The Curious About Everything Newsletter #31

The many interesting things I read in September 2023.

Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter! CAE 30, last month’s newsletter, is here if you missed it. The most popular link from last month was Mari Andrew’s ‘100 things I know’.

This month has been busy, with visits from friends and a ceiling leak in my apartment (just what I need, more leaks!). Thankfully I’ve also been able to get a few walks outside as I’ve made some progress in my healing.

On the non-ceiling front: I’ve been asked to speak (virtually) at a conference in Colorado on November 11th about living with a spinal CSF leak. It will be streamed online, and registration is free. You can learn more about the event here.

The Most Interesting Things I Read This Month

This section’s links here are once again formatted thanks to the help of my friend Mike, since the Substack app still doesn’t allow people to add hyperlinks.

Start here:

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

🥺 We were never supposed to see our faces this much. There are plenty of articles about how social media makes us feel like we can never measure up, but I found this piece’s angle interesting too. It argues that seeing our physical reflections over and over and being “constantly aware of ourselves” has transformative consequences. It can amplify self-recrimination, and fixation on physical appearance. Dazed.

🦯 I’m completely blind and far more capable than you might think. And on the other side of the coin: acclimating to blindness required more than learning how to live independently again, says Dr. Jeffry Ricker. For six decades, he had developed a deep interconnectedness with the world as a sighted person, then became blind. The piece is a very important discussion about cultivating a positive disability identity and what that looks like, as well as about how the disability itself would be less disabling if the world interacted with it (and us) differently. Relatable for my very different disabilities, insofar as I have found peace with my lot in life and tried to find joy within the indentations it leaves—whereas others often pity me for it. Aeon’s Psyche Mag

And, related: How Disabled People Are Left Behind In Climate Disasters. There is a focus on disability in these roundups, since my life necessarily encompasses navigating it. I realize now that I did not focus on these pieces when I was able bodied; it goes to show that even when you think you’re aware or compassionate, you’re likely missing important parts of the story. This piece resonated for me, too, given how much accommodation I need to live safely. Harsh but true that I likely wouldn’t last long. The New Republic

🩻 A Medieval French Skeleton Is Rewriting the History of Syphilis. Christopher Columbus is blamed for bringing syphilis to Europe, but for roughly two decades, paleopathologists looking at European burial sites have said bones and teeth from medieval time (pre Christopher) show signs of it. Now, a team based in Marseille, France has used ancient-DNA analysis to show evidence of the bacteria in a skeleton buried in the 7th or 8th century. It’s the best evidence yet that syphilis—or something related to it—was infecting Europeans centuries before Columbus sailed. WIRED

🍗 The food industry pays ‘influencer’ dieticians to shape your eating habits. This report is a joint investigation by The Washington Post and The Examination, a nonprofit newsroom specializing in global public health reporting. It found that influencers are being paid by food industry groups to give followers targeted wellness advice. Nothing shady there, eh? The Examination

🐦‍⬛ For the first time, research reveals crows use statistical logic. Turns out crows not only have funerals and play complex games, but also use statistical logic. Two carrion crows (Corvus corone) learnt to associate different symbols on a touchscreen with different probabilities of receiving food. They really are so impressive! Ars Technica

📸 Photo awards time. Putting this in the ‘start here’ section to give your eyeballs a break from the long form, and hopefully inspire some awe: (1) Ocean Photographer Of The Year 2023 (2) Minimalist Photography Awards 2023 (3) World Illustration Awards 2023 (4) 2023 Bird Photographer of the Year Winners, and (5) International Pet Photographer of the Year Awards for 2023.

🦷 Have you noticed that everyone's teeth are a little too perfect? I really enjoyed this article about the obsession with perfect teeth, often accomplished via veneers that “are technically improved but emotionally charmless, impossible to tell apart from the others on the page”. The author calls this phenomenon “hotness creep”. I call it, “another way we are made to feel ashamed of our bodies so it can make someone else money.” Either way, we’re all blending into one big mouth hole. Washington Post. (Archive link here, for those who can’t otherwise access)

(Also in teeth news: a drug for regrowing a third set of teeth? Seems like it may be possible in the next decade.)

🏈 They Played Football as Children. Now Their Families Mourn. In June, a large CTE study confirmed that the best predictor of future brain disease is the aggregate force of all hits to the head, not just the big-impact hits. It also showed that the damage wasn’t relegated to aging athletes, but could also appear in someone’s teens or twenties. This piece interviews families and athletes, some of who stopped playing after high school but are still showing damage in their brains. These head injuries, particularly in American football, are “hurting our children in insidious and incalculable ways.” Addressing the issue will be hard, as it requires a big change in a game that is a big part of America’s modern sport identity. Rolling Stone

✈️ Why does a plane look and feel like it's moving more slowly than it actually is? A fun short piece, and honestly the whole ELI5 series, called Curious Kids, is great. The Conversation. 

🚘 It's Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed For Privacy. The Mozilla team reviewed 25 top car brands and found some pretty worrisome things: namely that each brand is terrible at privacy and security, and collects information about you. A lot of information. And 84% of them share or sell that information to others. Privacy Not Included

🍯 The Sticky History of Baklava. A lighter read: the sweet dessert traces its origins back to ancient times, and several countries claim it. I love microhistories like this! I would be so excited for gluten free baklava but I have yet to find it. Smithsonian Magazine

👀 Do You Experience Pareidolia? It Could Help You Be Creative. Pareidolia, the tendency to see faces and other images in random visual patterns, could help us understand and enhance our creativity. I didn’t know it had a name, but I definitely see faces in clouds, electric outlets, and more. I thought everyone did. Do you? Greater Good Magazine

🎙 An Open Letter To Taylor Swift. Excellent, very interesting take on what Swift can potentially do to benefit artists themselves—and prevent them from getting screwed over like she did when her music rights were sold out from under her. The Honest Broker

🎞 Psycho and the End of the Continuously Showing Movie. “Going to the movies used to be a somewhat different experience than it is today: people wandered into a theater at any point in a film and would just watch until it looped back around when they came in.” That changed over time, but was particularly enforced when Psycho was screened. The changes stuck. I had no idea! Kottke

🔉 Noise And Fury. In Tehran, a team of scientists showed that urban plants French marigold and scarlet sage were negatively affected by highway noise, increasing hormones associated with fending off attacks by insects or with surviving inhabitable temperatures. Despite not having ears, these plants were affected by the vibrations—including thinned out petals as they grew. So what is constant noise doing to us humans? Nothing good, I imagine. Upon Reentry

🧹 Empire of dust: what the tiniest specks reveal about the world. “Nobody normally thinks about dust, what it might be doing or where it should go: it is so tiny, so totally, absolutely, mundane, that it slips beneath the limits of vision. But if we pay attention, we can see the world within it.” A lyrical essay about particulate matter. The Guardian

✝️ Having Nun of It. The strange, true saga of a mutiny at a Carmelite order in Texas, where some “pretty fired up nuns” have made allegations and accusations of illicit sexual relationships, drug use, theft, abuse, spying, planted evidence, and plots to steal a multimillion-dollar property. (Ahem.. TEAM NUNS.) Slate

🇦🇱 The Albanian town that TikTok emptied. The author went to Kukes, Albania to find out why so many young people are leaving for Britain, why TikTok is a factor, and what happens to them when they arrive. Pieces like this are why I love the internet; this provides a snapshot into lives and stories I'd never experience otherwise from my bedbound state, and helps provide important perspective in the world. Coda

😴 What are dreams for? When we twitch in our dreams, the body and brain aren’t disconnected; the brain is listening to and learning from the body, especially in REM sleep. People with schizophrenia (a condition that per the piece includes an inability to distinguish between the self and other) can tickle themselves, but those without schizophrenia cannot. Yet when people without the condition are woken up in REM sleep to tickle themselves, only then do they respond to their own touch as if it’s someone else’s. In dreams, says the author, the body, brain, and person converse imperfectly and the “delirious miscommunication” is the dream. I found this piece fascinating. New Yorker. (Archive link) 

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

💚 Emoji. The word for emoji is Japanese, a combination of ‘picture’ and letter’. This short post goes into how we got to using them worldwide, and where they began. Interesting read. One from Nippon

🏥 Unknown Costs. “Addicts and alcoholics cannot prove their need for treatment by requesting it. They’ve gotta bleed and pee for it. And even that might not be enough.” On the maze of addiction, and how our healthcare system does not favour a path through. Longreads

🍩 Food Can Be Literally Addictive, New Evidence Suggests. It’s not easy to “come off” processed foods or sugar, just like drugs — and these foods hijack the brain’s dopamine circuits too, leading to physiological effects. Scientific American

🍽️ Eating Fossils. Geologist Jan Zalasiewicz won an Ig Nobel Prize recently for his investigation into the history of licking (and, as the titles suggests, even eating!) rocks to try and figure out their structure.  “Quite often in the field in Wales, there are days when you don't have to lick rocks. But on dry days, that’s the standard repertoire.” The rest of the winners are here. Warning, one of them involves using dead spiders as grabber devices. Palaeontology Association

🇺🇸 America’s Surprising Partisan Divide on Life Expectancy This Colin Woodward piece argues that the reason the US has such crazy strong regional differences is because they were settled “by rival colonial projects that had very little in common, often despised one another, and spread without regard for today’s state (or even international) boundaries.” So what we net out with today are regional gaps with huge life expectancy differences, as large as one separating the US from Mongolia. For example, the poorest set of counties in the predominantly blue “Yankee Northeast” (one of his regions) actually have higher life expectancies than the wealthiest ones in the Deep South. “It’s as if we are living in different countries,” he writes, “because in a very real historical and political sense, we are.” Politico

😵‍💫 It's not just you. LinkedIn has got really weird. Divorce and stealing hotel food are not what we initially thought LinkedIn would be used to write about, so why did a job network become everyone's favorite place for oversharing? Business Insider

🤬 How Columbia Ignored Women, Undermined Prosecutors and Protected a Predator For More Than 20 Years. Your monthly ProPublica investigation. Very disturbing read, about an obstetrician who, for DECADES, patients warned Columbia University about. One even called 911 and had him arrested. And yet, Columbia let him keep working only 4 days later. More than 245 women have come forward now. ProPublica

💊 Are We Losing the War on Cancer? For half a century, we have thrown everything we have at the disease, but we are no closer to curing it. This piece interviews doctors who are pushing back against what they feel is squandering resources, the many millions spent on the “rhetoric of cure”. Instead, they suggest funding increased palliative care to help patients die with dignity, and upping prevention and early treatment. The Walrus

🧬 Most rare kākāpō parrots have had their genome sequenced. There are only around 250 kākāpō (Strigops habroptilus) left, and a team of researchers has sequenced the genomes of 169 of them, hopefully helping scientists and vets identify problems more quickly, and get treatment onboard swiftly as well. Nature

🦟 Feeling the heat. A deep dive into coming changes for mosquito-borne diseases in a warming world. Carried by its usual mosquito vector, the most dangerous form of malaria peaks at 25°C, cool enough that climate change could actually decrease transmission in some regions. But dengue and Zika may burgeon in a warmer world. See also: my crash course about dengue fever. Science

🧫 Parkinson’s Disease Blood Test Detects Mitochondrial DNA Damage. Parkinson’s Disease is currently diagnosed primarily based on clinical symptoms, after neurological damage has occurred. Now, a blood test that detects PD earlier, via mitochondrial DNA damage may change things. Mitochondria are the “power generators” of cells, helping convert oxygen and nutrients into ATP, energy that the cells can use to power the body, and mitochondrial dysfunction is a well-established underlying mechanism contributing to the pathogenesis of PD and other neurodegenerative conditions. This test, if made available, could allow patients to start treatment earlier, hopefully preventing damage in the process. The bad news: Covid impairs the mitochondria, something that is unlikely to bode well for us, and is already linked to the pathogenesis of PD. GENEng News

👩‍🔬 She wrote to a scientist about her fatigue. It inspired a breakthrough. A great piece about a patient who kept pushing for answers (and asking good questions), consequently impacting ME/CFS research as a whole. She wrote to a scientist about her fatigue, and the breakthrough that followed may help others with long covid and other ‘chronically fatiguing’ illnesses. Washington Post (The gift link is courtesy of Next Draft)

🌦️ Hyperlocal weather forecasters are now influencers in India. A community of weather enthusiasts sharing hyperlocal weather predictions online (including via Whatsapp) are gaining popularity in India, sometimes filling a gap left by local government weather departments. Rest Of World

💉 “Inverse vaccine” shows potential to treat multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases. Called inverse because the goal is not to stimulate the immune system (like conventional vaccines do), but rather to flag certain molecules with ‘do not attack’ / ‘this is your friend’ messaging, to prevent autoimmune reactions in the body. The implications are to use these both as treatment, and as prevention, which would be incredible. advance here was the demonstration as an effective treatment, not just a prevention. University of Chicago.

🦠 What long COVID taught me: How to help a friend with chronic illness. For anyone dealing with LC or other conditions, this will likely hit home— as well as how the many suggestions you get from others usually require lots of money and lots of hope. “‘Are you feeling better?’ I got this question a lot, and every single time it made me cringe…Because of the way the question was framed, it made me feel like I was a disappointment, or had done something wrong, or like it was my fault because I simply hadn’t wanted to get better.” The Times Of Israel

See also: Unraveling long COVID: Here's what scientists who study the illness want to find out. Some people and doctors claim long covid is ‘made up’ or ‘just stress’ but a cardiologist at Yale says otherwise, as do many others: “I've never doubted it — people are suffering”, says Harlan Krumholz. “We're now seeing imaging evidence, biopsy evidence, physiologic testing evidence of derangements in people who have long COVID.” The study on full immune profiling of LC mentioned in the piece is here. NPR Shots

🛠️ Citing sustainability, Starbucks wants to overhaul its iconic cup. Will customers go along? For a generation and more, Starbucks' throwaway cup has been a cornerstone of consumer society. But by 2030, the goal is transitioning fully to reusable cups. Will customers agree? Since their introduction in 2021, the reusable cups make up only 1.2% of sales worldwide. Associated Press

🌊 Libya's Deadly Floods Show the Growing Threat of Medicanes. Entire neighbourhoods of the Libyan city of Derna vanished following devastating floods wrought by Storm Daniel. The before and after pictures are horrifying, as is the death toll. These kinds of storms were rare, but scientists fear climate change will supercharge them, making them more common. EHN.org

🕳 Holes in Buildings. “The downside of these holes is that they’re structurally enclosed space that can’t be sold full-price […]. The upside is that being seen to not monetise every possible cubic metre is an indicator of prestige”. Photos of said buildingholes included! Misfits' Architecture (via The Morning News)

🕵🏻 Apocalypse-proof. Also architecture-focused, but in a different way: I lived in NYC for years, but did not know about this building. A windowless telecommunications hub, 33 Thomas Street in New York City embodies an architecture of surveillance and paranoia. That has made it an ideal set for conspiracy thrillers. Places Journal

📕 These 38 Reading Rules Changed My Life. A good list, minus the physical books part, which of course cannot apply to everyone but such is many things. “Don’t just build a library, build an anti-library—a stack of unread books that humbles you and reminds you just how much there is still to learn.” Ryan Holiday (via The Browser)

🥁 Wild male palm cockatoos rock out with custom drumsticks. Headline says it all. ScienceNews

⚕️ A biotech company says it put dopamine-making cells into people's brains. Another Ettenberg in the news! I haven’t met or interacted with Seth but it popped up in my feed and I certainly recognized the last name. The study is a critical early test of stem cells’ potential to tackle serious disease. MIT Technology Review

👖 What Should Men Do With Their Hands? Book review of a book that seeks to understand politics through our fashion, and thus traces the history of the pocket. Believe it or not, when first stitched into men’s clothing 500 years ago, using pockets raised anxieties and defiance. Getting them into women’s public clothing was another matter altogether. (Long live pockets!) Guernica

🔭 Black holes keep 'burping up' stars they destroyed years earlier. Years after “ripping stars to shreds”, 24 black holes suddenly flared up with radio waves in inexplicable 'burping' bouts. Half of all star-gobbling black holes may do the same. (As with many discoveries, this has the ‘but scientists don’t yet know why’ caveat. Maybe one day!) LiveScience

🍌 Security in Ecuador has come undone as drug cartels exploit the banana industry to ship cocaine. Ecuador is moving toward the intense intersection of two global trades: bananas and cocaine. Traffickers are using containers filled with bananas to ship illicit drugs. Associated Press

⚖️ A football player, a killing and the elusive search for justice. Crazy, tragic, and layered story about Virginia Tech player Isi Etute, who beat a man to death, a man who — it turns out — catfished other young Black men. As the author tweeted, “what is justice supposed to look like when the roles of victim and accused are so uncertain?” ESPN

🗻 Mount Fear Diary. A little over a year ago, when Joshua Hunt’s favorite uncle died, he carried his grief to the top of a mountain in Japan. The diary he kept served as the basis for this moving personal essay. The Believer

🍛 The Power Of Food For People With Dementia. On the potential power of food to trigger memories, improve the quality of life and enhance brain function of dementia patients. Food “provided a few minutes of joy and novelty for these elders,” and helps reinforce their humanity and dignity. New Yorker

☁️ Air pollution greatest global threat to human health, says benchmark study. Noise isn’t great either, as you’ve seen above. But air pollution’s health effects are staggering. Phys.Org

🔍 The end of the Googleverse. How Google made the world go viral for decades — and may now be losing its cultural relevance. The Verge

🪸 Behold a 20-armed, strawberry-shaped Antarctic sea creature. Marine biologists combing through some of the coldest ocean water on Earth have uncovered a never-before-seen sea creature whose ‘arms’ are up to 8 inches long and studded with bumps or feathery tendrils. Popular Science

🌴 The Irreplaceable. Palm oil is consumed more than any other fat on the planet, animal or plant—but it was born from a legacy of slavery and leaves environmental devastation in its wake. This interesting piece looks at two books about palm oil, and asks how we can try and replace it when it’s so ubiquitous and cheap. London Review of Books.  (Related, on BBC News: 'This could be the holy grail to replace palm oil.)

🔗 Quick links 🔗

• The annual interactive autumn foliage map from Smoky Mountains is back.

• A woman in the UK bought a book online for her husband’s birthday — only to find a 40-year-old-message she wrote to her father inscribed within it. What are the odds!

• Merriam Webster added 690 new words to the dictionary this month. How was jorts not in there yet?!

• The (mutant) tomatoes are here, and they come in peace. 

• Researchers in China successfully genetically modified silkworms to produce spider silk. The silk fibres produced were 6 times tougher than the Kevlar used in bulletproof vests. 

• A 3D-printed vegan fish fillet, salmon specifically, hits the market in Austria. 

• A couple that had to sit next to a ‘snorting, farting’ dog on a long-haul flight from Paris to Singapore in June are now getting a refund from Singapore Airlines. 

• Story and recipe from an old travel friend, Erik, about a Panamanian chicken and vegetable soup called sancocho. 

• Headline of the month: Florida man arrested after trying to cross Atlantic in ‘human powered hamster wheel (And it wasn’t even the first time he tried).

• Maybe a close second? “Ontario woman has 'no idea' why 1,000 condoms were shipped to her house”.

• Mosquitoes are more attracted to some people due to volatile compounds on the skin, and the size and itchiness of mosquito bites are due to reactions to the mosquito saliva. Interesting short piece about how genetic variants affect both.

• I rarely watch movies, and have probably seen only 2 dozen in my lifetime. I’ve always preferred to read. That said, most people do love movies, and love to see them in the theatres. So why is it that people “become bottomless pits” when they go to see a film? Time magazine investigates, and finds a few variables that play in.

• After years of unrest in Mosul, Iraq, a women-run catering service called “Taste of Mosul” has helped single mothers achieve financial security.

• You can 'play' the cello as a bird online. Created by Google Arts & Culture Lab artist-in-residence David Li, and right up my alley, obviously. 

• How Bangladesh removed lead from turmeric spice — and saved lives poisoned by lead in the process.

• A Danish artist has been ordered to return nearly 500,000 kroner ($72,000) to a museum after giving it two blank canvasses for a project he named Take the Money and Run.

• Methuselah the lungfish arrived in the US on a steamship in 1938. She’s now the oldest fish in captivity, living in San Francisco.

This month’s featured artist is Zhao Chuang. He is one of the world’s best dinosaur illustrators, and drew this amazing image of what he thought Fujianvenator prodigiosus, a bird-like dinosaur discovered near Nanping in China, might look like. Per scientists, this discovery is a an interesting one—the bird has unusually long legs and does not seem equipped for flight. It also doesn’t seem to conform to the scientifically accepted bird-evolution story, so it has shed new light on our planet’s first avians.

Hello pretty! Image © Zhao Chuang

That’s it for September reads! Hope to see you next month.

-Jodi