The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Sex Magick, The Oldest Mac and Cheese, Contagious Writer's Block

Episode Date: June 27, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from a NASA engineer who believed in sex magick to the world's oldest recipe for macaroni and cheese. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepses Mary Beth Griggs: www.twitter.com/MaryBethGriggs Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the same. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. I mean, you know what they say. Science is just applied math and math is just applied sex magic. At popular science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into our articles, there are lots of other weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured,

Why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Feldman. I'm Eleanor Cummins. I'm Marybeth Griggs. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each teasing a factoid that we learned either while reporting, editing, reading other great science journalism, answering angry emails, you know, just being a journalist.

And we decide which one we absolutely have to learn more about first. And then once we've all spun our little science yarns, we reconvene. and tried to decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. And as always, if you agree or disagree with us, you should let us know on Twitter at weirdest underscore thing or hashtag weirdest thing pod. So, Eleanor, since you're the birthday girl. Ooh, boy. All right. I'll just say about the scariest thing you can say to a room full of journalists.

Contagious writers block. Well, this fact is cursed and I will not have it. Marybeth, what about you? I found the oldest recipe for mac and cheese. Delicious. Or at least, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if the oldest recipe for mac and cheese is decidedly not delicious. You'll just have to find out. I guess we will.

It's a good tease. All right. Mine is about the intermingled history of science and magic, including sex magic, with a K at the. end. Magic. I vote for mac and cheese first. That's my vote. Eleanor wants mac and cheese, too.

She is nodding. We're demanding mac and cheese. I hope you brought some. You know, that would have been really good if I had actually brought some, but I did not, unfortunately. As I mentioned, this is, I found the oldest recipe for mac and cheese, which was very surprising to me. I came across this because I edited a piece by Claire that is a fantastic piece about why we

crave things like mac and cheese. We crave carbs and fats together more than carbs or fats alone. Yes, we do. Yes, we do. And it is so good. But that eventually kind of led me down this very, very interesting rabbit hole where I found out that the oldest recipe known for mac and cheese comes from a recipe book called The Form of Curie dating to 1390. Wow. And that's some old mac and cheese. It is very old mac and cheese. And I love it because it's actually called macros, which is a variation on macaroni.

And basically they ask people to make a really thin layer of dough, carve it into pieces, put it in boiling water, and, like, stir it all around. And then you take it out and you take cheese, you grate it and butter it, and then you put it all together, which is just like mac and cheese. today. Delicious. It's fantastic. But it was really fascinating. I was wondering how this came to be in a Middle English cookbook that was written on vellum. This is like this very elaborate piece of work. And it was actually created at the end of the 14th century by the master cooks of Richard the second. It's an incredibly fascinating document. It contains 196 recipes. And I found this segment on the British Library all about, like, what was the purpose of this? And from their website, it says,

The author states that the recipes are intended to teach a cook to make everyday dishes, common pottages and common meats for the household, as they should be made craftily and wholesomely, as well as unusually spiced in spectacular dishes for banquets. So curious pottages and meats and subtleties for all manner of states, both high and low. which is really cool. It's the first text, not only to mention macaroni and cheese,

but also to mention olive oil, cloves, mace, and gourds, all in relation to British food. And I think it's just such an important reminder that, like, we think of those things kind of coming into England and to Western Europe with the start of the age of exploration that we kind of learned about in school. But that's not that. case, these things were actually coming in to Europe a lot earlier because of trade roots and stuff. Yeah. Wow. I love a good potage. Yeah, it's incredible. And then I just started going down

the, you know, road of macaroni itself, which just got even more interesting. The title of my autobiography. Yeah. The road of macaroni or macaroni road. Like, I think that that would actually It would be a good album. Yeah, it really would. And apparently there's a Greek word macaria, which referred to a soup that was served at funerals. But there's another historian that thinks that, no, it probably came from an Italian word macare, meaning to pound or to crush. Oh, man, this is like my big fat Greek wedding. It is, it is, yeah, it can all be related back to Greek words.

It's from the soup. And it's wild. And then it started wondering from there, like not only, Where did macaroni come from? But where did this pasta come from that it ended up going over to England and Italy? And I know a lot of people have probably heard, right, Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy. Not entirely true because macaroni was there when Marco Polo was there. They have written records of like a soldier leaving a bunch of dried pasta called macaroni in his will to his benefactors, which.

I love how, like, deathly, the macaroni story already is. You really can't escape. I hope to leave behind some macaroni for my descendants. I mean, I think it's really, really important. And it's not the oldest, like, pasta that's out there. Right. The oldest pasta, definitely China wins that there is pasta that has been found in pots that is 4,000 years old. So, like, there is very old pasta out there.

But the dry pasta and the macaroni that we think of today, that probably actually came not from China where fresh pasta was really popular. But it probably came from the Arab world where dry pasta is taken on long journeys. And that's probably what brought it over into Europe and Italy in the first place, which is just wild. And in Italy, they were making pasta by using their feet. some cases. I'm Italian and I have literally never heard this before. I'm horrified. I mean, I think that, you know, after this was like records in the 14th century or so.

And it was just, they were using their feet to need the dough and then they would put it in these early kind of screw presses that would actually push it through and extrude it and get it ready for being dried. And it's actually, that's kind of, you know, getting back to macaroni and cheese is such an American, like, favorite food, right? But it came over to America, you know, around the time of the revolution and that sort of thing. It's often attributed to Jefferson as being the person who kind of brought it over. He was not the first, but he was really fascinated by these, like, extruders that he was seeing in Italy and these screw presses, which was really, really

fascinated. And it wasn't him, he was really fascinated in the mechanics and that sort of stuff, but it would have been his wife's half-brother, also his slave, James Hemings, who would have been his chef to cuisine, who would have actually been making the mac and cheese at Monticello using these machines. Of course, Jefferson would like be served some macaroni and be like, but what machine was involved here? Yeah. And there's actually, there's, A list, there's a thing written, kept at Monicello, a document that talks about kind of a description of how Jefferson's macaroni machine works. And so from that, the best macaroni in Italy is made with a particular sort of flour called

Samola in Naples. But at almost every shop, a different sort of flour is commonly used. A paste is made with flour, water, and less yeast than is used for making bread. This paste is then put little at a time, about five or six pounds each time, into a round iron box. The under part of which is perforated with holes through which the paste, when pressed by the screw, comes out and forms the macaroni. Which is kind of how it works today. Not much has changed. What has changed is that eventually, as Americans kept eating macaroni, they started coming up somewhat odd adaptations.

There was a cookbook called the Virginia Housewife that was written in 1838 by Mary Randolph, where she talks about macaroni. Same kind of dish that was like used in 1390. It's just like, oh, you boil the macaroni, then you put butter and cheese on it and bake it. It's delicious. But right underneath it, she has a recipe for mock macaroni. Because macaroni is a thing you really have to. I'm skeptical.

Mary Randolph says, break some crackers. into small pieces, soak them in milk until they are soft, then use them as a substitute for macaroni. No. Which, why? Why do we need to do this? So it actually sounds kind of like matzabri, but as someone who is Jewish and Italian,

I can say that Jews only eat that during the period of the year when we are forced to by law of God. That was another thing I came across when I was doing this research is going back to like the Arabic, there is actually something in the Talmud that's discussing whether or not pasta is kosher and whether or not it can be like eaten and kosher for Passover in particular, which was a really interesting kind of digression as well. But the mac and cheese that we know today in like boxes and that sort of thing, that actually didn't get its start until 1930s.

It craft mac and cheese debuted during the Depression and became very popular then because it was an easy and inexpensive food. And then it became even more popular during World War II because you could get two boxes for one ration ticket. And so that's kind of what got that pre-packaged mac and cheese going in the United States. Wow. Yeah. Do we know where Yankee-Doodle Dandy factors in because he calls. He called it macaroni. He did call it macaroni.

I am so glad you asked. No, this is so thrilling because that's something that you wonder about. And it goes back to, I mean, macaroni was a thing in England, but they associated the weird hats and the weird feathers that people would wear in their hats, which was a very popular Italian fashion with the shape of the pasta. And so macaroni became associated with like a kind of dance. So it's Italian dandies. I love that.

I want to be known as a macaroni. And so they called it macaroni. That's delightful. Yeah, honestly, I had no idea that there was an actual tie to macaroni. I thought it was some language relic. Right. That's fantastic. No, it's amazing because you don't think of macaroni and English culture, you know,

going back hundreds and hundreds of years, but it very much was. Which I think is just really bizarre and fascinating. Yeah, that's so great. Because it's not like you imagine people in the like medieval period like eating comfort food. Like everything is like pheasants or something in my head. No. And I mean, and that's actually, that's a very interesting point too because there is like a slightly older version of pasta recipe that came out roughly around the same time. and that was from Italy.

And that was a recipe from Liber di Cocinas, which I'm sorry, I'm butchering the pronunciation on that. But it was essentially a recipe for lasagna. And so it wasn't, instead of cutting the pieces of pasta into macaroni, you would just have it laid out flat and layered with butter and cheese and spices. And that was the idea. Going back to your point about the fat and everything, they would cook all of that wonderful pasta.

It must be cooked in capon or other fat meat broth. And so that was what they required. It was definitely part of it more so than I think it is today. Put some lard on it. Always. Always. Always. All right.

Snack break. And then we'll be back. Okay, pals, you love the weirdest thing I learned this week podcast. And now you can love it as. a Facebook group. Share your strangest facts and read all about the offbeat and outlandish findings of other science lovers. We'll also be

publishing some of the bonus info and ramblings that didn't make it into the final cut of the podcast. Just search for the weirdest thing on Facebook. Today on the weirdest thing Facebook group, I saw someone tell someone else that their fact was wrong, but then come back and apologize

and say they had actually been drunk and probably the fact was right. So Neil, I would just like to applaud you for that, mea culpa. It was very big of you. And I hope you enjoy more fun times on the weirdest thing Facebook group. I am about to talk about sex magic. We won't get into anything too explicit. But if you haven't had the sex magic talk with your children, it's happening now. Buckle up. So this story starts with a man named Jack Parsons, who's one of the kind of founders of modern rocketry, but whose name does not get thrown around as much as other folks.

There is a new show about him, I think, on CBS. Full disclosure, I have not watched it yet. So I am unbiased and uncolored by whatever good or bad things they have done to his story on this show. But I do appreciate TV shows about scientists being weird. So I will check it out. It's kind of our brand. Yeah. So Jack Parsons, I first heard about him. on this, this, like, docudrama podcast, really like this fictional podcast called Tannis. And because it's supposed to be real life, they weave in a lot of real history. And so they talked about Jack Parsons a lot, but I assumed it was really embellished.

And then I found out it wasn't, like, at all. And I was a little shocked. So when I found out they were making a show about our buddy Jack, I was like, well, I better read up on him now. So I like know what's what before I get even more confused about what in his fantastic sex magic story is true versus false. So Jack Parsons was really into rocketry. He was testing early rocket motors at Caltech's Guggenheim aeronautical lab in like the 30s. And it was so dangerous at that time to be working with those kinds of propellants that he and his friends were called the Suicide Squad.

So they were just a bunch of rowdy American boys blowing up some rockets. Really like what you think of when you think of the history of rocketry. This was like right around when the government first started paying people to actually investigate rocket propulsion. And jet assisted takeoff. And they had been working at Caltech, but then they got some money and they started a company called Aerojet. and then got a $3 million grant from the U.S. government, and it became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which, as most people know, is now part of NASA.

In fact, so it was founded in 1943, and my 1958, JPL was integrated into the brand new National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It really was, like, the dawn of the space age, and he did some of the most important work on, like, solid rocket fuel, and was, by all accounts, a real genius when it came to explosives, He served as an expert witness in trials involving explosives. That's like a great tombstone. A genius when it came to explosives.

But perhaps unfortunately for Jack Parsons, rocketry wasn't his only flight of fancy. He was also involved in famed occultist, Alistair Crawley's Ordo Templi Orientis and an active member of the Phelemite church, which was Alistair Crowley's church, which eventually is why JPL forced him to essentially sell his stock and leave. And a lot of people argue that NASA has kind of written Jack Parsons out of its history.

I mean, NASA, I've seen them respond a few times, be like, our official comment is he's still in the history books. But I think it's widely believed that his role has been sort of minimized or that just like people don't bring his name up much because he was kind of an embarrassment. And certainly at the time, he was an embarrassment to the other people who found to JPL. They did not want him around anymore, even though, again, by all accounts, very brilliant man. So what was going on with Alistair Crawley? I'm glad you asked. I need to know. They were doing a lot of magic with a K, which I always assumed that was like

people's way of making fun of people who did magic, but it was actually Alistair Crowley preferred that spelling because it distinguished the occult from parlor tricks. from illusions. A very important difference. So they had this philosophy that boiled down to do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, which basically just resulted in Jack Parsons hosting a lot of orgies at his mansion in Pasadena. But they did like, they had a lot of heavy ceremony. They were doing rituals all the time, like really complicated rituals.

That was kind of their whole thing. Most of the rituals involved sex. They were very much about like free love. He actually, his last wife, Marjorie Cameron, he believed he had conjured her up in a sex ritual. He had been trying to conjure an elemental. He basically wanted like the personification of some kind of satanic goddess to be his perfect wife. And he had done this ritual a few times, I believe. And Eleanor looks a little hard.

Oh, my gosh. This is so weird and gross. Eleanor's expression is just a Czech person was the kind of self-proclaimed feminist who calls women goddesses You know. Demonic goddesses? That are his creation.

Not his creation. Okay. His summoning. He had asked that she show up and she did. That's what he believed. Beautiful. So he better than Tinder. So apparently after one of these rituals,

Marjorie Cameron, who had this like brilliant red hair and was this very, like, handsome and powerful woman came into his house, like, uninvited? I mean, I think she was there with friends. I mean, they were basically having ordees in Pasadena, so I think a lot of... Who wasn't invited? I don't think it was that unusual that she showed up without being invited, but he was like, here she is, my elemental. And they were very in love and did some really weird stuff together and seemed to have been

pretty happy. The thing that's really interesting to me about... Jack Parsons, you know, other than kind of the subtle tragedy of his life, which is that the fact that he was involved in the occult and was kind of linked to Marxism, though loosely he may have like subscribed to a couple of newspapers that were considered, you know, socialist in nature at some point in his life. So when the Cold War started and McCarthy started targeting lots of government workers and government adjacent workers who they thought were enemies of the state. He came under a lot of scrutiny because he was an unusual dude and a lot of other

unusual people at the time who did not care about pretending to fit the mainstream ideal got in a lot of trouble with the government as well. He briefly worked for Howard Hughes but was accused of spying and so then was blacklist again and he ended up working in special effects and died concocting stunt explosives at the age of 37 died as he lived yeah wow actually died he did that's like extremely oh young and terrible yeah no so it's really sad and sad to me that you know his downfall was really that he was like I'm just living my life doing sex magic and also making rockets, and at the time, this country was really not friendly to people who did not fit the picture of the red-blooded American.

And he also believed that magic and quantum physics were intertwined. To him, his spiritual practices did not contradict his scientific endeavors at all. They were one and the same. He thought that there must be something kind of controlling the unknown corners. of the universe and that he could maybe access that with the right kinds of rituals. That's like not an uncommon thing in the history of science. You know, you see Thomas Edison in 1920. He announced that he was trying to design a phone to communicate with spirits.

And in 2015, a French journalist actually found a rare version of Edison's diary dedicated to his theory of the spirit world. And until then, a lot of people thought the spirit phone. in 1920 had been a prank, but it probably wasn't. And there's a lot of evidence that Edison kind of thought that the conservation of matter meant there must be some kind of immortal soul. Like he thought there must be some, like, particle that made you, you that didn't go away. So to him, it was like really logical to think that there must be something that you could

figure out how to access. It was kind of this era when anything seemed plausible because all these things that seemed impossible were happening. So people, including some of them, you know, brilliant working scientists, were like, well, maybe this is when we figure out how to commune with the dead. Nikola Tesla also loves seances, though he also said he had loved a pigeon as a man, loves a woman, which is my favorite Nikola Tesla fact. Oh, or just fact. Yeah, one of my favorite facts. So Tesla was like, you know, maybe a little more unbalanced. But like at the time, basically all scientists working on electricity had like weird, weird ideas for what electricity

might be able to do because it was practically magic to them. And you go back to Isaac Newton, he was studying so much alchemy. He was still looking for the philosopher's stone to turn base metals into gold because chemistry at that point was almost indistinguishable from alchemy. So he was like, great, we're starting to figure out how all this alchemy actually works. He didn't, he wasn't like, oh, great, we moved on from alchemy to chemistry. So Jack Parsons, in my mind, you know, clearly had a lot going on in his noggin. But I think he is part of this long tradition of scientists getting so close to something that seems so implausible and so unknown that it does take on a really spiritual bent for them.

And I think that's kind of cool. Yeah. So that's my sex magic story. It was wonderful. It was a very good sex magic story. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be right back. It's Pride Month. Celebrate with our limited edition Science Pride T-shirts, featuring a rainbow popular science logo.

All profits go to Out in STEM, an organization that empowers the LGBTQ community in science, tech, engineering, and math. Get yours now at popsy.com and share on social media, with hashtag sci pride. That's S-C-I-Pride. So we're back for one more fact from Eleanor. Um, all righty. So as I said earlier, I wanted to talk a little bit about a contagious writer's block. Um, I'm so sorry. I, we definitely need to cast some magic spells to protect us, but I've been super fascinated with this fact since I learned about it and, and going deeper has only revealed exciting new dimensions. So there was a New Yorker writer named Joseph Mitchell,

and he had writer's block from 1964 until his death in 1996. Oh, no. Even weirder, he was never fired from the New Yorkers. How? And went to work every day. He overlapped with David Remnick, the current editor of the New Yorker, which I find bizarre, that this could continue into the modern regime. team. So I'm just amazed. In the 1940s, Mitchell, he started hanging out with this guy named Joe Gould,

who his Wikipedia page calls him an American eccentric, which is an amazing title. But this guy he lived in Greenwich Village, and he was really sort of like famous in this literary set because they thought that he was just this like sort of lost genius. And if they could just persuade enough people, his friends were convinced that, you know, he would be recognized for his talent. That sounds like any good group of friends for anyone. Yes, support your friends. So Joe Gould, he said that he was writing this sort of exhaustive oral history about Greenwich Village, but also just sort of more widely about the era.

And he was working on it for decades. And so people sort of kind of got interested and are like, what's up with this Joe Gould guy and his friends, again, were like, he's a genius. Yes, and other people were not so sure. So in 1942, Mitchell profiled Joe for the magazine, and he wrote this sort of profile of him that's really highly regarded. But it turned out that he had been keeping a secret for Joe,

that he had been sort of piecing together in the years that he spent reporting this magazine story. It seems that Joe Gould had something called hypergraphia, which is a sort of kind of disordered mental pattern that manifests as just writing obsessively. And, you know, not necessarily new things, sort of like the Bart Simpson, like I will not do again, right? Doing that kind of thing over and over are letters or swirls.

And doing it all over, you know, different surfaces, like not just on a piece of paper, but on walls. But at the same time, also had writer's block. Oh, no. So while people thought that he was writing this exhaustive oral history, it turned out that he was actually just sort of writing the same few ideas over and over and over again. And so when he died in 1957,

Joseph Mitchell was like, I can finally tell Joe Gold's secret, which is the title of this book. Unfortunately, it's the last thing Joseph Mitchell writes. Wait, sorry, did he successfully write the book? He successfully wrote the book. He successfully wrote, good to clarification. He successfully wrote the book, and it was a huge hit. People loved it.

They thought it was great. And so this is where the sort of the mystery starts. So at 1964, the book is published. is also the last year that he writes anything, but for the next 30 years he keeps showing up the New Yorker. And so, for example, Roger Engel, who was another New Yorker writer, sort of like describes the daily business that Mitchell went about. Each morning, he stepped out of the elevator with a preoccupied air, nodded wordlessly if you were just coming down the hall and closed himself in his office. He emerged at lunchtime, always wearing his natty brown fedora in summer a straw

one and a tan raincoat. An hour and a half later, he reversed the process, again closing the door. Not much typing was heard from within, and people who called on Joe reported that his desktop was empty of everything but paper and pencils. When the end of the day came, he went home. Sometimes in the evening elevator, I heard him omit a small sigh, but he never complained, never explained. So that goes on day in and day out for decades. And then in 2013, someone decides to sort of profile Joseph Mitchell in a book, a book about his life, and he sort of like digs into like what the heck was happening. So it turns out that during that time, Joseph Mitchell was writing. He just hated everything he wrote and never shared it with anyone. And the New Yorker editors

were sort of trusting that something would eventually happen because in the most productive period of his life, he was writing an article every five years. For reference, I think Mary Beth writes an article every day, just about. So something to keep in mind. Oh, my God. So, you know, they were like, David Remnick even, who thought met him at the end of his life, of the end of Mitchell's life, was like, you know, he was an artist.

I'm a journalist. He was an artist. So people gave him a lot of space and were, like, convinced that something would eventually emerge from this office where he went and sat every day. But nothing did. But in 2013, the New Yorker posthumously published an essay that he had been working on. He'd been saying that he was going to write like a memoir of his life.

And so they published this essay called Street Life, And I read it, and it's a pretty winding sort of menagerie of ideas that sort of leaves on a cliffhanger, which is never fulfilled. It's sort of a mess. And I think, you know, revealingly, he uses the word haunted four times because that was clearly sort of his mental state. What's fascinating about all of this, too, is that when he apparently told a Washington Post reporter in an interview, you pick someone so. close that in fact you were writing about yourself. Joe Gould had to leave home because he didn't fit in in the same way I had to leave home because I didn't fit in. Talking to Joe Gould all those years, he became me in a way, if you see what I mean, which I think really says it all about

what was going on in his mind. The 1970s and 80s, apparently though no one ever told Joseph Mitchell about those or tried to help him. Psychologists started really avidly studying writer's block, which I feel like is a really strange preoccupation given that there are a lot of things to focus on in psychology. But not as many that preoccupy employed white men. Exactly, exactly. It's all a very privileged conversation, which is why I was so skeptical, because, like, on some level, who really has the privilege to not do their job for that long?

This one man. So essentially, the research came to the conclusion that there are four different flavors of writer's block, if you will. So one is sort of the anxious person, and this is someone who is so self-critical. that they are unable to produce because they're just, you know, I mean, I think we've all been there, right? You're just looking at this sentence and you're like, the sentence sucks and I suck. And then if you give in to that,

you can just never show anyone anything ever again and you can have writers block for the rest of your life. And then there's the person who is sort of like interpersonally angry, which I found to be a fascinating subcategory. So this is the person who essentially is jealous. Like they don't want to be compared to anybody. They want to be better than everybody, but to the point that they can't actually do anything. And that's its own whole form of writer's block, according to these researchers.

Then there is the sort of apathetic person. Extreme mood. This is the person who, according to researchers, has the most sort of like authentic form of writer's block in terms of just not feeling like they can do it, not even trying. Yeah, yeah, where you're just like, this isn't worth it. And then finally, there is the negative or hostile person, and this writer's block is driven by just an insatiable need for attention. So maybe you're not writing for the right reasons in the first place. And so based off of these sort of like types of writers block, researchers then wanted to try some interventions and like see, could you relieve this pressure?

Could you sort of like help these people out? And what they found was that exercises in what they call like directed mental imagery were actually pretty effective for people in sort of all groups, though some more than others. And so the idea here is like dream journaling, like doing exercises where you're not trying to produce for anybody else and you're not even necessarily trying to do things well. Like something sort of fantastical and a little bit removed from the actual work you're doing has been found to relieve writers' block pretty effectively. As far as the idea of contagious writer's block, I was unable to really find anything about that in the literature, which I feel like makes sense because it's probably not super legit. But I do think that it speaks to this thing that comes up on the weirdest thing a lot, which is this idea of just like the power of sort of like persuasion. I think it's so interesting reading through Joseph Mitchell's reflections on his own problems that while he never really ties it to Joe Gould in the book he was writing,

he also was like, we became very close and I became haunted by this entire experience. And that cripples him. Yeah, brains are terrifying. Yes. It speaks a little bit to the notion of genius too, like the problematic notion of genius. On some level that's structurally, a genius is someone who is allowed to spend 30 years. is not doing anything, but being paid, collecting a paycheck. That's really fascinating.

And not being sort of like pressured because like this is a part of their process. I think that pressure is good for producing things. Right. It is. Well, like, you know, and the question is like, who is the genius? Someone who puts out really good work consistently even when it's like not coming from the deepest steps of their soul, but like they're good at creating work that needs to be created.

or someone who like sits quietly for 10 years and then is like, my new single is dropping. And in science too, we have this idea of the kind of like the great scientist who just like sits there coming up with with groundbreaking ideas even if it takes, you know, years for one to pop out. And like that's not how any science works. Scientists have a lot of bad ideas. They have like mostly, you know, mediocre, somewhat helpful ideas.

and then some of them sometimes have something that goes on to change the course of human history, and that's great, obviously. But it's because they put the work in. It's not because they were like Eureka. Well, it's because... Von Bingen. It's because they're constantly working. I had a fascinating conversation with a scientist recently who had she'd taken data from a very long time ago,

and the results didn't make sense, and they didn't make sense. And it ended up being 10 years later that she was at. another conference where she saw, oh, maybe this is what I'm looking for. And when I was talking with her, she was about to finally write up the results that she'd been initially looking at because she'd finally answered this question. And it's like, you can have these things that take long amounts of time, but you're not going to get to that amazing moment. If you're just sitting in your office by yourself with paper, you get it when you're out and you're talking with others and you're learning from others and you're continuing to do that work.

And that's so, I think, key. It's like... Definitely. And yeah, I totally think that that speaks to the importance of collaboration, which is being increasingly recognized in science, but also is so relevant to, like, Joseph Mitchell's case, like, he did write things,

but instead of entrusting someone to help him make those better and shape them, he just, like, I mean, basically set them on fire, not literally, because we have them. He, like, stowed them away, you know? But it's just like, just hand that over to your editor or just like share your data with a colleague. You know, like you need more perspectives

and to sometimes just get out of your own head to do good work. Yeah, absolutely. So what do we think the weirdest thing we learned this week was, you guys? I learned so much about macaroni and Italian dandies that I'm going to give it to Mary Beth for my vote. Oh, exciting. I mean, I think I'm still like, I think I'm going to be haunted by the story of the, like,

of the writer's block, so I'm voting Eleanor. This is really bad because I'm like sex magic. Oh, is it our first tie? Is that an option? It's our first tie. This is like soccer? I make the rules and I say it's a tie. So it's a tie. We'll actually be back in two weeks.

Try not to miss us too much weirdos and have a great Fourth of July. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever you're listening right now. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes. You can buy our merch, including our limited edition side pride t-shirts and the weirdest thing I learned this week, tote bags, at popsai.threadlist.com. Our theme music was produced by Billy Cadden. Our editor is Jason Letterman.

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