The Curious About Everything Newsletter #56

The many interesting things I read in October 2025

Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter. CAE 55 is here, if you missed it. The most popular link from last month was Archeology Mag’s article about building a medieval castle.

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!

• 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