The Curious About Everything Newsletter #25

The most interesting things I read in March 2023.

Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter. CAE 24, last month’s newsletter, is here if you missed it.

Personal updates

My spinal CSF leak is still being a beast, and I am in bed most of the time. I stand to eat, to drink some coffee in the mornings, and for the occasional shower. I’ve started to walk the hallways in my building every few days, and while progress is very slow it is progress nonetheless. When my leak reopened in 2018, it took over a year to start walking again. Life is mundane, but time slips by. There is no shortage of work or emails with questions from patients or readers. And reading, of course, the fruits of which are below.

Over on Patreon, I shared a post called On Hope, Despair, and Pretty Art, about misinterpretations of famous Camus quotes, the myth of Sisyphus, and the genesis of the expression “the way out is through”. As the title suggests, there is also pretty art for download.

Thanks to a workout of my thumbs from bed, I published my celiac’s guide to Egypt, and updated my gluten free resource page to include information about how post-Covid autoimmune disease diagnosis is increasingly common, leading to more celiac diagnoses worldwide.

The Most Interesting Things I Read This Month

This newsletter is again possible thanks to the generosity of my friend Mike, who as with CAE 24 has taken my copypasta of links and quotes and formatted them into hyperlinks to share with you all.

🎼 Genomic analyses of hair from Ludwig van Beethoven. DNA extracted from 200-year-old Beethoven’s hair has provided clues about his death. It turns out he was genetically predisposed to liver disease. It also turns out that he had Hep B months before his death—and historical reports suggest he was a heavy drinker. The cause of his hearing loss? It remains a mystery. Current Biology Journal

🌎 I always read Elizabeth Kolbert, and this piece is no exception: Phosphorus Saved Our Way Of Life, And Now Threatens To End It. Fertilizers filled with the nutrient boosted our ability to feed the planet, but now they’re creating dead zones in our lakes and seas. The New Yorker (Archive link, because it’s an important read.)

🇨🇳 2022 Letter. I look forward to Dan Wang’s year in review annually, and missed it during last year’s hiatus. Thankfully for all of us it’s back, this time a dispatch from China. “As best as I can tell, China is the only country that followed a twisted logic to deny people fever medications during a fever-producing pandemic.” This annual review spans the strict Shanghai lockdowns, protests, and the relative calm of life in the Yunnan mountains. It’s a long and rewarding read, and a different take to the blaring media headline we get in the west. Dan Wang

👙Also in China: China censors women modeling lingerie on livestream shopping - so men are doing it. We know China deploys one of the world’s most stringent censorship regimes, blocking out politically sensitive info. But apparently, also images of women’s bodies deemed marginally racy. So instead, those companies use men. CNN Business

💊 On Novocain. Clean for over 17 years, a recovering addict has a dental procedure, and is then prescribed opiates to deal with the pain. The piece goes into the mental roller coaster that the prescription unleashes, and ethical questions about society, pain, and drugs. Excellent, raw read. Paris Review.

🤷🏻‍♀️ Why Doctors Can't Name Female Anatomy. A brief history of the vulva. (And, it turns out, doctors are not exempt from society’s general lack of understanding about this part of the body either!) Nautilus

🍼 Relatedly unrelated: The Tyranny Of Science Over Mothers. A book excerpt on new parenthood, and how science shared on social media puts a greater burden on mothers. The MIT Press Reader

🥳 How do you take a picture of happiness? We asked photographers to surprise us. I loved this gallery. Goats and Soda

🎰 America's bad bet on expanding legal sports gambling. A surge in sports betting leads to a surge in suicides from people who can’t get out from under spiralling debts. In the UK, since sports bets were legalized, 60% of profits came from a top 5% of users, including 36k children addicted to it. The UK government estimates that 8% of suicides are gambling-related. Vox

🇮🇸 An Icelandic Town Goes All Out to Save Baby Puffins. I love this story, and would 100% sign up for the Baby Puffin Rescue Patrol. Smithsonian Magazine

🪞 The mystery of Alice in Wonderland syndrome. A fascinating and sad read about a syndrome where patients have a distorted perception of their environment and their own body, often carrying a mirror for ‘reality checks’ over time. BBC Future

🪢 Foreign mothers, foreign tongues. 'In another universe, she could have been my friend.' On boundaries and the gulf between cultures with immigrant parents. A very thoughtful, powerful read by Dina Nayeri. The Guardian 

🤳 Influencer Parents and The Kids Who Had Their Childhood Made Into Content. “When the family is together, the YouTube channel is what they talk about. Claire says her father has told her he may be her father, but he’s also her boss. […] When Claire turns 18 and can move out on her own, she’s considering going no-contact with her parents.” The first generation of influencer babies comes of age. Teen Vogue

🏦 Banking in very uncertain times: a primer on how Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. And, a list of bank failures in the USA since 2000. Are Canada’s banks next? It’s thought to be unlikely. Bits About Money; FDIC; Bloomberg

🇨🇮 Speaking of money, Côte d'Ivoire is the highest taxed country in the world, at 60%. Next up are Finland (59.5%), Japan (55.97%), Denmark (55.9%), and Austria (55%). Quartz

🦉 The biggest celeb in New York right now. I LOVE YOU FLACO. Hayley Nahman

⏰ Changing our clocks creates health issues. Just ask a sleep doctor. It’s that time of the year where I rant about how we should never, ever stick to daylight savings time as our permanent time. Not being in sync with the sun is not good for the body and immune system. (I also wrote all about the hazards of new time zones and jet lag, and how to cope with time changes.) NPR; Legal Nomads

🌊 Banking on the seaweed rush. Or, as Hakai mag tweeted, “Let's talk venture kelp-ital.” Good read from Nicola Jones laying out some of the many issues associated with the rapid industrialization of seaweed harvesting. Hakai Magazine

🌬️ Ventilation matters. Indoor air quality is invisible and often poorly understood, so risks are often left unmanaged—and those risks go beyond Covid-19 and touch upon public health generally. (Interactive infographic) National Engineering Policy Centre

🐺Is the Alpha Wolf idea a myth? Spoiler: yes. Yet the myth persists. Instead, most wolf packs are families that are led by a breeding pair. Scientific American

🍲America doesn't know tofu. A beautiful ode to the wondrous range of tofu. Asterisk Magazine

🤑 Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved. Does money buy happiness? Apparently so! This study reconciles prior research and finds that money buys happiness except where someone is already financially well-off and also miserable; for that group more money does not help them feel better. PNAS 

💥 How two Jewish kids in 1930s Cleveland altered the course of American pop history. “Superman, an illegal alien, had come millions of miles not to be featured on the front page of the Daily Star, but to save mankind from itself, its ugly awful self.” On the birth of Superman comics. LitHub

🕹️‘It changed the world’: 50 years on, the story of Pong's Bay Area origins. How Atari created the world’s most famous video game. SF Gate

💉The yassification of Ozempic. It’s a big red flag to describe a weight-loss trend as something “everyone” is doing, writes Casey Johnston. The breathless coverage of GLP-1 inhibitors like Ozempic and Mounjaro only reinforces a huge problem we have with disordered eating. She's A Beast

♿️ Activist Judy Heumann led a reimagining of what it means to be disabled. “Disability only becomes a tragedy when society fails to provide the things we need to lead our lives — job opportunities or barrier-free buildings, for example”. Amen. Heumann, who passed away this month, was an activist who worked blisteringly hard to change the way people interacted with, and saw, disability.  NPR

🐘 Sanctuary: A woman, an elephant and an uncommon love story spanning half a century. When Carol Buckley met Tarra the elephant at a tire store in California in 1974, her life changed forever. Over four decades later, she would take the stand in court for custody of her lifelong friend. Unbelievable story. The Atavist

🍝 Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong | Financial Times From panettone to tiramisu, many so-called classics are in actually recent inventions. Financial Times

😭 How Loneliness Reshapes the Brain. Feelings of loneliness prompt changes in the brain that further isolate people from social contact. Quanta

😢 Related: How To Survive Hopelessness. “Even if you give up hope, you must never give up trying, for, as the result of your efforts, hope may well return and with justification.” The Marginalian

💻 When my dad was sick, I started Googling grief. Then I couldn’t escape it. “It was as if the internet secretly teamed up with my compulsions and started indulging my own worst fantasies […] with every search and click, I inadvertently created a sticky web of digital grief.” Tate Ryan-Mosley spent months trying to untrain the algorithms that were relentlessly serving her content on loss. MIT Technology Review

📚 How Barnes & Noble turned a page, expanding for the first time in years, and embracing TikTok's BookTok and social-media influencers. It also stopped accepting publishers' payments for special displays, allowing stores to prioritize what its area wanted to read. NPR

🫀Heart attacks and strokes after Covid. We've known that Covid can predispose towards blood clots. But what about late effects, months after an infection? Yep, it turns out, that too. Ground Truths

🩸Deep dive: microclots in long COVID. Solid overview of the microclots theory of long covid, including addressing those similar symptoms from the vaccine alone. Long COVID Research Breakdown

🇻🇳 The vanishing catch: how women are suffering in the Mekong Delta. As climate change, upstream hydropower dams and intensive agriculture threaten traditional farming and fisheries in the “rice bowl” of Vietnam, the Mekong Delta, women are struggling to find stable alternative livelihoods as they are less able to migrate for work than men. Viet Nam News (via Travelfish’s newsletter)

🇰🇭 TikTok's viral monks are clashing with Buddhist authorities. The Theravada Buddhist monastic code bans Cambodia's monks from drawing attention to themselves—but that hasn’t stopped them from using TikTok to preach, with some amassing more than half a million followers, causing friction. (Yeah, it worked for Barnes & Noble…but this is quite a bit different!) Rest Of World

🎬 'The Big Lebowski' Turns 25: "People Didn't Get It," Jeff Bridges Recalls. The Dude looks back—and shares his behind-the-scenes photos—from the Coen brothers’ beloved take on L.A. Noire. The film has inspired legions of fans, an annual festival, and even a religion, but it wasn’t an instant hit in 1998. Hollywood Reporter

🔮 Interview: Kevin Kelly, editor, author, and futurist. Fascinating interview with Kevin Kelly, “one of the thinkers who helped define the ethos of the tech industry from its early days,” covering a wide variety of topics. Noahpinion

🍔 Fat, Sugar, Salt... You've Been Thinking About Food All Wrong. This article isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s a good overview read about how low-fat/low-carb is less important than low-processing when it comes to health. My only criticism: it’s missing input the Global South / other regions where ultra-processed foods don’t prevail yet. WIRED (Archive version, if you can’t access it.) 

🍳 How A Giant Egg Farm Made Money Off Prisoners In Dangerous Conditions. In early pandemic days, as many businesses shut down, incarcerated women in Arizona, USA, were moved into a prison labor camp built just for them, on a giant egg farm. The conditions were awful and hazardous, and what these women endured was beyond cruel. Cosmopolitan

🇮🇳 The Woman Preserving The Endangered Cuisine Of Indian Jews. According to oral tradition, a group of Jews fleeing persecution in Israel shipwrecked on the island of Alibaug, off of Western India’s coast, in the 1st century. The 14 survivors settled in villages nearby, sowing the seeds of India’s largest Jewish community. Atlas Obscura

🤓 Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things. We need curiosity to seek out truth, but we also need humility. By seeking one, we also seek the other: being curious makes us humble (it shows us how little we know), and being humble makes us curious (it helps us acknowledge that we need to learn more.) The Prism

🪳New species of cockroach found in Singapore, named after Pokémon character. Researchers in Singapore have named Nocticola pheromosa after the Pokémon character Pheromosa (itself inspired by a freshly-moulted cockroach). It has elongated antennal and delicate appendages, much like its leggy cartoon namesake. The Straits Times

🇸🇨 Seychelles: The island paradise held prisoner by heroin. TIL that the Seychelles has a significant heroin problem. BBC News

🪶A Murder in Berlin. Susanna Forest’s beautiful essay on crows as objects of familiarity in a city she now calls home. “In some ways, the crows and I were similar. They changed only when disrupted. I thought I should change my life but let inertia cradle me.” The title references a murder of crows, not the other kind of murder. Longreads

🇺🇸 The Apocalypse of East Palestine: the most dramatic photos from the train derailment in Ohio weren’t taken by photojournalists, but from locals on their phones. Let us not forget that the recent train disaster in Ohio represents “the tip of a chemical iceberg that supports many of our lives.” And, despite government reports that chemical levels are 'low and safe’, ongoing health issues plague residents, like headaches and breathing difficulties. Field of View; Material World; Nature.

🤖 OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: corporate, closed-source, and for profit. See also: fake photos of Trump's “arrest” went viral, yet he has not been arrested. The doctored images highlight AI's capacity to create disinformation. (See the quick links below for more on that). Vice; Quartz.

🌒 Does the moon need its own time zone? We may need to decide soon. The EU is pushing for a separate time zone for the moon. Space

😬 Anxiety can be created by the body, mouse heart study suggests. Anxiety can cause the heart to race, and the reverse is also true according to a study in mice. “You can’t just look at the brain if you want to understand fear,” says neuroscientist Sarah Garfinkel. (Full study here) Nature. 

🌇 How '15-minute cities' turned into an international conspiracy. 15-minute city theories assert that everything you need (from health care, to groceries, to parks and schools) ought to be within a 15-minute walk / bike ride from your home. Why? To make cities more liveable and connected, with less reliance on cars. But conspiracies abound about “enforcing” movement, and are outlandish yet believed by a subset of an increasingly radicalized population. CTV News 

🐭 Scientists create mice with two fathers. Scientists create mice with two fathers after making eggs from male cells, which could pave the way for new fertility treatments in humans. Phys Org. (Full study here.)

🔗 Quick links 🔗

• Burrowing owl hitches ride aboard Royal Caribbean cruise ship for 2 weeks.

• A map of places in the U.S. with the same name: “We calculated what place someone is likely referring to, depending on where they are.” Handy!

• World’s first mRNA vaccine against deadly plague bacteria is 100% effective - yes, THAT plague!

• Winners of the 12th Annual Mobile Photography Awards.

• The Milky Way might be a star-producing machine.

• Happy 25th birthday to kottke.org! Jason's site was one of the first curation websites I ever read, way back when I was a disgruntled lawyer. These days, he remains an inspiration but I'm also happy to call him a friend.

• Experience Regina apologizes after criticism over new slogans 'sexualizing' the city. Uh, yeah this seems ... ill advised.

• How a little see-through fish gets its rainbow shimmer. On the ghost catfish’s iridescence.

• America’s drunk shopping habit reaches $14 billion. TIL.

• Man sues Buffalo Wild Wings after realizing 'boneless wings' aren't actually wings. Is this really worth a lawsuit?!

• New York landlord becomes legal guardian of 93-year-old Holocaust survivor. Heartwarming story.

• A Georgia county spent $1 million to avoid paying for one employee's gender-affirming care—the care, of course, would have cost far less. See also: National anti-trans legislation tracker for the USA.

• Toblerone will lose its Matterhorn logo as the chocolate can no longer be considered Swiss because Toblerone’s US owner moved production outside of Switzerland for the first time in the chocolate bar's history.

• Why are all action heroes named Jack, James or John?

• People who think they're attractive are less likely to wear masks, study shows. Ahahahaha, ah man.

• “After adjusting for geographic region, subject age, and subject population; erect penile length increased 24% over the past 29 years.” A worldwide, systematic review for the ages.

• Canadian grandmother helps stop fraud scheme targeting senior citizens. And even more eerie and messed up: They thought loved ones were calling for help. It was an AI scam.

• On the positive side, though: Where To? An AI-powered site that takes a Trip Advisor URL and a travel style and summarizes the reviews tailored to your needs.

• And a woman summarizes her dreams and psychedelic trips with an AI image generator that makes illustrations of what she experienced. 

• On the trippy side: The Effect Index, 235 descriptions of sensory, cognitive and physical effects that may occur under the influence of psychedelics.

• The World Nature Photography Award winners.

• Vermeer reimagined (while “Girl with a Pearl Earring” is on loan elsewhere).

• And finally, your monthly awe, courtesy of Andrew McCarthy: a blend of science and art, this photo of the sun was build using over 90,000 meticulously layered and processed images.

© 2023 Eva Redamonti

This month’s featured image is by artist of the month Eva Redamonti. She drew it for the piece about grief and algorithms in the MIT Tech Review, shared above.

That’s it for March. Hope to see you in April.

-Jodi