No book has helped me understand my own pain like Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, which was recommended to me by Mike Rugnetta. The Susan Sontag line about giving illness a meaning comes from Illness as Metaphor. I learned about meningitis, and recovered from it, thanks to excellent care by the neurologist Dr. Jay Bhatt. I know about catastrophizing thanks to a lifetime of doing it. I learned about the scope of viruses from Philipp Dettmer’s brilliant book Immune. If you are interested in the relationship between microbes and their hosts (especially their human hosts), I recommend Immune and also Ed Yong’s book I Contain Multitudes. The Nicola Twilley quote comes from her 2020 New Yorker piece “When a Virus Is the Cure.”

Plague

Most of the quotes from witness accounts of the Black Death in this review are from Rosemary Horrox’s book The Black Death. The book was recommended to me by my friend and colleague Stan Muller, and I’ve gone back to it many times in the last few years. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read, and deeply moving. I’m also indebted to Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. I learned of al-Maqrizi and Ibn Khaldūn’s accounts of the Black Death first from Joseph Byrne’s Encyclopedia of the Black Death. The information about cholera’s history comes from Charles Rosenberg’s The Cholera Years, Amanda Thomas’s Cholera: The Victorian Plague, Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, and Christopher Hamlin’s Cholera: The Biography. The more recent information about cholera and tuberculosis, including their annual death toll, comes from the WHO. For help understanding what drives contemporary cholera outbreaks, I am indebted to John Lascher and Dr. Bailor Barrie at Partners in Health Sierra Leone. Dr. Joia Mukherjee’s An Introduction to Global Health Delivery explores in detail the many ways in which poverty is humanity’s biggest health problem. The Tina Rosenberg quote about malaria is from her 2004 essay first published in the New York Times, “What the World Needs Now Is DDT”; I learned of it via Eula Biss’s book On Immunity. The Margaret Atwood quote is from The Testaments. Ibn Battuta’s story of Damascus is from The Travels of Ibn Battuta, as translated by H.A.R. Gibb.

Wintry Mix

I first read Kaveh Akbar’s poem “Wild Pear Tree” in his book Calling a Wolf a Wolf. The Mountain Goats song is “The Mess Inside” from their album All Hail West Texas. I first learned the phrase “wintry mix” from my friend Shannon James. Some of Wilson Bentley’s snowflake photographs are archived at the Smithsonian Institute; I know about them because of a 2017 Washington Post article by Sarah Kaplan called “The Man Who Uncovered the Secret Lives of Snowflakes.” The Ruskin quotes are from Modern Painters, Volume 3; the Walter Scott quote is from Lord of the Isles. The cummings quotes about the soft white damn is from a poem that begins “i will cultivate within.” I am a little hard on the poem in this review, even though actually it is one of my very favorite poems. Speaking of very favorite poems, the Paige Lewis quote is from their book Space Struck. The Anne Carson lines are from the verse novel Autobiography of Red.

In addition to being the first person to spacewalk, Alexei Leonov was probably the first person to make art in space—he brought colored pencils and paper with him into orbit. He recounts his first space walk, and the truly harrowing story of how their spacecraft landed hundreds of miles off-course, in “The Nightmare of Voskhod 2,” an essay published in Air and Space in 2005. I heard Leonov’s story thanks to a video made by Sarah called “Art We Launched into Space.”

The Hot Dogs of B?jarins Beztu Pylsur

Laura, Ryan, and Sarah all agree that some of the events I describe in this essay took place on a different day from the Olympic Medal Day, and I continue to believe that they are all wrong and that my memory is unimpeachably accurate. We all agree that was a great hot dog, though.

The Notes App

I learned about skeuomorphic design from a conversation with Ann-Marie and Stuart Hyatt. The 2012 Wired essay “Clive Thompson on Analog Designs in the Digital Age” gave me more examples of the phenomenon. The Mountain Goats’ song “Jenny” is from the album All Hail West Texas. Sarah Manguso’s astonishing and wrenching book The Two Kinds of Decay was first published in 2008. (I also love love love Manguso’s book Ongoingness. In fact, I need to make a note to ask Sarah to read it.)

The Mountain Goats

Thanks to John Darnielle, Peter Hughes, Jon Wurster, Matt Douglas, and all the other Mountain Goats through the years. Thanks also to the extraordinary Mountain Goats fandom, which responds to the songs with all kinds of magnificence—from fan art to flowcharts. Valerie Barr and Arka Pain are among the many people who’ve deepened my love for the band; thanks also to KT O’Conor for setting me straight on the meaning of “Jenny.”

The QWERTY Keyboard

I began this review after coming across a Smithsonian magazine article by Jimmy Stamp, “Fact or Fiction? The Legend of the QWERTY Keyboard.” “The Fable of the Keys,” an article by Stan J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis first published in the April 1990 issue of The Journal of Law and Economics, makes a convincing case that QWERTY is actually a pretty good keyboard layout, and that the studies finding DVORAK superior are deeply flawed. Thorin Klosowski’s 2013 Lifehacker piece, “Should I Use an Alternative Keyboard Layout Like Dvorak?” is a great summary of the (admittedly limited!) research into that question, and makes a case that QWERTY is only slightly worse than optimized key layouts. I learned of Sholes’s battle against the death penalty from the Wisconsin Historical Society. I also benefited from Bruce Bliven’s 1954 book, The Wonderful Writing Machine, and from Graham Lawton’s New Scientist: The Origin of (almost) Everything.

The World’s Largest Ball of Paint

Mike Carmichael is still caring for (and helping paint) the world’s largest ball of paint in Alexandria, Indiana. It is very much worth a trip just for the joy of meeting him and adding your own layer to the ball. You can email Mike at [email protected] Thanks to Emily for joining me on many trips to visit roadside attractions, and to Ransom Riggs and Kathy Hickner, who took a cross-country road trip with me where we discovered much about roadside America. Speaking of which, Roadside America (roadsideamerica.com) has for decades been a wonderful guide to the world’s largests and smallests. We used it in college, and I use it still, infuriating my kids with side trips to, say, the office building shaped like a picnic basket. More recently, Atlas Obscura (atlasobscura.com and, in book form, Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders) has become an indispensable resource. Eric Grundhauser’s Atlas Obscura article on the ball of paint was very helpful to me. Finally, a special word of thanks to ArcGIS StoryMaps article “Big Balls,” by Ella Axelrod, which contains many wonderful pictures and also some magnificent subheadings, like “Big Balls: An Overview” and “Balls of Various Composition.”

Sycamore Trees

This review references two of my all-time favorite books: Jacqueline Woodson’s devastating and perfectly wrought If You Come Softly and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Among its many gifts to me, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek introduced me to Herodotus’s story of Xerxes and the sycamore. I learned of the so-called Pringle Tree on a visit to Pringle Tree Park in Buckhannon, West Virginia. I first read the Edna St. Vincent Millay poem “Not So Far as the Forest” in her 1939 book, Huntsman, What Quarry?

“New Partner”

“New Partner” appears on the Palace Music album Viva Last Blues. I first heard the song because of Ransom Riggs and Kathy Hickner, who heard it because of Jacob and Nathaniel Otting. Kaveh Akbar’s “The Palace” was first published in the New Yorker in April of 2019.