The Weekender, July 15, 2022

The Now I Know Week in Review

Monday: JFK and the Two Joe Russos. A lot of you wrote in to tell me that this happened in Florida in 2020, apparently. 

Tuesday: The Center of the Universe, Oklahoma Edition. Apparently, there's a similar acoustic anomolies all around. There's one in Washington, D.C., at the Canadian embassy; more here, via reader Peter C., and another one at a cemetary in Minneapolis, Minnesota (here, via reader Scott W.). And from personal experience, there's the very cool Whispering Gallery in the lower level of Manhattan's Grand Central Station.

Wednesday: A Profitable Way to Stop Telemarketers: This probably won't work anymore because smart phones are good at screening out spam, and actual spam calls are more likely stumbling upon your number randomly than looking you up in a database. But it was still a great idea, once.

Thursday: The Herd Mentality That’s Actually Rather Democratic: How animals vote, kind of.

And some other things you should check out:

I’m lying on a table in Istanbul and a doctor I’ve never met is about to cut 4,250 holes in my head. He might be a doctor. I think he’s a doctor? The procedure will take six hours. I have no friends or family within 5,000 miles.

But in other ways I’m not alone. Thousands have joined me. We’re from the U.S. and the U.K. and the rest of Europe and we’ve flown to Turkey, which is now the hair transplant capital of the world. Surgeries that cost $20,000 in New York can be found for $2,000 on the shores of the Bosporus. We come here with sad hairlines and skimpy crowns. We leave with our heads shaved and raw, red and scabby—and with hope of newfound youth. At the Istanbul airport, a woman who works at the ticket counter tells me that every day she sees men who are clearly hair transplant patients, sometimes still in bandages, and sometimes with blood leaking from their scalps. She says that this is so ubiquitous, “We call it Turkish Hairlines.”

Other than from an aesthetic perspective, peafowl are essentially useless. Though, if English poet John Ruskin is to be believed, the “most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance.” Mostly, they just walk around and put on a show. For such a big bird, they have a negligible impact on the balance of an urban ecosystem—apart from a nibble here or a peck there. Likewise, not much pushes back: in North American cities, predators of peafowl are most likely to be dogs or raccoons. Beauty is the peafowl’s saving grace. Their feathers are long, colorful beacons splayed confidently, and the plumage is a protector of the species: peahens are attracted to peacocks with long tail feathers and piercing ocelli, the round, eye-shaped tips of the feather. It so happens that the same aesthetic trait attracts gawking humans too.