
*Someone Please Rip This Newsletter Out of My Hands*
^ me, whenever there is the slightest lull in conversation
The only thing more violating than having to strip down at the doctors and put on that demoralizing paper gown is going to the Apple store to get your computer fixed and have your Genius Bar expert get a long hard look at your folder and document names, search history, and every single tab you have open. Which results in you becoming visibly anxious and either trying to distract them from looking in your 15 pending shopping carts or worse, hurriedly attempting to rationalize and normalize everything, nervously laughing between erratic statements.
I recently got a new laptop so let me bring you through what I put the unfortunate soul assigned to me through against his will.

^ me, desperately trying to get a total stranger to feel sympathy for pigeons
No one can escape this newsletter without listening to another plea to be kind to pigeons.
- First, pigeons can fly up to 90mph. Video proof.
- In case your instagram discover isn’t also 80% birds, I’ve been fed nonstop mockery about how pigeons make the worst birds nests recently and everyone should be informed.
- So to put the blame on us, pigeons trying to make a life for themselves close to humans is our fault. We domesticated them for our own purposes, raising them for meat and messaging, and when they escaped or when they no longer served us, we abandoned them and called them rats with wings. They are, whether we like it or not, some of our longest-running companions.
- Marie Claire published this article so I feel slightly validated taking such an unpopular stance but to put it bluntly, pigeons are a really impressive species with a heroic history and some downright human’ish traits. They are literal war heroes, they come in gorgeous varieties, and they’re incredibly smart animals as well.
Now that Lorazepam is socially relevant due to White Lotus, let’s throw it back to a drug you won’t believe people used to casually expose themselves to: late 1800s through the early 1900s, people were ingesting and using arsenic for SO many things and didn’t realize it was a poison. It was used as food coloring, a very popular beauty product (commonly as a wafer that promised pure white skin), in a libido pill, in fertilizer, baby carriage fabric, medicines, and more. After reading this, I felt blessed to be alive now but then became morbidly curious about what product we’re consuming in now that in 100 years will leave people aghast.
Next time you’re walking through Soho, look around and you’ll notice that there are no trees – wonder why? All the sidewalks in Soho are hollow. Back when this neighborhood was industrial, there would be workers toiling away in the basement of most buildings so vault lights were installed in order to bring natural light to those working below since electricity had not been invented yet. You can still find original or refurbished vault lights running along side countless blocks in Soho, with some replaced with metal sidewalks. Here’s an annoying TikTok about it.
What caught the eye of a former wannabe dentist? Brand new research about dental plaque, the film on your teeth where they meet the gums which is made up made of hundreds of different bacteria. One of the most prevalent, C. matruchotii, functions as scaffolding for other bacteria. Until recently, the process by which it reproduces eluded scientists. To make it easier to study, researchers dyed it with fluorescent amino acids and recorded a time-lapse video of its growth. They discovered it is able to split into up to 14 new cells at once, also known as multiple fission. This division strategy is rare in the bacterial kingdom, where most bacteria split into only two new cells. This research is huge for understanding the spatial organization of the entire oral microbiome.
What have I been irresponsibly using as an emotional crutch these days, you ask? The bald eagle pair, Shadow and Jackie, and the live camera on their nest where they’re raising two eaglets at the moment. The couple has been unsuccessful with nesting the last few years, so now I, along with 600,000 others, am helplessly in a hurt locker of omnipresent anxiety watching wildlife defy the odds of the ruthlessness of nature. My poor boyfriend now has yet another unavoidable element of unpredictability to fear with regards to my general mental wellbeing.