Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter. CAE 52 is here, if you missed it. The most popular link from last month was Sarah Miller’s profoundly entertaining read, Pirates of the Ayahuasca. Apologies that this CAE is late; I’ve not been feeling very well and it took me longer than usual. My updates
Featured art for CAE 53CAE 53’s featured artist is Benjamin Barakat, whose image of dragon tree star trails from the Firmihin Forest in Yemen is on the Astronomy Photographer of the Year shortlist, below. This solitary dragon tree from the heart of Socotra’s famous forest paints a surreal landscape with star trails behind it. The photo comprises 300 different exposures, all superimposed into one image. You can see the rest of Barakat’s fabulous astrophotography on his website and Instagram feed.
The most interesting things I read this monthThese links are once again formatted into hyperlinks thanks to the help of my friend Mike. Start here:Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below. 🔬Allergic to Everything — The Mystery of Mast Cells. A good overview of mast cells, those sentinel immune cells discovered in the late 1800s that contributed to derailing my life, just as they did for those interviewed in this piece. Notes one interviewee: “I would describe myself as a person who had tremendous potential in this world, [...] and that potential has been hijacked by the mental, physical, and psychological impacts of this condition.” If this primer is up your alley or that of your loved ones, may I also interest you in the 22,000+ words I wrote on the topic? It includes my research notes, related diseases also affected by mast cells, and what I take / what I eat to manage the condition. Discover Magazine 🎓 What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom. Yes, the title is sticky-clicky, but it’s also effective. What did happen when Piers Gelly got creative with the robots? “Rather than taking an ‘abstinence-only’ approach to AI,” he writes, “I decided to put the central, existential question to them directly: was it still necessary or valuable to learn to write?” The choice would be theirs: at the end of the semester, after completing assignments with and without AI, his students could decide whether they believed AI could replace him or not. Excellent essay, with an interesting approach by this UVA prof, one that got his students looking more critically at AI output, and the commonalities in writing that it provides. LitHub 🪶 Everyone had a Feather Bed. This month I discovered that there is a bird history Substack, and my life is all the better for it. This piece talks about how in the 18th and 19th centuries, feathers were an indispensable part of life for the vast majority of Americans because they stuffed everyone’s mattresses “from frontier paupers to New York robber barons”. Feathers were “as ubiquitous as leather, as indispensable as cotton, and as luxurious as beaver pelts” — though not very cheap. And yet, everyone seemed to find a way to get enough of them to make a mattress — a mass of 30 to 50 pounds of feathers stuffed into a bag, basically. Fascinating stuff! Bird History 🧬 The Most Interesting Email I Ever Received: Remembering the Incredible Life of DIY Geneticist Jill Viles. A stunning piece about a truly special human being. I remember reading about her in the initial piece a decade ago. How awful, too, that her life ended due to respiratory infection when she could have made such a continued and profound impact. Still, the difference she made and the way she persevered is nothing short of gobsmacking. A self-taught genetic sleuth, Jill Viles lived with Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy and a rare form of partial lipodystrophy, and wrote to reporter David Epstein in 2009 with a surprising yet well-researched theory: that she shared a gene mutation with Olympic hurdler Priscilla Lopes-Schliep. To everyone’s shock (except Jill’s!), genetic testing confirmed their shared mutation, a discovery that not only led to important medical insights for Priscilla, but also new research — including via fruit flies called “Jill flies” that were engineered with her mutations. Jill’s memoir, published after her death, traces her remarkable journey of resilience, scientific curiosity, and hope. This piece really hit me too, as it tells her story from the eyes of the reporter she reached out to many years ago. Beautiful. ProPublica (via Aubrey) 🤧 Allergies seem nearly impossible to avoid — unless you’re Amish. (Archive link) Why would an Amish community in northern Indiana be considered one of the “least-allergic populations” ever measured in the developed world”? Even children from other traditional farming families, who still have lower rates of allergic disease than children from nonfarming homes, are more allergic than the Amish. It’s less about a ‘hygiene hypothesis’ note researchers, and more about a ‘microbial hypothesis’: analysis of farm dust found proteins that deliver molecules produced by microbes and plants, which line the respiratory tract in a protective manner to regulate airway responses and protect against inflammation. It’s the since beneficial bacteria that colonize the gut and other mucosal surfaces that play a significant role. Washington Post 📷 Some amazing photo links!
😃 The Emoji Tongue. Do emoji constitute a language unto themselves? If they are a language, what would the rules of grammar be, or other conventions that are found in more traditional language? This excerpt of a new book by Keith Houston called “Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji” talks about the linguistics and varied meanings of those ever-pervasive faces as they continue to dominate our digital conversations. I admit, I used to really dislike emoji as I’m such a lover of words. But as you can see in CAEs, I’ve taken to them happily — in this case as synthesis in and of themselves, a way to express the topic of text in one quick pictogram. Longreads 💊 The Future Of Health Data In The Age Of AI. Sensitive data about your health used to be relatively safe and anonymous. AI is making it much easier for that information to be used, in opaque and often detrimental ways. “Our willingness to surrender health information so freely not only jeopardizes individual privacy and autonomy but also poses significant risks to societal health,” writes Júlia Keserű. A major paradigm shift is needed, she says, in how we regard our bodies and how we envision their boundaries online. Noema 🛌 Depression linked to ‘internal jet lag’, study finds. The severity of internal 'jet lag' was linked to worse mental health symptoms in the Sydney patients studied, finding that 23% of patients had at least two circadian rhythm measures that were out of sync, similar to disruptions with time zone travel or shift work. In those two cases, body clocks were out of sync with the external environment. In this case, circadian rhythms were out of sync within a person’s body, among the different body clocks they have — a kind of ‘internal jet lag’. The University Of Sydney 🪱 The Worm Hunters of Southern Ontario. Southwestern Ontario is the worm capital of the world, apparently. Despite living in the province, I had no idea! It’s home to the bulk of of North America’s bait worm supply, and this piece by Inori Roy dives into this niche local industry. Each night, hundreds of thousands of worms come to the surface of the soil, and Roy ends up spending a surreal twilight picking wild earthworms as part of his reporting. He goes into not only the industry itself, but the existential threats in labour and climate change that affect farmland today. The Local (via Naomi) 🇹🇭 🇰🇭 Nationalist zeal & AI slop fueled the Thai-Cambodia conflict. While Thailand and Cambodia have reached a temporary ceasefire in their border conflict, many feel in the region believe that it is unlikely to hold. If you’re unfamiliar with the conflict, a short summary is in this article. Some 200,000 people have been displaced from the areas near the conflict. Most articles about it share the history of the disputed border; when I lived in Thailand, for example there was another wave of clashes. While the area has been disputed for over 100 years, this level of fighting is rare. So why have things escalated? This piece goes into details. Thhe conflict’s escalation is driven by each country’s efforts to consolidate military and political power and push nationalistic views, and it’s also fuelled to new peaks by AI slop. If leaders want conflict, would a ceasefire really hold? Kouprey 🦠 Common Respiratory Viral Infections Awaken Dormant Breast Cancer Cells in Lungs. A new study published in the journal Nature provided what the authors call “the first direct evidence” that respiratory viruses, including Covid and influenza, can awaken dormant breast cancer cells in the lungs, setting the stage for new metastatic tumours to grow. The study findings were from mice, which the authors then supported with data analyses from human cancer survivors who had Covid. They found that patients from the UK Biobank who were in remission for cancer had a 2x increase in cancer-related deaths if they had tested positive for Covid. They also found that a previous Covid infection was associated with a greater than 40% increased risk of metastatic breast cancer in the lungs. People are content to treat Covid “just like a cold”, but unfortunately each day new studies show us why that should not be the case. GenEng 🏥 What Scientists Learned Scanning the Bodies of 100,000 Brits. (Archive link) Also related to the massive database of medical data within the UK Biobank, mentioned above: this article discusses how these data are allowing an “unprecedented window” into how diseases take root, even years prior to symptoms beginning. This has changed perspective of disease, including for Type 1 Diabetes, for example, where it was long thought to affect only children. Physicians often assumed if one got diabetes later in life, it was Type 2. But the UK Biobank research demonstrated that Type 1 Diabetes occurs at the same rate throughout life. With clearer data, scientists realized that many older adults had been misclassified and were therefore given the wrong treatment. Hoping for more progress of this sort thanks to the data of ordinary UK citizens. Bloomberg 🐾 Maddie, a Coonhound Who Awed Instagram by Balancing on Things, Dies at 14. (Archive link) I followed Maddie via her owner on Instagram for many years, and loved her sweet nature and amazing photographs that resulted from her many creative poses. Rest in peace, sweet one. New York Times 💬 A literary history of fake texts in Apple's marketing materials. An entertaining compilation of “Applecore style” from the mocked-up texts and emails Apple puts together to share features or OS / iOS updates in its announcement presentations. These messages, ostensibly written by Apple’s marketing department, are “eerily cheery” and “aggressively punctuated”, an alternate universe where friends and coworkers use Apple products exactly as they’re meant to be used, “without complaint or error”. Enjoyable and very niche deep dive. Read Max 🌀 Flounder Mode. I’ve featured pieces by Kevin Kelly in CAEs past, most recently about his tips for travel. This is a piece profiling him, for a change. It talks about how he doesn’t want to be known for “one big thing” and traces the creative pursuits he’s built over the years. “The people who become legendary in their interests never feel they have arrived,” Kelly notes. It’s full of insight and thoughtful quotes and was a great companion to his prolific prose — and not only because I have the kind of “illegible” career path that he says “means you’re onto interesting stuff”. (I’ll take it, though!) Colossus 🧅 The History of The Onion You Didn't Know You Needed. Though I often feature micro histories of food, the onion in question is The Onion, the often pitch-perfect satirical American news site that consistently goes viral. The piece is an interview with Christine Wenc about her new book, “Funny Because It’s True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire”. It’s not just a history of the publication, but also the industry it makes fun of and how news has evolved over time. Culture Study 🧠 Interbreeding with Neanderthals may be responsible for modern-day brain condition, SFU study finds A new Simon Fraser University-led study reveals that a condition called Chiari malformation type I that affects the brain could occur due to genes that some people have inherited from Neanderthals. The gene is “mismatched” with the evolved size of the skull, leading to the brain descent found in the CM-I. In patients with the condition, the lower part of the brain extends too far into the spinal cord, often linked to having a smaller-than-normal occipital bone at the back of the skull. It can lead to headaches, neck pain, and neurological conditions, thought to affect 1 in 100 people. Crazy to think that this disorder is a consequences of lingering genes from many moons ago. ScienceAlert ⚜️ The Bloc Wants to Break Up Canada—but Not Yet. When I was in high school in the 1990s, Quebec held a referendum about separation from Canada. The “no” side won with very slim margins. Campaigning on separatism has taken a back seat in federal politics of late, but as Toula Drimonis notes, it’s percolating with increased interest whilst “politics as performance” plays out, waiting for the time to surge forward once again. The Walrus 👛 Inside the Shadowy, Lucrative Business of ‘Superfake’ Luxury Handbags. (Gift link) Forget fake handbags sold on street corners, now there are “superfakes”, hyper-realistic luxury knock-offs that can run customers $500 to $5K, purchasable discreetly via WhatsApp and other online channels, arrive in branded boxes, and often hawked by influencers as “mirror bags” or “1:1s” (instead of just calling them fakes). They’re near-perfect replicas, ones made in covert factories using stolen design blueprints and reverse engineering. This piece looks at how technology and luxury are intersecting to fuel these bags; resale experts now need x-rays and metal analysis to spot them, for example. The Wall Street Journal (via Chris) 👃🏻 How Smell Guides Our Inner World. Scientists are gaining a deeper understanding of how powerful human smell is as they deep dive into the sense’s fundamental elements. When we smell a rose, for example, “more than 800 different odorants enter your nose and bind to olfactory receptors expressed in the cell membranes of various neurons”, then individual neurons that translate them into perception in our brains. But studying smell is not simple, because it’s so bioindividual. New scent databases and studies decoding how smells translate into neural language are helping, and this piece is great at showing how the brain ‘makes’ a smell. For many, smells have deep ties to memory, emotion, and the human experience; I can still smell peach extract from Body Shop today and it transports me right back to Grade 9 even though it’s decades later. Love learning about why that is. Quanta Magazine 🏗 The Hidden Engineering of Liquid Dampers in Skyscrapers. Engineers have to find creative ways to limit vibrations of tall buildings, especially in ultra-skinny “pencil tower” skyscrapers, those tall and slender buildings where extra padding would eat into precious floor space. One option for stabilization is tuned liquid dampers, systems that harness the movement of water in tanks to counteract wind-induced movement in the rest of the building. When calibrated correctly, they reduce swaying without mechanical complexity or maintenance, making them quieter than bulky mass dampers. They’re also a lot less expensive! The “unsung heroes” of skyscrapers, says the author. I’ve never heard of them prior, and this piece and accompanying video is a great crash course. Practical Engineering 💻 Frame of preference - a history of Mac settings, 1984–2004. I know, I know, another Mac history piece. This one is a true masterpiece, though, one that displays the settings and control panel of Apple computers over time, interesting (I think!) even to those who aren’t Apple nerds. It goes through Macintosh System Software 1.0 all the way to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther — with interactive emulators to boot. I can’t imagine the time it took to build. Marcin Wichary 🦜 How an Indigenous Community in the Amazon Created a Bird Guide of Their Own. Inspired by naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace’s visit nearly 150 years ago, an isolated Indigenous community, the Baniwa people of Nazaré do Cuba in Brazil, is working collaboratively with scientists to to survey local birds and document indigenous cultural traditions that are at risk as modern influences mount. Today the Baniwa live off-grid communities, 5-10 hours of motorboat trip from the closest towns, with limited internet access only available now for about three years. While few scientists have visited, the Baniwa have elected to create a bird guide that would list each species’ scientific name, Portuguese name, and name in two Indigenous languages. Very interesting read, and beautiful pictures throughout. Audubon 📖 Literacy lag: We start reading too late Do Americans start reading too late? Throughout history, people started to read a lot earlier than they do now in the US, and this article argues that we’ve got it wrong due to “neuromyths” that persist since the 1960s. This piece (rightly, I think) argues that the literacy lag isn’t a biological necessity, but rather a self-inflicted education gap. And that we need to be teaching kids to read earlier than 6 or 7 years old. The idea that any expert would say it’s “developmentally inappropriate” to try to learn to read earlier, as one is quoted doing in this piece, is baffling to me. We expose children early to screens, but are delaying teaching them to read? Intrinsic Perspective 🇨🇦 The Canadians Are Furious. (Archive link) Interesting to read what is happening here in Canada from an American POV. This piece goes into the “Buy Canadian” movement and how many Canadians are not traveling to the USA nor buying products made in America. Many articles on the topic wrongly state that this push is due to tariffs; in reality, the movement is grounded in a reaction to threats Trump made to Canada’s sovereignty, and reports from fellow Canadians (some I know personally) about detention at the border when heading South for a visit. It’s anger and fear and frustration rolled into one, and far broader than tariffs alone. This is probably the most thorough piece on the topic that I’ve seen from the American press. There are, of course, Canadians who don’t feel that way and think Trump is great. They aren’t the majority, per polls. New York Magazine The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:🇨🇩 How Did a Pair of Football Buddies From Utah Join a Coup in the Congo? (Archive link) Quite the title, I know. Two former high school football teammates from Utah became participants in a failed coup attempt in the Democratic Republic of Congo in May 2024. The coup involved armed assaults on the presidential palace and other government targets, and deflated fairly quickly — in just 75 minutes. To the shock of their families at home, both students were subsequently arrested and convicted of terrorism, then eventually repatriated to the US. Now, they face some heavy federal charges. Intelligencer 😴 Why Can’t Americans Sleep? (Gift link) It isn’t limited to Americans, as many Canadians and Europeans and other readers often write in to say the same. This piece talks about the exhausting ‘textbook’ cycles of insomnia — “a fear of sleep loss that itself causes sleep loss that in turn generates an even greater fear of sleep loss that in turn generates even more sleep loss … until the next thing you know, you’re in an insomnia galaxy spiral, with a dark behavioral and psychological (and sometimes neurobiological) life of its own.” Sound familiar? Same. In my case, a big chunk of the neurobiological issues were mast cell dysfunction; as I’ve written previously controlling my mast cells was the only way I’ve managed to sleep again after years of horrible insomnia. This essay talks not about MCAS, but about the epidemic of sleeplessness in the USA, CBT-I as a remedy, and sleep myths that persist. The Atlantic 🦟 Genetic Ancestry Linked to Risk of Severe Dengue A new study shows that genetic ancestry surprisingly influences the severity of dengue infections. The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the Instituto Aggeu Magalhães in Brazil, and found that having higher proportions of European ancestry is linked to a more pronounced and inflammatory response, while African ancestry is associated with reduced inflammation and a protective effect against severe dengue outcomes. For decades, epidemiologic studies showed that in countries with ethnically diverse populations (such as Brazil, Colombia, Haiti and Cuba), people of African ancestry had milder cases of dengue, while people of European ancestry had more severe disease. But no one could explain why until now. Dengue’s at a peak in many countries this year; more about the mosquito borne virus, here from me. UPMC News 🏫 Who Benefits from Destroying the Department of Education. The Department of Education is facing growing political attacks, as no doubt you’ve all seen in the news. In a parallel world, these criticisms would be to make the department better, more effective for education children. But no, today’s messaging is about dismantling it entirely. Talia Levin winds her way back to the beginning of the movement to abolish the Department in 1979, and traces its momentum to present day — including how it ties into the growth of Christian nationalism and the belief by some that pulling students out of public education is important for a broader spiritual war. To answer her title question: it’s not the kids that benefit, not at all. The Sword and the Sandwich 🌏 Earth will spin faster today to create 2nd-shortest day in history. The day in question was July 21, 2025. But why? “The cause of this acceleration is not explained,” says scientist Leonid Zotov in the piece. Oh, ok. “Most scientists believe it is something inside the Earth,” he adds. Since ocean and atmospheric models don’t explain this acceleration, it remains a mystery, but we do know that the Earth has been rotating at its fastest now than ever, at least since records began in 1973. Space.com 🏙 Mapping New York Chinatown through transformations in its architecture. A really impressive interactive web project that maps Manhattan Chinatown through its architectural changes, showing transformations that have occurred in its buildings ever since Chinatown was established in the 1860s. Reflective Urbanisms (via Kottke.org) 🏭 Air pollution 'strongly associated' with DNA mutations tied to lung cancer. Research found that the higher the levels of air pollution in a given area around the world, the more cancer-promoting mutations were present, helping to explain why there is a rising proportion of people developing lung cancer who have never smoked, a trend the researchers called an urgent and growing global problem. (No mention of radon in this piece, but it’s another cause of lung cancer in those who haven’t smoked.) Science Alert 🖤 Andrea Gibson 8/13/75 – 7/14/25. Beautiful eulogy for a beautiful, powerful poet. 🔠 The radical 1960s schools experiment that created a whole new alphabet – and left thousands of children unable to spell. The Initial Teaching Alphabet was an initiative from the 1960s that aimed to teach children to read quickly in the UK. The ITA was “a strange chart of more than 40 characters, many familiar, others alien,” notes the piece — a photo is enclosed, and looks like a combo of Cyrillic and English. While it was intended to exist as an easy bridge to our standard alphabet, in practice it was not so simple — and many children from the experiment have felt confused and unable to spell accurately ever since. The Guardian 🩸 French scientists discover a new blood type found in only one woman alive today. Crazy! Scientists in France identified a new blood type that they’ve named “Gwada negative”, found in only one person so far — a 68-year-old woman from Guadeloupe. Her blood reacted to all known donor types, and after scientists did genetic sequencing, they found a unique mutation that means if she needs blood she can only receive her own. Scary to think of, if she needs a transfusion! Hopefully they can bank some of her blood just in case it’s needed. The Economic Times 🥳 The Death of Partying in the U.S.A. — and Why It Matters. Americans have dramatically cut back on partying, notes this piece. Between 2003 and 2024, time spent attending or hosting social gatherings dropped by roughly 50%, and for young people aged 15–24, the decline was a surprising 70%. Even on a typical weekend in 2023, only 4% of households hosted or went to a party. Why does this matter? The author links these shifts to a broader list of societal changes, fitting into what he calls “The Anti-Social Century”, where face-to-face interaction has plummeted amid rising loneliness and mental health struggles. “Today, I believe we’ve built ourselves a world of greater professional ambition, more intensive parenting, and lavish entertainment abundance,” he notes. “But in making this world, we’ve lost a bit of each other.” Derek Thompson 🎬 Everyone Wants a Piece of Pedro Pascal. A fun profile of one of the most beloved guys in Hollywood right now. Vanity Fair 🐸 Into the Forests of the Lost Frogs. The golden toad was last seen in 1989 and officially declared extinct in 2004. Decades later, the authors of this piece revisit the animal’s former cloud-forest home on Cerro Brillante, Costa Rica to dive into the ecological mystery of their extinction. While yes, diseases and fungi are part of what contributed to the toad’s disappearance (especially adding in climate change), the final determination of why we lost them remains elusive. At the link, pretty pictures of said toad, too. Earth Island Journal 👂🏻 Can a Medical Device Restore Your Balance? Millions of people suffering from vestibular disorders and/or vertigo worldwide have trouble maintaining balance and proprioception. Researchers have now have developed an experimental medical implant for the ear that promises to restore the sensory machinery responsible for balance, one that works like a cochlear implant and has shown impressive results treating these conditions. Smithsonian Magazine 🌊 At 40, She Discovered She Was One of America’s Best Free Divers. Hard not to root for Sara Burnett, who went from an introductory course to freediving in Dominica to competing in the sport’s world championship in just over a year. 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