The Curious About Everything Newsletter #41

The many interesting things I read in July 2024

Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter! CAE 40, last month’s newsletter, is here, if you missed it. The most popular links from last month were a tie between research as leisure activity, and the Excel spreadsheet championships in Vegas. If that doesn’t confirm that you are my people, I don’t know what would; it’s a perfect mishmash of delightful nerditry.

The Most Interesting Things I Read This Month

These links are once again formatted thanks to the help of my friend Mike, because Substack still doesn’t allow for easy hyperlinks on mobile.

Start here:

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

🪂 Emma Carey: The skydiver who survived a 14,000-foot fall. In June 2013, Emma Carey went skydiving for the first time, fell 14,000 ft off a helicopter into an empty cow pasture in Switzerland, with two tangled parachutes and her instructor passed out on her back. She somehow lived, and this profile tells her story. This August marks 7 years of leaking for me, and Emma’s resilience and stubborn desire to enjoy life regardless of what it took from here encourages my choice, even as the years of leaking pass by, to determinedly find joy where I can.
”She decided to put in the effort but let go of the outcome,” Ryan Hockensmith writes. Or, in her own words: “there's a whole world out there to see, and none of it depends on if I can walk well.” ESPN

🪶 Meet The Smithsonian Bird Detectives Saving Lives. A fascinating and sad read about bird detectives working in a special Smithsonian lab to identify the remains of birds that collide with airplanes. The director of the Feather ID lab is Carla Dove (my goodness how many jokes must she get about her name?!), and they are working to improve air safety by helping airplane designers and engineers know how their current designs are holding up in the skies using ID work, forensics, and more. Washingtonian

🧠 Study Reveals Brain Fluid Dynamics as Key to Migraine Mysteries, New Therapies. I know, I know, another brain fluid dynamics study. But this research is not only emergent, but relevant to my condition and to neurodegenerative diseases. I find it fascinating. In this case: a clue to migraine headache causes. Research showed how the flow of CSF to the trigeminal nerve triggered headaches, identifying a connection between aura and the migraine that follows. The hope: a host of new targets to suppress sensory nerve activation to prevent and treat migraines and strengthen existing therapies. Before this study, scientists thought the trigeminal ganglion, like the rest of the peripheral nervous system, was outside the blood-brain-barrier—but here they’ve shown an itty-bitty gap that allowed CSF to flow directly into it exposing sensory nerves to the cocktail of proteins released by the brain and causing pain. University of Rochester Medical Center

🥬 Caesar salad turns 100. TIL that Caesar salad is not only 100 years old, but—according to popular lore—was developed during prohibition on July 4, 1924. It was then that Caesar’s restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico was so full of customers pouring over the border to eat and drink that ingredients began to run out. So the owner used what he had on hand, which turned out to the the ingredients for the legendary salad (romaine lettuce, Worcestershire sauce, garlic oil, lemons, eggs and Parmesan cheese) and “created the salad in the middle of the dining room.” It was a huge hit, leading to more Americans crossing the border to eat it. In 1953 the International Society of Epicures in Paris called it “the greatest recipe to originate in the past 50 years.” Longer Tables

🛗 The American Elevator Explains Why Housing Costs Have Skyrocketed. A long piece about how elevators are costed out in the USA, and how fewer buildings are installing them because the economics don’t work out. But behind the math are also societal and social changes that got us to where we are. “Behind the dearth of elevators in the country that birthed the skyscraper are eye-watering costs. A basic four-stop elevator costs about $158,000 in New York City, compared with about $36,000 in Switzerland. A six-stop model will set you back more than three times as much in Pennsylvania as in Belgium. Maintenance, repairs and inspections all cost more in America, too.” At some point, the article argues, we must relearn how to build things in the real world, not just in software plans. New York Times (via NextDraft gift link)

♾️ What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained. I’ve long read Mary H.K. Choi’s work, and found it interesting and creative. This piece is a really fascinating backstory to her portfolio, a piece about how she was diagnosed as autistic at 43, and how she’s processed the label and what it means for her. “In fact, the disorder is not a spectrum but spectra, a solar system of sprawling constellations in 3-D that differs from one person to the next,” she writes. What it explains to her was why she long felt that something was off, waiting for the time that someone “would publicly point out some glaring defect of mine that had been obvious to everyone all along,” but she remained in the dark. The Cut

🚀 'We're Living in a Nightmare:' Inside the Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town. A piece about Texas town terrorised by a constant hum and “strange, debilitating illnesses” such as losing their hearing, fluids leaking from their ears, fainting spells, debilitating vertigo and nausea, and more—including behavioural and health changes to local animals and damage to plants. The suspected culprit? A Bitcoin mining facility that had opened recently, causing sufficient noise pollution to lead to cardiovascular and other injury. That buzz, caused by tens of thousands of computers and fans, is over the state’s noise limit—and Texas already has a pretty high limit compared to other states. It’s not the only facility like this either. TIME

❌ The Rise of Emotional Divestment. “We don’t have the patience for anything, let alone the slow unfolding of human emotion,” notes Heather Havrilesky in this compelling read. It discusses the onslaught of everythingness that comes with being alive in today’s online world, and what it does to our window of tolerance when it comes to relative empathy. Ask Polly 

⚖️ He Was Convicted of Killing His Baby. The DA’s Office Says He’s Innocent, but That Might Not Be Enough. When new science casts doubt on old convictions, the justice system doesn’t always work to fix the problem. In this case: a shocking, well-written piece where an assistant DA, Sunny Eaton, tries to undo a decades-old conviction—one that her own office had prosecuted. But the same judge that convicted the defendant decades earlier refuses to revise the initial sentence, despite seven medical experts testifying that the defendant was innocent. Wow. ProPublica

🏖️ Costco in Cancún. Fun writing in this entertaining piece about Simon Wu’s all-inclusive experience from Costco Travel. “In the Yucatan sun, stripped of this architecture, the Costco psychology (“Everything Is a Good Deal”) merges with the all-inclusive hotel psychology (“Everything Is Paid For”) in a sinister marriage of value and engorgement.” What this does is pressure you to consume more, because when something has been prepaid, you feel a compulsion to feast to get your money’s worth. In this case, it even comes with $100 gift cards to Costco itself, keeping you in their ecosystem. Paris Review

🗣 Logical fallacies: Seven ways to spot a bad argument. The internet can be a morass of outrage, and when people are doing less yelling and more “trying to persuade”, they sometimes (ok, often) reach for underhand tricks. This piece by Amanda Ruggeri covers some of the logical fallacies commonly in use, including appealing to ignorance, whataboutism, and false dichotomies. BBC Future

📷 How the Rise of the Camera Launched a Fight to Protect Gilded Age Americans’ Privacy. We think the internet is uniquely bad for privacy, but it turns out that the debut of the first Kodak camera in 1888 led to a big shift in how people saw themselves—and others. “Mass photography was an equalizer twice over: Nearly anybody could use a camera, and nearly anybody might be violated by one.” We know this to be true today, but it was at the turn of the century that Americans began to be “Kodacked” anywhere, and with no privacy concepts yet in place companies just stole peoples’ images for their ads. With privacy laws and lawsuits that followed, things are different today, but the first legal challenges were tepid at best. Smithsonian Magazine (via The Browser).

🥇 How to Feed the Olympics. “It’s a daunting task to feed 15,000 people no matter what, but if food is fuel, the chefs feeding the athletes at Olympic Village are somewhat responsible for how these athletes perform. Events management and catering group Sodexo Live takes that responsibility seriously. What results is an incredible feat of logistics, combining sustainable sourcing, diversity of options, and ensuring all athlete’s nutritional needs are met by some combination of the 500 dishes that will be served.” Interesting read on an aspect of the Olympics I’ve never thought much about prior. Eater

📖 Alice Munro Was Hiding in Plain Sight. (Archive link.) While society generally knows there are secrets like this lurking somewhere, of people in power who defended heinous acts like Alice did, it’s still nauseating to read the consequences of that silence. This nuanced read about how Munro chose to stick with her predator husband until the end, about how “adults are not always doing the best they can, not even the ones who seem so obviously to be doing so”, is one of the most poignant I’ve read after her death. In retrospect, all those Munro stories we in Canada were assigned in school read differently now. As Michelle Dean notes, “[i]t’s uncomfortable. It’s terrible. It’s very sad. And it’s something we just have to process, endlessly, every day, for the rest of our lives.” The Cut

⬜️ The most common wombat is also the least understood. Australia’s iconic marsupial has been viewed as a food source, pest, mascot and, now, a conservation concern. Like beavers, wombats are ecological engineers: their burrowing makes new homes for other animals, as well as aerates the soil to make plants grow better and make water easier to access. A deep dive into the square-pooping marvels, courtesy of Amber Dance. Knowable Magazine

🇮🇹 Why Italy Fell Out of Love With Cilantro. Coriander went from ancient staple, featured in 18% of recipes from a 5th century Roman cookbook, to persona non grata by 1851, where a seminal cookbook omitted it from its main dishes entirely. I had no idea coriander used to be popular in Italian cuisine, and I enjoyed learning through this piece (especially since it omitted the usual “some people think it tastes like soap!” talking point). The article also points out that coriander is not alone; marjoram was once widely used, but now not thought of as quintessentially italian. Conversely, basil originated in Asia and has only been part of Italian cuisine for a few hundred years—yet we often associate it “as” an Italian herb. Atlas Obscura

🗣 Not Everyone Has an Inner Voice Streaming through Their Head (Archive link). In CAEs past, we’ve talked about aphantasia (when your brain doesn't form or use mental images as part of your thinking or imagination — not me), or hyperphantasia (the opposite—definitely me). This piece is about the inner monologue, which I also have streaming in real-time. Apparently, not everyone does! A new study proposes the no-monologue condition be named “anendophasia”, and also talks about different types of inner monologues and how they affect cognition. Fascinating! Scientific American

🛋 Skill Issues. An in-depth look at Marsha Linehan, the founder dialectical behavioural therapy (DBT), and her mental health challenges that led to developing the modality. Before she did so, emotional regulation wasn’t a mainstay in therapy at all. She designed DBT with her life experiences in mind, so patients could avoid what she was forced to go through by developing skills to manage life better. “I suppose it’s true that I developed a therapy that provides the things I needed for so many years and never got,” she said in a 2011 interview. DBT’s vocabulary is “subtly designed to hold together the contradiction between the need for self-acceptance and the need for change”, basically telling the patient: if you build out these life skills, you can manage the ups and downs better. The Drift

🐀 The Amazing Mine-Sniffing Rats of Cambodia. In depth write up of the rats who are helping de-mine Cambodia with incredible efficiency: while a normal team would take 2-3 days to clear a 200 m2 area, these trained rats can do so in only 20 minutes. I’ve read many pieces about them before, but what set this article apart for me was the part about their training, as well as the accompanying videos. The rats are initially trained in Tanzania, where they must pass a de-mining certification before being deployed to Cambodia. Then, they undergo an added 6 months of additional rigorous training to ensure they’re ready for the job. Southeast Asian Archaeology

🗼 Has social media made sightseeing deeply uncool? A thoughtful read on how our identities have become fragmented by how we experience life through social media. Framed through the lens of “external presentation”, it’s a lot harder to figure out what we actually want versus how we want to appear. “We lose sight of what we actually feel and instead start to view ourselves from an outside perspective,” the piece notes, consequently choosing things that align that the outside, instead of our true wants. Mashable

🏞 The flow state: the science of the elusive creative mindset that can improve your life. I only learned of Csíkszentmihályi and the concept of ‘flow’ a few years ago, and enjoyed this piece about how it can help us function in fast paced lives. Elements that lead to flow include a high level of concentration, a sense of control, and decreased rumination or worry, with a clear goal and immediate feedback. Flow is also accompanied by an altered sense of time, which many writers or coders can attest to; the hours fly by when you’re in the ‘zone’. The Guardian

🗞 The rise of the online news hustlers. There’s a wild west of news over on Twitter (X), where “a varied group of anonymous middlemen have fast-become the platform’s go-to breaking news sources”. Many of these accounts post things as fact before they’ve been fact-checked, and the desperation of the hustle only contributes to unconfirmed information and misinformation that can result. An antidote on that medium is Shayan Sardarizadeh, a journalist at BBC Verify who often posts screenshots of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and more with the actual facts to debunk them. Links I Would Gchat YouI We Were Friends 

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

🌾 This Long-Dead Scientist's Collection of Rare Seeds Could Help Keep Us Alive. e Plant scientist Arthur Watkins collected samples of wheat from all over the globe 100 year ago, nagging consuls and business agents to give him grain from their local markets. Now, scientists have sequenced the DNA of all the 827 kinds of wheat that he gathered and that have been preserved for the past century. They are now being used to create hardy varieties with improved yields that could help feed the planet. Mother Jones

🚫 We're So Back. Can anyone truly optimize their way back into the good graces of an ex? A whole industry wants to convince you that you can, but that may not actually be the best thing for you, or anyone else. Slate

🍄 Your brain on shrooms: how psilocybin resets neural networks. Another interesting read about psilocybin, the hallucinogenic compound in magic mushrooms, and how it temporarily resets entire brain networks that relate to our “sense of time and self”. After seven volunteers took a giant dose of psilocybin, neurons that would normally fire together became desynchronized. These changes only for a few hours for the neurons—but the part of the brain that was affected changed for weeks. Nature

💩 Autism could soon be detected in your poop. Here's why. Studies in twins suggest that 60-90% of autism is down to genetics, but other factors contribute. This piece notes that if the researchers in this study are correct, then disruption to the microbiome does affect the severity of autism, therefore opening up the possibility of personalised interventions (diet, different pre- or probiotics, etc) to support those with the condition. This isn’t new—Amy Yasko, for example, has written about this for many years—but she was called a quack. Now, this theory is more accepted in research communities, and more studies are confirming the microbiome’s impact on the body as a whole. BBC Science Focus

🐝 To protect mangroves, some Kenyans combat logging with hidden beehives. After pleading with loggers to spare the mangroves in Mombasa, Kenya, Peter Nyongesa Nyongesa turned to bees for help. His group, Tulinde Mikoko (Swahili for ‘Let's Protect Mangroves’) concealed beehives in the top branches of mangroves as silent guardians to attack unsuspecting loggers. NPR

🏭 IVF success drops nearly 40% with air pollution exposure. Exposure to fine particulate matter, a common air pollutant, in the weeks and months before egg collection can significantly decrease the odds of a successful in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle, even in areas with good air quality. Global News

😂 Revolution in the air: how laughing gas changed the world. Since its discovery in the 18th century, nitrous oxide has gone from vaudeville gimmick, to pioneering anaesthetic, to modern party drug. The Guardian

🪽 Hawaii's birds are going extinct. Their last hope could be millions of mosquitoes. NPR. There used to be more than 50 species of Hawaiian honeycreepers, teeny bright birds that filled the forests. Today, only 17 are left, disappearing due to avian malaria, transmitted to them via mosquitoes—sometimes after only 1 mosquito bite. To the rescue: Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes, where the Wolbachia bacteria prevents the mosquitos’ eggs from hatching. I wrote about this bacteria in the context of its use to combat dengue fever, and hope these experiments pan out successfully. NPR

🌭 I Spent Three Years Inhaling Tacos and Corn Dogs in Eating Contests. Here's Why I Stopped. (Archive link.) Tales of a competitive eater and why they did what they did. “I wanted consumption to lead to contentment, but like so many things, food and alcohol can quickly outlive their purposes, then cling to our histories in unwashable ways”. I’ve read a lot about these food competitions, but never a piece about why someone called quits on the whole thing. Texas Monthly

🫂 How to Reconnect with Old Friends Who Have Become Strangers. (Archive link.) It shouldn’t take a study to tell us that people are reluctant to reach out to contacts they’ve slow ghosted, but are gratified when they do regain contact again. And yet the shame—of not writing when you ‘ought’ to have done, or of being too busy and worried you’ve missed the window—is common. This piece isn’t revolutionary but I found it interesting the increase in happiness came after sending a message to the old friend, but it said nothing about whether that person eventually replied. Scientific American

🛣 I drove a Cybertruck around SF because I am a smart, cool alpha male. “I got to drive a Tesla Cybertruck for a day this spring. You jealous? You should be, because Elon Musk’s Boy Scout project is the kind of virile, powerful spacetruck that should be owned and driven only by our largest, wealthiest, whitest men. The kind of men who use speakerphone on airplanes.” Drew Magary drove the (in)famous Tesla truck around San Francisco, and wrote about it with his usual style of cultural commentary plus sarcasm. SFGATE

😴 Study reveals how an anesthesia drug induces unconsciousness. Nitty gritty of medical stuff, sure, but I’ve always wondered how it is that anesthesia puts you to sleep. There are many drugs that anesthesiologists can use to induce that state of unconsciousness in patients, but apparently my question is a longstanding one in science too. MIT neuroscientists have now answered it for one commonly used anesthesia drug, Propofol. The how? It derails the brain’s normal balance between stability and excitability. MIT News

🧬 Parkinson’s Patients More Likely to Carry Genetic Risk Variants Than Once Thought. New research suggests genetic variants associated with Parkinson’s Disease are more common than scientists had previously believed, concluding that 13% of study participants have a genetic form of PD. Variants in seven genes (LRRK2, GBA1, PRKN, SNCA, PINK1, PARK7, and VPS35) have been formally acknowledged as causal contributors to Parkinson’s disease. Curious where this goes, and whether it can help with early diagnosis. Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News

🐾 Healing Pets and People: Part 1. A very interesting read comparing human and veterinary medicine. It makes sense that vets are likely better diagnosticians since their patients can't talk; so much of their detective work must be based on signs and labs and connecting disparate dots. This article gets into some nitty-gritty. All Science Great & Small

🤳🏻 The New Pornographers. “On TikTok, anything and everything can be content. For those who are willing to play that particular game, they can film and share and monetize every mundane or salacious aspect of their lives. Nothing is sacred and everything is scalable. But TikTok is not simply the content the app serves. It is a moneymaking machine.” Roxanne Gay’s piece has not convinced me to download the app, but as TikTok is such a prevalent force these days, I found it an important read with an interesting overview of what's on there and why things do so well vs. not. The Bitter Southerner

🇺🇸 The American Moment. A Justin Ling piece usually means news with narrative arcs woven in, and this article on JD Vance and Project 2025 is no exception. Yes, the Project 2025 director just stepped down, but with nearly 240 people with ties to both Proj​​ect 2025 and Trump, including at least 140 people who worked in the first Trump administration who participated in the project, it’s most likely that it’s technically shelved for optics—but not in practice. Bug-eyed and Shameless

🐋 How to solve a mass stranding: what caused 77 healthy whales to die on a Scottish beach? Scientists have been trying to figure out why a group of 77 long-finned pilot whales died stranded on a Scotland beach. This sad story notes that they were clustered around ‘key individuals’ in the pod, and leading researchers to suspect they were spooked by a severe sonic event. They’ll be able to confirm this when they look for “scarring of the tiny hair cells extracted from whales’ inner ears,” but this is only doable later, once their whale ear bones soften. The Guardian

🦠 Long COVID puzzle pieces are falling into place – the picture is unsettling. A recent Lancet study estimated that in England alone, Covid caused a 15% increase in new cases of diabetes. That’s just one aspect of how it affects the body. Images of the brain, infected, and post-infection (vs not), are also stark. The Conversation

🔗 Quick links 🔗

• Man caught attempting to smuggle 104 live snakes in his pants at the Hon Kong-China border.

• Different ways to think about earning, saving, and organizing money when you are neurodivergent.

• Study finds that a simple blood test can accurately identify whether a person with memory issues has Alzheimer’s 91% of the time.

• The origin and evolution of Italian stuffed pasta shapes.

• Couple talks about their favourite hobby: illegally scaling the world's tallest buildings together.

• How Canada became the car theft capital of the world.

• Investigation reveals “one of the dirtiest secrets of the Olympic Games”: that everyone pees in the Olympic pool.

• How Flavor Flav became the hype man for the US women’s water polo team.

• Boneless chicken wings don’t need to actually be boneless, says Ohio Supreme Court in a baffling verdict. (The court rejected claims by a restaurant patron who suffered serious medical complications from getting a bone stuck in his throat.)

• Gizmo the dog went missing in Las Vegas in 2015, and has been found alive after 9 years.

• Amazing photos of the world’s most elusive insects and arthropods.

This month’s featured artist is photographer Jose Miguel Picon Chimelis, whose photo below taken in Hvalnesviti, Iceland is on the shortlist for the Royal Museums Greenwich Astronomy Photographer of the Year awards. The image captures a panoramic view of Eystrahorn Mountain with dancing aurorae surrounding it.

© Jose Miguel Picon Chimelis

Hope to see you next month,
-Jodi