Mushroom & Black Banquet

Featured Articles

In the Mushroom

The American Scholar • 2 Dec 2024 • ~5150 words

Michael Autrey writes about mushrooms and foraging in a deeply personal way.

Pennybun to the British, Steinpilz to the Germans, porcino to the Italians, and cèpe to the French—whatever one calls Boletus edulis, the king of the boletes prefers certain trees. I found my orchard in a stand of mature, second-growth western hemlock. Porcini associate with other conifers, too, and with birch and aspen. But mushrooms surprise; cep is cunning. A few years later, after the hemlocks hosting my orchard had been clearcut, I accepted a gift from a forager who was retiring. He’d just had a child, and his wife wanted him near. He wanted his perfect spot to go to a good home, like a beloved pet. And it was pretty miraculous; some days I pulled more than 100 pounds of porcini from that place. Yet I would never have looked there had I not been tipped off because the terrain was all wrong.

Recreating an Ancient Roman Dinner of Death

Atlas Obscura • 29 Nov 2024 • ~5350 words

Sam O’Brien and Farrell Monaco trace the history Emperor Domitian’s Black Banquet and then they recreate it. Includes recipes!

While everyone seems to agree that it’s a great story, few believe it actually went down as Dio Cassius describes. That’s why I embarked on a mission to investigate the dastardly dinner, its host, its historical context, and its possible menu. What would a Roman emperor serve to scare the hell out of his guests? How might palace cooks have colored these foods with that terrifying black hue? And what can the horror show of Domitian’s dinner tell us about the fears, social mores, and dining customs of first-century Roman elites?

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How We Got the Lithium-ion Battery

Construction Physics • 27 Nov 2024 • ~4050 words

Brian Potter writes about the history of the lithium-ion battery and the decades of research and progress that led to it becoming a big part of our daily lives. Through this story, he also argues for unrestricted research and novel technological development, even if it is not immediately (or ever) profitable.

But to get there, the lithium-ion battery took a long, winding road. It took decades of research, performed around the world, before a practical lithium-ion battery was possible. And then, not unlike solar PV, it took many more years of marching down the learning curve before it could find its place in electric vehicles and large-scale energy storage. Since the early ‘90s, the cost of a lithium-ion battery has fallen by more than 97% per kilowatt-hour, which has finally allowed electric vehicles to approach cost-parity with gasoline-powered cars.

‘His Facebook was a shrine to my face’: the day I caught my catfish

The Guardian • 30 Nov 2024 • ~3050 words

I stumbled on a profile with my picture as the photo. What was this man doing with my identity? I set out to track him down …

Paweł said he initially created the account because he wanted to make money. He had some sort of scheme I didn’t understand, but it involved selling products. He needed a photo of someone “handsome” to lure customers in. He had found me by chance as a Google result because of an old article I had written; then he had tracked down my social media. He had used my face because he thought no one would recognise it. “Pretty boy not very popular,” he wrote. “You are not a celebrity, you are not famous.” I was now being negged by my impostor. Paweł failed to make money from the account, but somewhere along the line he started to enjoy logging in as me. “I could be free. I wasn’t afraid of anyone,” he wrote.

My friend was a popular, promising artist - how did he end up on the streets of Portland, addicted and dangerous?

The Guardian • 30 Nov 2024 • ~5850 words

Laura Barton writes about mental health, homelessness and addiction, through the story of their friend Evan.

I could not fathom how the person I had known – so bright and talented and popular – had ended up in this situation. So I got back in touch with Evan, and we had long conversations that would eventually branch out into equally long conversations with others who know him. His story is by turns horrifying and hopeful. To understand what happened to my friend is also, I think, to understand what happened to Portland, and to many cities across the US and beyond; a story of opiate addiction, mental health crisis and a homelessness epidemic; a lesson in how we care for our most vulnerable.

Collections: The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry • 29 Nov 2024 • ~6100 words

A surprisingly deep dive into armor designs used in fiction and particularly sci-fi, and how they got detached from realistic designs in favor of visual appeal.

I want to focus on rigid science fiction armors because they offer an interesting lens to consider their design: how to armor a human body in a rigid substance is an exceedingly solved problem: quite a few cultures have tackled this particular problem with a lot of energy and ingenuity, attempting to balance protection, mobility and weight. And the “problem with sci-fi body armor” begins with the fact that most of these futuristic ‘hardsuits’ utilize little of any of the design language of those efforts. Instead, where real armors evolve against threats, fictional armors evolve as a visual language, borrowing the design elements of other fictional armors far more often than they dip into their own historical exemplars, with the result that the whole thing sort of devours itself.

Wrong 1

Graphomane • 28 Nov 2024 • ~2500 words

Neal Stephenson discusses Charles Sanders Peirce's views on belief, reasoning, and wrongness.

The tricky part, as Peirce points out, is that beliefs that seem "agreeable to reason" don't always agree with each other. Plato and Kepler were intellectual giants who thought deeply about these matters. Both came up with reasonable-sounding explanations of the planets' movements. Highly intelligent and well-informed people all around them nodded their heads sagely and said "that totally makes sense." But they were all wrong.

The Wonder of It All

The American Scholar • 2 Dec 2024 • ~2300 words

Julie Boutwell-Peterson writes about the search for awe.

Keltner says we can also get “bird skin” seven other ways: when we encounter visual art, spirituality, nature, music, community bonding (think of nightclubs and football games), birth, and death. He lumps these last two together, as if they are connected by an invisible string—and I suppose they are. This last category focuses on the circle of life. The recognition of the journey itself—the fact that it necessarily has both a beginning and an ending—is what seems to make our hair stand up.