“The 21st-dynasty priests made extensive repairs to Amenhotep I’s mummy. For instance, they reattached the severed head with a resin-treated linen band, reattached limbs and fingers, tightened loose bandages, and placed two new amulets into the mummy.”

“When GM began selling leaded gasoline, public health experts questioned its decision. One called lead a serious menace to public health, and another called concentrated tetraethyl lead a ‘malicious and creeping’ poison. General Motors and Standard Oil waved the warnings aside until disaster struck in October 1924.”

“A study from J&J in September [2021] showed that after a second dose, the J&J vaccine was about 91% effective, nearly matching the efficacy of the Pfizer and Moderna shots after two doses.”

“Plugging in a USB-C cable can raise all sorts of questions. Will you get the maximum speed between two devices? Will you get the wattage you need to power a computer or recharge a USB battery? Will nothing happen at all, with no clue as to why?”

“The afterlife of a dead mall is interesting. Schools are moving into malls; some students are completing high school in a converted Macy’s in Vermont. A Dillard’s in Texas is now a radio station. Malls are becoming home to community colleges and libraries and offices.”

“Another course — a citrus foam — was served in a plaster cast of the chef’s mouth. Absent utensils, we were told to lick it out of the chef’s mouth in a scene that I’m pretty sure was stolen from an eastern European horror film.”

“‘If the Black Death caused the Renaissance will the COVID pandemic cause a golden age?’ You see the problems with the question now: the Black Death didn’t cause the Renaissance, not by itself, and the Renaissance was not a golden age, at least not the kind that you would want to live in, or to see your children live in.”

“[A] central theme of this story is that expectations move slower than reality on the ground. That was true when people clung to 1950s expectations as the economy changed over the next 35 years. And even if a middle-class boom began today, expectations that the odds are stacked against everyone but those at the top may stick around.”

(This is interesting and insightful, but I link to it with a very large caveat: It erases minorities from the story.)

“If the bánh mì of Saigon and Hanoi represents the peculiar alchemy of a colonized people choosing and changing a legacy forced on them at gunpoint, the bánh mì of the United States is a product of another long, cruel war, and a mass exodus from subsequent privation.”

“Veil’s website hadn’t been saved, and Pictures for Sad Children was hard to track down in its entirety. The last, tangible vestige of the comic came from those who had ordered a copy of the book. … They resolved to share the collection, mailing copies to whoever hadn’t cracked its spine yet.”

“Searle looked at two other locations much further to the south: the Azores and Madeira — and in both places they found mice there carried the same genetic signature as that carried by the Viking mouse. Crucially, they found very few mice that carried genetic signatures like those found in mouse populations in Portugal, whose mariners were also reckoned to be the first to settle on these islands.”

“From the perch atop the viewing tower, the spiders carefully surveyed the scene before descending the tower and climbing up a walkway. Most [Portia jumping] spiders chose the path that led to the meal, even if this meant moving away from the prey and passing the incorrect walkway on the way.”

“For the next handful of years, his work was passed by millions of cars, with a precious group of them aware of the quiet rebellion whizzing by above. For some, it was a statement about doing it yourself; for others, a statement about the nature of art in a highway-ruled metropolis.”

“Articles about the ‘illiberal left’ feel like dispatches from the Upside Down, a parallel universe where American political life looks nothing like it does in reality. Why are readers of national publications constantly being told that they should worry about the left potentially, sometime in the future, becoming as bad as Republicans are now?

“The Norse may have been at the site slightly earlier, but they were definitely there and cutting down trees by 1021. Based on the development stages of certain cells in the waney layer, Dee, Kuitems, and their colleagues say that one of the trees was cut down in the spring, while another was cut down in the summer or fall.”