The Curious About Everything Newsletter #33

The many interesting things I read in November 2023.

Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter! CAE 32, last month’s newsletter, is here if you missed it. The most popular link from last month was Sarah Zhang’s excellent read about how what we know about nasal congestion is wrong.

Personal updates:

• My new personal site, housing posts that don’t fit into travel or celiac or ‘life after law’ topics, is up and humming along. On it: meditation for beginners, a newly updated post about dengue fever (and how a new preprint says it may cross-react with Covid antibodies), and my post about how to make your home accessible for disabilities that come with a spinal CSF leak.

• I won an amazing award I didn’t know I was nominated for, in the health advocacy realm. I was surprised and honoured; it is a high point for this year.

• My talk on processing grief before getting to acceptance and how to set up a home for post-treatment or long-term leaking is now available on YouTube. It’s 16 mins long.

• I wrote a 2023 gift guide over on Legal Nomads, with whimsical kitchen items (spaghetti monster strainer, take my money!), jewelry, art, and products I use and love.

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. THANK YOU, MR. MIKE!

Start here:

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

🐝 What it’s like to be a bee. A great read, dense but still playful, about what it’s actually like to be a bee. That is: to have an exoskeleton like a knight’s armour—except your muscles attach to the armour itself (“all hard shell, soft core”). To have “an inbuilt chemical weapon”, yet you don’t want to use it because it can kill you, too. The pressure of bee-ing a be, the complicated minutiae of existing and learning how to forage, this piece has it all. Very well done, and part of Lars Chittka’s book on the same topic. Princeton University Press

🩸 The Train Wrecked in Slow Motion “It was supposed to be a routine C-section,” Grace Glassman writes, foreshadowing that the next steps were anything but routine. Dense with medical terminology, with storytelling, with impending doom, I couldn’t stop reading—and I can’t imagine what it took out of her to write this. Throughout, as I read, I’m thinking, she has to be alive because she WROTE it, right? “In medicine, the picture often changes incrementally. It can be hard to recognize the instant when a patient has crossed the line from stable to unstable, or from unstable to gracing death’s door, because there are no clear lines.” As Glassman notes, it is luck and skill that let her make it through her 4th child’s birth when others do not. Slate

👣 Notes on aloneness vs. solitude. “Self-worth plummets as aloneness rises,” writes Craig Mod, in this reflection on years of feeling apart from others. With the help of therapy, connection, and long walks, Mod has been able to disconnect from the density of what loneliness can steal away. “I still feel a deep and terrifying aloneness — mostly when I’m worn down. But now I can slightly detach myself from it, tell myself that we’ve felt this before, that we’ve come out of it, and believe in that pending emergence.” In the piece, Mod writes of how if he confesses his feelings to friends, in reply he’s often asked how he could feel alone with so many people who supported him. Spoken like well-meaning people who have never felt the strangling murkiness themselves! The feeling comes from the inside, not the outside. With therapy, with active attempts to connect to others, Mod feels less alone. But he still (as an introvert) enjoys the solitude when he needs and wants it. Really honest, thoughtful essay, and I found the choice of words interesting too. I often say ‘aloneness doesn’t mean loneliness’, but Mod uses the word ‘solitude’ to mean what I say with ‘aloneness’, i.e. quiet solo time that doesn’t eke into the black void of loneliness. It made me rethink my slogan and edit it into something more precise. CraigMod

🧠 Brain Study Suggests Traumatic Memories Are Processed as Present Experience Research tells us already that traumatic memories are different from non-traumatic memories, and this piece dives into new evidence of those differences, and what they look like in the brain. The hippocampus, the area that organizes and prioritizes memories, is involved in non-traumatic memories. But traumatic memories don’t involve that region and are not experienced as “memories” at all. Instead, PTSD patients experience them as fragments of prior events that take over the now; in lieu of a memory, the fragments are re-lived and re-experienced. Fascinating, important, and hopefully something that helps direct treatment for PTSD. Note: the article says EMDR may not be the right treatment because it involves ‘engaging’ with the traumatic events; personally I've found it to be crucial and far less activating than described. It may be different depending on the type of trauma experienced and the length of that trauma, but anecdotally others with cPTSD that I know have all said it was life-changing in the best way. New York Times (Archive link).

🏭 The haunting of modern China. Hooboy, the lede. This piece by an anthropologist conducting research in China since the 1980s is beautifully written, and one of the types I love to share. It delves into superstition and urban vs. rural beliefs about them in China, but also how urban living isolates from community enough that superstitions grow. “Urbanization makes ghosts”, the piece notes, adding elsewhere that, “family is sacred; strangers (and their ghosts) are dangerous.” The alternative, of simple tragedy and loneliness, without the infrastructure of support around death, feels worse. You may have thought urban dwellers have less superstitious beliefs, but per this piece, “ghostly beliefs” are integral to the experience of urban living and rapid urbanisation in China. Aeon

🎓 52 things I learned in 2023. I look forward to this Tom Whitwell/list each year, and I always learn something new. For 2023, a roundup of psychedelic cryptography, scorpions, fake belly button tattoos, instant noodles and burn injuries, contact lenses powered by tears, and more. Magnetic Notes

🏙 City of Glass. Chicago is the most lethal city in the United States for birds, both because it’s located on the migratory route for birds during spring and fall (called the Midwestern flyway), and because it’s a city of glass buildings and confusing lights at night. “The millions of artificial lights that glow across the Windy City present as a galaxy of false stars, confusing migrant birds that orient themselves by starlight and enticing them toward the glassy buildings below.” (You have perhaps seen October news that over a thousand birds were felled by a convention center abutting Lake Michigan.) There’s a myth that protecting birds will be bad for business, but as this piece notes, nearly all bird collisions happen in the lowest 100ft, so architects don’t need to treat entire high-rises with bird-friendly glass, only a part of them. Plus, the glass itself is a small percentage of construction costs: a 2022 report showed it adds 4/10ths of a percentage point, in terms of expense. Hopefully, as more states require this glass for new builds, the cost of it will fall too. I love birds, as you all know, and this piece was excellent writing as well. bioGraphic

🫥 Invisible landscapes. Loved this for its writing and the wonder it conveys. It’s about the “discovery” of a new body infrastructure, one that other modalities have worked with for some time, but has now received a name in Western medicine—the interstitium. Its structure is fractal, unified, and connects the entire body; it's just underneath the skin, and wraps around organs, arteries, capillaries, and veins, from head to toe. “It moves four times more fluid through the body than the vascular system does,” a clear pre-lymphatic fluid that we’re still trying to fully understand. Science writing done right. Orion

🐌 Tyrian purple: the lost ancient pigment that was more valuable than gold. Tyrian purple was worth three times the weight of gold, and unlike other dyes at the time, it was not made from a gemstone or plant. Instead, it began as a clear mucus produced by sea snails in the Murex family. After that starting point, everything was quite murky, as people did not write it down (potentially on purpose to prevent theft of the purple recipe!). Pliny the Elder did record a recipe involving fermenting, and then boiling the mucus, a time-filled process that took a staggering 100,000 snails to make 1g of dye. This article talks about the process, the mountains of snail carcasses found in areas thought to make Tyrian purple, and how the whole thing was the first chemical process for dyes that required precision instead of just transferring colour. BBC Future 

🏘 Yaar parivaar. The title translates to ‘dude family’, and refers to a growing number of urban professionals in India, some single, some separated, and some widowed, who are moving cities and changing jobs to make a home with their best friends. Opting for lifelong companionship unburdened by the “stress and drama” of marriage, they are finding stability in each other without the strictures of societal expectations. And, with this community mindset and form, they’re sharing living space and care for kids and pets — in the words of one of them, it’s “giving a group of strong individuals the joys of a shared existence, as well as their own personal space”.  Love to see it, honestly! Mid-day (via The Browser)

🐢 The Great Cajun Turtle Heist. I’ve featured several Texas Monthly pieces over the years, and they have all been gripping pieces full of mystery and excellent storytelling. This Sonia Smith piece is no exception, about a large turtle called the alligator snapper that has been endangered since the Seventies. Environmental protection allowed their numbers to grow, but that didn’t stop smugglers from trapping them. Smith profiles a family of particularly prolific turtle smugglers who brought the turtles from Texas to Louisiana, the inspector who wanted to catch them, and the turtles themselves. Hero of the story: Brutus the turtle, aged 10. Great read. Texas Monthly

🐾 The French Bulldog Revolution: A Culture War Over America's Most Popular Dog. Disturbing read about the fights over the colour of French bulldogs, apparently one of America’s most popular dog breeds. Distressful not only for that obviously discriminatory aspect but also because I learned that if not for humans, French bulldogs would be extinct in a generation, “as they generally have to be artificially inseminated and mostly only deliver puppies via cesarean section.” Wowza. Vanity Fair

💻 The people who ruined the internet. Did SEO ruin the internet, or did Google? A look at SEO techniques and the (mostly) dudes behind them, as told via romp through a Florida party with alligators. A very entertaining read, and though many in the SEO industry took offence to it (despite her saying she found many of the interviewees likeable), she’s not wrong that SEO is now “baked into everything” and regardless of who’s to blame, it’s often not a good thing for the reader. The Verge

🎁 The 2023 Kottke holiday gift guide. There are many gift guides out there, but instead of linking to them all, I’m going to share Jason’s guide, which is part ode to the creativity of his friends (thank you for the inclusion!) and part bookmarkable compendium of marvels online. Kottke

💬 The sound of your voice. “Is it odd that my closest friend is someone I never see?” asks this piece about a friendship sustained primarily via voice notes. “In that contained space, floating in the digital world, I'm more able to be myself. It's something about not being physically seen. Like asking someone to turn their head in the other direction when we sing.” As someone mostly confined to my home, my close friends and I communicate this way as well, allowing us to maintain our friendship despite my bed-bound state. Even pre-leak, though, we communicated this way—from in-between errands in Oaxaca to walking after a soup in Vietnam, sustaining us through the ether. Though we’ve not met up in person in years, we know more about each other than if we occasionally did meet up; the voice note — and the fact that it disappears after listening — has let us connect on a less superficial level, despite the distance. Dirt

🚕 A Celebrity in Every Taxi. An oral history of how NYC taxis got a celebrity voice-over: “If you got in a taxi in New York City between 1997 and 2003, you were greeted with the recorded voice of a celebrity reminding you to buckle up. When you left, the same celebrity reminded you to make sure you don’t forget anything, and get a receipt.” There were 38 celebrities in all, including Chris Rock, Jackie Mason, and Joan Rivers. I started my law job in NYC in 2003, and I remember these taxis clearly. I enjoyed this deep dive into the programme that let it happen. Ironic Sans.

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

🏠 My Website as a Home. A short essay about how a website is a space much like an apartment; it explains something about its inhabitants. “I feel as if someone is giving me a tour of their apartment: I’m looking at the papers on his desk, the notes stuck to his fridge, an album of butterfly photos taken by his brother, and so on. Sure, he probably tidied up before I arrived, and he’s choosing what to show me. But nonetheless, entering the space has given me a rich portrait of its occupant.” This caught my eye as I split up my work recently between Legal Nomads and my new personal site; as my own internal ‘home’ changed, so too have my sites. This is the nth iteration of Legal Nomads as well; I’d redecorated (so to speak) prior. But this time, I needed to move entirely because it wasn’t set up to house me with my new, disabled life. Nico Chilla

🇲🇽 Amazing reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, available in English, Spanish, or Nahuatl. Best viewed on a laptop, to see the scale, complexity, and beauty of this ancient capital, and use the sliders to see how the vast expanses of land looked then vs. now. Beautifully done. Thomas Kole  

🫀 Vegetation. A patient learns he has a 1/4 inch vegetation of bacteria on his aortic valve, walking back the steps he wished he knew to prevent it. “In hindsight, I could have demanded blood tests and better care, but deferring to doctors is what patients are supposed to do.” The piece is more than just heart surgery, but dips into the bone-deep exhaustion of managing care when sick, and on the small what ifs that snowball into something more—in this case, endocarditis that needed repair. Dirt

🍝 Anything Can Become Gluten-Free Pasta “In wheat-based pastas, gluten acts as a scaffold. It forms when two proteins, gliadin and glutenin, bond to create a firm, elastic molecular network. When a noodle cooks, its starches absorb water and expand inside of the gluten to create a plump, toothsome bite. Absent gluten, the starch softens without retaining any structure.” In 2002, when I first found out I was celiac, there were little pastas that held sauce on offer. I turned to rice or rice noodles instead, learning how to make Vietnamese or Thai dishes that were naturally gluten free. In 2023, this article notes that thanks to food engineers there are quite a few pasta options available. Despite that, I prefer a simple one: Italian pasta made from corn. Al dente, tasty, and delicious. The Atlantic, as syndicated to MSN

🧫 Bacteria Store Memories and Pass Them on for Generations. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin discovered that E. coli bacteria use iron levels to store information like resistance to antibiotics, and then pass them down to later generations. While bacteria don’t have brains (THANKFULLY), they can gather information from their environment and access it later. In this case, iron is the trigger: the researchers theorize that when iron levels are low, “bacterial memories are triggered to form a fast-moving migratory swarm to seek out iron in the environment,” and when high, it signals to the bacteria that they’ve found a good ‘home’, and they form a biofilm instead. UT News

📸 Photos Photos Photos (A little break from the reads):

• 2023 Natural Landscape Photography Awards.

• 2023 Information Is Beautiful Awards.

• Vibrant Colour Showcases Its Spectacular Impact in AAP Magazine 35.

• Wildlife Photographer of the Year - People's Choice 2023.

• International Wedding Photographer Of The Year - 2023 Winners Gallery.

• 2023 National Beard and Moustache Championships.

〽️ The surprising thing that helps you cope with change. Uncertainty, the “uneasy sense of not-knowing”, can be scary — but it also gives us an opportunity to develop cognitive skills such as curiosity, adaptability and resilience, says science writer Maggie Jackson. By embracing the challenge of uncertainty, we become alive to possibilities. CNN

🔀 The Allergy to Uncertainty. Dovetailing nicely with this piece is More To That on the “allergy to uncertainty” many of us have. He breaks that down to two main things: uncertainty is both a liability when optimizing for productivity, it’s mischaracterized as a lack of focus. The antidote, from his point-of-view? Embracing it. “[T]he real fruits of life come from an acceptance of that which we didn’t anticipate.” More To That

📑 How to be a Public Historian. Interesting read about how pursuing a larger and wider audience for one’s work is a double-edged sword, coming with significant risks and responsibilities and not just more readers. I've been writing online since 2008, and as my audience grew it was hard not to feel additional pressure and second-guessing of my ideas and feelings. Even more so when someone is a historian, as is the case with Anton here, where pressure includes how to frame historical events and processes—and when to revisit them. Age Of Invention

🤯 In the Gut's 'Second Brain,' Key Agents of Health Emerge. Another great piece of science writing: the nervous system in your gut helps with much more than digestion, and new research methods have provided a glimpse into a world of tasks performed by glial cells, once thought to be “mere glue that fills the space between neurons”. These cells, largely ignored, have now shown to be more relevant than scientists thought: they play physiological roles in the brain and nervous system that once seemed reserved for neurons. And now, we’re learning, they may be doing the same in the gut, not just the brain. Quanta

📱 First-Gen Social Media Users Have Nowhere To Go. I’m at the tail end of Gen X, so this only resonates in part as I was not raised on a diet of chatrooms or anything digital—but like many of my generation, I embraced it when it came. “Millennials are the last of the analog world, both of yesterday and tomorrow, the bridge between what was and what will be. Maybe this is where my hesitation takes root, and why it feels like there are no good apps left for socializing the way we used to. We were raised on a diet of chatrooms and Myspace. Our expression was devoutly digital. We signed up en masse because what we sought in the next frontier of adulthood, we slowly realized, was being actualized online.” While social media used to be about creating networks of support, today it’s far less driven by actual social connection. Instead, transactional social interactions have become the norm, which this article argues has now carried over into real-life interactions too. WIRED  

🛁 Scrub-a-Dub in a Medieval Tub. A rebuke of the enduring myth that the Middle Ages housed filthy people. TIL! JSTOR Daily 

🤪 The Strangest Gift Ideas From the Bowels of the Internet. This list is something else. Gizmodo

💩 A treasure beneath our feet. A very interesting source to generate heat during cold months: sewers. Sewage waste is now being seen as a reliable heat source for millions of homes in the Netherlands, writes Senay Boztas, sharing how warmth showers, dishwashers, washing machines and more can be used via a heat exchanger that bypasses the main sewer to bring the warmth back to houses using insulated pipes. The Guardian

☁️ The Magellanic Clouds must be renamed, astronomers say. “Magellan was murderous and awful but that isn’t the primary issue […] The primary issue is that the clouds aren’t his discovery.” Magellanic Clouds ought to be renamed for something more suitable than the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, says this piece, because (1) he didn’t discover them, (2) was a dick, and (3) the name only started being used for the clouds centuries after he was alive. Space

♥️ How to unfold your heart. A beautiful short piece about Victorian era ‘love purses’ and why we gift people parts of ourselves. Fox In The Dark

⭐️ Starfish Are Heads - Just Heads. In a research version of the meme asking where the starfish would wear pants, were it to wear pants, research finds that the starfish is all head, no butt. Many experts assumed that starfish had no heads, because of their immaculate arm-symmetry and, uh, they don’t seem to have a head or a tail. But, it turns out, their entire bodies are a head. Researchers found gene signatures associated with head development in young sea stars, but none for torso and tail portions. “It’s as if the sea star is completely missing a trunk and is best described as just a head crawling along the seafloor.” — can’t beat that quote, from the study’s lead author. Next up, the authors hope to look into genetic patterning in sea urchins and sea cucumbers. Scientific American.

🇹🇰 How a tiny Pacific Island became the global capital of cybercrime. Tokelau, a “necklace of three isolated atolls strung out across the Pacific” with a population of 1400 is so remote that it only connected to telephone technology in 1997, the last place on the planet to do so.  And yet, Tokelau’s .tk domains had more users than any other country until recently. Why? While other small island nations marketed their domain extensions to wealthy and business owners, a man from Amsterdam snapped up .tk domains before Tokelau even knew they had them on offer, and allowed Tokelau to become “the unwitting host to the dark underworld” with a bevy of scammer sites that harvested passwords and more. MIT Technology Review

🤥 Think You're Messaging an OnlyFans Star? You're Talking to These Guys. Meet the “Chatters”: anonymous workers, often men, hired to ghostwrite messages and build intimate relationships with none-the-wiser fans on OF. Vice

🌒 Yes, the Moon is indeed 40 million years older than we once thought. Confirming a 2021 paper authored by students at Canada’s Western University of Ontario, a new analysis confirms that the moon is actually 40 million years older than we previously realized. CBC News

☠️ Merchant of Death. After Kenneth Law lost his job as a low-level cook at the Royal York Hotel, he found another way to make money: peddling suicide kits on the internet. “Police have linked Kenneth Law to at least 120 deaths in countries around the world — the result of a profitable online business he started in 2020, selling a known poison to suicidal people. Since getting caught, Law, 57, has described himself as a humanist who only wanted to help. The truth is both less flattering and far more grim: “I need a source of income,” he told one interviewer. “I hope you can understand that.” Toronto Life

🔪 Who Killed the Fudge King? A whodunit and hunt for the killer of the “fudge king of New Jersey,” the owner of the Ocean City boardwalk landmark Copper Kettle, and how the author of this piece quite possibly solved the cold case after all. Atavist

🍄 America Goes Psychedelic, Again. “Psychedelics connect us to ourself or sometimes to something outside of ourself, which you could call God or nature or people. It cleans out the closet and it removes that pair of pants that you’ve been trying to put on again since you were three years old that just doesn’t fit. And for a lot of people it happens a lot faster than traditional therapy because we’re going in and we’re sandblasting the trauma so we can see what’s underneath it.” Say what you want about psychedelics: they are gaining momentum still. I do wish there was more emphasis on how important it is to integrate after a trip, as that’s where a lot of the healing may get ‘stuck’. Reveal.

🔗 Quick links 🔗

• Rizz named word of the year for 2023 by Oxford University Press.

• Two University of Tulane students learn life lessons while living in a senior community. They live there for free; in return, “they perform concerts, interact, and hold open practices throughout the year.” Love this.

• A new wastewater monitoring site that tracks twelve infectious diseases across the USA, for those who want to stay updated about these things. Input your zip code; output your diseases. 

• All of the weather in the world, on one pretty interactive map.

• Who chooses Pantone’s colour of the year? (They just announced that Peach Fuzz, “an orangey, pinkish beige” is the 2024 CotL.)

• A family in Andalusia long had a visual masterpiece hanging in their living room, but they did not know it was, in fact, a work by Renaissance painter Anthony van Dyck.

• NEW HEDGEHOG JUST DROPPED.

• Doritos makes an add-on software silencer to remove the sound of chips crunching from Zoom or other online communication. 

• We’ve talked a lot about rats the last few months, but here’s one more: Rats can ‘reminisce’ about another place, meaning they can access a mental map of somewhere they’ve been before.

• Wild chinstrap penguins take 10,000 ‘micronaps’ a few seconds long each a day, culminating in 11 hours of sleep.

• Advice to ‘always go to the ER’ after taking an EpiPen is set to change.

• Man discovers he has chopsticks in his brain after complaining about a headache for several months.

• Sunflowers turn to follow the sun as it crosses the sky, but how do they ‘see’ it to know where it is? A new study explains that there are multiple pathways, responding to different wavelengths of light, that make it all happen.

• In local news from my province: an escaped kangaroo punched a police officer before capture in Oshawa Ontario.

This month’s featured artist is Colleen Tighe, who illustrated the Vegetation piece, above.

Hope to see you next month,
-Jodi