 A history of disappointment A recent, much-publicized academic paper made a startling claim: That Black women in London were disproportionately likely to die of the bubonic plague. It based it on the skeletons of 145 14th-century people found in plague pits, of whom 18%, it said, were Black. This should come as a surprise, says the writer Ian Leslie, given that, if there were any Black people in 14th-century England at all, they would have been a tiny fraction of a percent of the overall population. If 18% of your sample is Black, then something has gone wrong. “It is just obviously bullshit,” says an exasperated Leslie. But the claim is not the only recent such example: Another paper claimed that Black slaves in Jamaica invented a key iron-production process. Other historians pointed out the many glaring flaws in the study’s claims, but the journal stood by it. These studies are using historical Black people “as tokens in an academic status game,” Leslie writes. “To me this seems a very bad thing for the authority of History as a discipline.” Enema of the state A word of warning: You should not squirt coffee up your butt. Perhaps you think it odd that people need to be warned of this, but apparently many do — the coffee enema is “one of the strangest health fads of the last century,” advertised as a treatment for almost anything, according to the epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz. “A quick search online shows people claiming that the introduction of some Joe into your rear end can help with everything from liver disease to chronic pain.” The idea was invented in the mid-20th century, part of a wider set of pseudoscientific cancer treatments known as “Gerson therapy,” designed to remove imaginary “toxins.” But the evidence shows that people using those treatments tend to die more quickly than those who use conventional medicine, and coffee enemas in particular have risks: Most commonly burns (“people can underestimate how hot the coffee is”), but also “bowel perforation, rectal bleeding, and even septicemia and death.” “Best to put the coffee in your mouth,” says Meyerowitz-Katz, not unreasonably. Tunnel vision In 2022, a woman on Reddit had an unusual query: “How can I get my boyfriend to stop digging his tunnel?” The boyfriend in question had inherited some land and decided to dig a tunnel on it. The tunnel had, apparently, become something of an obsession: He had reached significant depths, and had added lighting, support beams, and furniture. The Reddit community had some suggestions, mainly about making sure that the tunnel was properly ventilated, and about discussing her concerns with him, and as far as we know the couple are still happily together and the tunnel continues to grow. The blogger Dynomight loves Tunnel Man. So many of the things we get obsessed with are things humans evolved to obsess over — sex, food, our children — and/or that have been engineered to make us obsessive about them — such as “adult entertainment,” Doritos, or fentanyl. But “evolution didn’t program us to tunnel. No company optimized digging to increase engagement,” Dynomight writes. In that sense, the tunnel is a kind of “anti-pornography … a physical embodiment of the idea that we can choose to do things, rather than being chosen by them.” |
