The Curious About Everything Newsletter #28

The many interesting things I read in June 2023.

Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter! CAE 27, last month’s newsletter, is here if you missed it.

Personal Updates

• Thanks to support from readers, family, and friends, my fundraiser for the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation raised the most money of all the participants. Thank you to everyone who donated!

• Unfortunately, I’m still greatly on the struggle bus when it comes to my own leak—I was starting to improve, but things have devolved again after a “pop” in my back that’s left me back to being flat again. Over on Patreon, I go through what I’ve discovered with other complex lumbar puncture leak patients, and why even surgeries do not seem to provide lasting relief for the majority of them.

• Ottawa doesn’t have a “smokey season”, yet we’ve been enveloped in wildfire smoke from hundreds of fires still raging in Northern Quebec. For updated air quality index (AQI) numbers, I refer to Purple Air’s maps. They are what powers the USA’s AirNow smoke and fire map, but are updated more quickly straight at the source. Make sure you toggle indoor sensors “off” so you’re only seeing outdoor ones. For forecasts, see Canada’s Fire Smoke Currents map; today the AQI in Ottawa was 172 when I woke up.

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 doesn’t allow people to add hyperlinks just yet.

It’s another long one this month, with no shortage of interesting (and alarming!) reading for the digesting. Like last month, I’m going with a “start here” section as a result, where I’ve shared the pieces I found lingered the longest in my mind.

Start here this month:

🔥 Why Does Smoke Turn the Sky Orange? Relevant to my interests, and sadly many of yours, as the Quebec fires blanket parts of the world in toxic particulate matter and smoke. Scientific American

🦇 In the Dead of Night, a Deafening War. I loved this piece by Jason Dinh about the evolutionary tug-of-war between bats and moths, and sent it around excitedly before this newsletter came out. “One expert once called the bat-moth interaction a magic well that never runs dry: The more scientists learn, the more surprising discoveries come to light”. Now it’s your turn to enjoy the nitty gritty of this war between species that happens nightly, in many of our backyards. Atmos

🪦 Have assisted dying laws gone too far? “Compared with disability support, Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, seems relatively easy to request.” I am all for death with dignity, but not when used as a weapon to legally “unburden” the system of patients who are unable to make ends meet because they are too unwell. This important piece shines a light on the poverty that many disabled patients face, failed by a healthcare system that is already in shambles and too depleted to ‘deal’ with them.
I know several people with treatable conditions currently in the process of getting approved for MAiD, and one who was already approved—each who have said they can’t pay rent or make ends meet, and/or can’t get care, so this is all they’ve got left. Another friend was asked, “have you thought about MAiD?” when they presented to the ER for an acute but chronic issue.
I’m fortunate I have a Patreon and celiac cards to pay the bills since I am unlikely to be able-bodied again; others, less fortunate, get buried. As this piece reports, their hands are tied until their only option is to give up. The Walrus

🦀 Evolution Keeps Making Crabs, And Nobody Knows Why. Trying to reconcile the evolutionary history of crabs, researchers found that the “defining features of crabbiness” have evolved at least 5x in the past 250 million years, modifying the way crabs look and live. Oh and also, there are true crabs and false crabs, so what is a crab anyhow? Entertaining piece, with a great headline. Science Alert

🌪️ When Vertigo Melted my Brain. In 2018, Katy Vine experienced an episode of vertigo that triggered some confusing thoughts and side effects, including pulses of joy, being unable to move from her couch, ruminations on the colour orange (she felt she identified with it), and that she felt she could sense the presence of dead friends and relatives. “I plunged into what felt like a velvet sock. My awareness withdrew from my body into a dreamlike space that extended behind my shoulder blades about two feet.” Her enigmatic, thoughtful piece is an investigation of what the heck happened, and how something common like vertigo could evolve into much more. Texas Monthly

♿️ New York City, I Love You But I Have a Disability. “New York City was not built to make disabled people feel like equal members of the crowd. In ways as small as a step into a store, or as large as a widely inaccessible subway system, the city makes my body play defense.” I loved and lived NYC for years, returning almost every summer during my decade of nomadic living because I wanted to feel the warmth of its energy on my skin. But, like many places, it’s not very accessible. Cup of Jo (via reader Christina)

🕴️I was Russell Crowe's stooge. This profile is from almost 20 years ago, but I hadn’t read it before and oof, is it an entertaining read. I can only imagine Crowe’s outrage after it came out. Sydney Morning Herald

🛌 A catatonic woman awakened after 20 years. Her story may change psychiatry. Speaking of 20 years: a gut-wrenching piece about new research that suggests underlying autoimmune diseases may be driving psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia in a subset of patients. Treating the autoimmune issue then stops those diseases from attacking the brain. The piece also profiles researchers working on this issue, sharing that they’ve identified a list of specific antibodies that target neurons, which can then be tested for in cases like these. Important read. Stuff. (Syndicated from the original paywalled version at Washington Post.)

🛳 I Really Didn't Want To Go. I was very entertained by this piece, a lighter read than many here, about a writer who was begrudgingly sent on a “Goop cruise” to write about a Gwyneth Paltrow venture at sea. Harper's Magazine

🎶 A Beautiful Evening of Music Emerged from a New York City Sewer. Smiled at this NY sewer concert, where the Tideland Institute, an organization that “encourages New Yorkers to treat their home as a maritime city, reimagining how various waterways might be used,” put on a musical concert on a barge, funnelling the notes into sewer drains to provide “immersive, ricocheting acoustics”, with New Yorkers gathered on the shores of the East River able to enjoy the unique music. The concert’s name? “Drain Bramage”. New York Times. (Archive link, for those who can’t access)

🐟 FISH DOORBELL!! I’m putting this here because today is the last doorbell day until 2024. I love this, and have forgotten to mention this during spring CAEs. Each spring fish swim through Utrecht, looking for a place to spawn and reproduce. Some swim all the way to Germany. There is a problem, though, as they often have to wait a long time at the Weerdsluis lock on the west side of the city, since the lock rarely opens in spring. A creative solution: an underwater camera at the locks, live-streamed, allows anyone watching to press the ‘digital doorbell’ if a fish is there. I’ve done so some mornings and it is really, really satisfying. “The fish doorbell allows us to work together to ensure that fish do not have to wait as long. This is good news, because it means they are less likely to be eaten by other animals, such as grebes and cormorants.” Dinging the doorbell notifies the lock operator that there are fish, so they can decide to open the locks and let them pass. Municipality of Utrecht

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

🍤 My Benihana, Myself. Jaya Saxena on the gifts and emotional toll of performance, via a “be the chef” programme that lets her learn teppanyaki moves herself. Eater

📚 Ingenious librarians. A group of 1970s campus librarians predicted our world of distributed knowledge and research, and designed search tools for it, forerunners to search engines that we have today. “Atherton’s team wasn’t predicting a world where expert librarians wouldn’t be needed; they were preparing for a world where research would take place in many disparate locations, too far from a reference desk for them to be able to help.” What context can we anticipate losing, and prepare for today? Aeon

🇨🇳 Escaping China With a Spoon and a Rusty Nail. How one Uyghur man, Hashim Mohammed, fled Xinjiang via the notorious smuggler’s road, spending 3 years in detention in Thailand before making a dramatic escape. Coda

📈 Here’s why obesity grew so quickly worldwide, and where that’s starting to change. We’re more sedentary, the thousands of chemicals (“including fertilizers, insecticides, plastics, and additives”) that have entered our food supply may be impacting us, and food itself has changed. A good overview, though missing the metabolic effects of Covid, which will continue to increase these numbers as well. Stat

🇨🇦 Made-in-Canada Internet Takes Shape with Risks of Blocked Streaming Services and News Sharing as Bill C-18 Receives Royal Assent Geist’s summary of the mess that is Bill C-18 in Canada, aka the Online News Act. “The end result – at least for now – is a legislative mess that leaves no clear winners.” Geist calls the bill an “epic miscalculation” for having ignored the risks in creating a system mandating payment for links, and now Canadians will be cut off from their ability to share news on popular social media platforms and, per Google’s subsequent announcement, access news articles via search. Michael Geist

🧫 Changes in human microbiome precede Alzheimer’s decline. Looking forward to the next iteration of these studies, and the actual strains in question. NIH Directors Blog

🧊 The Coolest Library on Earth. In a freezer facility in Denmark, scientists are storing 40,000 sections of ice cores, long cylinders of ice from the Earth’s polar regions. They look the same to ice we see today, but the bubbles in them preserve the chemistry in the air in Greenland from more than two millennia ago—sharing historical secrets of the climate then. Hakai Magazine

📷 The 2023 BigPicture Competition winners. Two of my faves: (1) Kazuaki Koseki’s picture, called Lights of Life, a long exposure firefly dance captured in film that was a finalist in the Art of Nature category:

© 2023 Kazuaki Koseki

And, (2) J. Fritz Rumpf’s up-close photo of the underside of a mushroom, which he entitled “Field of Dreams”, which one the Art of Nature category:

©2023 J. Fritz Rumpf

😱 Penis link to the month: Inside the Secretive World of Penile Enlargement. A thorough exposé; also nightmare fuel. You may want to skip the description of the procedure itself. Pro Publica

🧠 Jack Hanna's long goodbye: how Alzheimer's is stripping away the man the world once knew. The Hannas are telling Jack's story because they want other families to know they are not alone when the struggle with Alzheimer's feels overwhelming. The Columbus Dispatch (via reader Chris)

🪠 How a Toilet Plunger Improved CPR (archive link for access) “In 1988, a 65-year-old man’s heart stopped at home. His wife and son didn’t know CPR, so in desperation they grabbed a toilet plunger to get his heart going until an ambulance showed up. Later, after the man recovered at San Francisco General Hospital, his son gave the doctors there some advice: Put toilet plungers next to all of the beds in the coronary unit. The hospital didn’t do that, but the idea got the doctors thinking about better ways to do CPR.” Fascinating read — I had no idea. NYT

🎤 This opera singer lost his voice after surgery. Then he met someone who changed his life. Diagnosed with spinal damage that accrued over a decade and required surgery, a singer lost his ability to sing once his procedure was complete. It took nearly a year of therapy, but thanks to a speech-language pathologist, he regained it. Wholesome read. CBS News

✡️ Amid a Wave of Antisemitic Hate Crimes, a New York Unit Offers a Model of Resistance. The still-rising levels of antisemitism are deeply depressing. This Vanity Fair piece takes us into a hate crimes unit in NYC that attempts to trace the threats to their sources. Vanity Fair

🏙️ Middle America's 'doom loop'. What leads to quality of life? This piece posits that it’s determined by the services and amenities available in a given community, like schools, libraries, safe public spaces, playgrounds, transport, restaurants and shops, and a not-too-insane commute time to the office. Midwestern cities have largely failed to invest in those things, so their downtowns are devoid of all but office space/industrial parks. To revamp, they need those amenities and attractions so they can bring in more than just workers. Insider

⛽️ The Hidden Cost Of Gasoline. An aspect of the switch to electric cars that I hadn’t thought much about: the vacant wasteland of crumbling gas stations, and the gasoline-polluted land beneath them. Grist

📓When We Are Afraid. “They are strong enough to handle this truth. In fact, they’re hungry for it. And when students realize they have not learned the full truth, they feel betrayed.” A teacher in North Carolina shares her own story of facing book challenges and laws meant to police her teaching. Longreads

🪰 Fruit flies have shorter lives if exposed to their own dead, scientists find. For a species that spends “much of its life feasting on decayed matter”, fruit flies are super sensitive to their own dead. Witnessing a parade of fruit fly carcasses was found to cut their lives short by 30%, with scientists finding two specific types of neurons, were activated around their own dead. They then stimulated those same neurons in healthy fruit flies, and doing so shortened their lives too—even though they weren’t hanging out with dead friends. Does the sight of the dead bring about a depressive state that can shorten human lives too? No doubt further research is to come. The Guardian

⏱️ Early time-restricted feeding improves blood sugar levels. “Early-time restricted feeding” is a type of intermittent fasting that involves eating the majority of your calories earlier in the day. It turns out that doing so reduces blood glucose fluctuations and also the amount of time that blood sugar is elevated. Metabolic health therefore improves. Since Covid is linked to new onset diabetes for some patients, this is a good tool to have in our back pockets. EurekaAlert

🌊 Scientist emerges half-inch shorter after living 100 days undersea His cholesterol went down 30 points, he had lower inflammation markers, more REM sleep, and also lost 1/2 an inch in height. Fascinating! HBOT users are no doubt very happy. USA Today

💊 How a dose of MDMA transformed a white supremacist. Interesting reporting by about a disgraced white supremacist who took MDMA and reconsidered what he believed. BBC Future

🍄 How psychedelic drugs achieve their potent health benefits. Some background about psychedelics themselves: researchers haven’t fully understood why they have such powerful therapeutic effects, but a new study suggests that they reset the brain to a more youthful state where it can easily absorb new information and form crucial connects between neurons, reopening the limits of neuroplasticity. Nature 

📰 How CNN broke the news from Trump's arraignment despite a courtroom ban on electronics. As a writer, I always enjoy stories that give background for how a particular scoop or story was obtained. This CNN piece, that details the creative ways that the reporting team circumvented a gag order at Trump’s arraignment, is exhibit A for those kinds of pieces. (Spoiler: it involved hiring high school students and frantically typing in an RV). CNN Business

🇰🇷 The $40m bet that made South Korea a food and cultural power. A tactic governments use to increase awareness of their nations through food, called gastrodiplomacy, has helped South Korea in its decades-long plan to get its food on the world’s menu. Hubspot

💰 Pro-RFK Jr. Super PAC Has Deep Ties to Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos. The fact that he spoke the Moms for Liberty event was probably enough to tip everyone off. I assume with his GOP funding, his goal is to raise a lot of noise and then run as an independent in 2024? I guess we will see. Rolling Stone

✝️ Christian nationalists fuelling anti-LGBTQ2S+ agenda across Canada. Not unrelated: increased radicalization of Christianity is happening in Canada, too. After WWII, Canada embraced immigration, multiculturalism, and secularism, but we are now seeing a loud, angry subset of people embracing dehumanizing rhetoric under the banner of Christian nationalism in a movement combining Canadian nationalism with American-style white evangelicalism Xtra Magazine

📉 The Illusion of Moral Decline. Also not unrelated: new Adam Mastroianni piece on his Nature paper about morality, namely that people on both sides of the political spectrum in America think morality has declined but, at least per the data he’s gathered, they don’t appear to be correct in that assessment. The part that made me laugh: when asked when this decline began, the date correlates with the person’s own birth. Ha! He does go into causes — memory change, plus biased exposure — but ultimately states that people simply think they know more than they do about the past. And all the clamouring for a ‘return’ to something else, a time that was ‘more moral’ is not going to work — because there’s nothing to reverse. (And activating a sprinkler system when the building is not on fire will only cause damage for nothing.) Experimental History

🦑 The Mystery of the Largest Light in the Sea. The biggest light-producing organ in the world belongs to Taningia danae, the Dana octopus squid. Like most deep-sea squid, this squid has bioluminescent photophore, but the Dana’s are enormous, the size and shape of lemons. “In darkness, evolution proceeds in a symphony of blue light.” I learned a lot from this piece! Nautilus

😷 We are in denial about the huge consequences of long COVID on Canadians' health. Many readers write in confused about how sick they feel, not realizing that Long Covid isn’t Covid-type symptoms extended, but rather a slew of other cardiac, neurological, and other symptoms and effects. A succinct, if deflating, overview. Applicable to non-Canadians too, of course. Globe and Mail

🇦🇶 Breaking News at the End of the Earth. The one-person team behind Antarctica's longest-running newspaper. Esquire

🧬 How Chile's stolen babies are finding their biological families after decades apart. Thousands of Chileans, illegally adopted during the Pinochet dictatorship, are now relying on DNA and other tech to trace their biological families. Rest of World

🐱 Cat-astrophe. Outdoor cats are a constant threat to birds, plants, and other wildlife. This piece goes into the many sides to that problem, and what’s being done to try and fix it. Noema

📺 We asked the creators of 'Succession' everything you wanted to know about the finale. I never watched it, but many of you wrote to say you did. Of interest, then, perhaps! NPR 

🎣 How Gen Z got hooked on fishing. Fun, active, and doable in a lunch hour: urban fishing is booming among young people. The Guardian

 🇦🇺 Australian intelligence's secret hand in bringing down the Bali bombers. IMEI number recovered at the site of the blast leads to the perpetrators when forensic crime scene examiner Sarah Benson found the tiny fragment of a Nokia 5110 mobile phone outside the US consulate. ABC News

🔌 A brain implant changed her life. Then it was removed against her will. Rita Leggett was forced to remove an experimental brain implant that successfully predicted her epileptic seizures after the company that developed it went bankrupt, raising human rights issues in medical brain–computer interfaces. MIT Technology Review 

💀The Death of Fancy Ketchup. Can any startup compete with the massive scale and heavy nostalgia of a single legacy brand? TASTE

🛠️ The sharpest tool in the shed: How Lee Valley built a cult-like following. Fun profile of a company I hadn’t read about much, despite seeing their tools everywhere. Globe and Mail

😠 Ask Hacker News: How do you not take criticism of your work personally? A variety of coping mechanisms and strategies throughout. Hacker News

❓ Brainstorm Questions Not Ideas. Stop performative ideation and ask questions instead. Mule

🔗 Quick links 🔗

• Santa Cruz surfers shocked as an otter climbs aboard a surfboard and goes for ride.

• Apple, the company, wants rights to the image of apples, the fruit, in Switzerland—one of dozens of countries where it’s flexing its legal muscles.

• A brief guide to gardening when you have chronic pain.

• The Arctic could be ice-free a decade earlier than we thought, by the 2030s. Meanwhile, sea ice in Antarctica dropped to 1.92 million km2 in February 2023—the lowest level on record and almost one million square kilometres below the 1991-2020 average.

• The 30 best running tips of all time.

• Who wants to die on vacation?

• A US atlas published in 1837 before Braille was widely used used embossed printing of lines, words, and symbols to be finger-readable.

• Why do railway tracks have crushed stones alongside them? (via HackerNewsletter)

• A list of the least popular baby names in American history.

• If you’re interested in the disaster that is Reddit effectively cutting off API access to 3rd party apps, including ones that help blind users navigate the site, before an IPO, Mike Masnick from TechDirt has the best coverage around.

• FTC sues Amazon over what it calls deceptive tactics to get consumers signed up for Prime, as well as Amazon Prime’s cancellation process.

• It’s about ducking time. Apple stops autocorrecting the “f” word.

• If you’re a fan of the streaming series Yellowstone, this entertaining profile of its founder, Taylor Sheridan, is worth a read.

• The rest of Quebec’s draconian language law, Bill 96, came into effect in early June. For those unfamiliar, here’s the summary.

• Ikea’s design lab is trying to make a couch fit in an envelope. (But is it comfy? I dunno.)

This month’s featured artist is 16-year old photographer Gustav Parenmark, who won the under-18 category in the Royal Entomological Society’s Insect Photography Award winners. He called his photo of a blue-tailed damselfly (Ischnura elegans) “Fresh out of the shower”.

©2023 Gustav Parenmark

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

-Jodi