The Curious About Everything Newsletter #35

The many interesting things I read in January 2024

Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter! CAE 34, last month’s newsletter, is here, if you missed it. The most popular link from last month was my Patreon piece about seasonal depression and how to treat it. (I’ve temporarily removed the paywall for the article).

On the Patreon front: I’ve got a special offer on for the next week: 10% off annual memberships. My newsletter is free thanks to my Patreon community’s support, so if you enjoy CAE, I’d love to see you over on Patreon too. 🖤

The Most Interesting Things I Read This Month

I know, two CAEs in one month!? As you may recall, when I was preparing for my talk on living with chronic spinal CSF leak I delayed my newsletter because I ran out of brain juice. I’m sending this to you in late January to get us back to schedule, where I publish CAE toward the end of each month.

This month, I’ve added a section at the bottom for friends who wrote books—all are published or coming out soon.

This section’s links here are once again formatted thanks to the help of my friend Mike, because Substack still won’t let me hyperlink on mobile.

Start here:

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

😣 The reason little noises drive you mad is about more than sounds. I have known for years that I have misophonia, a nervous system response to certain routine sounds, where they feel like they work their way into my brain in ways that feel impossible to tolerate. With a spinal CSF leak affecting my nervous system and brain, I’ve only gotten more sensitive. So this piece about the condition, one that validates the why (and I always want to know the why) was fascinating. While I knew it wasn’t “just stress”, it turns out misophonics have different brain patterns, including higher activity in the anterior insula— the brain region is involved with interoception, or our perception of what’s going on inside our bodies, as well as with integrating emotions into cognitive processes—in response to trigger sounds. Really interesting read. Aeon

🦥 Slow Change Can Be Radical Change “Most truths are like that, easy to hear or recite, hard to live in the sense that slowness is hard for most of us, requiring commitment, perseverance, and return after you stray. Because the job is not to know; it’s to become. A sociopath knows what kindness is and how to weaponize it; a saint becomes it.” I read this via Jason Kottke, who talks about how these sorts of “slow but still progress” changes happen in climate justice (and climate itself) but it also made me think of my own journey and the increments with which I’m forced to complete work or walk or even have social time. Slow change is still change—I need to be better at remembering this, instead of being caught up in what I haven’t yet been able to do. LitHub

📬 2023 letter I look forward to Dan’s annual letter each year, and this one is no exception. It’s filled with thoughtful observations and interesting analysis, as well as books worth reading and food worth eating (and learning about). Dan Wang

💻 The Perfect Webpage. How the pursuit of search traffic caused websites to reshape themselves to Google’s latest whims, the result being a web chock full of sites that look pretty much the same. “The relentless optimizing of pages, words, paragraphs, photos, and hundreds of other variables has led to a wasteland of capital-C Content that is competing for increasingly dwindling Google Search real estate as generative AI rears its head.” SEO isn’t something many non-perpetually-online people are versed in, but this does a good job of breaking it down for the masses. Also worth clicking through on desktop, where you can enjoy the interactive nature of the piece in full. Now I want a chameleon. The Verge

📱Also in digital culture:: TikTok and the power of the edit (video!). I don’t usually link to video because I rarely watch any; it’s very hard to watch it with a leak. But I would be remiss not to share

Jules Terpak

’s crash course on the zeitgeist of this era: the edit. For those not perpetually online, an ‘edit’ is essentially compiling a video — these days, a shorter video — with multiple clips or images, using transitions and/or effects, and setting it to music. This form of content is hugely popular and only growing, can generate strong emotional responses in viewers, and has moved from the ‘supercut’ style of TV/music/movies to now being ubiquitous in covering politics and cultural events too. So it’s best to pay attention, and Jules gives a great primer. Growing Digital

🗑 How 'bin chickens' learnt to wash poisonous cane toads. There are few Australian animals more reviled than the white ibis, nicknamed a “bin chicken” because it scavenges food from anywhere it can. But the bird may have figured out how to overhaul its bad reputation: it’s able to eat one of the only animals Australians hate more, the cane toad, a “toxic and pervasive pest.” (via my friend Jimmy, who also sends me bin chicken photos because I think the birds are beautiful) BBC News

🧪 Decorated nanoparticles prevent anaphylaxis without causing side effects in mouse study The first selective treatment to stop allergic responses, via nanoparticles. Per the study lead: “Currently, there are no methods available to specifically target mast cells.” (TELL ME ABOUT IT). “All we have are medications like antihistamines to treat symptoms,” he said — which don’t prevent allergies, they only counteract the effect of histamine released by mast cells after they are activated. So they are looking at a way to inactivate mast cells when exposed to specific triggers, which would potentially stop “dangerous immune responses in severe situations like anaphylaxis” (aka my life), as well as seasonal allergies. In the “start here” section because of how much my life is impacted by this—it’s part of why I’ve been unable to safely pursue further leak treatment—but so are the lives of many people I know, and likely some of you, too. Very curious to see where this goes. Phys.org

🍜 The game of gastrodiplomacy. I've shared articles about gastrodiplomacy in past CAE editions, but this one traces the proliferation of the strategy since Thailand first began deploying its Global Thai programme in 2001, considered the first official example of gastrodiplomacy. If like me you enjoy learning about politics and about food, this is worth your time. Vittles

📸 The Top 100 Close-up Images Of The Year. I featured the shortlist of CUOTY photos previously, but they’ve just announced the winners. Enjoy enjoy! (I'm obsessed with Pete Burford’s damselfly here.)

See also: The Nature Photography Contest Winners Gallery and the 2023 Ocean Art Photography Awards (this one is best viewed on laptop)

⚖️ The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty. “Everyone involved in Carlos’s case found a reason to look the other way. Everyone, that is, except for one woman determined to do the right thing.” Estella Ybarra felt so terrible about sending Carlos Jaile to prison for rape that 27 years later she called the District Attorney to ask him to reinvestigate— and he found DNA that showed Jaile didn’t do it. An emotional read about a wrongful conviction and the juror who helped free the man she'd once voted to convict. Texas Monthly. (If you prefer to watch, here’s a video summary and interview instead.)

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

🦉 Birds are the most interesting thing. A lovely retrospective of a year newslettering and exploring, by Bill Davidson: “The whole time these amazing things have been happening, there has been a little voice in my head telling me I am not good enough. Now, I acknowledge the refrain and respond to my small, scared self by thanking him for trying to protect me. I maintain a certain psychological distance and pause often to make sure I remain open to possibilities. I now embrace being uncomfortable rather than running from it. When I reside on the edge of my comfort zone, good things happen.” Good advice to remember.

Easy By Nature

📞 And, This pay phone is free, but you can’t make a call. It only plays birdsongs (gift article), a short piece about a ‘Bird Calls Phone’ in Takoma Park, Maryland. Washington Post

🇺🇬 Continuing on the bird theme: Taking flight: why the sky's the limit for a women's birding club in Uganda. Tour companies describe Uganda as a paradise for birdwatchers, as it has the highest concentration of birds in Africa — around 50% of Africa’s bird species, and 11% of the world’s. A club of 80 female birders are pushing boundaries in a traditionally male-dominated field: “Birding is expensive and many Ugandan women are struggling to meet costs such as buying binoculars, telescopes and cameras to record and share the birds they sight with other people,” their chair Judith Mirembe says, adding that cultural expectations of women as caregivers mean their spouses may not let them go for week-long birdwatching tours. “This is our reality. Even tourist operators do not take women seriously and we know that we must work twice as hard as men to get the same respect.” The Guardian

⚜️ The Quebec Government's Plan To Kill English Universities. "The right-of-centre government is led by a nationalist party hyper-focused on the survival of francophone Quebecers as an ethnic group. It practises an isolationist brand of politics, displaying clear favouritism for the French majority to the detriment of the rest of Quebec society, especially immigrants...For Quebec to lose any part of McGill would be a colossal mistake, but one solely caused by this government’s myopic populist politics & premier Legault’s insistence on playing to his party’s most radical base.” The Walrus

💸 Mission Statement. Austrian heiress Marlene Engelhorn announced a plan for a €25m giveaway: she sent invitations to 10,000 randomly selected people in Austria, asking them to complete a survey, eventually narrowing them to 50 people who will serve on a council that helps brainstorm effective ways to distribute the funds. Her website, linked here, emphasizes that these ideas ought to focus on mitigating inequality in society (not just the effects thereof). Engelhorn says her wealth was accumulated before she was even born, and since she didn't do the work she felt she can't claim all the fruits of its labour—a rare strategy for an inheritance of this nature. Her total inheritance totals €3.8bn, so this is a percentage of it. It's also a really interesting idea to create a council representative of the population of Austria to help earmark best uses for the money. Guter Rat. (Note: Guter rat means "good council".)

🇫🇷 Tallow to Margarine. TIL margarine is a French invention!? Napoleon III offered a prize to the person who could devise “a substitute product for ordinary butter, cheaper and which keeps well, for the navy and the less well-off classes,” which Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, a French chemist, won with a mixture of tallow, water, skim milk, and sodium bicarbonate. Scope of Work

🇺🇸 A Brief History of the United States' Accents and Dialects. Migration patterns, cultural ties, geographic regions and class differences all shape speaking patterns. The United States may lack an official language, but a road trip across the country reveals dozens of different accents and dialects of English that serve as living links to Americans’ ancestors. Smithsonian Magazine

🦅 Why the World Is Betting Against American Democracy. A stark read about the state of U.S. democracy and "poisonous politcs" that are hurting national security, the economy, and global stability. Per one European ambassador, the U.S. is a “fat buffalo trying to take a nap” as hungry wolves approach. “I can hear those Champagne bottle corks popping in Moscow — like it’s Christmas every f***ing day.” Politico

Not unrelated: The Top 10 Global Risks For 2024. Time

🐆 Courtney Dauwalter: Step inside the 'pain cave', where rules are remade. Research shows that in marathons,  women are approximately 11.1% slower than men, likely due to men having greater muscle mass and a higher V02 range. But at 50 miles, there is only a 3.7% difference. At 100 miles, 0.3% difference. And, "[i]t seems 195 miles is the magic number where women become faster than men." Why? Suggestions include women having greater distribution of slow-twitch muscle fibres (which allow for more resistance to fatigue), greater peripheral conditioning, oxygen efficiency, and mental toughness. Other possible causes could be that women tend to burn fat more efficiently than men and generally keep a steadier pace during long races. BBC Sport

🐓 Do You Speak Chicken? A new study shows most people can tune into how chickens are feeling based on their clucks alone. Atlas Obscura

🦓 Putting Zebras in Plain Sight: A Focus on Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS). In the process of finding care for my spinal CSF leak, I found out I have EDS. It connects all sorts of disparate symptoms and quirks in my body that I never knew were related, but is part of why my leak repairs do not hold. This piece is a good overview of how pathways to care remain difficult. Women are disproportionately represented among people with EDS (70% of cases) despite no obvious genetic reason for the bias, and “patients must overcome some huge challenges before receiving a diagnosis.” I got lucky that a geneticist called it quickly, but unfortunately, some practitioners still believe EDS is simply ‘being flexible’. In reality, collagen defects lead to a laundry list comorbidities, to chronic pain, and to complications. Inside Precision Medicine

✈️ Nice View. Shame About All The Tourists. An interesting read about the growing ethical unease around tourism, an activity author Wismayer calls “inessential by definition”—yet it is as integral to society as it’s ever been. The dilemma of modern tourism only grows as access to places become even easier. Noema

📸 And related: Do not disturb: Practicing ethical wildlife photography. Wildlife photographers on the thrill of the chase  — and the importance of setting ethical guidelines, something I don't often see covered in the press and an issue that warrants the utmost consideration. Canadian Geographic

🐒 Plus: Chimpanzees are dying from our colds. For some of Africa’s great-ape populations, human diseases are an even bigger threat than habitat loss or poaching. Even pathogens that cause only mild symptoms in people can be deadly for endangered chimpanzees and gorillas. Researchers are now starting to unravel where these reverse zoonoses come from: tourists who don’t follow biosafety guidelines and workers who inadvertently carry their children’s germs into the forest. Humans, we really suck sometimes. Nature

🎙 The Musical Age of Shitpost Modernism. “Agus’ music is just one dispatch from the strange new world of what I’m calling shitpost modernism. Imagine if ‘shitpost’ didn’t mean far-right 4channers spamming Dark Brandon GIFs but instead became a zeitgeist-defining aesthetic for music, a new frontier of profane genius that walks the tightrope between cringe and cool.” An interesting essay on the future of music, covering the rise of songs since 2020 that straddle the line between the serious and the silly, impervious to generalized music norms (and, per the author, taste boundaries). Pitchfork

🦇 How Fruit Bats Got a Sweet Tooth Without Sour Health. A high-sugar diet is bad news for humans,  as we all know. It can lead to diabetes, obesity and even cancer. But fruit bats not only survive but even thrive by gobbling up twice their body weight in sugary fruit every day. Why? Apparently it’s their pancreas, which has extra insulin-producing cells as well as genetic changes to help it process an immense amount of sugar. And fruit bat kidneys had adapted to ensure that vital electrolytes would be retained from their watery meals. UCSF News

👅 Speaking of taste: Feeling Bitter,

Bethany Brookshire

’s post about why it is that Paxlovid makes some people taste a very bitter taste throughout the course of the medication. Spoiler: it’s related to the TAS2R1 receptor. Team Trash

🥩 Why Right-Wingers Are So Afraid of Men Eating Vegetables. Incendiary title, sure, but when hugely popular right-wing personalities tweet about how there is “a shady cabal of elite globalists” conspiring to make everyone on earth eat bugs instead of burgers, it’s not actual consumers who benefit. New Republic

This quote says it all:

Because this is all so ridiculous, it’s easy to miss the tragedy: Turning meat into a culture-war issue both creates new, tribal ideals of consumption and undermines the political and systemic change needed to create a healthier and more sustainable food system—one where more Americans could afford to eat well, where waterways didn’t get poisoned by runoff, where superbugs aren’t bred in feedlots, and where food workers aren’t routinely exploited and maimed. Despite culture warriors’ iconoclastic and anti-elite posturing, the biggest beneficiaries of the meat culture war are the incumbent business and political interests that already play an outsize role in setting the menu of the American diet. Among the biggest losers are ordinary consumers.

💪🏻 Steroid to Heaven. The history of performance enhancement is almost as long as sport itself—ancient Greek athletes and Victorian cyclists used strychnine for muscle contractions. Serious anti-doping measures didn’t take off until the 1970s.  So, argues the author, perhaps it’s time for a better, more honest discourse around steroids. “The painful truth is we are a gawdy, grotesque, gluttonous, self-destructive country that watches Botched, dips Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in Velveeta, rolls coal, and responds to the mass murder of children by buying the same gun they were killed with in record numbers. No amount of education, social spending, or rehab will make us behave. Not with steroids, not with anything else.” The Baffler

🤖 My Parents' Dementia Felt Like the End of Joy. Then Came the Robots. “Caregiving is not just about tending to someone’s bodily concerns; it also means caring for the spirit. The needs of adults with and without dementia are not so different: We all search for a sense of belonging, for meaning, for self-actualization. And respect. […] The robot-makers are “a shaft of light at the bottom of the well,” she writes, trying to answer the problem of what a good life with dementia looks like. WIRED

⚠️ The Taylor Swift deepfakes are a warning. For years, researchers predicted a huge wave of AI-powered harassment, and we got a sick example of that recently: “Separating consensual, permissible adult content from AI-generated harassment requires strong policies, dedicated teams and rapid enforcement capabilities. X has none of those, and that's how you get 45 million views on a single post harassing Taylor Swift.” But this piece goes beyond X and also discusses how platforms that have rejected calls to actively moderate content have created a means for bad actors to organize, create harmful content, and distribute it at scale. Platformer

🧠 Psychoactive Drug Helps Veterans Who Have Sustained TBI. A new study shows that Ibogaine, a psychoactive substance made from the bark of a shrub, can help treat the psychological effects of traumatic brain injury, and PTSD. The drug decreased symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and depression by more than 80% on average even one month after treatment. (The drug was self-administered in Mexico, not doled out by researchers; participants went to Mexico themselves). Looks like a formal study is required! Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News

🔗 Quick links 🔗

• An add-on to the Verge piece on SEO above: researchers find Google Search really has gotten worse.

• Try not to let moose lick your car, Parks Canada warns, as more salt-seeking animals flock to highways. 

• A huge ancient city has been found in the Amazon in Ecuador, hidden for thousands of years by the jungle.

• Neptune is known for being a rich blue and Uranus green—but a new study has revealed that the two ice giants are actually far closer in colour than typically thought. 

• The most common causes of accidental deaths in the home (and how to prevent them).

• Another new dinosaur!

• A very short history of the F-word 

• An ambient noise generator, for you to create the ambient noise you wished you had as a soundtrack.

• “This is a class action against Hershey for falsely representing several Reese's Peanut Butter products as containing explicit carved out artistic designs when there are no such carvings in the actual products”. Hooboy.

• The City of Toronto says it is working to correct typos found on a couple of new bike path signs installed just last month, including two that misspelled Lake Shore Trail as “Lake Shore Trial.” 

• A sweater knitted from an aerogel fibre that mimics polar bear fur offers as much warmth as a down jacket, despite being 1/5th as thick.

• Women’s tears act to reduce aggression in men who are close enough to catch a whiff of the waterworks, says a new study.

🎉 Friends who wrote things! 🎉

Five people I love wrote books that I want to share with you:

• James Beard award-winner and all around delightful human Geraldine DeRuiter’s new book, “If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury” is available for pre-order. The essays follow her roller-coaster of funny, shocking, and always entertaining adventures in food.

• Angie Orth’s first book, ”Flirting with Disaster: True Travel Tales of Fear, Failure, and Faith”, is available for pre-order. The book follows her big life adventure of quitting a NYC job to travel the world.

• Similarly, “Finding Katya: How I Quit Everything to Backpack the Former Soviet States” is former lawyer Katie Aune’s story, an engaging read about the one-way flight that started her adventure through all 15 states of the former Soviet Union.

• In the fiction category, Lola Akinmade wrote “Everything Is Not Enough,” her second novel. Lola’s an award-winning photographer, but also a beautiful writer, and this book is no exception.

• In the life help category, Katie Matthews created an end-of-life planning journal called Legacero, which is divided into sections for finances, insurance, instructions and more. It’s marketed toward seniors, but would be helpful for anyone.

This month’s featured artist is Adam G from Messy Mod, who illustrated Henry Wismayer’s tourism piece in Noema that I shared above. I loved this image with its almost fungi-like trees, and I’m happy to feature it this month. You can find him on IG, too.

Hope to see you next month,
-Jodi