The Curious About Everything Newsletter #38

The many interesting things I read in April 2024

Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter! CAE 37, last month’s newsletter, is here, if you missed it. The most popular link from last month was the story about parent influencers from the POV of their kids.

Some Personal Updates

• My Croatian gluten free translation card is now available, with my guide to the country to follow once my uptime allows. I started the celiac translation cards project in 2014, and have 19 languages so far with more to come.

• On Patreon, I shared my detailed, (colour-coded) spreadsheet template for how I track my symptoms over time. People often ask how I kept track of symptoms between the conditions I have and the years I’ve been leaking. It’s divided by condition, and with variables like sleep score, HRV, and more in addition to symptoms.

• Thrilled to see this study paper about the spinal CSF leak conference I spoke at in November published with early online access in ANJR. Per the authors, 90.9% (!) of physicians stated that they would change the way they practice because of what they learned attending the conference. Can’t get better than that. My talk is summarized within the paper, too, in the section on living with a persistent spinal CSF leak.

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.

🌊 The Cloud Under The Sea. You may have seen this beautiful interactive piece, because it’s been shared all over. But if you’ve not read it yet, it’s worth your time, an inside look into the surprisingly small and very specialized industry that fixes the Internet’s cables when they break in the depths of the sea (usually ruptured by fishing equipment). “For the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data. If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function.” There are many hundreds of thousands of miles of those cables, close to 800,000 total per the piece, and they represent 600 different systems. The Verge

🍜 Insatiable: A Life Without Eating. “While scientists have figured out extraordinary ways to keep patients who can’t eat alive, they haven’t yet figured out how to deal with what it does to us mentally. I’d been through a lot with Crohn’s before, even believing that who I was as a person was largely the result of these struggles. But TPN was different. It was like I was sitting in a lawn chair (albeit a rickety one) at a picnic when somebody came along and kicked a leg out—the pasta salad that might’ve been in my hand, flung into oblivion.” I’ve spoken with some MCAS patients over the years who are on total parietal nutrition, or TPN. They never mentioned the psychological aspect and, in an effort to block it out and hope it wouldn’t be what my MCAS came to, I didn’t let myself think about it. But it makes sense, of course, that by not being able to eat, your brain would only become fixated on food. “With the way appetite brain signaling works, Smeets says it makes sense that some overlapping effects of starvation might take place in the brain, causing an obsession with food and all the behavioral baggage that comes with it.” Humorous, brave, humanizing read. Thanks Andrew Chapman, for writing it. Longreads

🧠 'Like a film in my mind': hyperphantasia and the quest to understand vivid imaginations. In CAE 32, I shared a piece about aphantasia, the mind’s inability to visualize things, and said that I thought I had whatever the opposite of that was. Well, the opposite now has an article, and it’s called hyperphantasia. There’s a quiz, and yes: I tested as wildly hyperphantasic. The Guardian

💬 101 Additional Advices. A list of additional life advice from Kevin Kelly, who has already gifted us with much wisdom in the past. This current list is for the occasion of his 73rd birthday, additional tips he wished he’d known earlier. Among those that I jotted down: “Most arguments are not really about the argument, so most arguments can’t be won by arguing”; and “If you want to know how good a surgeon is, don’t ask other doctors. Ask the nurses”; and “It is impossible to be curious and furious at the same time, so avoid furious.” The latter seemed especially apt for this newsletter. Kevin Kelly

📖 The Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name.  I have this book in my living room, and it is among my favourites. So you can imagine my joy that Maria Popova, one of the best and most creative curators out there, covered it in a recent post. “Each word is a portable cathedral in which we clarify and sanctify our experience,” Popova writes. The title of the book is a bit misleading in that the emotions are not at all obscure, but rather “profoundly relatable and universal”. And they are not sorrows so much as “emissaries of the bittersweet, with all its capacity for affirming the joy of being alive.” They include: maru mori (the heartbreaking simplicity of ordinary things), apolytus (the moment you realize you are changing as a person, finally outgrowing your old problems like a reptile shedding its skin), the wends (the frustration that you’re not enjoying an experience as much as you should… as if your heart had been inadvertently demagnetized by a surge of expectations), anoscetia (the anxiety of not knowing ‘the real you'), dès vu (the awareness that this moment will become a memory), and more. Despite how individualized life feels, there's a universality to our worries and sorrows, beautifully captured in the book and Popova’s summary. The Marginalian

🔇 Variations on the Theme of Silence. Thoughtful essay on how silence is not the absence of noise, but its contrary twin. Without breaks from the cacophony of modern existence, you can’t stop and digest, or even truly hear yourself. Common Reader

😡 Brief anger may impair blood vessel function. Previous research shows linked anger and increased risk of heart disease and stroke. But why? Researchers have now found that anger impairs blood vessels’ ability to dilate and function normally. In the study, people becoming angry by recalling past negative events for just 8 minutes was enough to detrimentally impact blood vessel function. Also in the study: episodes of anxiety and sadness did not trigger the same change in functioning of the blood vessel lining. Science Daily

💾 The Mysteries and Quirks of Human Memory. Contrary to what reports may imply, memory doesn’t actually work like a screen recording. It doesn’t preserve everything in pristine suspension, and it’s normal not to remember every detail about the movie you watched a while ago, or where your keys are. “These are not the symptoms of a failing brain. They are, on the contrary, signs that your brain is doing just what it was designed to do: prioritize and store important information and let nonessential facts and details slip away.” This function was evolutionarily crucial, but it’s harder and harder to manage with the firehose of information that we experience today. Undark

🚢 Teenager finds “holy grail” LEGO octopus from 1997 spill off Cornwall coast. The octopus is one of nearly 5 million LEGO Lego pieces that fell into the sea in 1997 when a storm hit a cargo ship. While 352,000 pairs of flippers, 97,500 scuba tanks, and 92,400 swords went overboard, the octopuses are considered the most prized finds as only 4,200 were onboard. The Guardian 

🩸 Blood Biomarker Reveals Signs of Multiple Sclerosis Years Before. In about 1 in 10 cases of MS, the body begins producing a distinctive set of antibodies against its own proteins years before symptoms emerge. These autoantibodies appear to bind to both human cells, and to common pathogens, possibly explaining the immune attacks on the brain and spinal cord that are the hallmark of MS. “The dozen or so autoantibodies all stuck to a chemical pattern that resembled one found in common viruses, including Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), which infects more than 85% of all people, yet has been flagged in previous studies as a contributing cause for MS.” For a disease initially thought to be ‘purely psychological’, we’re finding some very physical reasons for its manifestation. What other conditions now thought of as mental will have biomarkers in the future? I’m sure, at least a few. Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News

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

🐝 The Rise Of The Bee Bandits. Where once there was cattle and horse rustling, the American West is now confronting the theft of its bees. I didn’t realize how prevalent this was until I read this piece. Noema

🇨🇦 Foreign landlord fails to pay taxes, CRA goes after tenant. Really bonkers case where a landlord left Quebec for Italy, not paying their taxes for their residential property, and the court ruled that the tenant can be held liable for them even though they didn’t know the landlord wasn’t a Canadian resident. In Canada, non-resident owners have long had to pay withholding taxes on properties they sell or rent out, and if they don’t pay tenants can be on the hook. I’m surprised the court ruled in this way given the tenant had no reason to know they were out of the country. It adds a big burden on tenants. The Globe and Mail

👧🏼 Nothing Could Prepare Me for the Bizarre 'Live Birth' Experience at Babyland Hospital. I couldn’t stop reading this piece about writer Joshua Rigsby’s visit to the Cabbage Patch Kids Babyland General Hospital. “A nurse’s voice comes over the PA system: 'Everyone, please come to Mother Cabbage. Mother Cabbage is about to go into labor.' She speaks urgently, like a real nurse, rather than a checkout clerk.” And: “As with many sacred mysteries, it isn’t entirely clear what constitutes Mother Cabbage — whether it’s the tree, or the mound, or the hole that’s about to birth a doll.” A truly curious snapshot of Americana, humorous writing, and at times horrifying. What’s not to love? Thrillist

🌝 China's Moon atlas is the most detailed ever made. The Geologic Atlas of the Lunar Globe doubles the resolution of Apollo-era maps, and shows the moon’s 2,341 craters, 81 basins and 17 rock types, along with other basic geological information about the lunar surface — built at an gobsmacking scale of 1:2,500,000. Nature

🇲🇽 Hierve el Agua with Jeremy A lovely photoessay from my former home of Oaxaca, from a photographer I met in Bangkok back in 2009. He’s now based in Mexico. Still Out Riding

⚖️ Google trial wraps up as judge weighs landmark US antitrust claims. Judge Amit Mehta is about to render a major decision on whether Google's conduct broke civil antitrust law. He did not indicate when he would rule, but it could potentially require big changes to Google's business practices. Reuters

🔎 The Man Who Killed Google Search. And also on the GOOG front: a blistering read on the enshittification of Google, as demonstrated via emails released from the US v. Google case mentioned above. The TL;DR? Google's finance and ad teams led by Prabhakar Raghavan made searching worse to make the company more money. Where's Your Ed At

🦧 Wounded orangutan seen using plants as medicine. Scientists observed Rakus, a wild Sumatran orangutan in Indonesia putting a medicinal paste on a facial wound that he sustained fighting with other males for status, according to a new study research. Scientists observed him chewing the leaves of a vine known for its medicinal properties, then applying a poultice of those chewed leaves to his injury. It marks the first documented case of an animal self-medicating a wound using a plant with healing properties. In just 8 days, his wound fully closed! BBC News (via Everything Is Amazing)

👪 'Did Something Happen to Mom When She Was Young?' A surprising (to me!) read about the secret history of forced adoptions from Greece to the US, which were carried out in the name of fighting communism after the end of the Greek Civil War in 1949. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, close to 4,000 Greek children were adopted abroad, primarily by Americans. Politico

🥬 Something Weird Is Happening With Caesar Salads. With chefs tossing in ingredients like pig ears, smoked trout, tequila, pickled red onion, and other non-Caesarous ingredients, when does a classic dish become something other than itself? The Atlantic. (Archive link.)

🍽 Why don't rich people eat anymore? And speaking of food: “[b]eing able to demonstrate a lack of need for material goods, like food, suggests social transcendence”, says a doctor in the piece, talking about Judeo-Christian practices of fasting. The excesses of earlier times have been replaced by an airy nothingness when it comes to eating. Dazed Digital

📥 No, You Don’t Need to ‘Decant’ Your Groceries. Continuing on the theme: these organization videos of taking everything out of their packaging and putting it into plastic or glass jars are all the rage. Jaya Saxena argues they’re just for show; “the real goal of all of this extra work is clear: aesthetics.” Making things look good is nice and all, but what is lost is that people are “chasing an aesthetic defined by wealth and bounty”, one that in the end, she argues, is is labor and extra work over function — with no practical benefit. Eater

👅 I Understand Thee, and Can Speak Thy Tongue: California Unlocks Shakespeare's Gibberish. Fascinating! Frank Bergon on deciphering Shakespeare’s supposed gibberish in honor of National Talk Like Shakespeare Day. “I think he knew what he was doing: capturing the sound of a rare, ancient language, surviving nearly intact today.” What is that rare, ancient language? Basque. LA Review Of Books

👃🏻 This McDonald's billboard stinks (for all the right reasons). In the Netherlands, McDonald’s put out a series of plain billboards in its signature red and yellow colours, with a stash of fries that were leveraged to pump out smells for passerbys. Each billboard was placed within 200 metres of a McDonald's, so “those captivated by the aroma could instantly satisfy their cravings.” Wonder how often they had to change the fries? Creative Bloq

💰 On AI agents: how are these digital butlers supposed to get paid? An AI agent is a computer software that can be used to do things for you. The piece shares someone’s example of an AI agent finding birthday party ideas, then ordering the cake, reserving the room, sending invitations, etc. The kind of stuff people who can’t afford a personal assistant have to do themselves. Citing the “ghosts of digital futures’ past”, Dave Karpf is sceptical: “That’s why the current wave of enthusiasm seems like a hype bubble to me. I am seeing a lot of very smart, normally insightful people being taken in by the idea of “AI personal assistants for the masses,” without asking what the revenue model is meant to resemble.” Interesting read about how the trajectory of new technology bends towards money. The Future Now and Then

🦠 Viruses Finally Reveal Their Complex Social Life. Sociovirologists are moving away from viewing viruses as isolated particles to studying how they engage as members of a group. “We think of them as part of a community,” says virologist Carolina López, “with everybody playing a critical role.” Let’s not go too far in the anthropomorphizing of viruses now, ok? Quanta 

💉 Ozempic-like drug may help slow the progression of Parkinson's symptoms. Uh, what can’t GLP-1 drugs do? In a study of people with early-stage Parkinson’s disease, a GLP-1 receptor agonist showed promising results in reducing impaired motor skills associated with Parkinson’s. “Although the study suggested a potential neuroprotective effect of lixisenatide, the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood.” Sigh, it’s always “we need more data”. Still, though, it’s an interesting examination of the specific neuroprotective mechanism of these drugs, and eventually I hope we get more data on their effects on inflammation, oxidative stress, mitochondrial function, and a-syn (α-Synuclein, the presynaptic neuronal protein that is linked to Parkinson's disease pathology). Medical News Today

Pineapple-flavored oral spray successfully prevents UTIs for 9 years. A small UK study found recurrent urinary track infections can be prevented for up to 9 years following treatment with an oral spray-based vaccine, a promising potential way forward given the rise of antibiotic resistance with UTIs. Interesting Engineering

💊 The Next Drug for Fibromyalgia? Tonix, is an updated version of oral muscle relaxant Flexeril, but in sublingual form, which allows for small doses and ability to use it longer term (unlike Flexeril, where the higher dosing has toxicity concerns). Like Flexeril, Tonix aims to calm the central nervous system, but in this case also help with increasing deep sleep in doing so, as well as to minimize pain common in fibromyalgia. If the FDA approves it, I expect EDS patients to want in as well, since both of these issues (constant pain + lack of refreshing, deep sleep) are common with wonky collagen. Health Rising

🐢 Medical Mysteries: Years of hives and fevers traced to a startling cause. A California woman suffered from an episodic flu-like illness that defied explanation. Its origin stunned her doctors. TURTLE SALMONELLA IN A FIBROID WTF. Washington Post (Gift link)

🌀 What do I have to do to get better? “For the most part, my brain is full of other things—friends, gratitude, business, projects, little life philosophies, glimmers, trees, marveling, minutiae. The things that actually make my life better, even if they don’t make my health any better. Full of other things…usually. Almost always. But then, on occasion, that ever insidious whisper…'What do I have to do to get better'?” A short, raw read from a woman caught in the chronic illness vortex. The Arghonaut

🐝 Bees. Another entry on the bee-filled list this month: on making a “bee-sized hole” in the dense phobia of bees. A lovely piece about fear and adaptation. Salmagundi, via The Browser

🦉A New Birding Club Wants to Help COVID Long-Haulers Safely Enjoy Nature Together. Ed Yong, who I’ve featured here many a time for his excellent, much-needed science writing, has started a birding club for those with long Covid. His dedication to helping sick people find joy via birding in ways most people don’t care to include them is really beautiful. Audubon

🤫 Dark Matter. “But the postcards go even further: They’re public, available for anyone to see. They show us the types of stories people normally keep guarded, creating, in the aggregate, a living inventory of our taboos.” For Frank Warren, examining secrets was part of his lifelong quest to find what it means to use words. A fascinating deep dive into the man behind Post Secret, two decades later. Entertaining, well-written, and a trip down memory lane for those of us who loved the site many years ago, it is a reminder to check it out again today as it’s still kicking! (I remember reading it at my desk during lunch breaks when I was still a lawyer.) Hazlitt 

🎰 The Future of American Sports Isn’t Pretty. On the rise of sports betting, and the loosened regulations that let it happen. Persuasion.

🧬 Canadian DNA lab knew its paternity tests identified the wrong dads, but it kept selling them. Well this is horrifying. Testing by Viaguard-Accumetrics seemed to use guesswork over science, some ex-employees say — yet it kept sending out faulty results, upending families in the process. CBC News

🔪 Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI. The sheer volume of AI-generated content has overwhelmed the web, or — as Erik Hoel argues — to pollute it. “Pollute its searches, its pages, its feeds, everywhere you look. I’ve been predicting that generative AI would have pernicious effects on our culture since 2019, but now everyone can feel it.” The Intrinsic Perspective 

🧟 Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost Break Down the Making of Shaun of the Dead, 20 Years Later. Even I, a person who does not watch moving pictures, was well aware of the zeitgeist around zombie movie Shaun of the Dead and found this piece very entertaining. The sprawling discussion includes determining what should be thrown at zombies (vinyl records? Something else?) and the warm memories from filming, “with time not diminishing the dry sense of humor they share.” The author’s joy at interviewing them also comes through, which makes it even more fun to read. GQ

🔦 So You Think You’ve Been Gaslit. Gaslighting as a term is everywhere these days, but is sometimes used when it ought to be called something else. This clarifying piece argues not that narcissism or gaslighting don’t exist, but that in using the terms so frequently we risk dilution and “also attributing natural human friction to the malevolence of others.” Gaslighting isn’t brainwashing, and it’s not guilt-tripping. It’s something that destabilizes enough to undermine your sense of reality, volleying between trust and distrust enough that you can only occupy a shaky world between the two. The New Yorker. (Archive link.)

💻 What is “Substackism” and where does wellness fit in? Max Read’s take on the nascent Substackist ideology, and how wellness fits into it: “what links all of these diverse content producers together is less a particular level (or absence) of scientific rigor or expertise (sometimes these guys are absolutely correct!) and more an outsider attitude—a mistrust of institutions and a sense of pervasive environmental contamination.” Read Max

💣 My cousin was killed by a car bomb in Milwaukee. A mob boss was the top suspect. Now, I'm looking for answers. “Grady thought the boiler had exploded. But when she looked into the garage, she saw Augie’s car in flames. The blast shook the city. Paintings fell from walls and books tumbled off shelves. One woman said her recliner lifted off the ground. Tenants ran from the building as firefighters and police rushed to the scene. Augie Palmisano was my cousin. His murder has never been solved.” More than 45 years after Augie Palmisano was murdered in a car bombing in downtown Milwaukee, his cousin Mary set out to investigate his death. In doing so, she uncovered a story about power, loyalty, and jealousy and then lengths people will go to hold onto control. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

🫖 Steeped in chemistry. Investigating the molecular basis of a nice cup of tea. Chemistry World. (See also: ISO 3103, via Wikipedia.)

🔗 Quick links 🔗

• Bookmarkable list of the lawsuits in the USA that are shaping voting rights, redistricting and elections. These are updated as new cases arise.

• Still on about bees! Talk about a phobia-creating event, wow. A girl in North Carolina kept saying there were monsters in her bedroom, but nope — it was 60,000 bees instead. Stuff of nightmares.

• German art museum fires a worker for hanging his own painting in their gallery. Sadly we don’t know what the pic looks like as they’re not sharing, but I’m so curious.

• The James Webb telescope finds the origins of the biggest explosion since the Big Bang, revealing a new cosmological mystery. I love that they called it BOAT — “brightest of all time”. It’s a gamma-ray burst that spat photons toward earth with more energy than in the Large Hadron Collider, (!) and came from 2.4 billion light-years away in the Sagitta constellation.

• A missing cat was found in an Amazon return box — after it was accidentally shipped over 1,000km to California from Utah.

• For those of you on Twitter still (X), I’ve made a list of scientists I trust that are covering H5N1 and the current outbreak in dairy farms in the US. (Some of these scientists also tweet about Covid so you’ll see some updates there sprinkled in.) The current data suggest that H5N1 entered cattle from wild birds via a single spillover, likely in December 2023.

• We covered auto-brewery syndrome in a previous CAE, but this time it’s someone who got arrested for ‘drinking’ when it was really his own body making the goods. Spoiler: he was cleared of the charges

• A long list of travel scams in Europe and how to avoid them.

• Uber’s 2024 lost and found list, including most unique items. Among them: 2 containers of spiders. Again, stuff of nightmares.

• Famous paintings recreated with emoji; hard to pick a fave but that Klimt is something else, really beautiful! via Waxy.org

This month’s featured artist is Matthew Glover, whose photo below ‘Dancing in the Dark’ of great crested grebes (Podiceps cristatatus) in Killingworth, North Tyneside, England won a runner-up prize — well-deserved! — in the 2024 British Wildlife Photography Awards.

Hope to see you next month,
-Jodi