The Curious About Everything Newsletter #49

The many interesting things I read in March 2025

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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