Instituto Aggeu Magalhães in Brazil, and found that having higher proportions of European ancestry is linked to a more pronounced and inflammatory response, while African ancestry is associated with reduced inflammation and a protective effect against severe dengue outcomes. For decades, epidemiologic studies showed that in countries with ethnically diverse populations (such as Brazil, Colombia, Haiti and Cuba), people of African ancestry had milder cases of dengue, while people of European ancestry had more severe disease. But no one could explain why until now. Dengue’s at a peak in many countries this year; more about the mosquito borne virus, here from me. UPMC News

🏫 Who Benefits from Destroying the Department of Education. The Department of Education is facing growing political attacks, as no doubt you’ve all seen in the news. In a parallel world, these criticisms would be to make the department better, more effective for education children. But no, today’s messaging is about dismantling it entirely. Talia Levin winds her way back to the beginning of the movement to abolish the Department in 1979, and traces its momentum to present day — including how it ties into the growth of Christian nationalism and the belief by some that pulling students out of public education is important for a broader spiritual war. To answer her title question: it’s not the kids that benefit, not at all. The Sword and the Sandwich

🌏 Earth will spin faster today to create 2nd-shortest day in history. The day in question was July 21, 2025. But why? “The cause of this acceleration is not explained,” says scientist Leonid Zotov in the piece. Oh, ok. “Most scientists believe it is something inside the Earth,” he adds. Since ocean and atmospheric models don’t explain this acceleration, it remains a mystery, but we do know that the Earth has been rotating at its fastest now than ever, at least since records began in 1973. Space.com

🏙 Mapping New York Chinatown through transformations in its architecture. A really impressive interactive web project that maps Manhattan Chinatown through its architectural changes, showing transformations that have occurred in its buildings ever since Chinatown was established in the 1860s. Reflective Urbanisms (via Kottke.org)

🏭 Air pollution 'strongly associated' with DNA mutations tied to lung cancer. Research found that the higher the levels of air pollution in a given area around the world, the more cancer-promoting mutations were present, helping to explain why there is a rising proportion of people developing lung cancer who have never smoked, a trend the researchers called an urgent and growing global problem. (No mention of radon in this piece, but it’s another cause of lung cancer in those who haven’t smoked.) Science Alert

🖤 Andrea Gibson 8/13/75 – 7/14/25. Beautiful eulogy for a beautiful, powerful poet.

🔠 The radical 1960s schools experiment that created a whole new alphabet – and left thousands of children unable to spell. The Initial Teaching Alphabet was an initiative from the 1960s that aimed to teach children to read quickly in the UK. The ITA was “a strange chart of more than 40 characters, many familiar, others alien,” notes the piece — a photo is enclosed, and looks like a combo of Cyrillic and English. While it was intended to exist as an easy bridge to our standard alphabet, in practice it was not so simple — and many children from the experiment have felt confused and unable to spell accurately ever since. The Guardian

🩸 French scientists discover a new blood type found in only one woman alive today. Crazy! Scientists in France identified a new blood type that they’ve named “Gwada negative”, found in only one person so far — a 68-year-old woman from Guadeloupe. Her blood reacted to all known donor types, and after scientists did genetic sequencing, they found a unique mutation that means if she needs blood she can only receive her own. Scary to think of, if she needs a transfusion! Hopefully they can bank some of her blood just in case it’s needed. The Economic Times

🥳 The Death of Partying in the U.S.A. — and Why It Matters. Americans have dramatically cut back on partying, notes this piece. Between 2003 and 2024, time spent attending or hosting social gatherings dropped by roughly 50%, and for young people aged 15–24, the decline was a surprising 70%. Even on a typical weekend in 2023, only 4% of households hosted or went to a party. Why does this matter? The author links these shifts to a broader list of societal changes, fitting into what he calls “The Anti-Social Century”, where face-to-face interaction has plummeted amid rising loneliness and mental health struggles. “Today, I believe we’ve built ourselves a world of greater professional ambition, more intensive parenting, and lavish entertainment abundance,” he notes. “But in making this world, we’ve lost a bit of each other.” Derek Thompson

🎬 Everyone Wants a Piece of Pedro Pascal. A fun profile of one of the most beloved guys in Hollywood right now. Vanity Fair

🐸 Into the Forests of the Lost Frogs. The golden toad was last seen in 1989 and officially declared extinct in 2004. Decades later, the authors of this piece revisit the animal’s former cloud-forest home on Cerro Brillante, Costa Rica to dive into the ecological mystery of their extinction. While yes, diseases and fungi are part of what contributed to the toad’s disappearance (especially adding in climate change), the final determination of why we lost them remains elusive. At the link, pretty pictures of said toad, too. Earth Island Journal

👂🏻 Can a Medical Device Restore Your Balance? Millions of people suffering from vestibular disorders and/or vertigo worldwide have trouble maintaining balance and proprioception. Researchers have now have developed an experimental medical implant for the ear that promises to restore the sensory machinery responsible for balance, one that works like a cochlear implant and has shown impressive results treating these conditions. Smithsonian Magazine

🌊 At 40, She Discovered She Was One of America’s Best Free Divers. Hard not to root for Sara Burnett, who went from an introductory course to freediving in Dominica to competing in the sport’s world championship in just over a year. Texas Monthly

🔗 Quick links

• Since fish doorbell season is over, I’ve now become obsessed with Draw a Fish, especially at the end when you get to submit it to the fish tank and see all the other drawings swimming alongside yours. Swim freely, my pretty!

• Did Shakespeare write Hamlet while he was stoned?

• The real life science experiments that inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

• Huge milestone: approval of the first HIV drug that offers 100% protection with injections 2x per year, and the manufacturer is providing it at low costs where needed to ensure access (a serious rarity these days!)

• All roads lead to anteaters, apparently! Across different mammals, scientists found that 12 times thus far different animals evolved to have long sticky tongues, reduced or absent teeth, and powerful forelimbs to get to ants and termites.

• Loving, lovely photos of Istanbul's many cats by photographer Marcel Heijnen.

• A short read about a Brazilian neuroscientist whose passion for microscopy evolved into a mission to understand viral impacts on brain health. I’ve followed Dr. Beckman online for some time, and her microscopic images of brains before and after Covid have been eye-opening.

• A team of scientists has developed a sponge-like aerogel that can turn seawater into clean drinking water using only sunlight.

• I have always loved and used the em dash (the long dash —), but apparently it’s a hallmark of AI and it has me self conscious about my writing style and hoping people know I write things myself — I just love that form of punctuation. Parody, from McSweeney’s: “The em dash response to the AI allegations”

Hope to see you next month!
-Jodi

My updates

• My fundraiser for spinal CSF leak awareness and education raised over $4,000 this year, and the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation raised over $20,000 total in support of their mission. A big thank you to all who donated!

• CAE 51 overflow links are up on my Patreon here.

Featured art for CAE 52

CAE 52’s featured artist isn’t a person, but a powerful new telescope. The first images from the Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile were released in June, and the photo below of swirling, colourful gas and dust clouds from the the Trifid and Lagoon nebulae 9,000 light years away is a stunner. The observatory is located on private land near La Serena, on a mountain called Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes. More about this amazing telescope and its 3,200 megapixel digital camera, the largest in the world, below.

The most interesting things I read this month

These links are once again formatted into hyperlinks thanks to the help of my friend Mike.

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

📝 The Talented Ms. Highsmith. The subhead draws you in pretty quickly: “I worked for the novelist in her final months. I thought she wanted to kill me.” I’m sold. The piece, about what it was like to work for Patricia Highsmith, author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and other works, near the end of her life. It’s an unusual snapshot into the tail end of domestic life of a formidable author, one who spent her last weeks writing about how to get away with murder. But also perplexing, as Highsmith has been isolated for so long, yet can write so well about human nature. The piece is a fascinating juxtaposition of a talented, vivid writer and the life she lived, seemingly drained of the colour her writing held. Her characters were “written by the light of her darkness”, and while writing itself is often quite solitary, it’s hard not to see the result in binary terms, as if her characters ‘took’ that life-force from her. Alternatively, though, what if her writing gave her the outlet to communicate and weave connection that life itself never afforded her? The Yale Review

💀 The curse of Toumaï: an ancient skull, a disputed femur and a bitter feud over humanity’s origins. A deep dive into an archaeological niche, one about fossilised remains from the Djurab desert, in Chad. “Most of the fighting in palaeoanthropology is simply a function of the wild imbalance between the number of palaeoanthropologists, which is large, and the number of objects available for them to study, which is very much not.” A very entertaining read on two decades professional feuding, egos, and ethics in a field I’m not very familiar with. The Guardian

😶‍🌫️ Pirates of the Ayahuasca. Sarah Miller on a (harrowing) ayahuasca journey, as told with acerbic wit and pulling no punches. Some quotes: “Why is everyone else solving family trauma or doing the two-step with purple jaguars and every night I just see *that*?” and “I thought about how most of my experience of going to Peru to drink ayahuasca had been about working through the shame of having done such a thing in the first place.” This piece made the rounds last month, but I didn’t have a chance to read it until now. It’s entertaining, self-deprecating, and well-written. It stood up to its hype. n+1

🦇 The Wild Within the Walls. I stumbled on bioGraphic several CAEs ago, when I learned that the fabulous Hakai Magazine team was joining their ranks when Hakai unfortunately shut down. This piece, about the different species of wild animals who “creep, slither, scurry, and nest” among the architectural ruins and palaces of Rome, is one of many great reads on their site. Beautiful writing, and accompanied by the photos of those animals in situ, too. bioGraphic

🏆 The Big Picture 2025. Also on the bioGraphic site, the winners of 2025’s California Academy of Sciences’ BigPicture Photography Competition, now in its 12th year. I’ve shared earlier years’ winners here on CAE. The competition celebrates some of the world’s best photographers and the year’s most striking images. bioGraphic

🍄‍🟫 Out of the Ashes. ‪There’s a lot in CAEs past about mushrooms, whether psychedelic or otherwise. Though I’ve never enjoyed eating them, I’ve long been fascinated by their resilient nature, adapting to wherever they grow and serving as a beautiful example of connection in ecosystems. “What lessons might they offer us about when to hide and when to burst forth?” asks Meera Subramanian in this lovely, inquisitive piece. Orion Magazine

📷 Probe lenses and focus stacking: the secrets to incredible photos taken inside instruments. CAE 50’s Featured Artist was Charles Brooks, who takes breathtaking photos inside musical instruments. DP Review did a great interview with him about his camera set up and process for getting the pictures that wow us each and every time. DP Review

🦋 How Two 19th-Century Teenage Sisters’ Forgotten Paintings Sparked a Triumph of Modern Conservation. During a time when women had no access to formal education in art or in science, two Australian teenaged sisters drew precise and beautiful paintings of butterflies that sparked a ‘butterfly effect’ of their own: increased conservation efforts and protection for the area of Ash Island that they so lovely illustrated. Their artwork is featured in this post. The Marginalian

🌌 Ever-changing Universe Revealed in First Imagery From NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory More about that shiny new telescope in Chile, responsible for CAE 52’s featured image. In its first 10 hours of observations, the observatory “discovered 2104 never-before-seen asteroids in our Solar System, including seven near-Earth asteroids”. Amazing work to come, no doubt! Rubin Observatory

💵 My money story. A short, raw post from market professional Callie Cox, confessing how she what she calls ‘money dysmorphia’. No matter how much money she makes, the panic of it being insufficient persists. She discusses how early financial trauma can profoundly shape anyone’s relationship with money, causing long term financial insecurity. While some people flee their traumas, she did the opposite and leaned “into her wounds” by becoming personally and professionally obsessed and intertwined with money and markets. OptimistCallie

🇳🇿 Citadel of the Giants. I spent quite a few months in New Zealand years ago, very excited to soak up all I could about the country. I went for a friend’s wedding, then stayed for the landscape and extraordinary evolution of their various bird species. This piece is about something I didn’t learn about: their insects. The piece deep dives into the wētā, or Deinacrida, whose name translates to “terrible grasshopper”. The insect reclaimed the country as the land slowly rose from the sea, splintering into 11 different species over time. Some adapted to colder parts of the country by “turning into icy slurry” during winter months, where they dropped into hibernation as ice crystals formed in their cells. Really interesting read about a species now at risk. Warning: lots of ‘terrible grasshopper’ pics inside. New Zealand Geographic

🔥 Why Canada is riddled with wildfires that burn year-round. This piece is from 2024, but I found it when Ottawa was yet again engulfed in smoke early this summer. I was trying to understand how the fires started, since historically smoke rarely wafted this way. This piece explains that many of the fires actually live and breath through the winter, smouldering under the snow. Called “zombie fires”, they can’t be waterbombed because they’re not out in the open, but as snow melts they flare up again. BBC Earth

⚓️ Gold coins confirm ‘world’s richest shipwreck’ is 18th century Spanish galleon. An analysis of gold coins that were found scattered across the seafloor off the coast of Colombia has confirmed that they belong to a nearby shipwreck that was previously unidentified. This analysis, published in a new study, postulates that the ship is the San José, an “ill-fated Spanish treasure galleon that sank over 300 years ago during a battle with British warships”. In June of 1708, the San José and a fleet of 17 other vessels departed Colombia for Europe laden with gold, silver, and uncut gems. How much treasure are we talking about here? Per this piece, the modern value is estimated at $17 billion (!). To sleuth which ship sunk, scientists used high-definition photography and determined that the coins had etchings that indicated they were minted in Lima, Peru in 1707. The question is: who gets to claim the coins? Both Spain and Columbia assert ownership, and no doubt a heated battle will follow. Popular Science

💊 Poison Pill. In September 1982, seven people died from cyanide poisonings in tampered Tylenol bottles, with ransom notes sent to Johnson & Johnson headquarters. A killer was never charged, and the FBI still considers the Tylenol mystery an open, active case. But the effects on the medication packaging were profound; tamper-free packaging followed. At a time when regulations around food and medication safety in the US are being loosened, this piece is something to think about. Truly Adventurous

🇫🇷 The Email of Paris Recommendations I Send to Everyone. A curated list of lunch and dinners spots and patisseries and cafes, as well as parks to wander in and sites you may want to explore. For those who are gluten-free, my food list for Paris is in here. Franchement

🧪 Landmark test for coeliac disease promises to take away the pain of diagnosis. Determining whether you have celiac disease isn’t as simple as non-celiacs may assume. Yes, there’s a genetic test to show if you have one of the genes correlated with the disease, but the gold standard for diagnosis is a blood test to identify elevated levels of certain antibodies, most commonly tTG-IgA (tissue transglutaminase IgA), and then an upper endoscopy with biopsy to look for villous atrophy in the small intestine. The latter wasn’t very fun, but the part that is challenging is that you have to be eating gluten to measure the damage — if you’re not, the antibodies may not be present. A new test out of Australia measures T cell reactivity (interleukin-2 release, or WBAIL-2) for detecting gluten-specific T cells. The study on this biomarker shows high sensitivity (90%) and specificity (95%) in detecting celiac disease, even in patients following a strict gluten-free diet. The new test could boost rates of diagnosis, identify patients at risk of severe reactions to gluten, and detect silent celiac disease in people who are asymptomatic. The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research And for the celiacs out there, my free GF guides are here.

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

☀️ The Unseen Fury Of Solar Storms. Some of us associate solar storms with dazzling auroras lighting up unexpected corners of the Earth. But in this piece, Henry Wismayer explores a quieter, more ominous “what if”: the threat of a solar storm so massive it rivals the Carrington Event of 1859, the most intense geomagnetic storm ever recorded. We usually think of “the big one” in earthquake terms, but here it’s the sun that could wreak havoc, affecting our electrical grids, satellites, aviation systems, and undersea cables with geomagnetically induced currents, and potentially plunging us into widescale blackouts and digital chaos. Dramatic, yes, and made even more so by the spectacular NASA imagery of CMEs that accompanies the piece. As if we don’t have enough to worry about, eh? Noema

🚀 How a fake astronaut fooled the world, broke women's hearts, and landed in jail. Speaking of space, this is one eye-raising read. From aviation events in the 1980s to glamorous globe-trotting travels, Robert J. Hunt convinced countless people he was a NASA astronaut. He even had a proper Navy flight suit, “scorched” shuttle tiles, and wild war stories from his supposed time in service. Except he never held a military rank, nor had a pilot’s license. His many woven cons of inventions, careers — even a fake wife! — worked until he went too far and people began to suspect he wasn’t all that he seemed. Hunt was eventually arrested for larceny and impersonation. Space.com

☢️ The hunt for Marie Curie's radioactive fingerprints in Paris. I was assigned a biographical type project on Marie Curie in elementary school, long before internet research was possible. I imagine my presentation would have been far more in depth had I had access to pieces like this, about the lingering traces of Curie's work in the radioactive fingerprints she left behind. BBC Future

😋 The Expansive, Absurdist Canvas of Tiramisu. At Onda Pasta Bar in Manchester, tiramisu has been reimagined as a towering slab stored in a refrigerated drawer. What started as a “space hack” became a viral sensation with over 10 million views and celebrity buy-in, sparking a cult fad of serving tiramisu in bizarre places, from bike baskets to tractor beds. The result catapulted a delicious classic and creamy, espresso-soaked dessert into an absurdist spectacle, including unconventional Tiramisu vessels (like, uh, toilets). Anything for a click, right? Tiramisu’s simplicity and customizability (limoncello or chai versions abound) paired with its social media “vibe” make it a tabula rasa, a blank canvas for creativity and shock. For better or worse, this performative eating reflects broader trends around food that don’t seem to be ebbing anytime soon. I hate to be metaphorically yelling, ‘get off my lawn!’ but honestly I just prefer a simple Tiramisu, not served in a toilet or a drawer. Taste

🍄 Your psychedelic link of the month: I Tried Magic Mushrooms for My Mental Health. Here’s What Happened. Robert Sanchez on psilocybin, the mushroom compound with hallucinogenic and serotonergic effects that, he notes, “can upend how we view ourselves,” nudging negative thought patterns to the side “creating space for new insights”. A hands-on piece, Sanchez not only visits scientists at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus who are studying as a potential palliative treatment for terminal conditions, but also Colorado’s first psilocybin wellness clinic. And then he documented his own microdosing for the article. This isn’t a navel-gazing piece; it’s written with tenderness and vulnerability, woven together with history and science about the compound. 5280

🪶 Wild cockatoos are learning how to use water fountains. Cockatoos: also adaptable. And thirsty. And smart enough to learn how to use a water fountain. (There is somehow no cockatoo emoji! Sorry for the incorrect feather for this bird!) Popular Science

🚹 Jeremy Spoke in Class Today. Like many people who came of age in the 1990s, Pearl Jam’s “Ten” was playing on repeat. This essay, the title of which is pulled from a song on Ten, looks at guns and MTV and Stephen King’s books to answer the question of why so many American men willing to hurt themselves and others. “We’re all scarred and broken,” writes Paul Crenshaw, “and it isn’t from the stories we’ve read or music we’ve heard, but from what we see on the nightly news. Art imitates life, which makes me wonder what kind of lives we lead.” The American Scholar

🎵 Postwar Dreams, Pop Symphonies, and the Genius of Brian Wilson. RIP Brian Wilson. “And it’s worth pausing here—because genius is a word we toss around too easily. But Brian Wilson was a genius. If he’d been born in the 1700s, he’d have been writing court music for kings. Instead, he gave his symphonies to the surf, and his psalms to the suburbs.” Mark McInerney’s lovely piece on his passing. Smoke Signals

📻 The Wet History of Media in the Bathroom. This article is an excerpt from Rachel Plotnick’s book “License to Spill”, about the “wet history” of media in the bathroom: how we went from reading magazines or books on the toilet to bringing our electronics into the washroom, shower and all. Having any electronics in the bathroom used to be a luxury, available to upper classes. But by 1985, Adweek forecasted $1.5mm sales of shower radios for that that year. The type of media, and use in our water closets, has only grown since then. The MIT Press Reader

💆🏻 Facial Stimulation Clears Brain Waste and Boosts Aging Minds. Study finds that a device that massages the face and neck can help the body clear waste from brain. While this is a mice study, it offers a new, less invasive approach mechanically stimulating lymphatic vessels just beneath the facial skin, improving CSF drainage. This drainage declines as we age (or, you know, when you have a hole in your dura mater, I’d imagine?), and scientists believe that the decline also contributes to cognitive disorders like Alzheimer’s. Neuroscience News

🐋 Humpback Whales Blow Bubble ‘Smoke’ Rings to Communicate With Humans. A new study found that humpback whales don’t blow bubbles to each other, or to other species. Only to us, when humans were around. Yet again, we have chronically underestimated the intelligence — and playfulness — of an animal species. The crow, raven, or octopus also come to mind. KQED

🧠 Shadow of a Doubt. Reporting from the Annual OCD Conference, Andrew Kay investigates OCD’s grip on contemporary life in the USA, including his own. “Perhaps OCD has always been with us,” he muses, “some have ventured that it is an atavistic relic from the prehistory of Homo sapiens, when it behooved hunter-gatherers to check their space compulsively for safety reasons, or when repeatedly washing or picking at one’s person made sense in an outdoor world rife with parasites.” Regardless of origins, this piece —much like Sanchez on microdosing — is part narrative and part investigation, and an all-around interesting read. Harper's

🏁 The Tangled Past and Unsettled Future of Greyhound Racing in West Virginia. Wheeling, West Virginia is home to one of only two remaining live greyhound racetracks in the USA, and this piece traces greyhound racing’s legacy from ancient origins to modern times. The once-thriving industry now survives largely through gambling subsidies like West Virginia’s Greyhound Breeding Development Fund. While proponents emphasize “tradition,” economic benefits, and the supposed loving care of the greyhounds, critics highlight injuries, confinement, and euthanasia. To me, these dogs deserve better. Oxford American

🇮🇷 Digital Blow to Tehran: Hackers Disrupt Iran’s Illicit Finance Network. Interesting post on a crypto exchange hack in Iran, which largely went under the radar as news coverage focused on the more visible aspects of conflict in the Middle East. “Reducing Iran’s ability to provide financial support to its proxies was likely the intended goal of the hack; while this has been achieved in the short term, it remains to be seen whether this will be successful in the long term.” Insight Monitor

🤖 Some AI-related links for the month:

• AllTrails launches AI route-making tool, worrying search-and-rescue members. (Archive link) “Imagine dying because you want to say you went on the same hike as everyone else but have AI tell you the shortest path instead of doing it the way everyone else has done safely for hundreds of years.” Canada's National Observer

• ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study. Very small sample size, and preliminary research. Is it AI, or is it a loss of critical thinking skills? Have those critical thinking skills been replaced by entitlement and apathy? Maybe everything, all at once. This piece just covers the preliminary study, but it won’t be the last writeup on this hot topic. TIME

• Trends: Artificial Intelligence. A very long (many hundreds of slides) powerpoint presentation about trends in AI, with graphs, analyses, and interesting commentary from global tech investment firm BOND. Love AI or hate it, the data speaks volumes about how integrated it has already become. As the report concludes, “One thing is certain – it’s gametime for AI, and it’s only getting more intense … and the genie is not going back in the bottle”. BOND, via Travelbloggerbuzz

• And finally: They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling. (Archive link) This is the second story I've shared about how AI chatbots are leading people into psychological crises. New York Times

🏋🏻 The Death of a CrossFit Athlete. Calum Marsh on the drowning death of a CrossFit athlete, and the CrossFit Organization’s side-stepping of accountability. The sport isn’t generally considered to be dangerous, but reports like this are only one risk; not mentioned here: a spinal CSF leak. I’ve heard from several patients who sustained their spontaneous spinal CSF leak after a particularly gruelling CrossFit session. These cases aren’t the norm, but they are worth reading about. Rolling Stone

⚕️ Two Patients Faced Chemo. The One Who Survived Demanded a Test To See if It Was Safe. In rare cases, chemotherapy can kill. There’s a test to prevent this but most patients aren’t getting it, and it’s a matter of guidance trickling down to actual practice, something that takes so much longer than people realize and can have truly awful effects when it’s ignored. KFF Health News

🪐 The Mysterious Inner Workings of Io, Jupiter’s Volcanic Moon. A look at how “maddeningly inscrutable” the volcanic orb still is to scientists, though studies are starting to pick apart how it functions. “The more we observe it, notes Ashley Davis, a volcanologist at NASA, “the more sophisticated the data and the analyses, the more puzzling it becomes.” WIRED

🦠 Long Covid is Now the Number One Chronic Illness in Children I haven’t shared as many Covid links here during the last few months, but research continues and what it has shown is as the many pieces I’ve posted in CAE predicted: that there is plenty we still don’t know about what cumulative infections will mean for kids or adults, but thus far disability is rising as are cases of long Covid in kids and adults. This piece is a criticism of coverage from recent studies about the condition, but it shares data that is important for everyone. We’ve been failed insofar as we now have research about how viral infections can impact us later in life: EBV’s correlation with MS and certain cancer types, for example, and recent studies about Alzheimer’s potentially being “kicked off” by infection as well. Why would Covid be any different, especially when people are getting it over and over compared to other viruses? (We don’t get the flu multiple times a year, usually!). My life derailed starting with a virus in 2013; I don’t wish it on anyone, and I really hope where I ended up is the exception not the norm, but the data are not comforting. The Gauntlet See also: 90+ recent studies on what Covid does to the body, here, divided by topic.

🇷🇺 She tried to expose Russia’s brutal detention system—and ended up dead. (Archive link) 27-year-old Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna planned to investigate reports that Russia was operating a network of unofficial detention centers in areas it occupied in Ukraine, but she was disappeared into Russia's prisons and died. Her body, or what was left of it, was retrieved during a body exchange; a group of journalists (45 international reporters) then continued her work and investigation, creating maps, 3D reconstructions of sites, and doing interviews with former inmates. This is a profoundly tough read, but describes the cruelty, both physical and mental, that she and others face in Russian prisons. The Washington Post

🇺🇦 And, about the same conflict: How Ukrainian linguists prepare the country’s spies. This is journalist Tim Mak’s publication, which is a snapshot of more everyday questions from the ground. This time, about Ukrainian diplomats in Istanbul who pretended not to understand Russian during negotiations. The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak

🎥 ‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube star. Last month we talked about a MrBeast + James Patterson collab, and this month there’s a long read about the influencer himself, someone who ”spent 24 hours immersed in slime, two days buried alive – and showered vast amounts of cash on lucky participants.” Are his antics genius or irritating clickbait? I suppose it’s up to you to decide. But if his popularity is any indication, must like Tiramisu torture, the masses have made their decision very clear. The Guardian

🫠 The Emergency We Cannot Feel: On the Psychological Unreadiness for American Collapse. Mike Brock on how America is experiencing a constitutional crisis, but their emotional and psychological defences prevent them from seeing it clearly. “Democracy isn’t dying from a sudden blow”, he argues, “but from our collective inability to recognize reality.” Notes from the Circus

🇸🇻 Delay, Interfere, Undermine: How El Salvador’s Government Impeded a U.S. Probe of MS-13. T. Christian Miller and Sebastian Rotella for ProPublica uncover a much more complicated story about Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s relationship to MS-13, including allegations that USAID money was funneled to gangs. This piece finds that the Bukele government harassed and intimidated Salvadoran law enforcement officials who were investigating corruption and assisting a US anti-gang task force, and at least eight of them have since fled the country with US help. ProPublica

📖 Is the decline of reading poisoning our politics? “Through text, people could express ideas with an eye to precision rather than repeatability, while building upon the accumulated knowledge of all who came before.” So yeah, probably. Vox

🏢 The Unbearable Darkness of Jail. This article is about literal darkness, in addition to the figurative, ominous cloud of being incarcerated. The Marshall Project’s local reporters looked at jails in three cities that flout local, state, and federal directives requiring access to natural light and time outside. “That place is like a basement... Now that I’m home, [my family has] been asking me why I keep waking up at night,” says someone who was detained for over four years. The Marshall Project

🇨🇦 The US Badly Needs Rare Minerals and Fresh Water. Guess Who Has Them? Spoiler: it’s us, here in Canada. The Walrus

🎣 The Fish That Climbed a Mountain. “My treasured memories...are all subsidized by a massive Fish Industrial Complex—one that has taken a toll on all sorts of insects, invertebrates, frogs, and salamanders.” Alex Brown on fishing and conservation and all the nuances in between. Longreads

🌌 The 2025 Milky Way Photographer Of The Year. Title suffices! Gorgeous photos within. Capture The Atlas

🔗 Quick links

• A family of raccoons recently broke into an Airbus factory in Canada, adding an unusual headache to their existing issues.

• Per Axios, al dente pasta is better for your health — and you shouldn’t rinse it after cooking, either.

• Discover the murders, sudden deaths, sanctuary churches, and prisons of three thriving medieval cities in this Medieval Murder Map. (via Chris)

• I’ve shared Marconi Union’s Weightless track several times in CAE. Billed as the most relaxing song of all time, it’s a permanent bookmark in my browser. They’ve got a new album out, and you can listen to the Manchester-based duo’s first single, ‘Eight Miles High Alone’ here.

• A new study finds that the 28 of the most populous metros in the USA are losing elevation, from New York City to Seattle.

• Meet Chonkus, the mutant cyanobacteria that could help us manage climate change. (What could go wrong?)

• The best movie stunts of all time. (Archive link for those who hit paywall, here.)

Hope to see you next month!
-Jodi

My updates

• Today kicks off the annual Spinal CSF Leak Awareness Week. Many of you know my story: a lumbar puncture in 2017 led to a chronic spinal CSF leak that 4 repairs have not managed to seal. My longest ‘sealed period’ was 8 months. I have other genetic conditions I didn’t previously know about that make further repairs more risky and outcomes less promising. Every moment that I am standing or sitting up is excruciatingly painful due to the low CSF volume and its effects on my brain and spinal nerves. As a result, much of my days are spent bedbound. Research is ongoing, and I am making an appeal for tax-deductible donations to my personal fundraising page for the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that I volunteer at. My goal this year is $3500 and 150 minutes of (sloooow) walking by June 7th. With your support, we can help move research and education forward for this debilitating and under-diagnosed condition.

• CAE 50 overflow links are up on my Patreon.

Featured art for CAE 51

This month’s featured artist is graphic designer and artist Joanna Andreasson, whose illustration below accompanies the article about psychedelics and pharmaceutical companies in this CAE 51. You can also find her on Instagram, where she posts her beautiful, colourful art.

The most interesting things I read this month

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

🤖 I'd rather read the prompt. “I have never seen any form of create generative model output (be that image, text, audio, or video) which I would rather see than the original prompt.” An interesting read that frames LLM use in higher-education around the prompt itself. It is the prompt, not the submitted answer, that would yield information about the particular student’s assumptions and knowledge. (See the “quick links” below for how AI is being used in courts of law.) Clayton Ramsey

🇯🇵 Inventing Japanese Braille. Fascinating read on how Louis Braille's system was modified for languages that use characters, specifically for Japan. Japanese Braille came about after Braille was created, as it took time to figure out how to transfer a system made for Latin, alphabetic languages — something I hadn’t thought about prior, as my understanding of Braille is shaped by narratives from the West and not the East. In this article, Wei Yu Wayne Tan explores the global significance of inventing Japanese Braille, and how it was adapted; the key, it turns out, was to adapt Braille to phonetic characters called kana that could be used in writing to represent the sounds of a vast number of kanji characters. Braille was introduced to Japan in the Meiji period (1868-1912), and the first Braille newspaper, Tenji Mainichi (Braille Mainichi), was founded in Osaka in 1922. I’d never have known any of what I shared here without the beauty of this writing. I love pieces like this. History Workshop (via The Browser)

🚶🏻‍♀️ Craig Mod on the Creative Power of Walking. “I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom—without all that black-mirror dopamine—that you can access your deepest creative wells,” Craig Mod writes. This piece resonated for a myriad of reasons; walking is the only physical activity I can do, albeit slooooowly, but also: people always ask me if I’m bored being bed bound so much. To which I think, “of what?!” Boredom becomes opportunity if you still your mind enough through the initial discomfort of the open stretches of nothingness to start focusing on the little sensory details you’d otherwise ignore. It becomes a respite from the chaos, a comfort in times of pain. I loved this short piece and all that it represents, and now want to read the book from which it was excerpted. LitHub

🏦 The Hold-Up Artist. To fellow tourists he met around the world, Jeffery Shuman was a semi-retired developer with a bright smile, an even tan and a fat wallet. In truth, he was a legendary bank robber on the run from both Toronto police and the US Marshals. Inside the rise and fall of a globetrotting super-bandit. Toronto Life

🐈 This Strange Mutation Explains the Mystifying Color of Orange Cats. Orange cats are overwhelmingly male, which led scientists to suspect that the gene involved in the colour selection for the cats was on a sex chromosome. That hypothesis panned out in a new study concluding that a mutation on the X chromosome is what changes the activity of a gene that produces dark pigments — thereby leading to these orange-red loveable monsters. (But does this mutation also explain how dumb orange cats are? For the doubters, see: r/oneorangebraincell. We have an orange cat in the family; the stereotype pans out.) Scientific American

🇨🇦 How Ice Sculpted Canada. How water and ice has shaped Canada’s past and will continue shaping its future, the third post in a Canada series from Tomas Pueyo. The piece is full of graphics and explainers, and I enjoyed how he brought crafted its path with facts people may not realize, including for example that the Great Lakes are an extension of a line of many lakes, including Great Bear Lake, Great Slave Lake, Lake Athabasca, and others that chart a diagonal swath across our geography. Uncharted Territories

💐 Rebels with a Vase: Meet the Florists Taking on Big Flower. Floristry has been cruising along on its good looks and charm, but in reality, flowers can come with hefty costs for both the environment and florists. With florists making less than 50% of returns, some are left to wonder if it’s worth it at all. This is a thoughtful piece about something we purchase here and there in our lifetimes, but most of us know little about. The Walrus

🇰🇵 North Korea Stole Your Job. From his résumé, Thomas from Tennessee looked like a great potential employee: 8 years of programming, he passed a coding test with flying colours, and he seemed to fit the bill for the job. In reality, though, he was an IT worker deployed to work remotely for US companies in what this piece calls “a global cybercrime op to bankroll the North Korean government”. How are North Korean IT workers being embedded under false identities into Western companies? With friends on the ground — including, as the piece describes, a Minnesota woman who worked as a “facilitator” for hundreds of North Korea–linked jobs. She signed fraudulent documents, then wired paycheques overseas. WIRED

⛳ Proximity to Golf Courses and Risk of Parkinson's Disease. This case-control study found that you have the greatest risk of later being diagnosed with Parkinson’s if you live within one to three miles of a golf course, with that risk decreasing with distance from the course. The effect was largest for people living in vulnerable groundwater regions. The correlation here isn't golf itself, but rather the pesticides used to maintain a golf course, especially if drinking water from municipal wells are involved. Environmental exposure matters in many neurodegenerative cases; we've seen that with early onset PD with 9/11 first responders. In this case, a preventable risk — but will anyone do anything about it? JAMA Network

👁 Surgeons bid for medical first: Removing spinal tumor through patient’s eye. (Archive link.) Nineteen year old Karla Flores had a tumour strangling her spinal cord near the base of her skull, with her doctors weighing whether they ought to attempt a risky surgery that had never been done before. They went for it, and removed the tumour through her eye (!!) She is the first person in the world to have this procedure, and even a few millimetres of imprecision could have resulted in a fatal stroke or paralysis or damage to her eye. Thankfully the procedure went well. The Washington Post

🏰 People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies. Well, this piece is bonkers. I can see how using generative algorithm chatbots for therapy can lead to destructive outcomes, since they don’t really tune in (it seems) to discourage grandiose or destructive thought patterns. This piece looks at people who are developing some mighty unhealthy relationships with them, including those who “believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software.” Oof. Wild read through and through. Rolling Stone

🍅 An 80,000-year history of the tomato. How did the tomato go from a wild blueberry-sized plant to an ingredient found in markets and supermarkets all over the world? Thousands of years of very specific plant breeding, genetic engineering, and marketing. This is a topical history of a fruit many people love. Works in Progress

🍇 A Passion for Fruit. And, similarly: a long landing page of many interesting crash courses in different fruits and their uses throughout history. Lots of hours of exploration in here! Archaeology Magazine

🧲 MRI can replace painful spinal tap to diagnose MS more quickly, according to a new study. Yes, yes, yes! Similar to my excitement that there is a new blood test for Alzheimer’s to prevent using a diagnostic lumbar puncture (reported in CAE 50), I’m thrilled to read that yet another condition may be able to avoid the risk of spinal CSF leak to patients via a less invasive approach: a T2-weighted MRI, able to show lesions that are a hallmark of MS. Science Daily (The study is here)

💻 When the world connected on Skype. I must be old because the idea that we’re nostalgic for Skype is bonkers; wasn’t it just yesterday that we started using it?! Apparently not. It launched in 2003 and, as this article shares, it really changed the way we communicated — from our closest friends and family, to far flung people and jobs around the world. This piece isn’t a narrative tumble, it’s a lovely compilation of memories from people about how Skype affected their lives. Rest of World.

🇺🇦 The Show Must Go On (Underground) in the Kharkiv Opera House. The opera house in Kharkiv was almost destroyed and an undetonated Russian rocket can still be found on its roof. But after a long interruption, a group of Ukrainians are still performing — now forced to the opera house’s cellar for safety — and their shows are still sold out. What a read. Der Spiegel

🤢 Slop Farmer Boasts About How He Uses AI to Flood Social Media With Garbage to Trick Older Women. The term “slop farming” refers to when someone uses AI to create fake content over and over to monetize views and clicks. Like a ton of fake content. This piece looks at one “sloperator” (ew) and his monthly income and methods — targeting seniors primarily, it seems — in churning out AI content hundreds of times faster than a human could do. Per the piece, AI slop is now so widespread that more than half of all English posts on LinkedIn are likely AI. Pinterest is trying to find ways to let its users opt out or filter out the spam. Futurism

🧬 World’s First Patient Treated with Personalized CRISPR Gene Editing Therapy at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia More incredible medical news. The infant from the study, KJ, was born with a rare metabolic disease called severe carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 (CPS1) deficiency. Doctors took some of his stem cells, corrected two missing DNA letters and then re-implanted the cells after chemotherapy via lipid nanoparticles to the liver in order to correct KJ’s faulty enzyme. And now 66% of his neutrophils function normally. With no major side effects reported. This is a world first, and pretty amazing. Hopefully KJ’s success with the treatment continues. CHOP.edu

⚠️ What was food like before the FDA? Some in the US are championing the dismantling of the FDA, but they’re too young to know of a time when food was dangerous enough to kill. Formaldehyde, brick dust, lead, and borax once made grocery shopping a minefield. Information is power, and attempting to stymy it is never the right solution. With recent news reports of feces in butter and salmonella in cucumbers, for Americans who do want to stay updated: you may want to sign up for Canada’s product safety emails, or look at our alerts page here. We carry a lot of American products, so alerts will include them. Popular Science

🪶 The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch. What a fun, super niche read. “But during lockdown, I, like a lot of people, gradually became obsessed with birds—and it turns out that, with birds, they really are everywhere. They’re fluttering outside your window when you’re supposed to be working. They’re singing nearby when you’re supposed to be sleeping. They’re soaring overhead when you’re supposed to be paying attention to oncoming traffic.” This piece goes to places you wouldn’t expect, and it’s worth a read if not for the whoa! conclusion about the movie Charlie’s Angels, but also for the prose. Slate

🐁 Stupid rat facts. A compendium of information about various rodents, including that gerbils are unusually susceptible to epilepsy, and chinchillas have the densest fur of any land mammal. My kind of read! Loved it through and through. Rabbit Cavern

🍄 Sanitizing the Psychedelic Revolution. Pharmaceutical companies are racing to make a psychedelic panacea in a pill without the discomfort of a “trip”, taming their “unpredictable nature” and stripping them of the mystical or communal contexts from which they have evolved. Doing so may be a fool’s errand, argue Mia Cara Cosco and Rasha Elass; they wonder if this new and clinically decontextualized approach could potentially cause more harm than good. New Lines Magazine

➕ The Beast. This piece is written so entertainingly, and it is included both for its social and pop culture commentary, as well as for sheer talent in stringing words together. The topic: editorial about a collab between author James Patterson and (believe it or not) YouTube influencer MrBeast, a combo the piece notes is “a giant personal loot box in the winner-takes-all game of late-stage capitalism.” More at the link, about the “celebrity-influencer industrial complex” and the cultural necrosis it causes. Alien Sideboob

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

📸 Two photo links this month: (1) Nature Photographer of the Year 2025, some beautiful photos for your perusal, and (2) An Astrophotographers 20 day adventure under the darkest skies in the world — just wow. GDT Photo; PetaPixel

😵‍💫 The Era of the Business Idiot. Blistering criticism of the Business Idiot, whose era we are living in. It’s where middle management has seized power and essentially whittled away at actual meritocracy and value-creation in favour of symbolic growth and acquisition — and privileged, superficial intelligence. Ed has written about this at length before; think of this piece as one that ties his prior writing together into one overarching theory. Where’s Your Ed At?

🤮 The Airplane ‘Barf Bag’ Is A Genius Invention Most People Never Think About, And Using One Blew My Mind. Another topical piece that taught me something new. “Before yesterday”, Mercedes Street writes, “I hadn’t really thought about air sickness bags for perhaps more than 10 seconds over my entire life.” But a sudden-onset sickness and one flight later, the “puke purse” or emesis bag (as they're formally known) was a new subject of fascination. Part narrative, part history, this piece is 100% entertaining. The Autopian

🦷 Toothache from eating something cold? Blame these ancient fish. Headline of the month, really! New research on fossils shows that teeth first evolved as sensory tissue in the armoured exoskeletons of ancient vertebrate fish from the Ordovician period (about 465 million years ago). The finding here is that the bumpy structures on the fish’s armour contains dentine, and likely helped the creature sense conditions in the water around it. The conclusion: sensory organs in the armour of different animals evolved separately — in both vertebrates and invertebrates — to help them sense the larger world around them. And now our teeth hurt when we eat something cold as a result. University of Chicago

🧠 When memories from fiction become part of who you are. Scenes from books, movies and games sometimes carry as much weight as events from people’s own lives, offering “a semblance of autobiographical significance” to readers. Although the story in our memories is not based on reality, the experience of the story makes it real. Reminds me of the talks I used to give on how the brain interprets fiction, sometimes unable in the moment to discern that it isn’t reality. Interesting piece about why that may be, and the studies conducted on this topic. Psyche

🔪 I'd Like To Report a Murder. On the “dark art” of literary takedowns, via a conversation with two author-critics about the rejection of "excess politeness" and where it's taken public discourse in recent times, and a clinical therapist moderator to keep the conversation on track. Pioneer Works

🤰🏽A pregnancy almost denied. Inuit, Métis, and First Nations women in Canada are coming forward and sharing their experiences of being forced or coerced to undergo surgical sterilization in the country. This piece shares some of their stories, as well as those of the advocates who want to see the practice criminalized. CBC News

✍️ How to make a living as a writer. This piece, far more nuanced and emotionally-charged than the title would suggest, dives into Gabrielle Drolet’s hard work to stay solvent, a tangled map of different freelance and gig jobs that keep her afloat. The Walrus

🗣 How to find your voice when you are being silenced. Growing up behind the iron curtain, Luba Kassova thought the United States was a promised land of freedom, self-made wealth, and cool music. Now some Americans already know what she knew: an ever-present fear of the state. Resisting authoritarianism is about remaining engaged, remaining receptive and, above all, not turning away, Kassova writes. As above, crippling people’s access to information and facts is not the way to a functioning, healthy society. Coda

❌ Why Is Everyone Getting Their Tattoos Removed? For decades, Americans covered their bodies with more and more tattoos, a trend that was also reflected worldwide. Now, in the US at least, they’re getting them removed as fast as they can. This piece chats with those “going under the laser”, the tattoo-removal technicians whose businesses are booming, and the tattoo artists whose work is being erased — all to understand how something so permanent became so ephemeral. GQ

📖 Reading Behind Bars, and Beyond Barriers. A really interesting read about another topic I knew little about: access to books for people in Washington, DC prisons. In working for a books-to-prisons nonprofit, Jackie Snow had to learn prison regulations, which “felt like studying for a degree in carceral bureaucracy” to understand how to get prisoners the reading they asked for. “Behind every rejection lurked an institutional paranoia,” she writes. “Hidden messages, drugs or seeds of discontent that might blossom into unrest concealed within innocent pages.” The most sought-after book from prisoners? A dictionary. “What our incarcerated readers demonstrate is that true literary autonomy is about the right to seek what speaks to our individual humanity rather than institutional expectations,” notes Snow. Los Angeles Review of Books

💪🏻 The Incredible Rise and Fall of the Infomercial King The true story of the con man, the karate champ, and the workout videos that changed fitness forever. If you were around for the Tae Bo craze, this is the back story you likely weren’t aware of. Men’s Health

🇨🇦 Ontario Chief Coroner reports raise concerns that MAID policy and practice focus on access rather than protection. Canada’s MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying) was created with safeguards to prevent for coercion or neglect. But these days, there are valid concerns that those guardrails are being ignored. This piece discusses recent and very alarming cases where patients used MAID as a substitute for lacking access to medical care, situations that feel more like eugenics than dignity in death. MAID is a very compassionate option with terminal disease. As I’ve written here previously, it shouldn’t be used as a bludgeon. The Conversation

🐙 ‘About as close to aliens as we’ll ever get.’ Can AI crack animal language? AI is being applied to decode animal communication, and this piece about Dolittle Prize finalists who are exploring complex signals in dolphins, cuttlefish, and other species dives into what that looks like. Can these researchers get us to two-way understanding? Unclear! But interesting either way. Science

🐰 I bought a robot cat for my rabbit. Speaking of: I’ll be honest, this title is a far more effective click-bait for me than the “you’ll never believe” type headlines you see out there. I needed to know what her rabbit thought of the robot cat. What follows is a piece about how a TikTok experiment led Ericka Johnson into a strange world of cyborg cockroaches and animal observation. “Just because rats can learn to follow a robot rat doesn’t mean they think of it as a rat,” she writes. These and other musings made this an entertaining read. Nautilus

🦕 Solving the mystery of a dinosaur mass grave at the ‘River of Death’. Hidden beneath the slopes of a lush forest in Alberta, Canada is a mass grave on a monumental scale. Thousands of dinosaurs were buried here, killed in an instant on “a day of utter devastation”. Now, a group of palaeontologists have come to Pipestone Creek — nicknamed the "River of Death" — to help solve a 72-million-year-old enigma: how did they die? Spoiler alert: it was likely a flash flood. BBC News

👂🏻 What your earwax can reveal about your health. Another Beeb link, this time all about earwax. I’m including it in part because it’s informative, and in part because the illustrations of earwax (with arms and legs added!) are just so perfect for the piece. Thank you Emmanuel Lafont, for your ear wax whimsy. BBC Future

💧 Millions of People Depend on the Great Lakes’ Water Supply. Trump Decimated the Lab Protecting It. And finally: “It has taken over a century of bipartisan cooperation, investment and science to bring the Great Lakes back from the brink of ecological collapse,” Rice said. “But these reckless cuts could undo the progress in just a few short years, endangering the largest surface freshwater system in the world.” The lakes contain clean (for now) drinking water for 40 million people, 21% of the world’s surface freshwater, 3,500 species plants and animals, 170+ species of fish. Vance used to champion protecting the lakes; instead, these cuts will put people and animals at risk, say scientists. ProPublica

🔗 Quick links

• A database tracking legal decisions in cases where AI created ‘hallucinated content’ like fake citations.

• ‘I’m not going there anymore’: Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler’s list of places he won’t travel to right now — including the US.

• Man in Norway wakes up to find a massive container ship in his garden.

• A multiplayer roadtrip game in real-time where we can all vote on where the car should go, when to honk, and what to listen to on the radio. Another fun project by a clearly very creative human being.

• A new Japanese restaurant in NYC called Shirokuro where all of the surfaces (floors, chairs, walls, counters, etc.) are painted to look like a 2-dimensional drawing.

• Life-changing advice from 50 of the most interesting people Esquire Magazine’s editors know.

• An additional dino link: for the first time, footprints of armoured dinosaurs with tail clubs (!) have been identified, following discoveries made in the Canadian Rockies.

• Imagine walking down the street and feeling “an overwhelming love and warmth” for everyone you cross paths with. That’s what happens to individuals with Williams Syndrome, a rare genetic condition.

• New research reveals shared genetic link between endometriosis and certain immune conditions.

• Lifehacker’s advice on ‘what to hoard’ in the US in preparation for what happens when the effect of tariffs trickles down the supply chain.

• A baby hummingbird that looks like a dangerous caterpillar has been found in the rainforests of Panama.

Hope to see you next month!
-Jodi

My updates

• We just had a Canadian election, which you all likely know having seen updates in the news. What you may not know is how our parliamentary system works. I wrote a Canadian elections crash course, talking about ridings, our first past the post system, writs, and everything in between — including how our system differs to the USA.

• 50 editions! When I first started this newsletter, I was in a much worse place with my leak, almost fully bedbound and not sure if I could keep publishing it monthly as I’d hoped. 50 CAEs later, even when my pain is bad I’ve still managed to do so. It feels like a real accomplishment at a time where I lost most of what I identified with, not only my career as a food and travel writer, but also my mobility. A big thanks to my friend Mike converting links monthly into hyperlinks for me. I wouldn’t be able to publish from bed without his help. And thank you for reading, and for continuing to share this newsletter with your friends and family. Here’s to many more months of CAE!

Featured art for CAE 50

This month’s featured artist is Charles Brooks, whose Architecture in Music series is a wonder. I’ve chosen his stunning image of a 1755 Guadagnini violin as this month’s image, shared with permission. I played violin for years, and the beauty of the photo really struck me. His Instagram feed is also worth a follow.

The most interesting things I read this month

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

🐠 It’s FISH DOORBELL SEASON! The Fish Doorbell, featured in CAE28 and CAE37 is back. And now, thanks to John Oliver, even more popular that ever. Visdurbel

💫 World’s smallest pacemaker is activated by light. My dad has a pacemaker, and it was amazing to see that even a few years ago it was inserted via a simple outpatient procedure. Even more so with this new pacemaker, one that's smaller than a grain of rice. It’s awaiting human trials, and if it pans out it would be an even less invasive option for many, even babies with congenital heart defects, Northwestern

🧙🏻 Modern Magic Unlocks Merlin’s Medieval Secrets. Fragments of a rare Merlin manuscript from 1300 have been discovered and digitised in an intense, three year project at Cambridge University Library. Interesting read on how the manuscript was found, how they handled it so as not to damage it, and the technology used to make it accessible to read. University of Cambridge

😵‍💫 The Infinite Fringe. It used to be easy to kill a conspiracy theory. But the internet has made them ubiquitous, immortal and (unfortunately) politically powerful. “Pure, uncut populism in the Year of Our Lord 2025 is based on the notion that all gatekeepers are bad, even the ones who could be ideological allies”, writes Tina Nguyen. This piece on why political discourse has turned into an absolute heap of garbage. is worth a read. The Verge (via The Browser)

🚮 On Compost. And speaking of: the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read about actual garbage. “I make my own compost so that I can convince myself that even when the world seems socially and ecologically broken there are still mechanisms for recovery: it shows that change is possible.” A lovely short piece about “the alchemy of new life born from dead things.” London Review of Books

☎️ The Alabama Landline That Keeps Ringing. Truly loved this read about how students Auburn University’s help desk are still answering whatever calls they get on their landline, 70 years on. “A day’s worth of calls to Foy would look a lot like someone’s browser history: What is cefuroxime prescribed for? What’s the average cost of an acre of land in Texas?” About 13 million people in the USA aren’t online, and callers to this helpline — some from outside the USA — use the landline as their own browser search. “And lucky for callers,” Emily McCrary notes, “these students are remarkably non-judgmental when it comes to the questions they’re asked.” Oxford American

🌀 How Animals Understand Death. Conventional wisdom, both among scientists and much of the general public, is that animals know and feel very little about death. This piece goes into how different species perceive it react to it; there’s definitely more depth and shared experience there than most people realize. Nautilus

🎒 What's Happening to Students? “There must be thousands of people working at these tech behemoths—many in positions of great responsibility—who are horrified by what their own companies are doing. They need to speak up, and lead by example.” Ted Goia on the mass of students-turned-zombies, infinitely tethered to their phones. The Honest Broker

🐷 On the Origin of the Pork Taboo. “Pork accounts for more than a third of the world’s meat,” Andrew Lawler writes, “making pigs among the planet’s most widely consumed animals” — and the planet’s most reviled. For centuries, scholars have struggled to find a satisfying explanation for why the Hebrew Bible and Islamic Koran both forbid consumption of pork. widespread taboo, and this piece dives into the theories. Archaeology Magazine

♥️ Don't Know Where To Go? Go Where You're Needed. My friend Steve wrote this super lovely post, comparing my life arc to that of Shoresy, the main character in a beloved Letterkenney spinoff hockey sitcom. Sometimes I forget what my story looks like to others; I just try not to focus on the constant pain and instead put out work that makes me feel useful in some way. This piece felt like a bit of a shock to read as a result, but a kind one at that. Thank you, Steve. Steve Kamb

🔤 Markdown and the Slow Fade of the Formatting Fetish. Design firm iA on Markdown, a simple readable markup language that’s designed to structure plain text effectively. Year over year, formats like .docx, .ppt, and pdf lose a little bit of their popularity, and while most of us may not have taken notice, this dense article goes into why it’s happening, and how Markdown is “growing over and into the old formats, slowly, and nicely, like moss on a stranded star destroyer,” emphasizing clear structured thinking instead of “visual decoration”. iA

🤧 Climate change is supercharging pollen and making allergies worse. I never heard of “thunderstorm asthma” before, but wowza. It occurs when types of storms break up pollen particles in the air, releasing proteins and then showering to the ground below. This triggers down below, triggering allergic reactions in some people – even among those who weren't previously asthmatic. This piece by Amanda Ruggeri covers an aspect of allergic disease I never had heard about before, and I'm sharing in case it's new to you, too. BBC Earth

💸 Tariff Q&A. A great primer on tariffs. Many people don’t seem to understand how they work, despite them being in the news a lot of late (for obvious reasons). This is a solid crash course. Kyla's Newsletter

🪶 The Many Ways Scientists Are Turning Birds Into Feathered Field Assistants. Birds as research assistants! From frigatebirds and gulls to curlews and cormorants, researchers are tapping many birds to help them map and understand how the world is changing environmentally. This fun piece shares the different ‘job openings’ and the birds that are best suited to fill them. I enjoyed how they set up the article, instead of just in narrative form. Audubon

👔 The Evolution of the Alpha Male Aesthetic. (Archive link.) By Derek Guy, also known as the “menswear guy” on Twitter or elsewhere, famous for his zingers and replies — as well as picking apart the sartorial style of anyone on the internet, especially right wing grifters. “I want to give credit to my editors, who asked me to write 2,000 words on why Andrew Tate wears such tight pants,” he posted, “I submitted 3,700. They asked if I really needed to start with a story about the industrial revolution and I said ‘yes, absolutely don't cut.’ Bloomberg

🧠 Molecules that fight infection also act on the brain, inducing anxiety or sociability. New research on a cytokine called IL-17 adds to growing evidence that immune molecules can influence behaviour when someone is sick, acting on different areas of the brain — the amygdala and the somatosensory cortex — to elict anxiety and sociablility, respectively. Did you know mast cells are a dominant source of IL-17? IL-17 can also induce secretion of other proinflammatory cytokines, as well as matrix metalloproteinase enzymes; this can lead to inflammation, tissue breakdown, and more. Reading this study, I wondered if how IL-17 acts on the brain is part of why a subset of people with mast cell disorders who finally get treated say they no longer have panic attacks, and their mood is much more regulated. For me, I had what I thought was anxiety-induced insomnia. Nope, it was MCAS. With my mast cells more stable, my “anxiety” and the lack of sleep went away. (MCAS isn’t discussed in this article; this is my own editorial tangent.) MIT News

🦄 The free‑living bureaucrat. (Archive link.) If there’s a Michael Lewis piece, I’m here to read it. This time, a subject closer to my heart: an FDA employee “buried under six layers on an agency organizational chart”, whose job it was to help doctors find new treatments for rare, deadly diseases that often don’t get funding/interest from researchers as they are less lucrative or scalable than other conditions. The piece also highlights some of the futility that permeates research sometimes; even if a cure was found for a condition, there’s no way to really assure doctors will have it at their fingertips. Washington Post

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

🍯 “Not too sweet” or too sweet to fail? Across Asia, a little bit of sweetness is essential for the food’s ability to shift and flow into the other flavours that balance the dish — hot, salty, sour, and more. “This philosophy of balance and equilibrium exists in kitchens across the region, from the five key flavors of Thai cuisine to the Japanese concept of gomi,” Mahira Rivers writes. And sugar is not mean to be the ingredient that stands out on its own. These days, however, tastes are changing. There’s a big push of sweetness sweeping through the many different countries of Asia, where it’s “no longer just the supporting taste but the defining flavor”. Taste Magazine

🏛 Another Country. There are many pieces and books out there about how to change people’s minds when it comes to politics. This article, much like the Infinite Fringe above, looks at why it’s so hard to do so — and why things quickly devolve into ugly outrage these days. It concludes that our political statements are more about how we feel, not think, about the world, and as a result, it’s an assault to the ego when people disagree. Trying to Understand the World

❓ How To Create Meaningful Connections By Asking Great Questions. Curiosity isn't just an attribute — it's a skill. This piece talks about five different types of question styles (the non-sequitorist, the seeker, the socialite, the scientist, and the spaceholder) that can le ad to deeper conversations and connection with others. Clearer Thinking

🇯🇵 Photographs of Old Japan. “As with our look at old photos of the Russian Empire and the American West, I’m once again struck by the fact that none of the people in these images are still with us. If any of them somehow returned to the land of the living, I’m not sure they’d recognise the Japan of today.” Photos of Japan taken between 1860-1900. Cosmographia

🐖 The Great Pig War of Matagorda County. (Archive link.) Another pig piece: this time, a small-scale hog farm that has pitted neighbour against neighbour in this town of 18,000 people. A deep dive into the drama, legal and otherwise. Texas Monthly

🎓 Course of Treatment. After Stanford physician Bryant Lin was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, he invited students to follow along. The class was filled to the brim, not only with students who registered for it, but also with people auditing the class to participate in this unique viewpoint on the condition. Lin notes that he is “well aware of the irony” that in the spring of 2024, he went from raising awareness of growing rates of lung cancer in nonsmokers of Asian descent to being a poster boy for the disease. This profile is warm and compassionate and graceful, just like Lin himself. Stanford Magazine

🪴 Rotten tricks: How hot and stinky plants woo pollinators. There is a whole category of “stinky plants” I didn’t know about, including the aptly named skunk cabbage. It’s one of a smattering of plants that can generate a lot of warmth, called thermogenesis; its floral tissues can reach 84F/28.9C, even if it’s near freezing outside. Why they’re foul-smelling, and how the stink stinkifies, at the link! Knowable Magazine

🧀 There’s White Stuff Growing on Your Cheese That Isn’t Mold. I am familiar with the white mould that can grow outside cheeses, but I did not know that there were desirable white things that could grow on them too. Crystals! Several different types of them, either the product of mineral (salt) emulsion during cheesemaking, or protein breakdown (proteolysis) as the cheese ages. The Phcheese

💎 This Impossible New Color Is So Rare That Only Five People Have Seen It. By stimulating specific cells in the retina, a new colour named ‘olo’ was apparently seen by five people — a claim contentious enough that some researchers claim it didn’t happen. Researchers used lasers and tracking technology to activate only specific cells in participants’ retinas to mimic the signals that thee brain uses to interpret colour. Olo is a blue-greenish hue similar to peacock blue or teal, but with a bonkers level of saturation. Scientific American

🐝 Telling the Bees. Emily Polk on how bees bear witness to our sorrow: “This is the miracle that connects me to the bees, the thread that connects all of us wild creatures who are still breathing—it’s not the inevitability of loss and grief, but the astonishing revelation that somehow we’ve managed to survive in the face of it.”Part essay, part science, all well-written. Emergence

🍄 Psychedelics May Reverse Effects of Neuroimmune Interactions That Drive Fear Responses. Interesting read about how psychedelics may do more than just change perception; they can also help reduce inflammation. This makes them an interesting target for neuroimmune interactions, whether for neuropsychiatric disorders or other inflammatory diseases. To be clear, it’s not a cure, but the study author noted that they found evidence that there are “tissue-specific benefits” to using them. I’d be worried about how to prevent a worsening in some patients, but I am sure they are a long way from making any sort of therapeutic target a reality. Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News

🏘 Raising a Ghost Town From the Dead. Two investors bought most of the buildings in downtown Brownsville, Pennsylvania, and then let them fall into ruin. Now, the town’s residents are trying to reinvigorate the area. Great photos accompany this piece. Atlas Obscura

🇺🇸 America’s Future Is Hungary. (Archive link.) Why does Hungary’s trajectory matter? This piece argues that it’s because America is on the same path. “Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe […] and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union.” And yet, its authoritarianism and structure has been praised by the current administration in the US. The Atlantic

🔊 How an unused nuclear power plant became home to a world-class acoustics lab. Acoustics testing is “two-thirds science, one-third witchcraft,” writes Allison Johnson. It requires creating a controlled space to measure sound, without interference from background noise. In this piece, a very remote location: inside a nuclear power plant where the thick concrete walls mute the outside world. The Verge

🩸 The Breakthrough Blood Test for Alzheimer's Disease. The ‘routine’ procedure mentioned in studies as a test for Alzheimer’s is the thing that derailed my life. I am very glad to see less invasive tests being pioneered for Alzheimer’s Disease instead of lumbar punctures to access CSF. Ground Truths

💥 The Next Terrorist Attack. A gloomy read but an important one. Undermining trust in government and systems and diverting intelligence away from preventing an attack will allow one to happen — domestic or foreign. And let’s not forget that authoritarians use attacks to divert power. “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives,” Timothy Snyder writes. “The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances” is “the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.” Thinking about.

🐄 How Dairy Robots Are Changing Work for Cows (and Farmers). Apparently robots are taking over a lot of the hard daily labor at dairy farms, including the milking, feeding, and cleaning of cows. Not only does it make dairy farmers burdens less weighty, but — the piece assets — it makes the cows happier as well. IEEE Spectrum

👀 ‘I am not who you think I am’: how a deep-cover KGB spy recruited his own son. A wild, melancholy read about the life of a boy from the US who discovers both of his parents are KGB agents — and feels pressured to join them. The Guardian

♿️ RFK Jr.’s “MAHA” movement doesn't want to eliminate chronic illness. They want to eliminate the chronically ill. The ‘Make America Healthy Again’ movement broadcasts more than a few misconceptions about science, medicine, and disease, and but what is also scary as a disabled person is that it is underscored by eugenicist beliefs about a world that is free of sick people not sickness itself. The Gauntlet

⚠️ Around the Pit. I’ll be picking up Nick Triolo’s new book “The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere” after reading this excerpt about his vagabonding walk around America’s largest superfund site, Butte/Silver Bow Creek in Montana. Longreads

🏥 17 Ways to Cut Your Risk of Stroke, Dementia and Depression All at Once. (Gift link thanks to one of you!) Researchers have identified 17 risk factors that contribute to the chance of developing stroke, dementia or depression later in life, and they all share an underlying factor of causing damage to smaller blood vessels in the brain. The tips in here are not a big surprise; they include eating well, staying physically active and keeping your brain working as you age. But there’s emphasis on lowering blood pressure as one of the biggest factors of the list. New York Times

🦠 Children face elevated kidney, heart, and gut risks for years after COVID infection. A study of 1.9 million health records finds that children face elevated kidney, heart, and GI risks for years after a Covid infection, including a 17% higher risk of developing stage 2 or higher chronic kidney disease and a 35% higher risk of chronic kidney disease at stage 3 or higher. Penn Medicine News

🔗 Quick links

• A food historian shares what she considers ‘the most disgusting British foods ever’.

• A live, real-time map of passenger trains in North America.

• A live, real-time aggregate of animal cameras all over the world, for so many different animal species that you’ll have a hard time picking what to watch first.

• The Earth to Sky store has some fun gifts for a good cause. All items in this store have been flown to the stratosphere on Earth to Sky Calculus cosmic ray helium balloons. (Earth to Sky Calculus is a youth club started in 2010 and are 100% crowdfunded; more about their research here.) I bought a gift from here last month, and wanted to share — it is such a fun gift for anyone who loves astronomy or science.

• Meet Root, the turtle with a mobility aid that is made of LEGO.

• New research reveals shared genetic link between endometriosis and immune conditions, including celiac disease and MS, with endometriosis patients having a 30-80% increased risk of developing autoimmune diseases.

• Excerpt from “How to fall in love with questions”, a new book about how curiosity helps us get through uncertain times — right up our alley!

Hope to see you next month!
-Jodi

Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter. CAE 48 is here, if you missed it! The most popular link from last month was Kevin Kelly’s tips after 50 years of travel.

My updates

• I received some cruel emails lately, and it led me to write on my personal site for the first time in awhile. My piece, called “Fight harder” and other myths about living with a spinal CSF leak, also features quotes and artwork from other spinal CSF leak patients about why they too have deferred treatment.

• Excited to share that I was a co-author in a recent research article about spinal CSF leak. The paper features a patient-physician collaboration to develop a structured reporting system for myelography, and was published in the American Journal of Neuroradiology. Yay!

Featured art for CAE 49

This month’s featured artist Jake Mosher spent years trying to capture this scene of the summer Milky Way reflected in Montana’s Hyalite Lake — a photo that won in the landscapes section of the 2025 World Nature Photography Awards. “This was a hard-earned photo that I chased for five years waiting for the perfect conditions,” he said. You can purchase the photo here, or find Jake on IG here.

The most interesting things I read this month

These links are once again formatted into hyperlinks thanks to the help of my friend Mike.

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

❓ A ‘Jeopardy!’ Win 24 Years in the Making. A truly wonderful read by Claire McNear about a J! contestant whose grit to get on the Alex Trebek stage was put to the test over many years of attempts and auditions. The piece is made even more beautiful for me because Harvey is a close friend, someone I met back in my early days of travel writing and who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s not long after my leak re-opened. Over the years, we bonded over the common deterioration of our health, in markedly different symptoms and ways. I was bursting with pride to see him not only win his first game but also share how he hoped his time on the show helped others with Parkinson’s see what they too can do. He was a machine, dominating his first game, and the press since his win has been so well-deserved. He’s one of the kindest people I know. He’s also currently fundraising for the Parkinson’s 2025 Unity Walk. The Ringer

🔉 Onomatopoeia Odyssey. I am obsessed with this amazing, interactive fun, a webpage that visualizes and demonstrates how onomatopeias sound in different languages, divided by animal. Example, for cat: meow in English becomes mijav in Turkish and jaoŋ in Korean; you can play the sounds of each as you explore. Hours of entertainment, for adults and kids alike. The Pudding (via Kottke.org)

🍍 King of fruits. I always thought pineapple grew from a tree, and it wasn’t until I went to the Philippines in 2009 that I saw it being grown from a bush on the ground — and promptly lost my mind (to the amusement of locals who were used to it). “The pineapple was once Europe’s ultimate status symbol,” says Étienne Fortier-Dubois in this piece. Aristocrats spent fortunes on their ‘pineries’ for centuries after Columbus introduced them, until technological progress like steamships, refrigeration, and the Ginaca processing machine’s invention in 1911 — transformed this luxury fruit into an every day snack. Works in Progress

🦐 Yes, Shrimp Matter. The author of this piece left private equity to work on shrimp welfare. He says so in the opener to this piece, an excellent way to ensure we’ll all keep reading. Why? Why worry about shrimp when so many mammals and birds are on the edge of extinction? His answer is numbers. “An estimated 230 billion shrimp of various species are alive in farms at any given moment,” he writes, “the estimated number slaughtered annually for human consumption at 440 billion” — far more than pigs, cattle, chickens, or farmed fish. These numbers “wouldn’t matter” (he says) if shrimp didn’t have the internal experience associated with suffering, but a growing body of evidence suggests that they do. Therefore shrimp welfare isn’t just about reducing their suffering, but also about redefining our relationship with the natural world, expanding our circle of compassion, and “challenging the limits of our ethical responsibilities.” Asterisk

🌳 How To Build A Thousand-Year-Old Tree. This line stood out: “only a forest knows how to grow a forest.” The piece is really thoughtful and interesting, about researchers making time-machines for trees in the hopes of growing a 1000-year-old tree ‘from scratch’. Well, not from scratch but not in the natural way; they’re using microbe injections and other technology, as well as the oak’s own ingenuity. Controversial in tree management circles, this piece argues that building trees in this way can help save ancient forests. NOEMA

🍺 How the Irish Pub Became One of the Emerald Isle’s Greatest Exports. TIL that a Dublin-based company, the Irish Pub Company, designed over of 2,000 pubs in more than 100 countries around the globe — in every continent except Antarctica. Pub design is a societal-mood metric, the article states, noting that people are “looking more toward comfort and familiarity” and seeking less sleek shininess and more hardwood bar tops and traditional leather on chairs. I learned a lot about the explosion of Irish pubs around the world. Smithsonian Magazine

☛ The Secret History of the Manicule, the Little Hand that’s Everywhere. A microhistory of the manicule. The name is taken from maniculum, Latin for “little hand”. It was added to Unicode version 1.1 in 1993, where it is represented by the symbol ☛ of a pointing hand. It derives, however, from way further back — it used to sit in the margins of old texts or documents to show that a passage is worth a closer examination. An often-intricate relic of older texts, it was rescued by the internet. But did you know much about it? Me neither, and this piece fixes that. Messy Nessy (via The Browser)

🌎 The Canadian roots of Elon Musk’s conspiracist grandpa. Elon Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was the Canadian leader of the North American Technocracy movement, which proposed one ‘Technate’ to of the entire American continent — which includes Canada, Greenland, and Panama. Sound familiar? A 2021 piece covered this too, called ‘In science we trust’. CBC

🌸 From Princely Regalia to Women’s Underwear: The Evolution of the Color Pink. Pink is still used as a cultural bludgeon for implications about sexuality, and people who do so do not seem to realize just how common it was for boys and men to wear the colour in the 18th and 19th centuries. “[I]t would be absurd”, writes Michel Pastoureau, “to see a sign of homosexuality or effeminate behavior in the wearing of pink by men” at that time. LitHub

🦫 The dam, the myth, the legend: 50 years of the beaver. On March 24, 1975, the National Symbol of Canada Act received royal assent, naming the beaver to the role. While the cost to manage the beaver’s impact in Canada each year is substantial, it also has many benefits for local ecosystems. Estimates of the beaver population when Europeans first arrived in North America run anywhere from 100 million to 400 million. But after 300 years of the fur trade, different wars, and land clearance and drainage for agricultural settlement, beavers were wiped from much of the continent. Beavers were so scarce by the early 1900s that trapping was banned or restricted in many areas. Today, Canada’s beaver population has grown again, and is estimated at six million to 12 million — a healthy total, though still a fraction of their numbers pre-contact. In droughts, their ponds had water. And their presence can prevent flash flooding, too. Canadian Geographic

💫 The Hummingbirds Brought Me Around. Instead of my thoughts, I’m using a quote from the article: “It is a cliche, and also extremely frowned upon in science writing, to call an animal a miracle. But if any creature could live up to the title, would it not be the hummingbird? An impossibly miniature jewel pulsing with life, with heart, with song. It is almost less a bird than a bug, a creature so small and quick you can never take it all in. Instead you settle for glimpses, flashes of a life so vibrant and a heart beating so terribly fast that all you can do is orbit around its edges.” A lovely read, and a break from all the chaos. Defector

🇺🇸 I’m the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped. The opposite of the hummingbird piece, really. If white Canadians are being treated this way by the current administration, imagine how people of colour are being treated? We don't need to imagine, though, because there’s much coverage and videos showing how the rule of law is being ignored for legal immigrants who are people of colour, and even sometimes for citizens. The Guardian

👔 The World Was Flat. Now It's Flattened. I’ve shared posts from Ted Goia in CAE numerous times over the years. I appreciate his deep dives and thoughtful essays. Annually, he shares a “state of the culture” speech, with a common heuristic: The culture always changes first, then everything else adapts to it. For 2025, what does this mean? Several decades ago, the internet changed culture to equalize it, making ideas and commerce accessible through most of the world. Today, Goia argues, it’s gone from equalized to flattened. He notes that flattening wasn’t done by corporations on purpose but rather because over time so much was standardized (like logos, scrolling, apps, etc.) because it was more profitable to do so. The same memes are on all social media sites, and “shallow and flattened digital fluff” has replaced community. The only rule is essentially: don’t make it too serious or too earnest, he notes. Plus, those platforms also make it hard to close your account. All of it is to prevent us from thinking too hard about how the web went from giving us power to taking it away. (His graphic here is a summary of how). This stagnation is especially visible in the digital lives of teens, which Goia notes is ripe for rebellion. Chilling read, and I think an accurate one too. The Honest Broker

🇨🇦 Blame Canada. If you’re wondering why I’m sharing a Snyder link fairly often, it’s because he is the expert on tyranny, and that's where we’re at right now. “War with Canada is what Trump seems to have in mind. Fentanyl is not the only big lie. That Canada does not really exist is the other.” This formula is “strangely Putinist”, writes Snyder, uncannily echoing Russian propagandists towards Ukraine. The piece discusses how this competitive authoritarianism will likely not ‘eliminate’ elections, but rather make them very different and no longer free and fair by targeting big opposition donors, going after businesses and groups who fight for civil rights (we’re already seeing this with law firms being targeted — and caving), going after journos or publications for defamation, and more. Opposition becomes riskier, and though massive protests yesterday took over the country, what the administration is counting on is that eventually as things get worse many people just decide it’s not worth the fight. Thinking about

🇷🇺 How the West lost the war it thought it had won. Related: Putin had reason to celebrate as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine moved past its 3rd anniversary. He scripted a new ending to the Cold War by exploiting the gap between Western democratic ideals and their practice. This piece argues that his success stems from the collective failure of the west to “recognize his systematic dismantling of the order they claimed to defend”. Coda

🍣 The Role Sushi Plays in Feeding Ukrainian Troops on the Front Lines. Related in a different way: “Sushi was probably one of the first properly foreign dishes that came to Ukraine [after the restoration of independence],” said Yaroslav Druziuk, the former editor in chief of The Village Ukraine, a Ukrainian culture and politics publication. The rise in sushi’s popularity is intertwined with a Ukrainian trend toward eating what America and the rest of the West eats—“a cosmopolitan way of looking at the world absent of Russian influence.” Bon Appetit

💍 Why More Marriages End When Wives Get Sick Than When Husbands Do. Short read: a study of 25,000 European couples aged 50+ found that men struggle more than women with a partner’s declining health, potentially jeopardizing the couple’s stability. Marriages are 7x more likely to end in divorce when the wife is the partner who gets sick versus the husband. I’ve seen the conclusion reflected in the leak world; a significant number of female patients I know have said their divorce is a direct consequence of being disabled. (Spinal CSF leak does affect women more than men, so I share this to note that it’s been a sad reality of hearing from patients the last many years, not as a scientific conclusion — but as a result the study caught my eye.) Psychology Today

💎 Obsidian and the Birds. The ancient city of Teotihuacán was popular because of volcanic glass, but as if that weren’t “already miraculous enough”, the discovery of a special kind of obsidian — iridescent, with a green-gold sheen — made it even more so. Rainbow obsidian, as it was called, became the most sought after in Mesoamerica, bringing in wealth-seekers much like the Gold Rush did. I had no idea! Magnetite may have given Teotihuacán its rare rainbow obsidian, but it also fomented the destruction of Mesoamerican civilization by the Spaniards. The Marginalian

🤖 AI Search Has A Citation Problem. The Tow Center for Digital Journalism recently studied eight AI search engines, including ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Perplexity Pro, Gemini, DeepSeek Search, Grok-2 Search, Grok-3 Search, and Copilot. They tested each for accuracy and recorded how frequently the tools refused to answer. Overall, the AI search engines were wrong in about 60% of the queries, and Grok 3 was wrong 94% (!) of queries. Do people care? I’m honestly not sure the majority do, which is a big part of the problem in our post-factual world. Columbia Journalism Review

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

🥩 Why Big Pharma wants you to eat more meat. I’m a meat-eater myself, though I was vegetarian for some time before I was diagnosed with celiac disease. After losing access to wheat, I went back to meat. These days, with MCAS, every plant-based protein source I’ve tried triggers awful reactions of flushing, hives and GI distress — and that’s with antihistamines on board. So meat it is, mostly chicken and bison, and I buy mine from smaller, local farms near me. Not everyone has that privilege, and this piece goes into what bargain went into the agriculture industry in the United States. The title is clickbait, but the piece had plenty I did not know about before reading. Vox

📱 The Diabolical World of Phone Scams. We’re in a golden age for fraudsters, and Canada is no exception. With new tech like AI, con artists can more readily identify targets and dupe them. The piece uses the “CRA Scam” as an example — CRA is the Canadian Revenue Agency — and like the predecessor IRS scams in the USA, the scam tries to convince people (often successfully) that they owe back taxes. Fraud investigations in Canada were under-resourced and overwhelmed, until the CRA Scam began. Then the government launched a huge anti-fraud investigation called Project Octavia, one that temporarily quieted things down. It’s been disbanded, so the CRA Scam lives again. Macleans

🍳 We’re running out of eggs. The USA discovered a way to produce the cheapest eggs in history, through giant industrial farms, but in doing so made their food supply (and other countries’ who adopted this model) highly vulnerable to disease. This leads to volatility in supply, and inflated prices when it goes wrong. And it’s all part of a global cheap food system that relies on massive factory farms and processing facilities that are just too big to fail. Until the chickens start dying en masse. UnHerd

♀️ Young conservative women build an alternative to the manosphere. For years, conservative media was built by and for older men — think, Fox News founder Roger Ailes’ alleged ‘leg cam’ aimed at his female newscasters. Of late, there’s a conservative womanosphere, too: “These YouTubers and writers are often avatars for a “trad” lifestyle, espousing traditional gender and family values that are part nostalgia, part revolt … powered by algorithms on Instagram and TikTok, where young women are the dominant users”. This pieces goes into that newly emergent group. Semafor

💥 How Measles Destroys Immune Memories. Um, so, setting aside the utter insanity of almost eradicating a highly contagious disease and just ... inviting it back into our homes and lives, one of the talking points I don’t see discussed enough is how measles can cause immune amnesia. This means that it infects and damages memory cells from other past vaccinations or infections, wiping out the immune system's memory and resistance against reinfection for them as well. Not what we want at all. Harvard Magazine

🦠 Beyond long Covid — how reinfections could be causing silent long-term organ damage. On the same topic, a discussion of how even milder reinfections can impact the body, with good graphics that illustrate the piece. I know people don’t want to hear about this any more, but I’m still dealing with consequences from a viral infection in 2013; I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. My goal is to inform you all as much as I can, to help you make the best decisions for you. CBC

🏊🏻 Meet the People Fighting the “Crisis in Sperm”. I am including this piece, a compendium of research and self-experimentation vaguely similar to the long Covid piece below but a different topic for a few reasons. First, because it’s an area I wouldn’t otherwise know about, and second, because the illustrations throughout by graphic artist Kelsey Niozelek are so delightfully out there that they complemented the piece perfectly, and I couldn’t omit them. Though studies do show Covid can lower sperm count, which isn’t mentioned. GQ

🏥 When I lost my intuition. “For years, I practised medicine with cool certainty, comfortable with life-and-death decisions, writes Richard Dworkin. “Then, one day, I couldn’t.” Science generally demands ‘order and light’, scoffing at something as spiritual as ‘intuition.’ And yet, as Dworkin notes, it’s an important aspect of skills that often gets ignored. Important enough that when he lost his, he felt it right away — “I felt uneasy about my ability to perform my duties as a physician. Some kind of inner harmony was gone.” Researchers have long recognised intuition’s relevance to professional judgment, but what of within the science world? Thoughtful read. Aeon

⛓️ Inside ICE Air: Flight Attendants on Deportation Planes Say Disaster Is “Only a Matter of Time”. I mentioned ICE above in the piece about the Canadian who was detained, and in this very disturbing article McKenzie Funk writes about families in chains and deplorable conditions on planes that are run by private or start-up companies contracted to deport and instructed to act “as if the detainees’ lives were worthless”. Pro Publica

🪦 Here’s a ‘dead’ person on Social Security in Seattle, with plenty to say. A very different, zoomed-in view of what is going on in the US right now: a man is told he’s dead — ‘But I’m on the phone with you right now!’ he says to US authorities on the phone. As a result, Social Security clawed back two months of benefits and paused others. Fixing errors like is a big problem because, as I understand it, the US system largely relies on SSA records; if you’re ‘deemed’ dead it may freeze bank accounts, void health insurance, mess with your credit, etc. One story in a sea of chaos down south. Seattle Times

🕵🏻 Finally, something is puncturing conspiracy theories. (Archive link.) Spoiler: it’s the robots. Seriously, though, some of the stories in here are mind boggling. Take the case study that opens the piece, about Michael Protzman, who attracted a big group of QAnon conspiracy group of followers who traveled to Dallas in November 2021 so they could witness JFK and JFK Jr — when that didn’t happen, they followed him to a concert because he said they’d be unmasked there. When that didn’t happen, they stayed in Dallas for months, raising money from followers. How do people get out of cults when sunk fallacy and so much more keeps them so stuck? Annie Duke writes about how taking an extreme position broadens them being “othered” from the general population, which becomes an identity issue over time. And once a belief is integral to identity, it sticks. Could an AI bot help dislodge it? It seems that it might. The Washington Post

🩸 James Harrison, whose blood donations saved over 2 million babies, has died. I wasn’t aware of this person, whose plasma contained a rare and precious antibody called anti-D. The antibody, discovered in the mid-1960s, is used in medications to prevent haemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn (also known as rhesus disease), a potentially fatal condition that occurs when a pregnant person's blood is incompatible with that of their unborn baby, prompting their immune system to attack it. NPR

🦣 Company Seeking to Resurrect the Woolly Mammoth Creates a ‘Woolly Mouse’. WOOLY MOUSE! (What could go wrong?) Scientists at Colossal Biosciences have engineered live mice with a coat colour, texture, and thickness that is reminiscent of the woolly mammoth. Their editing approach used a combination of technologies to introduce eight edits into seven key genes. Scientific American

⚕️Need a Knee Replacement? You Can Get It at the Mall. Canadian health care system is different, and sometimes hard to describe, and yes — there are quite a few pieces about Canada in here. I find my non-Canadian friends haven’t learned much about how things work here, and with US-Canadian relations at risk I want to share more about my country so readers who live outside of Canada can understand more about the country. Increasingly, patients here are turning to private health care options, at less-than-US prices but (per friends at least) more than the EU. This piece looks into knee replacement from a private health perspective. The Walrus

💉The Doctor, the Biohacker, and the Quest to Treat Their Long Covid. Five years after Covid began, there are millions of people around the world with long-Covid, a “debilitating condition that still has no approved treatment and is often misdiagnosed and misunderstood.” This piece is about two men in their quest to find solutions, but it highlights what the last many years have been for me, too, and many others like me — orphaned by much of the medical system due to our complexity, we’ve gobbled up medical studies, used ourselves as lab rats, and tried to see what answers we could find to help us feel like ourselves again. Men’s Health

🧠 Speaking of health: Boosting Brain’s Meningeal Lymphatic Vessels Improves Memory in Aged Mice. Another mice study, but an interesting one — especially as having a spinal CSF leak for 7.5 years is bound to do worrisome things to my brain. I’ve shared prior studies about clearing brain waste; this one found that by targeting the network of vessels that drain waste from the brain and rejuvenating them, memory improves. Curious what, if any, treatment options arises from this. GenENG News

🏙 ‘Startup Nation’ Groups Say They’re Meeting Trump Officials to Push for Deregulated ‘Freedom Cities’. (Archive link.) The architects of projects like Próspera are drafting legislation to create US cities that would be free from federal regulations, and meeting with Trump’s administration to make it happen. “[T]he goal of these cities would be to have places where anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups, and building construction can proceed without having to get prior approval from agencies,” notes. As I said with the wooly mice, what could go wrong?! (/s, in case that isn’t clear). WIRED.

🇵🇬 In search of the South Pacific fugitive who crowned himself king. Noah Musingku made a fortune with a Ponzi scheme and then retreated to a remote armed compound in the jungle, where he still commands the loyalty of his Bougainville subjects. The Guardian

🇸🇩 Five key moments in the battle for Khartoum. We’re at a level of information overload, combined with the onslaught of misinformation that seems to be the norm these days, that leads to some international crises being ignored. Sudan is an example of this saturation of news, and in this piece BBC Verify examines social media footage of the fight for control of the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. Recently, the Sudanese regained control of key areas of the capital from a paramilitary faction seeking to overthrow the government. BBC News

🗳 Utah Was a Rare Red State to Champion Mail Voting. That Era Is Ending. Utah has had universal vote-by-mail since 2019, and a recent poll found that 87% of Utahians (Utahns?) trust that their ballots are counted accurately. Utah currently sends a mail ballot to every registered voter, but false claims about fraud in mail voting caught up with the state, and in March, Utah’s governor signed a law that ends their mail voting system. Bolts

🇬🇷 The city that forgot itself. I learned reading this piece that Thessaloniki was a very different city to my preconceived notions — something it seems is intentionally the case. Its bloody modern history, which includes massive fires, pogroms, and invasions, is one I’ve never read about prior. The city was once majority-Jewish, called the ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans’, until a 1931 pogrom divested the city of its Jewish population; around 50,000 Muslims also once lived alongside sizeable Bulgar, Armenian and Levantine minorities at the same time. In a city once bustling with minarets and synagogues, it is now “afflicted with amnesia” over anything connected with its past. The Critic

🧫 Parkinson's Gut Bacteria Link Suggests an Unexpected, Simple Treatment. Researchers found the changes in gut bacteria communities in Parkinson’s patients were associated with a decrease in riboflavin (Vitamin B2) and biotin (Vitamin B7). Could an unexpectedly simple treatment help with this condition? We’ll see where the research goes. Note, however, that if you take biotin, it can affect a wide variety of lab tests — stop taking it at minimum a few days before your labs. Science Alert

🍼 Why don’t we remember being a baby? Infants can encode specific memories, a new Yale study shows, suggesting “infantile amnesia” might be a memory retrieval problem and not a lack of memories after all. Historically, people who remember baby memories were often dismissed as making it up; I guess that’s not the case! YaleNews

🔗 Quick links

• Headline of the month: “Your Butthole Had A Very Different Role In The Ancient Past, New Study Suggests”. "

• A repository of more than 21,000 free audio books; search by book title.

• A tour of ancient Rome’s best graffiti.

• Iguanas likely crossed the Pacific millions of years ago on a record-setting rafting trip.

• The cult of the American lawn, a deep-dive into why manicured grass, an “ecological dead zone” is still being forced on people — especially by HOAs.

• A search engine for recipes.

• Cloudflare turns AI against itself with an endless maze of irrelevant facts.

Hope to see you next month!
-Jodi

Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter. CAE 47, last month’s newsletter, is here, if you missed it. The most popular link from last month was the very disturbing piece about Neil Gaiman and sexual abuse.

My updates

• In February, I wrote about the how and why of thundersnow on Patreon, an eerie, rare winter phenomenon.

• I’ve gotten a lot of messages on social media asking for proof of life as I’ve been quiet for many weeks. I’ve been running on fumes since we are in the middle of searching for a new executive director for the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation, and in my role as president of the Board of Directors (which is unpaid — I mention as many people ask!) it’s my role to put the hiring process together and be on all interviews. With an active spinal CSF leak, all of it takes a lot out of me and my brain. After interviews, I used any remaining brain juice to write CAE. Thank you for the concern! ♥️

Featured art for CAE 48

This month’s featured artist is Mike Rigney, a close friend of mine who I met back in 2011, when he was working as a naval engineer. In the years since, he’s quit that job, become a USCG certified captain, and now works as a marine engineer aboard a NatGeo expedition ship. He’s also honed his photography skills to blow us away. His photo of two dolphins leaping in the air together was taken in Baja California. You can follow him on IG, or see his work on his website.

The most interesting things I read this month

These links are once again formatted into hyperlinks thanks to the help of my friend Mike.

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

🌍 The Long Flight to Teach an Endangered Ibis Species to Migrate. (Archive link.) This piece has all the elements I love: a narrative woven with beautiful and entertaining words, a stubborn bird, and science. It tells the labour of love story behind trying to teach the northern bald ibis, an almost-extinct species in Europe, how to migrate. Raised in captivity, the birds no longer know that they are meant to get moving; every year, a small group of scientists do their best to get them to follow a microlight plane from Austria to Spain so that they’ll learn the migratory path of their ancestors. And often, the birds are not having it — nor are some other personalities in the mix. “While attempting to cross the Pyrenees, the helicopter pilot had requested permission over the radio from French air-traffic controllers,” writes Nick Paumgarten. The controllers replied, 'Fuck off with your ducks.’ It’s wonderfully-written, engaging, and funny — and I really enjoyed it. New Yorker

✈️ 50 Years Of Travel Tips. Kevin Kelly’s tips after decades of travel. While many people travel to retreat, to “escape the routines of work, to recharge, relax, reinvigorate, and replenish themselves”, Kelly travels to engage and experience, “to lean into an adventure whose outcome is not certain, to meet otherness.” I relate, and my many years of travel began because of that sense of adventure. I continued for a decade fuelled by a desire to learn from places and people and foods I wouldn’t find at home. A very delightful list of lessons learned over his many years of intentional wandering. The Technium

🇯🇵 My Quest to Find the Owner of a Mysterious WWII Japanese Sword. A fascinating read tracing the story of a WWII American soldier and the author of this piece, his grandson, who works tirelessly to return a 500 year-old katana sword to its original family of owners. Since WWII, when the author’s grandfather found the sword on a beach in Okinawa and mailed it back to the USA (2025 could never), it’s been in the States as a souvenir and trophy of war. The author’s starting point: an inscription with a name and town, and a plea to send the sword home if found. From there, modern internet sleuthing, bureaucracy, and eventually a trip to Japan. Outside

🧠 Alzheimer’s Biomarker Test May Detect Disease Years before Tau Tangles Appear. The good news: researchers say that this new CSF biomarker test correlates with the severity of cognitive decline, independent of other factors, including brain amyloid deposition, and could enable early-stage disease diagnosis and intervention. The bad news, specific to me as the author of this newsletter: accessing CSF requires a lumbar puncture — and we know how that worked out for me, and many others. LPs are classified as ‘routine procedures’ of low risk, but if my advocacy work has taught me anything in the last 7.5 years, it’s that chronic puncture leaks are under-diagnosed. I’m all for science advancing in this way, but truly hope that these studies are using smaller gauge, atraumatic needles with CT or other guidance, to minimize the risk of spinal CSF leak. Even less invasive: a new blood test that may eventually supersede using lumbar punctures for diagnosis. Yes please. Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News

🐚 My Final Days on the Maine Coast. Diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, writer Joseph Monninger meditates on life, death, and beauty from his small seaside cottage down east. “I have chosen to live this way, to live near the sea without running water, to surround myself with simple beauty”, he writes. “The middles of days are hardest to fill. The world is at work during those hours, while I am released of that burden.” Beautiful, moving, and evocative. DownEast

🇲🇽 Lasers reveal 15th-Century fortified Zapotec city in Mexico. LIDAR lasers shot from an aircraft have revealed a 600-year-old Zapotec city in Oaxaca State (243 km southeast of Oaxaca city) with over 1,100 buildings, 4 km of walls, and a network of urban roads, temples and spaces that housed 5,000. Wow! To learn more about the 15th-century city known as Guiengola, a team led by Pedro Guillermo Ramón Celis, a post-doctoral fellow at McGill University used LIDAR to map out the site in December 2022. A cross-over of multiple interests for me, LIDER, my alma mater university, and an ancient city in the Mexican state I used to call home. LiveScience

⚖️ Elite lawyers sell out the rule of law. Sullivan and Cromwell, a prestigious law firm that — when I was working in Biglaw in NYC at least, many years ago — was known to work its associates to the bone and pay extra well for the privilege, is the subject of this piece. “It’s a sad spectacle to see a reputable law firm render itself into an instrument for lawlessness. It’s also a cautionary tale of how lawyers should not conduct themselves as Trump proceeds with an effort to replace the justice system with one governed by cronyism and corruption,” admonishes David R. Lurie. He also wonders if people will even bother spending money on lawyers at all if eventually the justice system is replaced by a system where “power and cronyism make adherence to laws optional”. I’m sure many lawyers working at S&C aren’t happy about this management decision, but it isn’t their choice. Also: Trump suspended the security clearances of lawyers at Covington & Burling over their pro bono work for special counsel Jack Smith. Basic authoritarianism at its finest, with the government punishing a law firm for defending a client. Isn’t that the kind of tyranny the US fought a revolution against? Public Notice

🇮🇳 BBC undercover filming exposes Indian pharma firm fuelling opioid crisis. In North America we’re familiar with Purdue and their impact and influence in the opioid crisis here. There is another opioid crisis, in Africa, where an Indian pharmaceutical company is manufacturing unlicensed, highly-addictive opioids and exporting them illegally to West Africa where they are driving a public health crisis in countries that include Ghana, Nigeria, and Cote D'Ivoire. BBC News

🔡 The hardest working font in Manhattan. “The first time I realized the font even existed was some time in 2017, when I was researching for my book about the history of typing”, writes Marcin Wichery. Every stroke of the font — called Gorton — is exactly the same thickness, making it a monoline font. And it turns out that monoline fonts are not highly-respected, because “every type designer will tell you: This is not how you design a font.” And yet, it’s everywhere in NYC! A fabulous deep dive, with lots of images to accompany it. Aresluna

🚘 The Fascinating History of Women Drivers. A very interesting discussion about the often-overlooked history of women drivers, including surprising (to me at least!) contributions by women to early automotive culture. Dorothy Levitt set speed records and authored a handbook for female motorists, Luella Bates was one of the first licensed female truck drivers in the United States, and others, all helped set the stage for more acceptance around women behind the wheel. Despite loving driving — it’s one of the things I miss most that my spinal CSF leak took away — it’s a topic I haven’t looked into before, and I’m grateful that Ann Helen did this deep dive so I could learn about it. Culture Study

😎 How the Capybara Won My Heart - and Almost Everyone Else’s. (Archive link.) A second animal longread from The New Yorker this month, this one as entertaining as the first. I first saw a capybara in 2002, when I was living in South America and spending time in Los Esteros del Iberá in Brazil. I’ve never forgotten the awe of seeing one of these enormous rodents in person. I’d never even heard of capybara before then, but now thanks to social media they’ve become a dearly beloved subject of reels and shorts. This piece goes into the animal from the perspective of its author, Gary Shteyngart, who fell for them right around when I did. He rightfully muses that their “remarkable calmness” and maximum chill around other species is something we humans could do to learn from. New Yorker

☠️ An L.L. Bean Heiress Suspected Neighbors of Poisoning Her Trees. What Happened Next Roiled Camden, Maine. Hooooboy. Treelaw! Neighbour feuds! Mystery! When Lisa Gorman noticed that a grove of her majestic oaks had died, she turned her suspicions to seasonal neighbours who claimed they wanted a better view of the harbour. The fight that ensued became a town drama — one that rages on to this day. Vanity Fair

🤖 This Therapist Is Not Who She Seems to Be. An interesting read about AI generating realistic content and people, and how that can become a larger issue, especially where reporting is concerned. I recently had a tangentially related problem where someone copied my celiac cards that go through two sets of translations and not only duplicated my copy from my sales pages, but screenshotted my own customers’ reviews on their product pages — and then slapped on a “10,000 cards sold” from an account that started that week. The about page for the seller was vague with no outbound links confirming a real person; the Facebook profile that shared the product page too was created that week and full of AI-generated art. It’s frustrating to see someone have no qualms throwing a bunch of immoral spaghetti against the wall at once for ulterior aims, be it a fake therapist or copied products. Such is the world we’re in these days, I know. But it doesn’t make it less frustrating. Allure

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

👔 Seth Rogen is the Boss Now. Seth Rogan is known for comedies and his love of weed. This profile of the 42-year-old actor and producer features some great writing, and sheds a light on his personality and humanity. He’s got a lot more integrity than many in showbiz, notes the piece, and a big heart to go with it. “He was the fun, crazy, party guy of the mid-2000s,” says recent costar Ike Barinholtz, “[n]ow he’s aged into a perfect example of how you can be a massively successful man and not be a huge prick.” Esquire

📸 Some roundups of beautiful, award-winning photography:

• 2024 Northern Lights photographer of the year.

• 2025 World Nature Photography Award Winners.

• Underwater Photographer of the Year 2025

• Sony World Photography Awards

🤑 FAFOnomics: How Chaos Became America’s Economic Strategy. A piece by Kyla Scanlon that attempts to cut through noise on tariffs, trade agreements, unipolar vs multipolar, DOGE, the market reaction, and America’s role in the world. It's from early February and more unraveling and threats have happened since then. “The goal isn't good governance,” she writes, “it's capturing attention at any cost.” That, and I would argue, a purposeful dismantling of treaties and relationships with historical allies. (Here in Canada, we’re feeling the chaos and the threats lobbied at us, including challenges to our sovereignty — this link is an 11 minute video interview with 🇨🇦’s Foreign Affairs minister about the current situation). Kyla's Newsletter

🍹 Why is my drink so damn weird? “Somehow we went from bartenders playing reanimator with forgotten cocktails, to bartenders reimagining themselves as Michelin-starred chefs.” When every cocktail is an experiment in novelty, ordering feels like a gamble. If history teaches us anything, it’s that this era of ‘out there’ drinks won’t last forever. Punch Drink

🏈 This Was a Super Bowl for the Haters, and the Eagles Were the Perfect Antagonists. “The lesson of this Eagles Super Bowl championship is that nothing, and no one, is inevitable.” The Super Bowl feels like forever ago, but this is an engaging analysis not only for the football fans, but for those curious about mindset around competitive games where a lot is on the line, including how to manage an opponent that everyone says is invincible. The Ringer

‪🌀 The Secret Pattern. “The soft morning light flits through the tender leaves, and I can’t believe I am here, in China, in Shanghai, in this very park of my childhood, after so many years, feeling as though nothing has changed.” A touching essay about family, patterns, food, and how they all connect in a nostalgic web. Granta

💸 Trump Order Shifts the Financial Burden of Climate Change Onto Individuals A proposed change that would “obliterate an obscure but critically important calculation the government uses to gauge the real-world costs” by getting rid of the social cost of carbon measure would also upend energy and environmental regulations meant to address climate change, and effectively transfer financial responsibility from companies like oil drillers and auto manufacturers onto to Americans individuals themselves. ProPublica

😥 Sorry Not Sorry. On the art of saying nothing in apology statements aka the corporate apology. “When you have too many communications professionals, every crisis looks like a communications crisis”, notes the piece. Everyone is falling all over themselves to do and say what they deem the “correct” thing, especially if it excuses them from actually taking action at all. The Walrus

🗣 Huh? The valuable role of interjections. Utterances like um, wow and mm-hmm aren’t garbage — they keep conversations flowing, writes Bob Holmes. I’ve spent many years trying to banish some of them from any public speaking, but it turns out some of them aren’t so terrible after all. Knowable Magazine

🍽 From the gut. Billed as a literary history of indigestion, this is an entertaining albeit sometimes wince-worthy roundup about the “gastrointestinal agonies” of writers, which — it turns out — can pretty much be its own genre, dating back to when the West started digging into how our digestive tract worked. VQR (via Longreads)

🇺🇦 The Reality of Ukraine. Timothy Snyder on the sadism of present-day actions and the larger meaning of the war in Ukraine. The divide in politics today is between unreality and reality, Snyder warns, noting that Russia’s invasion of was “a pioneering act of unreality politics” because the Russians targeted the vulnerabilities of westerners with messages that would resonate — all ways to say that Ukraine and its culture, language, and history weren’t “real” and that Ukrainians “are just Russians who do not know it”. This is still happening today against the backdrop of war, except America is now promulgating and amplifying those lies. Thinking About

💪 If You Ever Stacked Cups In Gym Class, Blame My Dad. “The first thing you need to know about Bob Fox is that he used to be a clown ... The second thing you need to know about my dad is that he was a really, really good clown.” I did not ever stack cups in gym class, but I did find this piece entertaining. Defector

🎫 High and Dry. (Archive link.) I attended Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, held in Tennessee, back in 2002. It was a long, long drive down from Montreal, which we did in two cars of friends, a ton of prepped food, and two tents with comfy air mattresses. We were sober throughout too, not out of mission but mostly out of practicality; less need to pee, more music to remember. In this piece Barrett Swanson builds a snapshot of his sober Bonnaroo experience, the desperate escapism attendees look for, and a look at the history of communal gatherings to boot. Harper's

📱 Digital Drugs Have Us Hooked. (Archive link.) Interview with the author of ‘Dopamine Nation’, Anna Lembke. “I think we’re essentially struggling with endemic narcissism, where our culture is demanding that we focus on ourselves so much that what it’s creating is this deep need to escape ourselves. And I think that is what is driving much of our pursuit of intoxicants as a way to just not have to think about ourselves for a blessed, you know, hour or two.” Ultimately, she thinks people are unhappier than they’d like to be, and can’t figure out why. Oof. New York Times

🏠 Why Gen Z Will Never Leave Home. “Many families are unprepared for the financial obligations of parenting adult children”, writes Claire Gagné, in a piece about Canadian families. Still, American friends echo similar findings: that many people don’t have enough for retirement, even without kids at home. A recent survey notes that 44% of still-working Canadians aged 44 to 55 have less than $5,000 CAD in savings. But housing prices have soared in Canada — the benchmark price of a home has ballooned from around $163,000 to $700,000 CAD over the last 25 years — while the median household income during that time period has increased by only $15,000 CAD. It’s a stark picture, though the piece isn’t all bleak. It also shares the stories of multigenerational living where it works out for all parties, and the interdependence is a boon, not a burden. Maclean's

🎧 Are noise-cancelling headphones to blame for young people's hearing problems? Dangers of noise canceling headphones— some audiologists believes the overuse of noise-cancelling headphones could have a part to play in how many teens are developing audio processing disorders, though the article doesn’t also mention the impact of Covid on hearing, especially in young people, nor go deep into research. Still, this piece made the rounds this month, because of how many people use subtitles and are struggling with audio, and it’s an interesting theory. BBC News

☣️ Low concentration chemicals spur toxicological debate. Does the dose still make the poison in today’s day and age? Environmental-health scientist Laura Vandenberg is among the researchers challenging that traditional adage and asserting that there may be long-term effects of even tiny amounts of endocrine-disrupting ‘forever chemicals’, especially with babies. Chemistry World

🔍 Murder in the Blue Mountains. Ashley and James Schwalm had what seemed like a fairy tale life: 2 wonderful children, fulfilling careers, and a gorgeous home close to the private ski club where they’d fallen in love. Then Ashley’s remains turned up in a burned-out car at the bottom of a ditch, and all signs pointed to her husband. This murder-mystery piece by Luc Rinaldi traces the couple’s story, and provides a stark reminder of the harrowing statistics that accompany it: if a homicide victim is a woman in Canada, there’s a 44% chance she was murdered by her spouse or romantic partner. Toronto Life

🕵 A ‘True Crime’ Documentary Series Has Millions of Views. And speaking of murder, this piece is an interview with the creator of viral “true crime” series where the murders were all created by AI. 404 Media

🪱 She thought she had jet lag. Doctors found parasitic worms in her brain. (Archive link.) Headline tells you all that you need to know. Also, new fear unlocked. Washington Post

🔗 Quick links

• Single-purpose site of the month: owls in towels.

• What did Hubble see on your birthday? NASA will generate the image for you.

• A woman in Colorado donated her kidney to save her prom date’s life — 35 years after they went to prom together.

• Cuttlefish ink can help keep sharks away from humans. Go bioluminescent cephalopods, go!

• World’s smallest otter makes a comeback in Nepal after 185 years.

• Oven to air fryer calculator.

• David Lindon has set a new Guinness World Record for building the world’s wee-est structure, a red Lego piece measuring 0.02517 mm by 0.02184 mm.

• Vagus nerve stimulation may tame autoimmune diseases.

• Scientists glue two proteins together, driving cancer cells to self-destruct.

Hope to see you next month!
-Jodi

The outpouring of empathy and desire to help more has been truly beautiful.

Thank you so much for the support.

Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter! CAE 46, last month’s newsletter, is here, if you missed it. The most popular link from last month was the ProPublica investigation of an oncologist who lied to his patients, with devastating consequences.

Personal updates

Over on Patreon, I shared a 9 minute mini-podcast about my progress since my leak re-opened and also a crash course in what it’s like to live with spinal CSF leak.

It’s been over a month since my leak reopened, and unfortunately I’m still in rough shape, with little ‘uptime’. I said I wasn’t sure if I could manage CAE due to my leak, but in the end it’s not only going out, it’s longer than usual! The world is chaotic and worrisome, both economically (hello tariffs) and otherwise — and bedrest leaves a lot of time for reading.

Featured art for CAE 47

This month’s featured artist is Pedro Luis Ajuriaguerra Saiz, whose image “Galactic Bee” won an award in the macro category for this year’s 1839 awards, linked below. You can follow Pedro on IG. I love this image to bits, and saw it via the TravelBloggerBuzz newsletter.

The most interesting things I read this month

These links are once again formatted thanks to the help of my friend Mike.

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

💰 Caviar Pizzas, New Money, and the Death of an Ancient Fish. I’ve shared pieces from Hakai magazine over the last few years, and they’ve consistently put out great writing and journalism, with beautiful feature photos. Unfortunately this is likely the last article I’ll share, as they have shut down. It goes into the history of caviar and its renaissance (putting it on pizza, or Doritos, for example). Caviar used to be a “pricey but very niche menu item first popularized by Russian royalty in tsarist times” — but no more. Global caviar sales are up 74% since 2020, and still rising. Bad for nature, good for restaurants’ bottom line. Great writing from Paul Greenberg, whose books I’ve read enthusiastically. Hakai Magazine

👀 On ‘paying attention’ to the bad stuff. One of the things that I've said a lot during these past 7.5 years of leaking, is to please, please not ask me how I'm feeling. People mean well in asking; they're trying to show they care. But asking causes me to focus on how I’m feeling. And how I feel is almost always terrible, which means it’s one more moment lost to thinking about the terribleness of it all. Instead, I’ve asked people to say they’re ‘checking in’ or ‘sending love’, and not ask ‘how are you feeling’ or ‘how’s the pain’ or ‘are you feeling better?’ It may seem like semantics to you, but to not ask directly means that I can sidestep a renewed focus on the awfulness and pain. I've found it a crucial discussion with readers and friends and family in order to find my way through this time of my life. This thread from Mishell Baker, a patient with incurable cancer, has a similar ethos. She explains the “why” in a way that resonated for me; every moment she’s not focusing on her illness is a better moment for her. Skywriter

📱We’re getting the social media crisis wrong. A lot of the arguments about democracy talks about the wisdom and knowledge of individuals, hoping they are willing to think of others — even though, as Henry Ferrell notes, democracy “is a profoundly collective enterprise.” So we point fingers at social media and how it shapes people. This piece asserts that we’re mistaking outcomes from social for causes of the deterioration of democracy. Instead, he says, “the problem is that actual individual citizens are biased and, on average, not particularly knowledgeable about politics.” I don’t disagree that his thesis is true, but how do we fix that? Especially when cuts to education or algorithms that tamp down on factual reporting are increasingly the norm, and we’re watching the destructive outcomes of that lack of knowledge play out in real time. Programmable Matter

👃🏻Scent Makes a Place. “Perhaps due to our trouble translating scents into language, it was once common wisdom that human noses were weak, shoddy things compared to our animal friends. Time and research has challenged that paradigm.” Sure, we don’t have the scent-skills of some animals, but we can distinguish between some 1 trillion (!) different odours. Smell is so inextricably linked to memory, and as this piece notes it’s also deeply dependent on a dizzying amount of variables. It can be impacted by lives already lived, by sounds and temperature, by the food we’re eating or the colours we’re seeing. By our emotions. Something may smell amazing to us in one situation, but we get disgusted in another. “It’s a sense that shifts and slips, sometimes in predictable ways but sometimes in totally unexpected directions,” writes Katy Kelleher in this beautiful piece. “Much like the brain as a whole.” Nautilus

❌ Dismissed and Disbelieved, Some Long COVID Patients Are Pushed Into Psychiatric Wards. A hard read. As there still aren’t conclusive biomarker tests for long covid, and because patients often don’t look outwardly unwell, many patients are told it’s just a mental issue and not a physical one. My post-viral anaphylaxis, flushing, hives, and other symptoms were also dismissed as ‘stress’ or ‘migraines’, as was my spinal CSF leak—despite a lumbar puncture that preceded it. Um, I was a former corporate lawyer, and I happen to know stress. It wasn’t stress. I was validated by detailed testing, at least for MCAS, but some physicians still believe that too is ‘in your head’. Invisible illness can be so difficult and isolating. TIME

🧠 Scientists uncover how the brain washes itself during sleep. I have shared many posts over the years about the glymphatic pathway, and how it helps the brain ‘wash’ out toxins as we sleep. Since cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is involved, it’s like catnip to me. If you haven’t read about it, the TL;DR is that the brain doesn’t have lymphatic vessels that move fluid like in the rest of the body. But in 2012, scientists identified an alternative system where CSF (hiiii!) seeps through the organ via teeny passages alongside blood vessels, one that clears out metabolic waste as we sleep. Mostly during non-REM sleep, particularly stage 3 slow-wave deep sleep. I don’t get that much deep sleep, so the early glymphatics papers led me to work on optimizing it; I went from 20 mins deep sleep to 1 hour-1.5 hours a night, which I hope to write about somewhere, when my brain juice (ahem CSF) allows. Anyhow! This link is to a new paper, where scientists found that the sleep drug zolpidem (Ambien) impedes the blood vessel oscillations that help this washing process — meaning it can hamper the brain’s ability to clear waste. Which we do not want. Why? “Studies from Nedergaard’s group and others suggest vigorous glymphatic clearance is beneficial, but circulation falters in Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative illnesses.” Ooooh, ok. And given Ambien’s popularity, this is very notable…but it’s also one study among many; more research is needed. This is, after all, a new system. No doubt we’ll find out more — and you’ll be stuck reading about it here. Science

(For those who want to dig into glymphatics, including with great illustrations, please see this post on sleep, brain aging, and waste clearance. It’s a great overview of the pathway, and the recent studies including the one above.)

😱 There Is No Safe Word. (Archive link) I had to include this profile, as harrowing, horrifying, and very very ugly as it is. It’s about Neil Gaiman, sexual abuse, and what consent really means when you’re involved with someone who is ‘untouchable’ and famous. It’s disturbing to read, but important to read. It’s also really really depressing. If you’re even somewhat reasonably online you’ve likely seen it, but for those who aren’t: I didn’t want to let it sit in the dark for CAE. Vulture

🐳 How Whales Found Peace in War. A fascinating article about researchers who used hormone analysis from the forgotten collection of post-war plates of whale baleens (baleen grows from a whale’s upper jaw downward, lined up like the slats of window blinds) to see how the resumption of whaling after WWII impacted the species. During the gruesome years of war, whales were at peace; hunting stopped as people went off to fight in ships previously used for whaling. Now, analysis from the baleen collection show that stress hormones rose in whales in the first year that whaling resumed after the war—even in the whales that weren’t killed. Biographic

🇬🇱 Inside the race for Greenland's mineral wealth. What a bizarre timeline we’re in. Yep, the US is trying to take over Greenland, the world’s largest island and home to more than 56,000 people — despite it being part of Denmark and self-governing. Why? It’s in a unique geopolitical position, for one; its capital Nuuk is closer to New York than it is to Denmark’s capital Copenhagen. But also, it’s rich in rare minerals and as the ice melts there and in the Arctic due to climate change, it will only afford more access to areas that can be mined. (As an aside, Greenland has been looking for more independence from Denmark, but it still relies on a $500mm USD annual grant from them.) BBC

🏜 Signs of Life in a Desert of Death. Beautiful read from Nick Hunt, who journeyed through the Aralkum desert. It’s a thoughtful contemplation about natural and renewal, informed by his time visiting the world’s youngest desert, left by the vanishing of the Aral Sea. Sure, the landscape looks post-apocalyptic — but it also contains new life. And, new to me, it also houses an Apocalypse Clock from an ancient civilization, counting toward the end of the world. Noema

♿️ Fleeing the LA fires alone on a wheelchair: ‘I had to take my chances’. A society is only as good as it treats its most vulnerable. As I’ve said many times, I may be disabled now, but we’re all going to get there eventually (usually in older age). It’s unacceptable to treat the vulnerable as if they don’t matter, yet we often get left behind both figurative and literally. And being blamed, as we have publicly this week, for a plane crash we had nothing to do with is horrifying. I can’t count the number of times trolls have told me that I’m “useless to society” with my leak disabling me, and that I should just kill myself. My situation could be anyone. It only takes one moment. In this piece, Galen Buckwalter shared how he fled the Eaton fire alone in a wheelchair, dodging debris as the fire closed in. “In emergencies, disabled people are the last to get services … [w]e have no system. You’re on your own.” The Guardian

⌚️ Building a (T1D) smartwatch from scratch. Detailed post about how the watch was built for the author’s 9 year old son. He wanted something simple, no bells and whistles that would distract his son in school, and something that could withstand sports or occasional water. He also wanted it to provide reliable CGM data on demand, and haptic feedback for urgently low or high glucose levels. And a fun watch face. Talented, and creative! Andrew Childs (via Hacker Newsletter)

🪖 The Militia and the Mole. This piece made the rounds when it came out, rightfully so. Outraged by the Jan 6 riots, a wilderness survival trainer spent years climbing the ranks of right-wing militias undercover, telling no one until now. The person who chose to tell was reporter Josh Kaplan, whose piece goes into militias, their tactics, and domestic terrorism, and is supported by documentation and covertly recorded conversations. Well worth a read. ProPublica

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

🇯🇵 Eastern Promises. A thoughtful essay on the changes in Japan’s megacity, one that shows how much things have evolved even since I visited in 2015: “As Tokyo’s economy has become a client of the service industry, it has drained its reservoirs of young people to run cash registers and deliver food, meaning guest workers must be tolerated.” In a Tokyo of tourists, many of its residents have become strangers. The Baffler

🦠 Are some cases of Alzheimer’s disease caused by infection? A very large study compared people who had contracted Covid (even mild cases) to people of similar age who had not had Covid, and found that over the next 3 years, those who’d had the virus were nearly 2x as likely to develop Alzheimer’s. Several other viruses (and bacteria) also have been linked to the condition, though the evidence is more preliminary: see this recent piece about how getting shingles is linked to cognitive decline, and also how head trauma may be linked. Harvard Health Publishing

🪦 Donald Trump Wants You to Die. Unfortunately, though, these kinds of studies are in question. We were able to mostly conquer infectious disease via advances in the scientific understanding of disease and vaccines, but those also depend on public policy, which is what is currently being dismantled in real time. Paul Krugman

🎥 The Second Trump Presidency, Brought to You by YouTubers. (Gift link) Related: a Bloomberg team — seriously, there's a robust byline here! — analyzed 2,000 videos and 1,300 hours of podcasts to map their interconnectedness in one dataviz story, showing how only a few podcasters (including Joe Rogan, Theo Von and Logan Paul) are mobilizing America’s men to lean to the right. Bloomberg

✍️ Signature moves: are we losing the ability to write by hand? In elementary school, I had to earn a “penmenship certificate” to be allowed to write in pen, instead of pencil. (I was the last one in grade 4 to achieve this dubious honour, and yet the idea of losing handwriting-as-skill is one that I never really thought much about). I’m surprised the author doesn't differentiate between cursive and block handwriting, and the piece veers a bit too hard into nostalgia (or maybe I'm too bitter about that last-place finish). Still, an interesting discussion for this month's CAE. The Guardian

⚖️ A former tech CEO is on a crusade to get the record of his arrest removed from the internet. How? By suing a journalist for $25 million for truthfully reporting that his domestic violence arrest had occurred. Gazetteer San Francisco

💬 Blake Lively Reshoots the End of Her Story. You may be asking yourself why I’m bringing this case up again, because I mentioned it in CAE 46. It’s not because of the gossip, it’s because few articles reveal the “contemporary machinations of Hollywood” (as Petersen calls it) this nakedly. And it’s a reminder that, even if you’re not on TikTok, you’re still susceptible to and absorbing a messaging strategy that you may not realize is a strategy — because it’s cloaked in the furtive tone of small-town gossip. Yes, TikTok has shaped the narrative of public opinion thoroughly, but also: yes, readily we can be manipulated, even when we think we’re not. And this applies to anything, right? To baseless conspiracies about wildfires, about Haitian immigrants, about birth certificates, about covid. We’re so easily manipulated by “a nefarious army of people working in the shadows to manipulate the public,” as Petersen calls it. To our detriment. Culture Study

😡 Does One Emotion Rule All Our Ethical Judgments? (Archive link) Not unrelated, this Elizabeth Kolbert review looks at Kurt Gray’s new book about outrage. The book asserts that as long as there’s a perception of harm, there’s a potential for outrage — because fear and moral indignation are inextricably linked. Gray argues that the less physical danger humans have been in, the more hazards we ‘see’ lurking out there. “Millions of years of being hunted have made us preoccupied with danger,” he writes. “But without saber-toothed cats to fear, we fret about elections, arguments in group texts, and decisions at PTA meetings.” Interesting theory. New Yorker

💻 The Rise & Fall Of Silk Road. From 2015, but worth a read (and an excellent piece) on why the Silk Road founder, recently pardoned by Trump, was sentenced to two life sentences in the first place. WIRED

🧬 The genetic key to bipolar disorder. In the largest study conducted to date on the genetics of bipolar disorder, researchers have identified 36 genes linked to the condition. This marks a significant step toward understanding the genetic factors behind bipolar disorder, which could lead to improved diagnosis and treatment in the future. University of Oslo

🔎 AI means the end of internet search as we’ve known it. AI is reshaping search — and to what end? This piece explains how it’s pulling away access to links and providing direct answers instead, leaving publishers and blogs with far less traffic. Also those answers aren’t always accurate. My celiac cards primarily depend on search, and I’ve seen a considerable downturn of late. It’s pretty demoralizing for those of us working for years to build the sites Google said it wanted. Those guidelines changed, as has the ability for smaller sites to rank well. Evolve or die, as they say. Technology Review

🗳 On Tyranny. For those who want democracy and the rule of law in the US after 2024, notes Timothy Snyder, “I would only add: now is the time to organize, to prepare to win locally and nationally, and to talk not only about what is to be lost but what can be gained.” This list of lessons from tyranny in the 20th c. was written years ago, but has been used around the world since and is still (very) relevant now. Thinking About

🔥 LA is Toxic, and We Need to Talk About it. Like many, I’ve watched in horror as flames engulf the LA area. I was relieved to see the fires are now all contained. This talks about post-fire toxicity, and it’s not to be missed; I have more than one close friend directly impacted by exposure during 9/11, both now with significant health issues as a result. Their lives have not been the same since. Please read, and if you’re in the region, please try to protect yourselves. I realize not everyone can leave, but at minimum please mask up with a good mask — even when it seems like the air is better. Good Material

🦋 The Technological Poison Pill. Mike Masnick’s thorough post explaining why Bluesky is enshittification-resistant (not enshittification-proof, but resistant!), mainly because it has a tech poison pill baked in. TechDirt

💸 Dangerous Oligarchs Grab Everything. Yeah, CAE has a lot of political reads this month, I know. There’s a lot going on, and it’s going to get worse as the current admin continues to flood the zone. This read is about the new era of “regulations are bad, cost cutting is good” type of governance (if we can call it that) will bring us in the hands of DOGE — not just in the US, but broadly — here in Canada, in Greenland (clearly) and otherwise. It’s not cheerful, but it’s also important. In talking with outraged MAHA-leaning Americans in my inbox, they don’t seem to realize just how much of their safety is corralled into a reasonable place due to public health policy. Which is how Trump et. al wants it wants it, of course. You may say, why is this piece focused on billionaires? It’s because the current admin has a combined net worth at least $383 billion — higher than the GDP of 172 countries. It's going to be a rocky few years, at best. Can We Still Govern?

🥰 She Is in Love With ChatGPT. (Gift article via my friend Eugene!) A wild piece about a woman in love with ChatGPT—or Leo, as it named itself. She spends up to 56 hours a week on the ChatGPT app, with it filling the role of boyfriend, therapist, advisor, and erotic partner. Wilder still is that her friends think it's been good for her, and her husband (yes, husband) doesn't mind. New York Times

🛒 Inside ‘Teflon Joe’s’: Why your favorite grocery store is not what you think. We don't have Trader Joe’s here in Ontario, and many a Canadian has brought back a haul on a visit to the States, sharing the coveted goodies with their loved ones (or sometimes hoarding it for themselves). I've had readers mail me ube pancake mixes, and family bring back gluten free treats. And yet, as this piece notes, not all is great at this beloved institution, with its food recalls, safety violations and more — but somehow, none have tarnished their reputation yet. Fast Company

⚕️ Study Ties COVID to Higher Risk of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. A now-conclusive American federal study (RIP, federal study monies) of 15,000 people shows that Covid has a 1 in 20 disability rate, and triggers ME/CFS at rates 15x higher than pre-pandemic incidences. In the study, those who had Covid had nearly 8x high rates of ME/CFS than uninfected participants. Make America Sick Again, I guess? Psychiatrist.com

💵 There’s One Weird Trick to Being Healthy. Speaking of, I can confirm that there would be no way I could have made the progress I did on slowly getting ‘uptime’ and some mobility back — including via the many different accessibility aides I bought such as electric blinds and others that improve my quality of life — without my income supporting that privilege. I’m lucky I built out my celiac cards as mostly passive income to contribute to my business even while ‘laying flat’ and leaking, but for many the support I’ve put in place is out of reach for many. Slate

🌨️ When a Deadly Winter Storm Trapped a Luxury Passenger Train Near the Donner Pass for Three Days. In January 1952, a train heading from Chicago to San Francisco, normally a 40-hour trip, got stranded in the Sierra Nevada because of snow — despite having three engine cars trying to haul it. There were 226 on board. Very engaging read! Smithsonian Magazine

📰 Becoming Trauma Informed. We're going to see more harrowing reporting, more tragedy, more angst — and how to report it effectively, kindly, or ethically is something not everyone learns in J-school or generally. As the author of this piece notes, in journalism school, “we were instructed to never share a draft of your story with your subject”. But practicing ‘trauma-informed journalism’ involves its own special set of guidelines. This piece goes into them. The Reported Essay (via ‪Mark Armstrong‬)

📸 Photography!

• BigPicture’s 2024 competition winners.

• 1839’s Photographer Of The Year Contest winners, also where the featured image from CAE 47 is from.

• Life in Another Light Infrared Photography Contest 2024 Winners. I’ve not seen this one prior, though it's got earlier years of winners too so it's been going on! Interesting galleries, and different than the usual award types.

🇺🇸 The Values Gap. On how the USA is an outlier in the developed West, both for its political norms and for its attitudes toward and tolerance of a high scale of violence. Scrupulous Pessimism

🥺 More Than Just Things: The Deep Ache of Losing Everything. For those on the outside of the LA fires (or other disasters), it’s tempting to say, “they’re just losing things.” To the people who’ve lost those things, it’s a complex issue, layered with sentimentality and memory and meaning. “When everything is gone, grief runs deeper than belongings—it's the loss of security, identity, and the physical proof of a life once lived. Survival is a gift, but it comes with an unshakable ache for all left behind. Recovery isn't just about rebuilding but finding a way to heal when the flames have taken more than just things.” The grief isn’t just about the item lost, it’s also about a reality of living that is also now gone. It’s pure saudade, a melancholic nostalgia and the love that remains for something that can never return. Dispatches with Holly McKay

🥷 What The Thieves Did Not Steal. A car break in led to a loss of some things for Andrew Chee, but he was able to claw back some of them during his stay in Montreal, including his annotated manuscript of a new novel. This is a different piece about theft than we’re used to; it’s about the nostalgia of what was recovered more than than the initial loss. It reminded me of finding my backpack again years after the burglary night that started my life of disability. The Querent.

Mostly links, less editorial: sorry, I ran out of brain juice:

David Lynch was here. A dispatch from the real Twin Peaks, where fans flocked after the director’s death.

Chins Are In. Hypermasculine jawlines are all the rage in Hollywood, and beyond. Vulture

The battle for the soul of Serbia. The need for lithium is driving a global race for resources, while plans for a mine 190km from Belgrade have triggered social and political turmoil. New Statesman

Parents Are Gaming Their Kids’ Credit Scores. (Archive link). Title is self-explanatory. The Atlantic

My Mom Was Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Then She Got Better. A spinal CSF leak patient misdiagnosed, and finally treated. She had a CSF-venous fistula, a different kind of leak to the one I’ve got. The Free Press

How Watch Duty Became an Essential Resource for Angelenos During Wildfires. I hadn’t heard of this app before the LA fires, but it was a critical download for many in harm’s way. Hollywood Reporter.

The School Shootings Were Fake. The Terror Was Real. For almost 2 years, a California teen terrorized schools across the US with violent swatting calls. This piece tells the story of the PI and former hacker who tracked him down. WIRED

What Happened to School Lunch Hour? Everyone’s concerned about nutritious school lunches, but they don’t give the same thought to whether kids actually have time to eat them. Play Makes Us Human

Y2K seems like a joke now, but in 1999 people were really freaking out. I remember it well! NPR

The pandemic’s untold fertility story. A well-researched longform piece by Hayley Gleeson about how Covid can affect fertility, as well as complicate pregnancy for those who are able to conceive. ABC News

🔗 Quick links

• As there’s a US pause on health comms, including recalls, I shared on social that it may be useful for Americans to sign up for Canada’s safety recalls and alerts newsletter. As a celiac, I’ve long been signed up for both, and there is overlap as lots of products are sold in both countries — for now at least (hello tariffs 😭). Subscribe here, or see the online database here for food recalls, where you can also search by type of recall / alert.

• Where did dinosaurs evolve from? We finally have a clue! Due to supercontinent Pangaea, it’s not where I expected.

• World Sports Photography Award winners.

• A statistical analysis to determine the best movie sequels, and why they’re so good.

• Speaking of statistical analysis, there’s a 1.3% chance that a giant asteroid will hit Earth in 2032. (This may be good or bad news, depending on whether you’re bullish on humanity or not)

• My bio used to say “I eat soup for a living” and that is likely why 384372 of you sent me a link to these new ‘soup cough drops’ from Progresso this month.

• Dartitis: like the yips, but for darts.

• A marriage proposal entirely in office jargon.

• A primer on hydroclimate whiplash.

• A paralyzed man flew a virtual drone using a brain implant that links neural signals to fine movements.

Hope to see you next month,
-Jodi

It’s now January, and many symptoms that had disappeared have come rushing back. The screeching tinnitus, the nausea, dizziness, and shakiness upright, the ‘brain sag’ at the back of my head yanking my skull downward the minute I stand, and the searing pain at my leak sites. Before I slid, I was averaging 7-8 non-consecutive hours upright a day. Now, I’m back to being almost entirely bedbound.

This is the first time that I’ll need to manage a reopened leak while living alone. Truthfully, I’m not sure how it will go. I’m planning to hire increased home-care support, and reach out to friends to help batch cook items I can freeze. It’s daunting, and I am so very sad to lose my hard-earned uptime hours. And from such a tiny movement too.

All this to say: next month’s CAE may look different, because I either may not be able to send it, or it’ll be a shorter link list with less editorial.

Either way, I hope you’ll stick around until I can send out CAE the way I usually do.

Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter! CAE 45, last month’s newsletter, is here, if you missed it. The most popular link from last month was my post about the lumbar puncture-burglary nightmare of an evening that changed my life.

A quick read on seasonal depression

For those who have seasonal affective disorder, or are in the market for a SAD lamp (if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, now is the time), I am sharing an article I wrote about what SAD is, and how to help manage it.

Featured art for CAE 46

This month’s featured artist is Elspeth Mclean, an artist who creates beautiful landscapes and mandalas in a riot of colours. Her Autumn Blossom artwork, below, made me feel things. I thought you might enjoy it too. You can find her on her website, or IG.

The most interesting things I read this month

These links are once again formatted thanks to the help of my friend Mike.

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

🧠 A devastating nerve disease stalks a mountain village. Why did a cluster of cluster of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis happen pop up in a tourist town in France? ALS, a disease that occurs due to the progressive loss of nerve function in the brain and body (eventually leading to paralysis and death) is rare — and usually does not happen in clusters. Estimated at occurrences of 2-3 out of 1000,000 people, in Montchavin, France a population of only a few hundred people yielded 16 cases since 2009. Neurologists were stumped, until researchers figured out a possible link. I won’t tease with clickbait; the culprit is a toxic mushroom that grows locally called “false morels”—that do indeed look a lot like real morels. They’re illegal to sell Finland and Denmark because they’re so toxic, but nonetheless have an underground market; some people may also purchase them or forage them thinking they’re eating the non-toxic real morel version. How researchers were led to the mushroom thesis is fascinating too, and set out in the article. Knowable

🕳 How to disappear completely. The internet is forever, or so the saying goes. But also, and especially these days, it isn’t. I use a broken link checker plugin for my 16 year old site Legal Nomads, because so many links I’ve shared over the years are simply dead ends these days. “The loss of content is not a new phenomenon,” writes s.e. smith. For every “iconic cuneiform tablet bemoaning poor customer service,” many more have disappeared into the ground (or the ether). And yet it feels more real in the digital age because we’re seeing it happen in real-time in ways that couldn’t be accounted for in prior eras. The digital decay is happening at a breakneck speed, and it’s hard not to feel, like the author does, as if we’re all just fading away. The Verge

🚘 Asleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness Wars. Fascinating read by Nate Rogers, diving deep into the increasingly-bright (way too bright!) headlights on cars—both why it's happening, and how companies leverage their tech to appeal to safety-conscious consumers, despite it being poorer for roads overall. The Ringer

🌝 Moon. Everything you ever wanted to know about the moon, and then some. A whopping 16,000 words of deeply-researched information, this explainer by Bartosz Ciechanowski about “a fellow companion that gently affects our own existence” is full of physics, interactive graphics, and bolded words to illustrate its points and break up the density. His pieces are always educational marvels, and this one is no exception. Bartosz Ciechanowski (via The Browser)

🔊 The Ghosts in the Machine. A surprising investigation about how Spotify is aggressively replacing artist-driven music on its most popular playlists with “fake artists” or “ghost artists”. Apparently at Spotify this is called Perfect Fit Content. The piece explains that the use of ‘Perfect Fit Content’ to bulk up playlists allows Spotify to replace real artists and therefore minimize the royalty payments they’d otherwise be forced to pay. Le yikes. Harper's Magazine

🦀 Animals as chemical factories. Why do we still rely on animals for life-saving chemicals? We use a “Noah’s Ark of biofarming”; horses for antivenin, horseshoe crab blood to test medical equipment, silkworms for silk, eggs for influenza vaccines, and much more. Some of these practices go back millennia, and this piece gives us a deep dive. These days, though, just about any molecule that has historically been made from animals can be made synthetically from engineered cells, note the authors. So why don’t we? It’s complicated. Partly scaling issues, partly finding the right solutions. But it’s a worthy cause, and not only because the animals we’re farming are clearly worse for our vampirish tendencies. This piece has it all, charts of the synthetic process, an overview of a niche but fascinating topic, and sets it all out with a ‘meta’ take on concept overall. I’ve only read micro-histories on the individual animals prior. Very good piece. Works In Progress

🎗 “Eat What You Kill.” Imagine going through 9 years of chemotherapy only to discover you never had cancer in the first place? This horrifying fact pattern is but the tip of the iceberg in this investigative piece by J. David McSwane. He called it one of the more haunting pieces of journalism he’s worked on in two decades of writing. ProPublica

💔 How Does My Divorce Make You Feel? (Archive link) Oof, what a read. This is a personal essay by Dr. Lilly Jay, about her divorce from actor Ethan Slater. But it’s not a gossip piece, it’s about healing after betrayal and shaming. The piece made me wince, both for how she was treated and for the public callousness of it all. Her ex is now with pop singer Ariana Grande, and he left Jay just after she gave birth — while she had PPD, and having recently moved to the UK so that he could film Wicked. “My entire adult life, I feared that loss of control and postpartum depression would destroy me,” Jay writes. She encourages us to think about her “messy not-so-personal” life in that way, that her loss, rage, powerlessness, and sadness allows her to hold ours. “Some of what you loved most about your partner is actually your own goodness reflected back to you,” she says. “It’s yours to keep and carry forward.” We’re hearing from her, but we can’t hear from Ariana’s ex-husband (who presumably has some thoughts on the topic); allegedly he signed an NDA as part of the divorce settlement. The Cut

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

❓ Medical Mysteries: Her depression and poor memory had an unusual cause Woman’s suicidality and depression turns out to have been misdiagnosed for 50 (!) years. So, how did she finally get the diagnosis? A neurologist ordered a high field epilepsy brain MRI, her first MRI in nearly 50 years of suffering. How did no one suggest an MRI for this poor woman?! What she really had was a hypothalamic hamartoma, a tumorlike growth that is present at birth and as it grows affects mood, release of hormones, and memory. Washington Post via archive link

🍚 The Secret History of Risotto archive link - https://archive.is/YqDMG Another long read, this time about the ‘why’ of risotto. I’d read a full book on this one. “Nobody is quite sure where risotto came from,” Anthony Lane notes early on, sharing that there is a recipe for riso giallo in padella, or “yellow rice in a pan,” that dates from 1809. “Did that mark an innovation or codify a long-held custom?”, he asks? A very delicious read. The New Yorker

🎞 Casual Viewing. A very long piece that discusses how Netflix has significantly shaped the film and television industry, including the studios themselves. With Netflix’ membership model, audiences no longer pay for films in one-offs, at least not from the privacy of their homes, and what Netflix creates doesn’t need to be profitable or pretty or even well-made. Netflix’s audiences watch from their homes, on couches, in beds, on public transportation, on toilets; oftentimes “they aren’t even watching.” This very big shift has allowed their programming to be a guinea pig of sorts, crashing through the fences of cinematic rules. n+1

👯 Twins were the norm for our ancient primate ancestors − one baby at a time had evolutionary advantages. Recent research suggests that having twins used to be the norm, not the exception. Despite the fact that almost all primates today (including people) usually give birth to one baby at a time, our most recent common ancestor from North America (and by ‘most recent’ the article means ‘60 million years ago’) likely gave birth to twins as the standard. TIL. The Conversation

📱How WhatsApp ate the world. WhatsApp is the world’s most popular messaging app, with 2 billion users who every day send 100 billion messages in 60 languages across 180 countries. I’ve used it for many years, to communicate with my landlord in Mexico, to arrange for a ride in Vietnam, to book appointments for a hair cut in Thailand. While Americans don’t use it much, it’s a humming part of business infrastructure in many a location. This is a deep dive into how WhatsApp grew so big — and Meta’s plan for what comes next (hint: making you use Meta products as much as possible). Rest of World

🇸🇾 Dawn in Damascus. ‪ “‘Forever is over,’ Syrians chanted over and over” notes Kareem Shaheenin this moving read that attempts to share the importance and feeling of Assad’s regime disintegrating thereby ending 60 years of Baathist rule. New Lines Magazine

🌱 In a Noah’s Ark move, PNG migrants bring thousands of trees to safer ground. Maria Kamin left the Carteret Islands in Papua New Guinea in response to rising sea levels. She and others moving to the nearby Bougainville Island have started a ‘green migration’ — taking plant and tree specimens from their native islands with them across the ocean to preserve their biodiversity. Mongabay

🩹 Seeing the Forest for the Trees. Good overview of simple tips to improve health from a ground level in America, a likely counterpoint to the MAHA messaging which — much like the messaging surrounding chronic illness, often paints America as lazy and unwilling to be healthy or well. That may be part of the issue for some of the population, but there are systemic issues of access to healthier food, to infrastructure that makes it easier and more pleasant to exercise, and to care that play in. Ignoring those factors only victim-blames for something that is a societal responsibility. This short post also goes into some of those inequities and how fixing them would boost health of the country overall. Your Local Epidemiologist

🇻🇦 Inside the Vatican’s secret saint-making process. To be recognised as a saint, a person has to go through what is essentially a long ‘posthumous trial’, one that picks apart their physical and spiritual remains to decide what is worthy of canonization. How does the Vatican do it? As the Vatican contemplates canonizing a ‘millennial saint’, this piece unpacks the process, as well as the office that handles it. Named the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, it has been in operation since 1588. The Guardian

ℹ️ Why Misinformation Must Not Be Ignored. I am glad to see substantiated pushback to the bizarre assertion from other research that misinformation is not that big of a deal, and that fear of it is a form of moral panic. It is a big deal. And as the paper notes, “[i]t is not irrational to be alarmed when alarming things are happening”. In this new article, researchers respond to critics in detail, and clarify two key points for the field: (1) that when misinformation is properly defined, its prevalence in society is substantial, and (2) misinformation causally impacts attitudes and behaviours in society. APA PsychNet

⚖️ Speaking of: I Fell For Justin Baldoni’s Act — And His Smear Campaign. This piece by Ella Dawson is a good reminder that even savvy modern people, well-schooled in the smoke and mirrors of social media, can fall for misinformation campaigns. Says Dawson, “He represents so many advocates and allies who are neither, and are in fact the perpetrators of the injustices they claim to fight.” For those unfamiliar with Baldoni’s coordinated campaign against Blake Lively, it’s also a primer of what unfolded from it. Patreon (ungated)

🐔 How America Lost Control of the Bird Flu, Setting the Stage for Another Pandemic. No one wants to hear it, but here we are. Bird flu could still be contained on dairy farms if the US shifted gears rapidly — but politically, that is not going to happen. We don’t know yet if it’ll become a pandemic, but it’s a short mutation away from transmitting between humans — and if it does, notes a source in the article, “we’re screwed.” KFF Health News

🏥 What I've learned about long-term disability insurance providers. I know Leif, the author of this piece, from my travel writing days. Like me, he’s shifted careers and in his case spent the last years writing legal content online, with a task list that included finding some of the “most egregious court cases involving providers spending vast sums of money to avoid paying benefits to seriously sick and injured people.” Killing Batteries

⚕️Gisèle Pelicot, Medical Misogyny, and Disability. Kelly writes about why she thinks Gisèle’s physicians failed to listen and help her, and how disabled people face higher risks of abuse. The Disabled Ginger

🇻🇳 The Forgotten History Behind Saigon's CEE Colonial Substations. During my years in Saigon, I loved this bright blue building. I always thought it said EE, my dad’s initials, and it gave me an extra smile to wonder by. It turns out it’s CEE, not EE, and it’s an electrical substation. Woven into the fabric of modern-day streets, the aging building is a throwback to the “complex legacy of French colonialism,” writes Uyên Đỗ. Saigoneer

Some fun stuff! Year end lists and photos:

• Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards’s 2024 finalists. Always delightful.

• Astronomy Photographer of the Year’s gallery of 2024 winners.

• The Best Of 2024 from Longreads.

• The 2024 Bloomberg Jealousy List (Archive link), a list of the pieces Bloomberg staff thought were so good, they wish they wrote them. I look forward to this post every year.

• Tom Whitwell’s 52 things I learned in 2024. Another annual tradition.

• Time Magazine’s best inventions of 2024.

• Pretty niche, but New Scientist has a roundup of the best and weirdest photos of robots from 2024.

• Deadline’s best films of 2024.

• Wikipedia’s most popular articles of 2024.

• Far Out Mag’s 50 best albums of 2024

• The 8 worst technology failures of 2024 courtesy of Technology Review

• The top 10 product designs of 2024 from Dezeen

• And, finally: the most scathing book reviews of 2024 from LitHub.

🔗 Quick links

• Former lawyer (now a writer and more) Irene Kim compiled a ‘best of 2024’ list from around the Substackverse, and asked me to contribute the best things I read, bought, wore, etc.

• New reports sharpen the clinical picture of recent human H5N bird flu illnesses in US and Canada.

• An barred owl flew down a chimney and into an Arlington, Virginia home to perch atop the family Christmas tree. (video)

• A team of biologists, mycologists and microbiologists found that a species of mushroom growing in parts of Africa is the closest relative of Psilocybe cubensis, the most widespread hallucinogenic mushroom known to science.

• Vietnam to spend $67 billion on a new high-speed railway between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city.

• Toronto man builds tiny mobile homes for the homeless

• Diamonds can now be created from scratch in 15 minutes.

• Why did your insurer deny your claim? Use ProPublica's claim service to request notes and documents (via Kottke).

• Do your shoelaces sit crooked? This granny knot primer will fix that for you, for life.

• A new way to tackle inflammatory skin conditions, via inhibiting mast cells in the skin. (Sign me up)

• A species of whale so rare it’s never been seen alive.

• New slug “glue” can stick brains back together. Can we get this for my dura too, please?

This newsletter is free because the projects below all support me enough to pay the bills.

If you’re able, please consider supporting my work elsewhere, as it helps keep CAE free!

• Patreon. A monthly membership where I share overflow links from CAE, write more personal posts about managing chronic pain and tools that have helped me, and share photos (mostly of flowers and trees!).

• Typographic maps of food. I designed these maps, and they are for sale as museum-quality posters, tees, and tote bags.

• Celiac translation cards. I’ve sold 19,000 of these gluten free cards, now in 19 languages, and I’m thrilled that I can still help celiacs travel safely, with less anxiety.

Hope to see you next month,
-Jodi

Holiday sales

This newsletter is free because my other work — my writing on Patreon (monthly membership), my hand-drawn maps of food, and my celiac translation cards — all support me enough to pay the bills.

If you’re able, please consider supporting my work elsewhere, as it helps keep CAE free! Some discounts for the holiday season:

• 15% annual memberships to my Patreon. There, I share overflow links from CAE, write more personal posts about managing chronic pain and tools that have helped me, and share photos. Mostly of flowers and trees.

• 10% off my hand-drawn maps of food. I’ve got these for sale as museum-quality posters, tees, and tote bags. Use code CAE10.

• 10% off my celiac translation cards, using code CAE10. I’ve sold 19,000 of these gluten free cards, now in 19 languages, and I’m thrilled that I can still help celiacs travel with less anxiety.

Hopefully there’s something there for you, or your loved ones!

This month’s featured artist is Bell Hutley, an artist and designer who tells stories through work that is inspired by nature, literature and folklore. Her meandering weed illustrations were a perfect early-winter image, and the companion to the MIT article about superweeds, shared below.

The most interesting things I read this month

These links are once again formatted thanks to the help of my friend Mike.

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

🐦 What Can Birdsong Teach Us About Human Language? In a magazine column true to my heart called The Joy of Why, this piece looks at birds and their language. We think of human language patterns as unique, and setting us apart from animals. But brain research has shown us that some animals, including birds, have some of our brain circuity that relates to language. And! That only vocal-learning species can learn how to dance. A fascinating interview with a neurobiologist. Quanta Magazine

🏡 There Is No Place like Home, Whatever That Is. I very much liked this piece, beautifully-written as it is. Despite growing up in Montreal, NYC always felt like home, and then it slapped me in the face by being the place that The Very Worst Thing happened to me, a burglary-lumbar-puncture combo in one merciless evening that changed my life. Unbound and nomadic for a decade, ‘home’ became confusing; now trapped in my bed it’s a resignation. I’ve made my apartment as accommodating as it can be, and I am truly grateful for it. But for years I wondered where my roots would bring me, only to find myself with little choice at all. As you can see, the article got me thinking! As good articles are wont to do. The Common Reader

🐁 I’m a neuroscientist who taught rats to drive − their joy suggests how anticipating fun can enrich human life. Also about the brain, and without a doubt I have career envy: this piece shares how rats’ anticipation of ‘good car time’ actually afforded them more joy overall. Back in 2019, I shared a video of rats learning to drive, and now the same behavioural neuroscientist Kelly Lambert talks about her updated research that she conducted with “new improved rat-operated vehicles” (ROVs, obvs) that have rat-proof wiring, indestructible tires and ergonomic driving levers. The rats that learned to wait for their car time to were found to be more optimistic in their thinking, perform better on cognitive tasks, and were more innovative in their problem-solving strategies. A good lesson to remember. The Conversation

🤩 We need raw awe. On the other side of the anticipatory coin: do we need anxiety in order to feel awe? This piece says yes. “If awe is to be a life-changing experience, it will need to encompass something that is all too often overlooked in today’s prepackaged world: anxiety, and in particular, life-enhancing anxiety. Life-enhancing anxiety is invigorating anxiety. It is anxiety that enables us to live with and make the best of the depth and mystery of existence. […] Too often, however, we ignore the paradoxes of anxiety and fail to do the work necessary to go beneath the surfaces of life, to unveil the fuller and deeper questions of life.” A thorough read about how technology can interfere with feeling ‘awe-some’ in the classic (not vernacular) sense. The author says that a sense of death is necessary to experience awe, something people with near-death experiences would probably agree with. Personally, I think it’s a twofold: that perception of limitation can heighten the awe, but to truly lose yourself in it, a level of safety is needed. Aeon Magazine

🐈 Gene behind orange fur in cats found at last. A loyal subscriber to r/OneOrangeBraincell, I enjoyed this piece about how after 60 years, scientists finally know why gingers, calicos, and tortoiseshells look the way they do. We knew torties and calicos were offsprings of a black cat and an orange cat (and usually female), and that calicos added white fur to the mix because they have a second, unrelated genetic mechanism that shuts down pigment production in some cells. Now, we know where the orange itself comes from: a deletion mutation in the Arhgap36 gene, on the X chromosome. Two separate teams came to this conclusion at the same time, both noting how it’s unusual that a deletion mutation would cause more colour (red) than less. Science

🖼 A Man of Parts and Learning. What a piece, my goodness. I was rapt throughout while reading through the historical detective work undertaken on a portrait of Francis Williams, an 18th-century Jamaican scholar and poet. It’s an important piece of art — Francis Williams was the most famous Black person in the world at that time, and this painting also was the “only painting ever made of Halley’s comet in 1759, on its momentous first predicted return.” And yet, until now, no one has ever been able to figure out who painted it, when, and why. London Review Of Books

🪖 Another moving mystery in imagery, this time in photos: How France uncovered the mystery of the forbidden photos of Nazi-occupied Paris. This story of a “normal man who tried to fight” traces some 377 black-and-white photos taken between 1940 and 1942 back to the man who put his life in danger by taking them. The photos include street scenes with civilians and German soldiers during Nazi occupation, set against Paris’ notable landmarks like Montmartre, Place de la Concorde, Champs-Elysée. The Nazis strictly prohibited outdoor photography, and taking pictures without an official permit was punishable by imprisonment or death. All the more impressive that these hundreds of photos made it through. The mystery of who took them is part of what makes this piece great. NPR (via Kottke)

🪞 Bad Influence. One Amazon influencer makes a living posting content from her beige home, but after she noticed another account promoting the same minimal aesthetic, their rivalry shifted a lawsuit, the first of its kind in the influencer world. Read on about influencer culture, algos, the ‘clean girl aesthetic’, and whether the legal system can protect the ‘vibes’ of a creator. The Verge

🤖 The Therapist in the Machine. How AI is taking on therapy. Is removing humans from the therapeutic setting good or bad? Finding a therapist who you jive with isn’t easy —but that connection, a “therapeutic alliance” often is needed for someone seeking therapy to commit to necessary changes. After all, if you don’t like the therapist, you’re probably going to ignore their advice. This creates a treatment gap, notes the piece, and “wherever there’s a treatment gap, there’s an opportunity for profit.” First, text- and video-based therapy, but now enter the robots. And yet, a preliminary study showed an AI app did not offer any benefits above other typical self-help behavioural interventions. It isn’t stopping companies from cashing in, though. The author concludes that finding a compatible therapist with the right modality for your brain is when “the help can really begin.” Anything less doesn’t get at that ‘core wound’ one may have, and therapy is becomes another temporary bandaid as a result. The Baffler

⚖️ Empirical Disability Legal Studies. Disability studies is a relatively new academic field that focuses on human difference, perceptions of “normalcy,” and the ways disability has been constructed and perceived by society at large. It wasn’t a topic available to explore during my law school days, as it was only in the mid-2000s that legal scholars started to use a disability studies lens to explore legal doctrine and the treatment of people with disabilities under the law. This review article by Doron Dorfman goes into its history, focus, and the everyday life of disability rights. Annual Reviews

🏵 The secrets of butterfly migration, written in pollen. Fascinating! Analyzing pollen collected from 264 butterflies in 10 countries, researchers found 398 different plants to track the butterflies’ movements backwards, finding that swarms of butterflies in Russia, Scandinavia, and the Baltics were likely offspring of butterflies from Arabia and the Middle East. Knowable Magazine

🚲 The Alchemists. Incredible read about the women who led a cycling revolution in Afghanistan where women were forbidden to ride. When the Taliban returned to power, they knew they had to find a way to escape. The piece opens with the line, “[t]he day before the Taliban trammeled her freedom, a young woman went for a bike ride,” and only gets more engrossing from there. I am in awe of the determination and courage of these women. Bicycling Magazine

🏎 Racing’s deadliest day. A compelling read about how the 1955 Le Mans disaster changed Formula 1 forever, both because Mercedes recused itself — allowing Jaguar and Ferrari to rise to the top — but also because Mercedes funnelled research dollars into safety tech, pioneering anti-lock brakes, anti-collision radar systems, and other crucial consumer safety items. “It would be another 40 years before Mercedes got back into racing,” notes the piece, “and it did not win its next Formula 1 championship until 2014.” Esses

🛏 These wellness culture thoughts about chronic illness are incredibly stigmatising. The ‘you choose your illness’ philosophy that is so prevalent on social media places an insurmountable burden on patients’ shoulders, painting a picture that we are in control of our bodies and are simply not working hard enough to rid ourselves of illness. With my 4 repairs that have not given me a lasting fix for my spinal CSF leak there is a lot within my control—my attitude and mindset, my decision to reframe, the company I keep. But not my body’s ‘ability’ to seal my leak on its own. Framing the end point illness as a choice only serves to make very sick people even less resilient. It may seem like it’s giving more control, but ultimately I think the self-blame inherent in that heuristic undermines any strength. The Bed Perspective

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

🐟 The Rough Fish Revolution. In lighter fare, I enjoyed learning about gar fish and other long-maligned species called rough fish, so named “either because they’re difficult to clean, or because of other misinformed or arbitrary rationale.” Uh, could also be because of their imposing teeth? Regardless, we are only now learning how important these species are to freshwater ecosystems. bioGraphic

🕵🏻 Surveillance and the secret history of 19th century wearable tech. Did you know that in the mid-to-late 1800s, people used pedometers for domestic and social surveillance? ME NEITHER. Learn all about it in this piece on those early devices, including how they became instruments of “intimate monitoring and control.” MIT Press Reader

💰 The super-rich and their secret worlds. Interview with Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, who grew up in Geneva and whose new book Hidden Globe talks about the gray areas and hiding places of oligarchy. From a young age, Abrahamian became aware of enclaves and secret spaces within Geneva that were inhabitable only by the wealthy, places that “denied national borders and laws”. Now based in New York, this interview goes into that secrecy—from anonymous storage facilities to outer space, potentially the ultimate tax haven. Coda Story

📱 Schools vs. Screens. This autumn, several Canadian provinces banned students from their using cell phones in class, including in my current province of Ontario. Billed as a way to allow students to focus without distractions, it was put in place fairly swiftly, without provincial governments setting out an implementation structure. The result is that teachers are the ones who need to enforce it, and — if they lose or damage the phone they confiscate here in Ontario — be on the hook for the costs. Per teachers, school administrators “have decided that insulating themselves from risk—a broken iPhone, an irate parent—is more important than students’ education”. The result is a hodge-podge of pseudo-enforcement, and very little change. Macleans

🌱 The Weeds are Winning. Weeds can become resistant to any type of control method, chemical or otherwise, and in our race to contain them as a human species we may be creating a ur-weed, a super-weed, the weed of our nightmares. Innovation is necessary, this piece implores, sharing a farmer’s prototype that injects steam into the ground, killing weeds within several inches of the entry point and that is 90% effective. It takes longer, though, than spraying herbicides. Will we heed the weed warnings? MIT Technology Review

🐬 A lone dolphin has been yelling into the Baltic Sea for years. Relative empathy overload! Popular Science

🌌 New study on moons of Uranus raises chance of life. Pretty amazing that scientists are now like, “you know what? Uranus had a bad day back in 1986 when Voyager 2 passed by, and actually we think its moon is NOT the dead sterile world we thought it was.” Yep, Uranus’ weird, distorted magnetic field was due to a powerful solar storm. BBC News

🇬🇧 Our Coast to Coast Walk Across Northern England Was an Exercise in Hope and Joy. Delightful piece about one couple’s trip along an ancient trail network in England and Wales. “My wife decided we needed an active outdoor getaway, a romantic ramble across moors and fells and three national parks,” the author writes. “I knew it’d be hard. I’ve never been happier.” Outside Magazine

💬 Why do we talk this way? (Archive link.) On technology of all sorts will influence how we speak and what we say. The printing press did it. The radio did it. Now the internet has done it as well, which this piece uses as a backdrop for the shifts in political speech specifically, and how “each side hates the way the other talks.” Tech rewards quantity and variety. This means giving up on having consistent, focussed, and pre-formulated messages. It may also mean giving up on the actual truth. “The kinds of speech that strike us as authentic, satisfying, and desirable change with time, and depend on our position in the world and on the conversations happening around us,” the piece notes. And: “an army of new assertions masses every minute and marches on us through our screens. We welcome the invasion because, somehow, we remain bored.” Personally, I feel that the more we feed the sensationalist monster, the more we gobble up the soundbites and headlines without stopping to say, “wait — does this really make sense? What did that draft bill actually say? Where’s the proof of this messaging?”, the more we’re going to devolve into a post-fact world. The New Yorker

🗞 Peeling Back The Onion. To that end, this read talks about how ‘major media’ allowed objective truth to become political. At some point, just telling the truth became “cheerleading” for a specific side. “A vacuum cannot exist in nature and when truth is ignored, untruth will easily fill the gap.” It did, and we are all worse for it. On Democracy

🦋 The Great Bluesky Migration and Benefits Of An Open Network. I’ve been increasingly using Bluesky. It has no ads, and it feels like 2009 Twitter all over again. I met many great people in person via Twitter back then, whose work I’ve had the pleasure of following since. I’m still on Twitter (or Xitter, or X, depending on your naming convention), and on Threads. But Threads feels like a series of conversations you’re eavesdropping on, plus they’ve made clear they devalue links, science, news, and politics in their algorithm. But I love science, news and politics, and I love to read articles, so Bluesky is a dream. My profile is here. The two articles I’ve linked to explain a bit more about the network (the first one), and how being an open network is a good thing (the second). Will it stay that way to remain profitable? Unclear. For now, though, it’s more fun and informative than the others. Little Flying Robots & Emily Liu

🇲🇽 Mexican President’s Harsh Takedown of Trump Exposes an Ugly MAGA Scam. Greg Sargent on how the whole premise of Trump’s tariffs threat when it comes to Mexico is based on a lie, namely that Mexico must be bullied into stopping migrants. Except that Mexico is already working to stop migrants, which is why border crossing levels have dropped — and it’s because of Biden’s diplomacy, not threats. The scam part, per Sargent, is that Trump is creating the illusion that his threats are needed for Mexico to act, so “once he's in office, he will credit his threat of tariffs for getting Mexico's cooperation, even though it's already happening.” The New Republic

💔 The Fall: My once-vibrant dad emerged broken from the hospital. Then he was gone. A painful, personal story from a seasoned health reporter in Canada, about her father’s journey through Canada’s beleaguered health-care system after a fall. “As a society we know how to properly care for the hospitalized elderly in a way that does not leave them in worse shape than when they were admitted,” she writes. And yet, many are worse off when discharged. Very touching read. Ottawa Citizen

🧬 Genetic Discrimination Is Coming for Us All. (Archive link.) Some insurers increasingly refuse to cover Americans with “risky DNA” (that is, where their DNA reveals certain health risks). And it’s seemingly legal: “Gaps in the United States’ genetic-nondiscrimination law mean that life, long-term-care, and disability insurers can obligate their customers to disclose genetic risk factors for disease and deny them coverage (or hike prices) based on the resulting information. It doesn’t matter whether those customers found out about their mutations from a doctor-ordered test or a 23andMe kit.” Could employers hire and fire based on genetic risk factors? It may not be so far off. Medical ethics was one of my favourite classes in law school, because the can of worms was bottomless and the discussions so fascinating. But how they play out in the real world, outside the classroom, is far more worrisome. The Atlantic

🦠 Many long Covid patients adjust to slim recovery odds as world moves on. More than two dozen experts, patient advocates and pharmaceutical executives told Reuters that in wealthier countries, the money and attention for long Covid is dwindling. In low- to middle-income countries, it was never there. The result is a still-growing number of patients left behind. Reuters

🍎 Apples Have Never Tasted So Delicious. Here's Why. (Archive link.) Apple experts divide time into “before Honeycrisp” and “after Honeycrisp,” and are currently in “the golden age of apples”, where they have never tasted so good. Don’t hate me, but personally I’m a Lobo kind of gal and I find Honeycrisps too sweet! Still, for those who never read The Fatherland of the Apples, you’ll learn about how today’s cultivated apples can be traced back to Kazakhstan, and that farmers began domesticating apples sometime between 10,000 and 4,000 years ago in the Tian Shan Mountains of Central Asia. Scientific American

❄️ What It’s Like to Experience Polar Night in the World’s Northernmost Town. “Living this far north in a place marked by extreme weather and seasons, you learn to appreciate it all. Each season has its own special magic, and I believe it would be a shame if we only longed for the more standard seasons that we don’t have.” An ode to Svalbard’s unique seasons. Smithsonian Magazine

🪦 My Weekends With the Dead. “It’s a good way to spend a Saturday morning—if, admittedly, a strange one. I wake up and pack a tote bag with leather gardening gloves, a water bottle, a towel, and headphones. Then I drive to one of Chicago’s 272 cemeteries and spend hours taking pictures of the dead.” In 2017, Tony Ho Tran decided to solve a longtime mystery about his family. It led to a controversial pastime that consumes thousands, and has changed untold lives. “It’s not just for mourning or nostalgia”, Tran clarifies, “the revelations held in cataloged graves have proven vital for everyone ranging from historians to journalists to your aunt who is really into your extended family’s history.” Slate

👪 Here's What I Learned About Donald Trump's Victory. I'm The Problem. It's Me. (Archive link.) “America obviously wants a return to something… I wish I’d ever heard a cogent explanation of exactly what, but there was, apparently, a time of American greatness that was also, somehow, a time when the men were men, the women were happy and in which, as Garrison Keillor so lovingly described his mystical hometown of Lake Wobegon, the children were above average. It is, in other words, a fiction. Worse, it’s the fiction of a fiction. Because that America loved its neighbors. This America spits on them. Or maybe, again, I’ve just got it all wrong.” The Daily Beast

💫 How the Occult Gave Birth to Science. For scientists of yore anything—from mermaids to alchemy—was on the table. Newton wasn’t the first of the Age of Reason, “he was the last of the magicians.” And when it came to fascination with the occult, Newton was hardly alone. Early modern thinkers who laid the foundations of modern science believed that the world teemed with witches, unicorns, stars that foretold the future, alchemy, and more. “These fantastical beliefs were shared by the illiterate and educated elite alike—including many of the forebears of contemporary science, including chemist Robert Boyle, who gave us modern chemistry and Boyle’s law, and biologist Carl Linnaeus, who developed the taxonomic system by which scientists classify species today. Rather than stifling discovery, this piece argues, their now-arcane beliefs drove them to the current scientific process and discoveries. Nautilus (via The Browser)

🗳 What Other Countries Can Teach Us About Turnout. This report looks at the roles that different voting structures around the world play in trying to increase turnout among eligible voters. There are many different mechanisms (e.g. adding mandatory voting laws, automatic voter registration, flexible voting options like mail-in or weekend voting), as well as robust voter education campaigns to increase electoral participation in the US. Worldwide, 22 countries countries, including Australia, Belgium, and Singapore, have mandatory voting laws — but enforcement varies widely. In Brazil, Argentina, and Peru, while voting is mandatory penalties for non-compliance are minimal. Some countries, like Greece and Mexico, have mandatory voting laws on the books but do not enforce them. What’s best? Who knows. Interesting though! Institute for Responsive Government

💆🏻 16 Nerve Cell Types Identified in Human Touch. Researchers compared those 16 nerve cells to those in mice and macaques, showing both shared and unique traits, and revealing unexpected complexities in how nerve cells respond to stimuli. I wonder how that response differs in neurodivergent brains, where overstimulation is common? Neuroscience News

🔗 Quick links 🔗

• Astronomers take the first close-up picture of a star outside our galaxy, the Milky Way. Found 160 000 light-years from us, the star WOH G64 was imaged via by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (the name makes me giggle).

• In 2009, I went to Siem Reap in Cambodia, and met a monk living in Sri Lanka at the time. While we corresponded then via email, we lost touch until this month — and since then, the photo site he’d only just started has now become one of the largest Buddhist photographic website in the world, with the photos used in books, seminars, presentations, and courses.

• A short but interesting read on the neuroscience of heartbreak, including that evidence (and many song lyrics) show that romantic love works in a way very similar to drug addiction in the brain.

• Hidden message in a bottle found in a Scottish lighthouse wall after 132 years.

• Researchers discover a hidden tomb beneath Petra’s Treasury in Jordan.

• Compelled to include this headline: Wearing A Salmon On Your Head Is Back In Fashion For Orcas, After A 37-Year Break (it’s truly an orca fashion fad, per scientists)

• New Zealand’s Dunedin airport caps goodbye hugs at the departures drop off area to 3 minutes. A new sign says there’s a cap on cuddles, and to use the parking lot for “fonder farewells”.

• Man arrested in the UK for a $389,000 cheese heist (tl;dr — it was cheddar).

• Why so many cheese heists of late?! Based on price alone, cheese is one of the most desirable foods a criminal can steal, apparently!

Hope to see you next month,
-Jodi

Personal Updates

Yesterday, I had the honour of presenting my story to a room of patients and physician experts in spinal CSF leak, as well as an audience from 32 countries virtually. The conference is unique in the field, as patients are able to share their story alongside physician presentations. Because of my volunteer role as Board president with the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation, I was also able to help plan the event. While a ton of work, especially while leaking, feedback thus far from patients has been overwhelmingly positive. I’m so glad.

I need much rest, but first: I wanted to get CAE out pre-election, to give everyone something to read if you so choose. I figured we all needed something to distract during the stress of those interstitial hours or days when results are still pending.

This month’s featured artist is Gael McGill, who a few years ago created this stunning 3D rendering of a eukaryotic cell, modeled using X-ray, nuclear magnetic resonance, and cryo-electron microscopy datasets. It’s truly awe-inspiring to think of how complex and beautiful one teeny tiny cell can be. Interactive versions of parts of this image can be found here.

The Most Interesting Things I Read This Month

These links are once again formatted thanks to the help of my friend Mike.

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

🐙 The Argonaut Octopus Has Mastered The Free Ride. Although most octopuses live near the ocean floor and its “ample hiding places,” argonauts spend their entire lives floating around in the open ocean, but just under water’s surface. Researchers have found that most large female argonauts preferred to “scoot around” on plastic waste, plant debris, and jellyfish, while smaller ones clung to free-floating tinier animals. Either way, this octopus loves to ride! Crustaceans, mollusks, fish, even other argonauts. New type of octopus for me. And that fist photo truly is ‘accidental renaissance’ in action. (via Peter O, a longtime CAE and Legal Nomads reader.)

🦈 A Shark Attack and a Terrorist Bombing: This Is a Love Story (Archive link). A masterclass in profile writing, weaving a beautiful and complicated story of two people whose lives were rocked by tragedy outside of their control, and how they found and then fell in love with each other. “When our deepest trauma leads to our most profound joy, what do we call that feeling?” Worth your time. Esquire

🐋 The Coming Collision Between Whales and Tankers on British Columbia’s Coast. “For a few exhilarating moments, time slows as the whales and boat glide next to one another.” Decades after they were hunted to local extinction, fin whales are finally recovering in the Kitimat fjord system—only to be threatened by a booming liquefied natural gas industry. This piece looks at the collateral damage to mammals from marine traffic. Some 20,000 whales are estimated to be killed by ship strikes each year, likely an underestimate because “the vast majority of struck whales vanish, sinking to the bottom”. Hakai Magazine

🐘 Elephants develop wrinkles through both form and function. During fetal development, wrinkle numbers in elephants double every 20 days, with later wrinkles slowly added (but faster in elephants living in Asia vs. in Africa). Here’s a read that provides a deep dive into wrinkle distribution and how the elephant’s trunk became the “most unbelievable grasping organ on the planet”. It’s SO much more than just a nose! It’s a “prehensile probosces” that can be used to pick up food, spray water or sand across their backs to cool off, and trumpet warnings to other elephants. Baby elephants nurse by sucking up milk via their trunks and spraying it into their mouths. But why does the trunk, “a muscular appendage without any bones,” work so well? THE WRINKLES. It’s the wrinkles. In case you couldn’t tell, I found this fascinating. Royal Society Open Science

👵🏻 Gasping at Straws. Moving on from animals, this is a delightful short read about an author turning into her mother as she ages, but in the sweetest way possible. Peak Notions

🎭 The divine discontent. “The most fulfilled people I know tend to have two traits. They’re insatiably curious—about new ideas, experiences, information and people. And they seem to exist in a state of perpetual, self-inflicted unhappiness.” A bold statement. Why do those curious people working on big projects often feel they’re not doing enough, are not skilled enough, or feel a lot of self-doubt? Celine calls this “restless pursuit of greatness” a divine discontent, because “even when they feel demoralized and inadequate, that shapes their lives and makes things interesting.” Excellent read, from a newsletter I look forward to. Personal Canon

🌐 McDonald’s Macarons. At international outposts of McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut, Starbucks and others customers can find menu items infused with regional flavours, textures and trends, like bastones la lechera, yuzu citrus tea and macarons. While living in Hong Kong, the author bought Macanese-style egg tarts at KFC. “The custard filling was smooth and pudding-like, cradled in a buttery, flaky crust,” she writes. Determined to find out why they were so good, she finds out that KFC bought the original recipe from the bakery that put the desserts on the map. And because they were produced by a big chain, they were consistent every time. “America does not have a monopoly on fast food. What it does have is a draw so powerful that franchise owners worldwide often feel compelled to adopt American branding or imagery to attract customers, even when serving their own traditional dishes.” The Dial

🎖 Not all Nobel laureates react the way you might expect. Adam Smith spent 18 years thus far recording what it’s like when someone receives a life-changing call from the Nobel Prize committee. “In a perfect world, the news is breaking as I'm phoning, and they haven't talked to anybody else. And sometimes that really does happen,” says Smith. “It's a very nice point in time to catch somebody, when their guard is down a bit.” Delightful insider baseball read. BBC Future

🧳 A parasympathetic panacea via our vagus nerves? The vagus nerve is all the rage these days. It’s the longest nerve in the body, and sends its “branches and roots” all over the place. The vagus connects with so many circuits that bridge mind and body that Quanta mag called it “the conduit of the mind.” The name ‘vagus’ comes from the latin word for wandering — hence the word vagabond! And as it’s been in the news a lot these days, and I wanted to share this straightforward post about the ways that we can engage with it to our benefit. It’s is a good resource new to the parasympthatic system, too, the part of our nervous system that helps us know when to relax and rest. These tips help increase parasympathetic tone, something that can engage with that state of unclenching. Examined

🇫🇷 The Miraculous Resurrection of Notre-Dame. In 2019, a fire nearly destroyed the crown jewel of France, the Notre-Dame Cathedral. The country set a deadline of 5 years to bring it back from the ashes, and this piece is the story of how. It shares that an army of artisans turned back centuries to rebuilt Notre-Dame by hand. The cathedral “has a soul”, the piece notes, and in this painstaking revival the artists ended up reviving a closer replica to the original than they ever thought possible. More of a resurrection than a restoration. GQ

✈️ The Final Flight of the Airline Magazine. When I started writing about travel, airline magazines were a pub type many recommended I aim for, a great way to get in front of millions of readers monthly, but they also had beautiful, glossy spreads, and paid reasonably well. With a captive audience in a flying tube of metal, these magazines convinced people to buy or visit or do; they “possess powers of persuasion that on-the-ground reading material lacks,” the piece notes. These days, most airline magazines are digital, the end of an era for what was once a coveted byline, and a way to “connect with humanity” from many thousands of feet in the air. Lovely, nostalgic read. Columbia Journalism Review

🧠 In a First, Scientists Found Structural, Brain-Wide Changes During Menstruation. Hormones that guide menstruation don’t just affect the reproductive parts of the body. Any person who menstruates could tell you that it deeply affects mood and cognition and much more. It turns out, that “much more” includes reshaping the brain (!), something we now know thanks to a recent study that showed “simultaneous brain-wide changes”, including that as hormones fluctuate, gray and white matter volumes change too—as does the volume of CSF fluid. Relevant to my interests! Science Alert

💫 A Head Is a Territory of Light: Seeking answers about my migraines. I’ve shared many pieces about pain over the years, and several of them are about migraine, a condition that affects many millions of people and has no cure. The many medications on offer aren’t a balm for everyone, and in this essay Tan Tuck Ming goes digging for why theirs exist. Migraines are unpredictable, both in triggers and how each person is affected by the severe pain that accompanies them. They are genetic, and because women are 3x more likely than men to suffer from them, some researchers think that they are matrilineal. They cluster like earthquakes. And the triggers can feel arbitrary. “One migraine begins when I’m lying on my side, reading the Wikipedia page for La Niña,” Ming notes, “Is the trigger the phone screen? The encyclopedic formatting of the text? Or the depressing lurk of climate change?”  His writing is lyrical, and it hits hard; the “when is it going to hit me” feelings come across perfectly; an excellent essay on a terrible condition. The Yale Review

🖤 The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age. What a read. Thea Lim on how algorithms now decide what is art and what is worthy. We’re all expected to perform online now, even if we aren’t doing it for a job. And that performance is measured in clicks and likes and monetized; it can easily corrode a sense of self. “And when the reception started to roll in, I’d hear good news, but gratitude lasted moments before I wanted more. A starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, but I wasn’t in ‘Picks of the Week.’ A mention from Entertainment Weekly, but last on a click-through list. Nothing was enough. Why? What had defined my adult existence was my ability to find worth within, to build to an internal schematic, which is what artists do. Now I was a stranger to myself.” The Walrus

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

🇪🇸 How Did a Chartreuse Slushy Become the Signature Drink of Tarragona, Spain? Austin Bush on mamadetas, a drink from the city of Tarragona that is spiked with Chartreuse — not the colour, but a French herbal liqueur created in the early 17th century, when Carthusian monks in France were given a recipe for an “elixir of long life.” These days, Bush writes, Chartreuse is still made in France (a mix of “130 different herbs allegedly known by only two monks”), but the drink remains beloved in Tarragona. Punch Drink

🇰🇷 As these Korean adoptees search for their roots, some are finding what they knew about their past isn’t true. This is an online interactive feature that tells the stories of over a dozen Korean adoptees searching for information about their origins. It’s a tough read as they were simply sold for adoption with fabricated records, others stolen from families. We’re talking an adoption system that carelessly separated generations of Korean children from their families. I can only imagine wanting to have more understanding of who you are but finding that withheld. It must be so achingly hard. PBS

🇺🇸 She Voted for Trump. Then She Had Two Terrifying Miscarriages in Texas. “In 2023, my sister Victoria spent more than 24 hours hemorrhaging into three diapers when Dallas-area hospitals declined to help her.” A devastating, but important read especially given tomorrow’s election. The Barbed Wire

🦠 Inside the Bungled Bird Flu Response, Where Profits Collide With Public Health. When dairy cows in Texas began falling ill with H5N1, alarmed veterinarians expected a fierce response to contain an outbreak with pandemic-sparking potential. But politics—and, critics say, a key agency’s mandate to protect dairy-industry revenues—intervened. And I hate to say it, but it’s getting more worrisome as a result. Vanity Fair

📸 My Big List Of Photography Videos. Nearly 400 videos in this very long Big List of Photography Videos playlist by photographer Andy Adams. I don’t do well with videos myself, having a leak, but this looked like a great resource to share with all of you. YouTube

🧑🏻‍🔬️ Scientist scans her own brain 75 times to study the effects of birth control pills. There's not enough data about women's brains, so Carina Heller hopped into an MRI machine to take matters into her own hands. CBC

🐍 She’s One of Florida’s Most Lethal Python Hunters…but the Invasive Creatures Still Have a Hold on Her. Compelling writing in this portrait of Donna Kalil and her many years of professional python hunting. She is “the original python huntress,” the piece notes, as the first woman to ever do so. Garden & Gun

🆓 How Substack’s follow feature betrays its original mission. Taylor Lorenz recently moved to Substack, and discusses how the ability to follow people here without subscribing is a departure from the initial goals of Substack, since you can’t ‘export’ follower lists so they don’t really belong to you. Still, she finds it of benefit. I personally have barely used Notes as my cognitive capacity limits don’t allow for it with my leak, but can see how it would be useful! As a results though, I use Substack as a distribution platform more than anything, sharing CAE with you all. User Mag

🍸 I Don't Drink. Short and useful read featuring 8 lessons from a woman who went sober in NYC. Includes tips like what to say to the bartender (“what can you do for a non-drinker like me?”) and more. Plant Based

🚿 Viruses are teeming on your toothbrush, showerhead. Ok I’m not shocked that there is a “jungle of untapped biodiversity” in the bathroom, but the SHOWERHEAD?! A new study’s findings yes — but don’t worry, these are phages that target bacteria, not people. Northwestern News

🌌 The ‘Beautiful Confusion’ of the First Billion Years Comes Into View. Astronomers are revelling in the James Webb Space Telescope’s many discoveries, including some answers as to why some galaxies bigger and brighter than expected. They’ve found new cosmic structures like far-away, massive black holes, mysterious red dots, early galaxies shaped like pickles, and much more. It’s changed what we know about the early years of cosmic history. Quanta

⚜️ Learning French in Quebec Just Got Harder. Last-minute changes, outdated textbooks, and financial aid cuts are some of the many challenges immigrants face in learning French in Quebec. This piece shares how Quebec’s government focuses on “controlling the use of the language in private spaces”, using coercive measures to do so that forces immigrants to learn the language in just six months after arrival. The Rover

🎵 Stevie Nicks: ‘I believe in the Church of Stevie’. An enjoyable read for any other Fleetwood Mac fans out there, from a long interview (close to four hours) that dives into a lot of personal stuff often omitted from her prior profiles, like why she ended her relationship with Lindsay Buckingham, politics, and more. I was entertained, I was engrossed, and kudos to the author who clearly got Nicks to open up more than usual. Rolling Stone

😴 Sleep perfectionists: the exhausting rise of orthosomnia. I found this read interesting, urging people to to keep a pen and paper sleep diary of what time they go to bed, how tired they feel, when they wake up and how awake they feel at 11am. A sleep expert notes to “listen to your body, not data”. But I use sleep trackers and they’ve only helped me sleep better. I’ve figured out when I need to go to bed to get the most deep sleep, helping my leak symptoms considerably. And the data also also helped me correlate the VOCs issue last year, when I was in my old apartment that was getting me sick and I couldn’t figure out why. I can see how obsessing over data may cause someone to worsen insomnia, but I love me some data and find the opposite. YMMV! The Guardian

😭 I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is. (Gift link.) The truth is, Charlie Warzel writes, “it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality”. This may sound like hyperbole, but the nihilism of the current moment is truly something to behold. Some Americans, distrustful of authority during early pandemic years, spread many conspiracy theories that attacked public health. But when Hurricane Helene hit, the second in a short period of time, “those sharing the lies are happy to admit that they do not care whether what they’re pushing is real or not.”. The primary use of misinformation isn’t to change beliefs, as some may think, says Warzel. It’s rather offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The Atlantic

💸 Welcome to the Golden Age of Scams. US consumers lost a record $10 billion to fraud in 2023, at least according to the Federal Trade Commission — which was a 14% increase over 2022. This is likely underestimated, too, and the real amount is far higher. The majority of victims, three-quarters of them according to this piece, don’t report that they’ve been defrauded. And we’re constantly being bombarded with spammy scammy crap, whether by phone or text or email. Per the piece, an average smartphone user in the US gets 42 spam texts and 28 spam calls per month, more sophisticated than ever before. We have romance, investment, fake-job scams, scammers that target corporations or target individuals. We’re being scammed at all levels, all the time. The question is: what can we do about it? TIME

🌀 Deadly Helene. A paper in South Carolina tells the story of Hurricane Helene. “By some estimates, more than 40 trillion gallons of rain fell on the Southeastern United States — enough water to create a lake 3.5 feet deep and the size of North Carolina.” Soon thereafter, a year of rain fell in Eastern Spain in just one day, the deadliest disaster in the country's recent history. We think of both areas as not particularly susceptible to a changing climate, but the planet is proving us wrong. Post & Courier

🌊 I Stayed at This Coast Guard Station in the Middle of the Ocean. And so can you! The author stayed overnight at the Frying Pan Tower, a decommissioned Coast Guard light station a few dozen miles off the coast of North Carolina. It sits high above the water, overlooking the fish and underneath the stars. He calls it “the coolest vacation rental on earth,” and his writeup doesn’t make that sound like hyperbole. Outside Online

🔗 Quick links 🔗

• Most meteorites come from just 3 sources! 70% of the meteorites found on Earth to date can be traced back to just 3 separate collisions in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Crazy!

• New emoji drop! A beet, a new flag, and a splat.

• The three loudest animals on earth.

• How comic sans became “the crocs of fonts”.

• The FTC adopts a rule to make it easier for consumers to cancel unwanted subscriptions. Happy to see this change.

• An AI model helped uncover 303 previously unseen Nazca Lines in Peru

• The history of the strawberry.

• Infinite Mac is a collection of classic Macintosh system releases and software, all easily accessible from the comfort of a (modern) web browser.  

Hope to see you next month,
-Jodi