The Curious About Everything Newsletter #45

The many interesting things I read in November 2024

Dec 09, 2024

Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter! CAE 44, last month’s newsletter, is here, if you missed it. The most popular link from last month was Ryan McCormick’s post about the parasympathetic nervous system.

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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.
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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

Curious About Everything