The Curious About Everything Newsletter #63

The many interesting things I read in May 2026

Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter! CAE 62 is here, if you missed it. The most popular link from last month was NPR’s interactive report from remote Tristan da Cunha, the “busiest place you’ve never seen”.

Personal updates

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

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

Featured art for CAE 63

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

The most interesting things I read this month

Start here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🔗 Quick links

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope you enjoyed these links! See you next month,

-Jodi