Monopoly
Mary Pilon’s book The Monopolists is a comprehensive history of Monopoly’s early days and especially illuminating in its portrayal of Elizabeth Magie. I was introduced to the video game Universal Paperclips by Elyse Marshall and her husband, Josef Pfeiffer. I learned of Hasbro’s response to Elizabeth Magie from Antonia Noori Farzan’s 2019 Washington Post piece, “The New Monopoly ‘Celebrates Women Trailblazers.’ But the Game’s Female Inventor Still Isn’t Getting Credit.” That piece also contains the most concise and comprehensible summary of Georgism I’ve come across.
Super Mario Kart
The Super Mario wiki （mariowiki.com） is so astonishingly exhaustive and carefully sourced that it might be the best wiki I’ve ever encountered. Its article about Super Mario Kart gave me much of the background I needed for this review. The interview with Shigeru Miyamoto I quote comes from a Nintendo roundtable; it’s available online under the headline “It Started with a Guy in Overalls.”
Bonneville Salt Flats
Donald Hall’s essay “The Third Thing” was first published in Poetry magazine in 2005; I was introduced to it by Kaveh Akbar and Ellen Grafton. Much of the information about the Bonneville Salt Flats came from the Utah Geological Survey; I am particularly indebted to Christine Wilkerson’s article “GeoSights: Bonnevile Salt Flats, Utah.” I learned about the history of the Enola Gay and Wendover from the artist William Lamson and the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover. The Melville quote is from Moby-Dick, which I read only thanks to the dogged efforts of Professor Perry Lentz. We were joined on that trip to Wendover by Mark Olsen and Stuart Hyatt, both of whom deeply enriched my understanding of the salt flats.
Hiroyuki Doi’s Circle Drawings
I first saw Hiroyuki Doi’s artwork in 2006 at the American Folk Art Museum’s exhibition Obsessive Drawing. The untitled drawing I refer to can be seen at its digitized collection at folkartmuseum.org. The Doi quotes and his biographical background come from a 2013 Japan Times article by Edward Gómez, “Outsider Drawn to the Circle of Life,” from a 2017 Wall Street International review of a Doi exhibition at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, and from a 2016 review in Brut Force by Carrie McGath called “The Inscape in Escape Routes: Five Works by Hiroyuki Doi.” The study “What Does Doodling Do?” was published by Jackie Andrade in Applied Cognitive Psychology in 2009.
Whispering
The idea for this review came from a conversation with my friends Enrico Lo Gatto, Craig Lee, and Alex Jimenez. I don’t remember how I learned that cotton-top tamarins whisper, but a 2013 paper in Zoo Biology by Rachel Morrison and Diana Reiss details “Whisper-like behavior in a non-human primate.” The authors noted that a group of cotton-top tamarins whispered （or, technically, engaged in whisper-like vocalizations） when in the presence of a human they didn’t like, which is the sort of detail that reminds me that humans are just primates trying to make the best of a very strange situation.
Viral Meningitis
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.）