A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
Britain’s Forgotten Pandemic: What We Failed to Learn from the Outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease
The first confirmed case of foot-and-mouth was in an Essex slaughterhouse on February 19, 2001—soon followed by a European ban on livestock exports from the UK. By this time, infected animals had made their way to market and cases were found far away as Devon.
After a thirty-year lull, the ministry of agriculture was unprepared. Testing was slow and a new order came in. All livestock within three kilometers of an outbreak were to be culled. The countryside was shut down and an army of veterinarians, knackermen, soldiers, and body haulers were sent in.
The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Going to College
Benjamin B. Bolger has been to Harvard and Stanford and Yale. He has been to Columbia and Dartmouth and Oxford, and Cambridge, Brandeis and Brown. Over all, Bolger has 14 advanced degrees, plus an associate’s and a bachelor’s. Some of Bolger’s degrees took many years to complete, such as a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Others have required rather less commitment: low-residency M.F.A.s from Ashland University and the University of Tampa, for example.
This Prison Newspaper Has Been Publishing for More Than a Century
Inside a state prison near Stillwater, Minn., past the guards and the wings of cells stacked one on top of another, tucked in the corner of a computer lab, Richard Adams and Paul Gordon are fervently discussing grammar.
Both men are on staff at the Prison Mirror, a newspaper made by and for the people held at the Minnesota Correctional Facility – Stillwater. Gordon had written a profile on the prison art instructor. He read it aloud to Adams.
“I was curious if there was a certain style or something he preferred to paint. ‘When I get time I like Bob Ross, the guy that does the painting on the TPT channel,’” Gordon recited, referencing the Twin Cities’ PBS channel. Adams leaned in, a confused look on his face, and asked him to repeat the sentence.
“Is that what he said?” Adams asked. “It sounds like you’re saying you like the guy from the TPT channel.” He suggested Gordon add an attribution to the quote, like “he said” or “he replied.”
The Mythical Promise of Tin Foil Hats
Open your kitchen drawer and take out some tin foil. Twirl it into a cone – maybe even double-wrap it – and put it on your noggin. Do you feel safer yet? The tin foil hat is perhaps the most iconic headgear for conspiracy theorists. Wearing one signals to others that you’re unhinged, have a deep distrust of the government, or that you’re really worried about aliens. To some, it’s a way to block a centralized power’s electromagnetic waves from entering your brain. Where does this myth come from, and is there any actual science to it?
The Worm Charmers
The attention led the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to start regulating the harvest of worms, investigating unreported income, and implementing permit requirements. Back then, the sound produced by grunters in the first hours of daylight was as common as birdsong in this forest, and hundreds of thousands of worms were carried out in cans. Folks who once turned to grunting to make ends meet seasonally were soon in the woods year-round during that decade, competing to summon the bait to the surface and sell to brokers among the counties set between the capital city and the Apalachicola River. Millions of worms left those counties bound for fishing hooks across America. Money followed the pink fever, but as with any rush, the demand eventually dimmed as commercial worm farms caught on and soft, plastic lures became popular.
The Little-Known Legacy of the EP
The EP came out of a good old-fashioned form factor war between Columbia Records, which issued the first LPs—Long Playing records—in 1948, and RCA Victor, which had issued the first 7-inch 45 RPM singles in 1949. RCA saw an opportunity to compete with the LP by issuing an EP—more than a single, less than an album, typically four songs split two a side—in the early 1950s. My research traces the first of these to a 1952 RCA Victor holiday catalog called Music to Play on Christmas Day—the first true EPs likely came from this, and my book includes the Three Suns’ 1952 double EP (eight songs) Christmas Party to represent the milestone.
21 Rhetorical Devices Explained
Dysphemism
If a euphemism is a nicer turn of phrase used in place of a more offensive or embarrassing one (like “call of nature” or “bought the farm”), then a dysphemism is an offensive or detrimental phrase deliberately used in place of a nicer one. This applies to everything from using an insult instead of someone’s name, to phrases like frankenfood and junk food that try to influence what we should think of genetically modified crops and take-out restaurants with just a few choice words.