Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter. CAE 50 is here, if you missed it. The most popular link from last month was a lovely piece about how to create meaningful connections by asking better questions.

My updates

• Today kicks off the annual Spinal CSF Leak Awareness Week. Many of you know my story: a lumbar puncture in 2017 led to a chronic spinal CSF leak that 4 repairs have not managed to seal. My longest ‘sealed period’ was 8 months. I have other genetic conditions I didn’t previously know about that make further repairs more risky and outcomes less promising. Every moment that I am standing or sitting up is excruciatingly painful due to the low CSF volume and its effects on my brain and spinal nerves. As a result, much of my days are spent bedbound. Research is ongoing, and I am making an appeal for tax-deductible donations to my personal fundraising page for the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that I volunteer at. My goal this year is $3500 and 150 minutes of (sloooow) walking by June 7th. With your support, we can help move research and education forward for this debilitating and under-diagnosed condition.

• CAE 50 overflow links are up on my Patreon.

Featured art for CAE 51

This month’s featured artist is graphic designer and artist Joanna Andreasson, whose illustration below accompanies the article about psychedelics and pharmaceutical companies in this CAE 51. You can also find her on Instagram, where she posts her beautiful, colourful art.

The most interesting things I read this month

Start here:

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

🤖 I'd rather read the prompt. “I have never seen any form of create generative model output (be that image, text, audio, or video) which I would rather see than the original prompt.” An interesting read that frames LLM use in higher-education around the prompt itself. It is the prompt, not the submitted answer, that would yield information about the particular student’s assumptions and knowledge. (See the “quick links” below for how AI is being used in courts of law.) Clayton Ramsey

🇯🇵 Inventing Japanese Braille. Fascinating read on how Louis Braille's system was modified for languages that use characters, specifically for Japan. Japanese Braille came about after Braille was created, as it took time to figure out how to transfer a system made for Latin, alphabetic languages — something I hadn’t thought about prior, as my understanding of Braille is shaped by narratives from the West and not the East. In this article, Wei Yu Wayne Tan explores the global significance of inventing Japanese Braille, and how it was adapted; the key, it turns out, was to adapt Braille to phonetic characters called kana that could be used in writing to represent the sounds of a vast number of kanji characters. Braille was introduced to Japan in the Meiji period (1868-1912), and the first Braille newspaper, Tenji Mainichi (Braille Mainichi), was founded in Osaka in 1922. I’d never have known any of what I shared here without the beauty of this writing. I love pieces like this. History Workshop (via The Browser)

🚶🏻‍♀️ Craig Mod on the Creative Power of Walking. “I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom—without all that black-mirror dopamine—that you can access your deepest creative wells,” Craig Mod writes. This piece resonated for a myriad of reasons; walking is the only physical activity I can do, albeit slooooowly, but also: people always ask me if I’m bored being bed bound so much. To which I think, “of what?!” Boredom becomes opportunity if you still your mind enough through the initial discomfort of the open stretches of nothingness to start focusing on the little sensory details you’d otherwise ignore. It becomes a respite from the chaos, a comfort in times of pain. I loved this short piece and all that it represents, and now want to read the book from which it was excerpted. LitHub

🏦 The Hold-Up Artist. To fellow tourists he met around the world, Jeffery Shuman was a semi-retired developer with a bright smile, an even tan and a fat wallet. In truth, he was a legendary bank robber on the run from both Toronto police and the US Marshals. Inside the rise and fall of a globetrotting super-bandit. Toronto Life

🐈 This Strange Mutation Explains the Mystifying Color of Orange Cats. Orange cats are overwhelmingly male, which led scientists to suspect that the gene involved in the colour selection for the cats was on a sex chromosome. That hypothesis panned out in a new study concluding that a mutation on the X chromosome is what changes the activity of a gene that produces dark pigments — thereby leading to these orange-red loveable monsters. (But does this mutation also explain how dumb orange cats are? For the doubters, see: r/oneorangebraincell. We have an orange cat in the family; the stereotype pans out.) Scientific American

🇨🇦 How Ice Sculpted Canada. How water and ice has shaped Canada’s past and will continue shaping its future, the third post in a Canada series from Tomas Pueyo. The piece is full of graphics and explainers, and I enjoyed how he brought crafted its path with facts people may not realize, including for example that the Great Lakes are an extension of a line of many lakes, including Great Bear Lake, Great Slave Lake, Lake Athabasca, and others that chart a diagonal swath across our geography. Uncharted Territories

💐 Rebels with a Vase: Meet the Florists Taking on Big Flower. Floristry has been cruising along on its good looks and charm, but in reality, flowers can come with hefty costs for both the environment and florists. With florists making less than 50% of returns, some are left to wonder if it’s worth it at all. This is a thoughtful piece about something we purchase here and there in our lifetimes, but most of us know little about. The Walrus

🇰🇵 North Korea Stole Your Job. From his résumé, Thomas from Tennessee looked like a great potential employee: 8 years of programming, he passed a coding test with flying colours, and he seemed to fit the bill for the job. In reality, though, he was an IT worker deployed to work remotely for US companies in what this piece calls “a global cybercrime op to bankroll the North Korean government”. How are North Korean IT workers being embedded under false identities into Western companies? With friends on the ground — including, as the piece describes, a Minnesota woman who worked as a “facilitator” for hundreds of North Korea–linked jobs. She signed fraudulent documents, then wired paycheques overseas. WIRED

⛳ Proximity to Golf Courses and Risk of Parkinson's Disease. This case-control study found that you have the greatest risk of later being diagnosed with Parkinson’s if you live within one to three miles of a golf course, with that risk decreasing with distance from the course. The effect was largest for people living in vulnerable groundwater regions. The correlation here isn't golf itself, but rather the pesticides used to maintain a golf course, especially if drinking water from municipal wells are involved. Environmental exposure matters in many neurodegenerative cases; we've seen that with early onset PD with 9/11 first responders. In this case, a preventable risk — but will anyone do anything about it? JAMA Network

👁 Surgeons bid for medical first: Removing spinal tumor through patient’s eye. (Archive link.) Nineteen year old Karla Flores had a tumour strangling her spinal cord near the base of her skull, with her doctors weighing whether they ought to attempt a risky surgery that had never been done before. They went for it, and removed the tumour through her eye (!!) She is the first person in the world to have this procedure, and even a few millimetres of imprecision could have resulted in a fatal stroke or paralysis or damage to her eye. Thankfully the procedure went well. The Washington Post

🏰 People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies. Well, this piece is bonkers. I can see how using generative algorithm chatbots for therapy can lead to destructive outcomes, since they don’t really tune in (it seems) to discourage grandiose or destructive thought patterns. This piece looks at people who are developing some mighty unhealthy relationships with them, including those who “believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software.” Oof. Wild read through and through. Rolling Stone

🍅 An 80,000-year history of the tomato. How did the tomato go from a wild blueberry-sized plant to an ingredient found in markets and supermarkets all over the world? Thousands of years of very specific plant breeding, genetic engineering, and marketing. This is a topical history of a fruit many people love. Works in Progress

🍇 A Passion for Fruit. And, similarly: a long landing page of many interesting crash courses in different fruits and their uses throughout history. Lots of hours of exploration in here! Archaeology Magazine

🧲 MRI can replace painful spinal tap to diagnose MS more quickly, according to a new study. Yes, yes, yes! Similar to my excitement that there is a new blood test for Alzheimer’s to prevent using a diagnostic lumbar puncture (reported in CAE 50), I’m thrilled to read that yet another condition may be able to avoid the risk of spinal CSF leak to patients via a less invasive approach: a T2-weighted MRI, able to show lesions that are a hallmark of MS. Science Daily (The study is here)

💻 When the world connected on Skype. I must be old because the idea that we’re nostalgic for Skype is bonkers; wasn’t it just yesterday that we started using it?! Apparently not. It launched in 2003 and, as this article shares, it really changed the way we communicated — from our closest friends and family, to far flung people and jobs around the world. This piece isn’t a narrative tumble, it’s a lovely compilation of memories from people about how Skype affected their lives. Rest of World.

🇺🇦 The Show Must Go On (Underground) in the Kharkiv Opera House. The opera house in Kharkiv was almost destroyed and an undetonated Russian rocket can still be found on its roof. But after a long interruption, a group of Ukrainians are still performing — now forced to the opera house’s cellar for safety — and their shows are still sold out. What a read. Der Spiegel

🤢 Slop Farmer Boasts About How He Uses AI to Flood Social Media With Garbage to Trick Older Women. The term “slop farming” refers to when someone uses AI to create fake content over and over to monetize views and clicks. Like a ton of fake content. This piece looks at one “sloperator” (ew) and his monthly income and methods — targeting seniors primarily, it seems — in churning out AI content hundreds of times faster than a human could do. Per the piece, AI slop is now so widespread that more than half of all English posts on LinkedIn are likely AI. Pinterest is trying to find ways to let its users opt out or filter out the spam. Futurism

🧬 World’s First Patient Treated with Personalized CRISPR Gene Editing Therapy at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia More incredible medical news. The infant from the study, KJ, was born with a rare metabolic disease called severe carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 (CPS1) deficiency. Doctors took some of his stem cells, corrected two missing DNA letters and then re-implanted the cells after chemotherapy via lipid nanoparticles to the liver in order to correct KJ’s faulty enzyme. And now 66% of his neutrophils function normally. With no major side effects reported. This is a world first, and pretty amazing. Hopefully KJ’s success with the treatment continues. CHOP.edu

⚠️ What was food like before the FDA? Some in the US are championing the dismantling of the FDA, but they’re too young to know of a time when food was dangerous enough to kill. Formaldehyde, brick dust, lead, and borax once made grocery shopping a minefield. Information is power, and attempting to stymy it is never the right solution. With recent news reports of feces in butter and salmonella in cucumbers, for Americans who do want to stay updated: you may want to sign up for Canada’s product safety emails, or look at our alerts page here. We carry a lot of American products, so alerts will include them. Popular Science

🪶 The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch. What a fun, super niche read. “But during lockdown, I, like a lot of people, gradually became obsessed with birds—and it turns out that, with birds, they really are everywhere. They’re fluttering outside your window when you’re supposed to be working. They’re singing nearby when you’re supposed to be sleeping. They’re soaring overhead when you’re supposed to be paying attention to oncoming traffic.” This piece goes to places you wouldn’t expect, and it’s worth a read if not for the whoa! conclusion about the movie Charlie’s Angels, but also for the prose. Slate

🐁 Stupid rat facts. A compendium of information about various rodents, including that gerbils are unusually susceptible to epilepsy, and chinchillas have the densest fur of any land mammal. My kind of read! Loved it through and through. Rabbit Cavern

🍄 Sanitizing the Psychedelic Revolution. Pharmaceutical companies are racing to make a psychedelic panacea in a pill without the discomfort of a “trip”, taming their “unpredictable nature” and stripping them of the mystical or communal contexts from which they have evolved. Doing so may be a fool’s errand, argue Mia Cara Cosco and Rasha Elass; they wonder if this new and clinically decontextualized approach could potentially cause more harm than good. New Lines Magazine

➕ The Beast. This piece is written so entertainingly, and it is included both for its social and pop culture commentary, as well as for sheer talent in stringing words together. The topic: editorial about a collab between author James Patterson and (believe it or not) YouTube influencer MrBeast, a combo the piece notes is “a giant personal loot box in the winner-takes-all game of late-stage capitalism.” More at the link, about the “celebrity-influencer industrial complex” and the cultural necrosis it causes. Alien Sideboob

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

📸 Two photo links this month: (1) Nature Photographer of the Year 2025, some beautiful photos for your perusal, and (2) An Astrophotographers 20 day adventure under the darkest skies in the world — just wow. GDT Photo; PetaPixel

😵‍💫 The Era of the Business Idiot. Blistering criticism of the Business Idiot, whose era we are living in. It’s where middle management has seized power and essentially whittled away at actual meritocracy and value-creation in favour of symbolic growth and acquisition — and privileged, superficial intelligence. Ed has written about this at length before; think of this piece as one that ties his prior writing together into one overarching theory. Where’s Your Ed At?

🤮 The Airplane ‘Barf Bag’ Is A Genius Invention Most People Never Think About, And Using One Blew My Mind. Another topical piece that taught me something new. “Before yesterday”, Mercedes Street writes, “I hadn’t really thought about air sickness bags for perhaps more than 10 seconds over my entire life.” But a sudden-onset sickness and one flight later, the “puke purse” or emesis bag (as they're formally known) was a new subject of fascination. Part narrative, part history, this piece is 100% entertaining. The Autopian

🦷 Toothache from eating something cold? Blame these ancient fish. Headline of the month, really! New research on fossils shows that teeth first evolved as sensory tissue in the armoured exoskeletons of ancient vertebrate fish from the Ordovician period (about 465 million years ago). The finding here is that the bumpy structures on the fish’s armour contains dentine, and likely helped the creature sense conditions in the water around it. The conclusion: sensory organs in the armour of different animals evolved separately — in both vertebrates and invertebrates — to help them sense the larger world around them. And now our teeth hurt when we eat something cold as a result. University of Chicago

🧠 When memories from fiction become part of who you are. Scenes from books, movies and games sometimes carry as much weight as events from people’s own lives, offering “a semblance of autobiographical significance” to readers. Although the story in our memories is not based on reality, the experience of the story makes it real. Reminds me of the talks I used to give on how the brain interprets fiction, sometimes unable in the moment to discern that it isn’t reality. Interesting piece about why that may be, and the studies conducted on this topic. Psyche

🔪 I'd Like To Report a Murder. On the “dark art” of literary takedowns, via a conversation with two author-critics about the rejection of "excess politeness" and where it's taken public discourse in recent times, and a clinical therapist moderator to keep the conversation on track. Pioneer Works

🤰🏽A pregnancy almost denied. Inuit, Métis, and First Nations women in Canada are coming forward and sharing their experiences of being forced or coerced to undergo surgical sterilization in the country. This piece shares some of their stories, as well as those of the advocates who want to see the practice criminalized. CBC News

✍️ How to make a living as a writer. This piece, far more nuanced and emotionally-charged than the title would suggest, dives into Gabrielle Drolet’s hard work to stay solvent, a tangled map of different freelance and gig jobs that keep her afloat. The Walrus

🗣 How to find your voice when you are being silenced. Growing up behind the iron curtain, Luba Kassova thought the United States was a promised land of freedom, self-made wealth, and cool music. Now some Americans already know what she knew: an ever-present fear of the state. Resisting authoritarianism is about remaining engaged, remaining receptive and, above all, not turning away, Kassova writes. As above, crippling people’s access to information and facts is not the way to a functioning, healthy society. Coda

❌ Why Is Everyone Getting Their Tattoos Removed? For decades, Americans covered their bodies with more and more tattoos, a trend that was also reflected worldwide. Now, in the US at least, they’re getting them removed as fast as they can. This piece chats with those “going under the laser”, the tattoo-removal technicians whose businesses are booming, and the tattoo artists whose work is being erased — all to understand how something so permanent became so ephemeral. GQ

📖 Reading Behind Bars, and Beyond Barriers. A really interesting read about another topic I knew little about: access to books for people in Washington, DC prisons. In working for a books-to-prisons nonprofit, Jackie Snow had to learn prison regulations, which “felt like studying for a degree in carceral bureaucracy” to understand how to get prisoners the reading they asked for. “Behind every rejection lurked an institutional paranoia,” she writes. “Hidden messages, drugs or seeds of discontent that might blossom into unrest concealed within innocent pages.” The most sought-after book from prisoners? A dictionary. “What our incarcerated readers demonstrate is that true literary autonomy is about the right to seek what speaks to our individual humanity rather than institutional expectations,” notes Snow. Los Angeles Review of Books

💪🏻 The Incredible Rise and Fall of the Infomercial King The true story of the con man, the karate champ, and the workout videos that changed fitness forever. If you were around for the Tae Bo craze, this is the back story you likely weren’t aware of. Men’s Health

🇨🇦 Ontario Chief Coroner reports raise concerns that MAID policy and practice focus on access rather than protection. Canada’s MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying) was created with safeguards to prevent for coercion or neglect. But these days, there are valid concerns that those guardrails are being ignored. This piece discusses recent and very alarming cases where patients used MAID as a substitute for lacking access to medical care, situations that feel more like eugenics than dignity in death. MAID is a very compassionate option with terminal disease. As I’ve written here previously, it shouldn’t be used as a bludgeon. The Conversation

🐙 ‘About as close to aliens as we’ll ever get.’ Can AI crack animal language? AI is being applied to decode animal communication, and this piece about Dolittle Prize finalists who are exploring complex signals in dolphins, cuttlefish, and other species dives into what that looks like. Can these researchers get us to two-way understanding? Unclear! But interesting either way. Science

🐰 I bought a robot cat for my rabbit. Speaking of: I’ll be honest, this title is a far more effective click-bait for me than the “you’ll never believe” type headlines you see out there. I needed to know what her rabbit thought of the robot cat. What follows is a piece about how a TikTok experiment led Ericka Johnson into a strange world of cyborg cockroaches and animal observation. “Just because rats can learn to follow a robot rat doesn’t mean they think of it as a rat,” she writes. These and other musings made this an entertaining read. Nautilus

🦕 Solving the mystery of a dinosaur mass grave at the ‘River of Death’. Hidden beneath the slopes of a lush forest in Alberta, Canada is a mass grave on a monumental scale. Thousands of dinosaurs were buried here, killed in an instant on “a day of utter devastation”. Now, a group of palaeontologists have come to Pipestone Creek — nicknamed the "River of Death" — to help solve a 72-million-year-old enigma: how did they die? Spoiler alert: it was likely a flash flood. BBC News

👂🏻 What your earwax can reveal about your health. Another Beeb link, this time all about earwax. I’m including it in part because it’s informative, and in part because the illustrations of earwax (with arms and legs added!) are just so perfect for the piece. Thank you Emmanuel Lafont, for your ear wax whimsy. BBC Future

💧 Millions of People Depend on the Great Lakes’ Water Supply. Trump Decimated the Lab Protecting It. And finally: “It has taken over a century of bipartisan cooperation, investment and science to bring the Great Lakes back from the brink of ecological collapse,” Rice said. “But these reckless cuts could undo the progress in just a few short years, endangering the largest surface freshwater system in the world.” The lakes contain clean (for now) drinking water for 40 million people, 21% of the world’s surface freshwater, 3,500 species plants and animals, 170+ species of fish. Vance used to champion protecting the lakes; instead, these cuts will put people and animals at risk, say scientists. ProPublica

🔗 Quick links

• A database tracking legal decisions in cases where AI created ‘hallucinated content’ like fake citations.

• ‘I’m not going there anymore’: Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler’s list of places he won’t travel to right now — including the US.

• Man in Norway wakes up to find a massive container ship in his garden.

• A multiplayer roadtrip game in real-time where we can all vote on where the car should go, when to honk, and what to listen to on the radio. Another fun project by a clearly very creative human being.

• A new Japanese restaurant in NYC called Shirokuro where all of the surfaces (floors, chairs, walls, counters, etc.) are painted to look like a 2-dimensional drawing.

• Life-changing advice from 50 of the most interesting people Esquire Magazine’s editors know.

• An additional dino link: for the first time, footprints of armoured dinosaurs with tail clubs (!) have been identified, following discoveries made in the Canadian Rockies.

• Imagine walking down the street and feeling “an overwhelming love and warmth” for everyone you cross paths with. That’s what happens to individuals with Williams Syndrome, a rare genetic condition.

• New research reveals shared genetic link between endometriosis and certain immune conditions.

• Lifehacker’s advice on ‘what to hoard’ in the US in preparation for what happens when the effect of tariffs trickles down the supply chain.

• A baby hummingbird that looks like a dangerous caterpillar has been found in the rainforests of Panama.

Hope to see you next month!
-Jodi