Avsnitt
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What a treat! In this episode, author and recovering bluebottle Cory McCarthy joined us to talk about research holes from his latest novel Man O’War, a coming-of-age YA about a trans swimmer growing up near Sea Planet, a marine life theme park in small-town Ohio. I fully expected us to mostly talk about sea creatures, and then we had a heart-to-heart about the nuances of writing queer YA, parallels between growing up trans and animals in captivity, and who coming out is really for (*cough dinosaurs cough*). But don’t worry—there are still sea creature facts! Cory gave us tidbits about the inherent plurality of Portuguese man o' war, upsetting shark sex, and joyful penguin interactions, and more. Bonus game: count the times Cory and I laugh semi-maniacally about queer kidlit writer stuff, or the amount of times I say “that’s so real.” Remember, kids: it’s not that it gets better; it’s that straight people get less important.
SHOW NOTES:
The New York Times article “Boys Don’t Cry’ 20 Years Later: For Trans Men, a Divisive Legacy” gives an overview of the many complex responses to this movie. I personally like the piece “Fighting to Thrive: Reflecting on Boys Don’t Cry 20 Years Later” by William Horn on Bitch Media, which reminds us that the project of the movie is educating straight, cis people, and was not necessarily made for queer and trans people. Here’s a quote from Horn: “Boys Don’t Cry is powerful, but it’s traumatizing. The movie is intentionally designed that way: It pulls you into Brandon’s story so that you feel his fear and his pain. Good movies do that, and Boys Don’t Cry remains important viewing for a cis audience. For people like me, it’s a fear and pain that we already innately know.”
The other trans YA novels I mentioned (published before 2011) were Parrotfish by Ellen Wittlinger and Luna by Julie Anne Peters.
The two documentaries Cory mentioned are Blackfish and My Octopus Teacher.
I asked Cory where he got his sea creature facts. He said many of them were from the science tomes of his youth, but he is also a lifelong fan of National Geographic for inspiring random research holes to go topple down into.
[pic of preorder perk]
From “Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Enduring Fame: Why the ’80s Art Star Remains Relevant Now” by Tessa Soloman in ARTNews: Jean-Michel Basquiat was a Neo-Expressionist artist who was famous in the 1980s, before dying of a heroin overdose in 1988 at 27 years old. He started as a graffiti artist, spray-painting walls around SoHo and the East Village with his friend Al Diaz, under the pseudonym SAMO, short for “same old shit.” He blew up after displaying work at a “New York/New Wave” show at P.S. 1, when viewers called him the new Rauschenberg.” His iconic works include Dustheads (1982), a seven-foot-tall canvas featuring two vibrantly colored, chaotic figures against a black background, and the sculptural painting Ten Punching Bags, a collaboration with Andy Warhol.
The article Leah sent me was also from ARTNews, titled “The FBI Seized 25 Contested Basquiat Paintings from the Orlando Museum of Art.” I can’t really summarize it because it seems to deal with issues of authentication and theft specific to the high art world. But I’m glad it lead me to learn a bit about Basquiat!
Visit the episode page on our website for the pics I promised: www.researchholepodcast.com/episodes/man-owar-and-sea-creature-facts-with-cory-mccarthy-episode-24
You can learn more about Cory McCarthy by following them on instagram at @cory__mccarthy or visiting their website https://onceandfuturestories.com/.
Follow me on instagram @val.howlett or support me on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/valhowlett for bonus clips, extras, and more. -
Every time we say “pneumatic tubes,” take a drink! I continue telling Leah Felicity Lucci the life story of Inez Milholland, from her unpaid job as a PR symbol for suffrage to her uphill battle to become a lawyer. We contemplate the unimaginable horror of millions of bros, how happy Inez looks on a horse, and the dangers of pushing yourself too hard.
SHOW NOTES:
I could not find anything online to support my claim that women weren’t allowed to practice certain types of criminal law in the 1910s. Sorry about that.
In the 1916 election was Woodrow Wilson, who had already been president for a term, vs. Charles Evans Hughes. Wilson was okay with letting suffrage get decided on a state-by-state basis, whereas Hughes endorsed a national amendment. But Wilson campaigned on keeping America out of World War I, while Hughes criticized his weak foreign policies. Hughes also was against some of the progressive policies that Wilson wanted to pass, including the 8-hour work day for railroad workers. He said they would hurt the economy :( So I was wrong about old timey Republicans being better. Brittanica.com gives a nice overview of the election.
According to HopkinsMedicine.org, aplastic anemia is a form of bone marrow failure. Treatments include bone marrow transplants, blood transfusions, drug therapy, and supportive care.
Inez died of aplastic anemia in 1916. She was thirty.
The poem that coined the expression “burning candle at both ends” was titled “First Fig,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, published in 1922. Here’s the poem:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
The music I played under Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem:
Heartbreaking by Kevin MacLeod | https://incompetech.com/
Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/
Creative Commons Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
The spongy moth is a highly invasive, non-native moth that defoliates hundreds of acres of forests across the country. You can read more about how they do this on MassAudobon.org.
Which instar are you in?
If you want to see that picture of Inez on a horse, visit https://www.researchholepodcast.com/episodes/inez-milholland-pt-2-burning-the-candle-at-both-ends. Support us on Patreon for extras and general good feelings at https://www.patreon.com/valhowlett. Follow Val on instagram at @val.howlett and Leah on instagram at @leelee_lulu_. -
Saknas det avsnitt?
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Gather ‘round, kids, for another suffrage story: INEZ! Great friend of the pod Leah Felicity Lucci listens to me go on about historical suffragist Inez Milholland. And because I am long-winded, this is a two-parter. Part One covers Inez’s early life through her college years. We get into the idea of The New Women of the early 1900s—her Gibson Girl style, how she was marketed in the media, and how feminism is always complicated. With bonus detours into pneumatic tubes, historical allyship, and how Leah needs to get herself to England.
SHOW NOTES:
Leah’s Skillshare class: https://www.skillshare.com/classes/How-to-Destroy-Your-Sketchbook-Reclaim-Your-Art/2089505027
Leah and I tried to describe pneumatic tubes, but if you want a slightly more scientific explanation, check out the youtube video How Pneumatic Tubes Work.
Guglielmo Marconi lived a fascinating life and could be a future topic for a Wikipedia Special. Seriously, check out his page if you are ready to fall down a very deep research hole.
As it turns out, Eastman is a common name! Max Forrester Eastman and Crystal Eastman were a radical sibling duo living in bohemian Greenwich Village in the early 1900s. They started a socialist magazine together, called The Liberator, in 1918. The magazine published essays, art, fiction, and poems by prominent figures including Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, and Claude McKay. Crystal was a lawyer who contributed to suffrage and the founding of the ACLU. Max was an activist who wrote about Marxism, communism, and eventually socialism, but changed his mind later in life and became an anti-Communist. He edited for Reader’s Digest for many of his later years.
The Eastman that Leah was asking about was George Eastman, founder of the Kodak camera company. You can read his life story on DigitalCameraWorld.com.
The two movies I confused were Enola Holmes (2020) and Suffragette (2015).
More on Inez’s suffrage rally at Vassar: It was held in June, 1908, when Milholland was a junior and alumnae were on campus. She invited a badass roster of women to speak, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, writer of The Yellow Wallpaper. They had the meeting in a cemetery because it was across the street from the college, technically not on campus. It was referred to as the “graveyard rally” in the many New York newspapers that covered it.
I’m guessing the article Leah’s friend posted about LFO was “The Only Surviving Member of LFO Has a Story to Tell” in Esquire. That remaining member is Brad Fischetti. Rich Cronin died of leukemia in 2010 and Devin Lima died of cancer in 2018. The members of O-Town are still alive and kicking.
Follow Leah on instagram at https://www.instagram.com/leelee_lulu_/. Follow Val @val.howlett on instagram, and/or subscribe to Val Howlett on Patreon for bonus episodes and other goodies. -
Whether you think about it or not, many stories we know are chock full of governance. This is the second part of my chat with writer and programmer Shauna Gordon-McKeon. I enjoyed learning about governance in last week’s episode, but the conversation we had in this episode is my favorite. We get into what inspires us to (or to not) take action, the laziness of dictatorship-topple stories, and the ethics and logistics of writing major and minor characters. I also go off on a tangent about Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut because of course I do. If you have a governance story you love or just want to talk about, feel free to email me! [email protected]! Justice for rhubarb!
Read Shauna’s story, Sunlight, for the After the Storm anthology here: https://medium.com/after-the-storm/sunlight-cdb9bb0be8bc
This note is from Shauna: There's a good article by Ada Palmer and Jo Walton on how over-reliance on heroic narratives leads to conspiracy thinking: https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-protagonist-problem/. I don't think I referenced it explicitly but it's very relevant.
If you want to read two very articulate views on the politics of Black Panther written by actual Black people, as an antidote to Shauna and I—two white people—just riffing, check out “There Is Much to Celebrate–and Much to Question–About Marvel's Black Panther” by Steven Thrasher and “The Passionate Politics of ‘Black Panther’” by Richard Brody.
If you want to not be like Shauna and I and actually read the books we reference, you can check out Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War by Eric Bennett. The book I couldn’t remember the name of in the podcast was called Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Mathew Salesses.
Before you plant nerds come at me, yes, I misspoke. Technically, rhubarb is a vegetable, though it is legally a fruit! So I was kind of right! The Huffpost article “So What Exactly IS Rhubarb, Anyway?” explains this distinction further.
The article Leah referenced in her Something I Learned This Week email is “Listen to the Sick Beats of Rhubarb Growing in the Dark” on Atlas Obscura.
You can learn more about Shauna by following her on twitter at @shauna_gm or visiting her website: http://www.shaunagm.net/. You can find bonus material, including a brief preview paragraph from Shauna’s governance story-in-progress by supporting me, Val Howlett, on Patreon. -
Buckle up, anthropology, history, and political philosophy nerds! It’s a two-parter! Shauna Gordon-McKeon, a writer, programmer, and one of the most brilliant, multifaceted people I know, talks about how two books: The Dawn of Everything and Legal Systems Very Different from Ours, inspired her to think differently about progress and the possibilities of governance. In part one, we learn about: the myth of the evolution of civilization, historical seasonal governance structures, and what political egalitarianism and high school yearbook superlatives have in common.
Books referenced:
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything
Legal Systems Very Different from Ours, by David Friedman, Peter T. Leeson, and David Skarbek: https://bookshop.org/books/legal-systems-very-different-from-ours/9781793386724
ConstitutionFacts.com has a complete list of people who left the Constitutional Convention early. Note that it includes people who left in protest because they did not want to overturn the Articles of Confederation, but also people who left because of poor health, sick family members, etc.
The historical cultures that Shauna referenced that had seasonal governance structures were Cheyanne Lakota, Inuit, and pirates. The Wikipedia article “Governance in 18th-century piracy” explains the leadership structure on pirate ships in detail.
You can find the article "Why The inside of a Camel's Mouth is a Sarlacc Pit" on Mental Floss.
You can learn more about Shauna by following her on twitter at @shauna_gm or visiting her website: http://www.shaunagm.net/. You can find bonus clips, including a chat I had with Shauna Gordon-McKeon about the movie Twelve Angry Men by supporting me, Val Howlett, on Patreon. -
When most people think of Philly and history, they think about the Liberty Bell. But there’s a tour company that goes way beyond that. Beyond the Bell Tours offers walking tours of women’s and queer history in Philadelphia. Rebecca Fisher, co-founder and tour guide, joins Research Hole to take us on a Pride-themed journey of the queer community’s fight for civil rights in Philadelphia. It ranges from marches of people wearing respectable suits to civil disobedience with giant witch puppets. We talk about Barbara Gittings, pre- and post-Stonewall actions, and how fights over identity politics are endless. Happy Pride, y’all!
SHOW NOTES:
I found a wonderful audio clip of Kiyoshi Kuromiya talking about his life of activism on Them.us.
The other “one-dress lesbian” I referred to was Anna Howard Shaw. I don’t know if she actually only owned one dress—what I meant was that she stopped wearing pants because she felt comments on her appearance was distracting from the cause. Her obituary from the New York Times in 1919 does a pretty good job of giving an overview of her complex role in the suffrage movement.
You can find a great rundown on John Fryer (Dr. Anonymous) and his historical marker sign (which you can go to 13th and Locust Street and take a pic with) on WHYY.org. The page includes a pic of Fryer with the mask on. Sadly, in the photo he is sitting and not standing at his full height.
Philly Gay News article “Philly’s First Attempt at Nondiscrimination” takes an in-depth look at the fight for Bill 1275 and the role of Dyketactics in that fight.
The Barbara Gittings Wikipedia page is a pretty thorough biography. If you want a briefer roundup of her many contributions to gay rights, you can find a sort of paragraph-long list on Legacy Project Chicago.
We don’t explain OutFest on the podcast itself, but it’s a block party in the leadup to National Coming Out Day in October.
Visit researchholepodcast.com to see the pictures! -
THAR she blows! Welcome to our first “Wikipedia Special,” an episode where someone tells us a story that you could otherwise find by reading one wikipedia page. Today’s page: “Essex (whaleship),” a story that features 300 turtles, a really big whale, and some difficult decisions. Historical figures Captain Pollard, Owen Chase, Michael Joy, and asshole Thomas Chapel make up our cast of characters. A fun activity: keep count of the working whale boats, keep count of the survivors. The wiki page is your built-in content warning - read it first if you have trouble with gross or unsavory material.
SHOW NOTES:
Our star of the episode: the wikipedia article Essex (whaleship).
I don’t have a ton of additional links to share with you, because the entire story came from this one Wikipedia article, but I couldn’t help looking up:
A “Nantucket sleighride” is the dragging of a whaleboat by a harpooned whale, according to wikipedia.
Some basic facts about sperm whales: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/species/sperm-whale
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of The Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick is a book that came out in 2001. A movie with the same name came out in 2015, starring Chris Hemsworth as a young Owen Chase.
Wifi - learn what it stands for on our friend wikipedia! (or by listening to the end of this episode)
Watch “Up to Here,” a short film by Joey Howlett, Steve Harrellson, and Luke Sarre on youtube at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAX8F6a3Rl4 -
Writer, cellist, and horror enthusiast Jane Flett joins the show to tell all about the literal and metaphorical grotesqueness of scurvy, rendering Val awed and sometimes speechless. The Age of Exploration was full of it! Vasco da Gama and Captain Cook get referenced, and we learn about the many cures that were attempted by James Lind, from good ideas to very bad ones. We also play a fun game: what wounds would open on your body if you had advanced scurvy? Your body, your meat sack: you gotta keep putting stuff in it. Bonus body horror: A fun fact about placentas!
SHOW NOTES:
According to Medical News Today, free radicals in the brain are “are unstable atoms that can damage cells, causing illness and aging.”
The other podcast Val was referring to is called The Dream. Season Two interrogates/exposes the wellness industry. S2E3: “Magic Little Pills” tells the story of the history of vitamins.
Scurvy gets a mention, and they cover the ensuing panic.
AlphaHistory.com has a short but helpful article on James Graham and the practice of earth bathing. Also, as Jane put it, the James Graham wiki is *chefs kiss*
An article about the soil study Val was vaguely referring to can be found on EurekAlert! and is called “Healthy fat hidden in dirt may fend off anxiety disorders.”
If you’d like to learn more about scurvy and its history, here are some links that Jane recommends: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/scurvy-disease-discovery-jonathan-lamb
https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/the-age-of-scurvy
I got my own anxiety-assuaging info about vitamin C at https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/by-the-way-doctor-whats-the-right-amount-of-vitamin-c-for-me
I googled “Why do people eat placentas?” and found a BBC article with just that name. Apparently, many mammals in the animal kingdom consume their afterbirth. Some people think eating the placenta can prevent postpartum depression, increase energy, and give other health benefits, but there hasn’t been enough science to confirm the claims or warn of risks.
You can read (or listen to) Jane’s story “Mermaids” on PANK, and some of their poetry on Hobart. Learn more about them at http://janeflett.com/. -
A Minnie, a Mamie, and a Mary walk into a complicated, possibly polyamorous romantic friendship. Writer Marne Litfin lets me tell them a story involving M. Carey Thomas: famous suffragette, early Bryn Mawr College president, and complicated, racist historical figure. Mary Garrett, Mamie Gwinn, Alfred and Jessie Hodder, two ill-fated Olives, and even Gertrude Stein make appearances in this old timey scandal. Stay tuned for more about the Friday evening; I’m not done with them yet!
SHOW NOTES:
This episode is presented to you (and is inspired) by To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America by Lillian Faderman. The other Lillian Faderman book we mentioned is called Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers.
“Coercive philanthropy” is a term often used in tandem with Mary Garrett and first wave feminists of that time period, whereas I don’t see it used widely today, even though, as Marne pointed out, it still happens.
Case in point: You can read an article on coercive philanthropist Charles Munger on CNN, with the great title “Warren Buffett's billionaire partner bankrolls windowless dorm. An architect quit.”
Check out https://www.researchholepodcast.com/ for the pictures of the Friday evening and Alfred Hodder that we look at during the show.
A great way to learn about the life of character and voice actor Arnold Stang is through his wonderful obituary in the New York Times. But you can also watch his string of chunky commercials here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jpg2liApM0A. (Marne and I got through about five.)
Other sources for this episode include the books The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz and Mary Elizabeth Garrett: Society and Philanthropy in the Gilded Age by Kathleen Waters Sanders.
If you want to find Marne Litfin’s work, check out https://www.marnelitfin.com/ or start with their cool tweets at @jetpackmarne on twitter.
Email [email protected] to share your research hole, something you learned this week, or corrections to the errors we inevitably made. -
"Can I tell you about one more plant?” could be my catchphrase at this point, but thank god I got someone to listen--my brother Joey! After we chat about the wonders of Wikipedia, I explain how I accidentally bought and subsequently learned about native plants. We get into the whole native plant debate as well as the conversation about whether cultivars of natives really count. I name some of my favorite native plants of the East Coast, and we decide that when it comes down to it, we’re all annuals.
SHOW NOTES:
The wikipedia page for Mary Kay Bergman is indeed as sad as Joey claimed. Keep listening to this podcast, because Joey’s other wikipedia page is getting its own episode. And, as Joey mentioned, the wikipedia page for Natalie Wood gives an overview of her very sad and mysterious death.
Both daisies and asters come from the same family, Asteraceae (of which sunflowers are also a part!). Though daisies grow all over the U.S. at this point, they are native to Europe and Asia, whereas the majority of what we call “asters” (now classified in the genus Symphyotrichum, which is confusing) are native to North America.
Peachy Pie Rose is not a real name for a type of rose but here are some actual rose cultivar names:
Cherished Pet,
Miss Congeniality,
Love Always,
Eyes for You.
You can look up the studies on native species vs. native cultivars on PiedmontMasterGardeners.org.
The article "The Native Plants Debate" on Winterbloomfarm.com outlines both sides and recommends some books if you want to read the anti-native plant movement point of view.
I was fairly correct about the life cycle of trillium! They take five to seven years to bloom, and they actually spread seed once they start blooming, but then, of course, it takes another several years for that seed to grow into other mature, flowering trillium plants.
Check out researchholepodcast.com for expanded show notes with pictures! And follow me at @vhowlett on instagram if you want more of this sort of thing. -
Mezzo soprano singer and pastoral musician Jamie Caporizo visits the pod to share something a little different: a research hole she would like to go down, but hasn’t started the research part yet. On the way, she teaches us plenty of other things, including the age when a female’s voice fully matures, what the Bel canto style of singing is, and a little bit about Leider. Take a drink every time Jamie says “another research hole” if you want to get tanked.
SHOW NOTES:
The Singer’s Ego: Finding Balance Between Music and Life is a book by professional singer Lynn Eustis about the “psychological conflicts that make up a singer’s world.”
Did you know that sisters and nuns are not the same thing? According to the website Simply Catholic, a nun typically spends her life in prayer and work and silence in a cloistered convent, while a sister may or may not live in community, and lives an active life typically serving in health care or educational institutions.
Sisters of the Holy Cross is a Catholic congregation of religious sisters that Jamie worked with as a choir director in South Bend, Indiana. Ministry is an important part of their mission. They also acknowledge and speak out against modern racism, have publicly disavowed some of Trump’s refugee policies, and aim to combat climate change. You can read their statements on various issues on their website.
Jamie is still working with sisters in her role as the Senior Director of Mission and Ministry at Alvernia University. You can read the story of how the Bernadine Franciscan Sisters wound up in Reading on the Alvernia U website.
In my vague attempt to explain the concept of scaffolding in education, I only managed to explain a small part of it. Upeople.edu has a broader breakdown of the concept in their article What is scaffolding in education?
According to Brittanica, Frauenliebe und-leben (German for “Woman’s Love and Life”) song cycle by Robert Schumann, written in 1840, with text by the French-born German poet Adelbert von Chamisso. The text of the songs is written from a woman’s perspective. The text of the songs is written from a woman’s perspective, and all of Schumann’s songs for this cycle were written for the female voice.
For "Love in Stages," Jamie’s concert-to-be: Here are some links to performances of the songs Jamie mentioned:
Frauenliebe und-leben: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym9mHHsXvGI
If I Were a Bell from Guys and Dolls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMLq68cMMNk
What I Did for Love from A Chorus Line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ4VL2u6Yw4
The song Jamie sang on the episode was E amore un ladroncello from Cosi fan tutte. Visit JamieCaporizo.com to listen to more recordings of her gorgeous voice! -
YA author Blair Thornburgh shares the appeal of her special witchcraft skill / future apocalypse job. Blair explains the challenge of planning for a garment and graces us with her Strong Opinions about historical costuming in movies. We learn the technical meaning of the word “notions,” wax poetic about the magical appeal of fabric before use, and detour into classic children’s books that really show their age. It was really fun, and I could’ve talked with her about sewing for three more hours. Hope you enjoy!
SHOW NOTES:
There’s a great video on youtube called “A Dress Historian Explains the Difference between Corsets and Stays” by Abby Cox that explains exactly that, with lots of pictures. Skip to 5:28 to get down to business.
The LuLaNo reddit really does provide some sewing schadenfreude, if you need that sort of thing.
At one point, Blair refers to the Belle Epoque - check out MyModernMet’s article on the Belle Epoque to learn a bit more about that time period.
The wikipedia link that we looked at in “something I learned this week” was called List of Highest Grossing Media Franchises
Hit up blairthornburgh.com to learn more about Blair and her projects! -
Kristin Everham, hand-lettering artist and card maker @hensonhandmade, is a programmer in her day job life. Today, Kristin shares some of the research holes she falls down at work. We talk about color wheels, the Element Inspector, and parts of websites you never think about that take programmers months to create.
SHOW NOTES:
The twitter thread about color guidelines can be found here: https://twitter.com/DanHollick/status/1417895151003865090
Here is one of Baymard’s articles about why Quick Shop (or “quick views” as they call it) generally showcase usability issues on a site rather than solve them.
Bigotry Encoded: Racial Bias in Technology explains the hand soap dispenser that Kristin mentions in the context of racial bias in tech overall.
The piece that Leah shared about barber poles and bloodletting was on History.com, called “Why are barber poles red, white and blue?” -
Children’s author extraordinaire Julie Leung shares the fascinating story of her work-in-progress, a middle grade series about a Chinese American girl traveling back in time to various Chinese dynasties. The dynasty Julie focuses on in her first book is the Tang dynasty, and in this episode, Julie tells us the story of Emperor Gaozu’s three sons: Li Jiancheng, Li Shimin, and Li Yuanji, and their fight for the throne. We get into other fascinating aspects of Chinese history, as well as the challenges and surprise revelations of learning your own cultural history as an adult.
SHOW NOTES:
You can find a list of Chinese dynasties and their corresponding time periods on PBS.org and many other sites.
Yu Chigong and Qin Qiong were the generals that guarded Emperor Gaozu (formerly Li Shimin). They are now common door gods. You can watch a video about the history of door gods on youtube, on VisitChinaTV.
Mythology Source offers a brief overview of the 8 Immortals, including Julie’s family’s patron immortal, Lu Dongbin.
The Qingming festival, known as Tomb-Sweeping Day in English, occurs on the 4, 5 or 6 April in a given year.
Thanks to listener Katie Molski for guiding us through the research hole of fan history! She graciously provided some links for us:
LA Times article called Whirlwind History of Ceiling Fans
Wikipedia article on Punkah fans
How to maximize the benefit of ceiling fans by changing direction - on Bob Vila
Visit researchholepodcast.com for all links! -
YA author Maria E. Andreu takes us through her process of imagining an island in the sky for her work-in-progress. We talk a bit about real adaptations living things have developed to live at elevation, but mostly we imagine our way through her excellent thought experiment. Bonus topics: Snowpiercer, yaks, and circus fashion! Then we pivot real hard to the ground and share our best road rage stories.
SHOW NOTES:
I don’t know if this is the exact article Maria read, but BBC.com’s The Reason Zoom Calls Drain Your Energy brings up the mental strain of having to be ‘on.’ From the article:
“An added factor, says Shuffler, is that if we are physically on camera, we are very aware of being watched. ‘When you're on a video conference, you know everybody's looking at you; you are on stage, so there comes the social pressure and feeling like you need to perform. Being performative is nerve-wracking and more stressful.’ It’s also very hard for people not to look at their own face if they can see it on screen, or not to be conscious of how they behave in front of the camera.”
Visit https://www.researchholepodcast.com/episodes/life-in-elevation-with-maria-e-andreu-episode-10 to see an early map and aesthetic collage Maria made for her story.
Dad’s road rage links:
The article about brains and shifting attention is on the Amen Clinics blog, called Road Rage, Where Does it Come From?
The article about threat and drive is called This Is What Road Rage Does to Your Body and can be found on Vice.
Search Maria E. Andreu for her website to learn more about her books: Love in English and The Secret Side of Empty. -
We're back with a (w)hole new season of sidequests, tangents, and trivia! How was your summer?
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The invisible star of the “Something I Learned This Week” segment joins me to help close out Season One. We learn: how he fell down some of his mini-research holes, which temporary Jeopardy host he loved best, and what he really thinks of Millennials. Doing my part to make my Dad slightly more traceable online!
SHOW NOTES:
Not many show notes today because we aren’t doing a specific hole! We mainly rehashed some of the Something I Learned This Week segments from the past season. If you’d like to go back to the original writing on these topics, check out the final part of each of these episodes:
Polyglots: Episode 1 - Sailboats, with Rebecca Jay
Jeopardy host tryouts: Episode 3 - German Chocolate Cake and Terrapin, with Laurie Morrison
Generations: Episode 7 - Alleged Murderess Lillian Green, with Leah Felicity Lucci
J.K. Rowling vs. trans people: this was a tidbit Dad wanted me to read on an episode and I didn’t feel like it worked for a quick something-I-learned-type discussion. So Dad and I got into it here. It was very hard to find a breakdown online that actually explains the impact of what J.K. Rowling said. The closest I found was the article “Harry Potter and the Author Who Failed Us” by Aja Romano on Vox. It has lots of links if you want to read Rowling’s original tweets, or if you want to read how the “science” she cites is flawed.
The Foodie Flamingo picture book is now out! You can order it from your local bookstore.
The city of Uruk: Here is the link listener Katie Molski shared with me: https://www.worldhistory.org/uruk/
The link explains more about the people she referenced. Innana, for example, was a goddess of the region. She does appear in the Epic of Gilgamesh, but I believe Katie was more referencing what the link says about her. -
Award-winning author, queer visionary, and Val’s wife Carmen Maria Machado reads us fascinating old-timey articles she found while searching for answer to a seemingly simple question: when was the first tiger brought to America? On this long and winding road, we learn about a very old tiger named Jim, two historical badass 70-year-olds in a fight with a big cat, menagerie hippos with very Irish names, and the “panda-monium” of Washington D.C. in 2004. I promise Tiger King is only referenced once.
SHOW NOTES:
Tigers are known to live roughly 8-10 years in the wild. They can live up to 25 years in captivity because of the lack of natural predators. So Jim the Tiger was indeed very old. (Source: KidsFeed.com)
Here is Carmen’s twitter thread about the tiger: https://twitter.com/carmenmmachado/status/1404089399453831172
Titles of articles Carmen read aloud during this episode:
“Fight with an American Tiger,” January 29th, 1853. Found via the New York Times Article Archive.
“A Dying Bengal Tiger,” December 28, 1885. Found via the New York Times Article Archive.
“Jim the Tiger Dies of Old Age,” January 15, 1886. Found via the New York Times Article Archive.
“Boy Killed by Tiger: Lion Cub Keeper in Indianapolis Absentmindedly Enters the Wrong Cage,” February 16th, 1901. Found via the New York Times Article Archive.
“A Baby Hippopotamus: Mr. and Mrs. Caliph Murphy Are to Be Congratulated,” December 3, 1889. Found via the New York Times Article Archive.
The baby hippopotamus turned out to be male and was named McGinty, but he died seven days after his birth of pneumonia. (Source: New York Times Article Archive.) Fatima and Caliph did breed several more times and Fatima bore about ten offspring total, though not all survived. You can find an article on the old Central Park menagerie and the controversy over its practice of giving its animals Irish names on a blog called The Hatching Cat: True and Unusual Animal Tales of Old New York.
Book recommendation from both Val and Carmen: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Dad’s infographic on zoos was originally printed on the website Treehugger.
PETA & racism: I didn’t do a deep dive, but I found an article on USA Today called “PETA ridiculed, criticized for comparing 'speciesism' with racism, homophobia and ableism” and an article on CivilEats called “Is the Vegan Movement Ready to Reckon with Racism?”
There is an article in Mental Floss about the young black man held captive in the Bronx zoo in 1906. His name was Ota Benga, and he was a member of the Mbuti pygmy tribe from what was then known as the Congo Free State.
We can’t tell you about Carmen’s story yet, but I will upload this note once she is able to announce it! Stay tuned. -
[Episode alt. title: Thank You Sky Daddy.] Val tells the incomplete story of “Allentown’s prettiest widow” who was accused of poisoning her husband with strychnine in 1912. Leah asks hard-hitting questions like, “Has historical rat poison ever killed a single rat?” Old-timey snack johnnie cakes and modern food-adjacent items Diet Coke, Lean Cuisine, and Hemotogen candy also get mentions.
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SHOW NOTES:
Jim Thorpe (full name James Francis Thorpe) was the first Native American to win a gold medal for the United States. He won two--in classic pentathlon and decathlon. In addition to his Olympic stardom, he was also a major-league baseball player, co-founder of the National Football League and even pro basketball player, a stunt performer, and Hollywood character actor.
Jim was a Sac and Fox Indian, and when he died in 1953, his funeral was held where he was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Then his third wife Patricia made a deal with Mauch Chunk to have his body interred there. Jim’s son Jack filed a lawsuit in 2010, but it was unsuccessful. Jim Thorpe’s body remains in a Pennsylvania town he never visited.
(Sources: Smithsonian Magazine, Wikipedia)
You can find a short summary of the execution of the Molly Maguires on ExplorePAHistory.com, but there is plenty of in-depth reading about that period in history. A thing I meant to mention about the Molly Maguires that I didn’t actually get to was that it was entirely run by the private sector. The corporation that hired the detective agency was private, and a private police force arrested the defenders, and they were prosecuted by private attorneys for the coal companies. The wikipedia page is really detailed if you’d like to read more.
You can find a picture of the creepy handprint in the old Jim Thorpe jail in a Philadelphia Inquirer article titled “For sale: Historic NE Pennsylvania jail haunted by the ghosts of hanged coal miners.” Apparently the Molly Maguire who imprinted his hand said, “This handprint will remain as proof of my innocence.”
Check out The Reno Gazette Journal article "Experts weigh in on use of paralytic drug in executions" to learn more about that.
Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker is the book Leah referenced.
It’s true that crime rates have gone down over very long periods of time. In the U.S., the homicide rate went down each century since the 1700s. However, there was a peak in homicides in the 1960s - 1900s, with a steady decrease afterward. So it isn’t a simple, continual downward trend. (Source: Wikipedia)
Here is a piece on Generation Jones or “Jonesers”: https://timeline.com/generation-jones-baby-boom-923270cb2010
(Turns out “keeping up with the Joneses doesn’t refer to a tv show but is a long-ago expression referring to generic neighbors, originating from an old cartoon.)
You can find links to all these articles as well as photos on our website, researchholepodcast.com. -
It all comes back to the Hapsburgs! Illustrator and graphic designer Leah Felicity Lucci tells Val about her fascination with the genetic story of the Hapsburg royal family, and how that lead to a research hole about eugenics, racism, and anti-Semitism and inspired her sketchbook project These are Not My Ancestors.
SHOW NOTES:
There is an article in The Atlantic about the layered “erased” writing of monks in the Middle Ages called The Age of Erasable Books. A palimpsest is a word for parchment on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain. Type that word into google image search for lots of examples.
To view some examples of Mannerist art, search for The Vision of St. John by El Greco or Madonna with the Long Neck by Parmigianino.
The Do you know the Muffin Man? Pic can be found on Leah’s instagram at https://www.instagram.com/p/CNyAAZKnjk-/
23&Me wrote a concise summary of the Habsburg inbreeding problem.
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg can be found wherever books are sold.
Hitler or Lovecraft? quiz is at http://www.beesgo.biz/horp.html
Not going to dignify David Eden Lane with a link but suffice it to say he was a piece of shit who died in prison after instigating and taking part in many crimes.
Here’s the graphic Leah described of a Jewish family tree. It dates back to the 1700 and you can look at how it changes in 1940: https://upload.democraticunderground.com/12237693
These Are Not My Ancestors sketchbook project by Leah Felicity Lucci:
https://www.sketchbookproject.com/library/S258809
Remember Me: Displaced Children Archive via the Holocaust Museum:
https://rememberme.ushmm.org/ - Visa fler
