Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 91

The Jonestown Diet

During one of our recent discussions about food taboos, a sage commenter noted that one of the theories regarding such prohibitions is that they aid social cohesion—if we can all agree to, say, eschew beef or Funyuns, we instantly have something that defines us in opposition to "The Other." Given the inherent creepiness of that tactic, the commenter wondered, was there perhaps a history of cult leaders using food taboos to bind together their flocks?

Well, as it turns out, the answer appears ...

The Deadest of Cities

Of the twenty abandoned cities chronicled on this list, none seems quite as spooky as Agdam. Once home to 150,000 Azerbaijanis, the city's population is now officially zero, thanks to the ravages of the Nagorno-Karabakh War. Agdam was supposed to the capital of a new republic, but was instead destroyed by retreating Armenian soldiers in the waning days of the conflict. The residents who fled didn't bother returning to rebuild, leaving a bombed-out husk of a city that would've made an...

A Bitter Price Tag

Last night while cooking dinner, we decided to rev up a documentary that's been languishing on our Netflix Instant queue for ages: Witch Hunt. Suffice to say that we weren't anywhere near prepared for the ensuing 90 minutes, in which the filmmakers unwind a completely devastating J'accuse regarding the Kern County child-abuse panic of the 1980s. By the end, we were ready to tote our pitchfork to Bakersfield so that we could exact vengeance upon Ed Jagels, the district attorney who let this...

Bear Fat as Mental Savior

Just before we broke for Christmas, we posted about the possibility that America's recent love affair with unsaturated fatty acids may be part of the reason our crime rates have dropped so precipitously. Now comes word that fat may have another positive application: curing folks afflicted with witiko psychosis, which (allegedly) causes a sudden craving for human flesh.

In a 1970 American Anthropologist article, a professor at San Diego State University related the typical Ojibwa cure for this ...

"Untouched by Time's Dark Captains"

In the midst of prepping a forthcoming post on urban population trends, we randomly stumbled across this 1959 video from the Bureau of Mines, in which asbestos gets its praises sung by an amazingly eloquent narrator. Historical curios such as this can only make us wonder which of today's miracle products will eventually be revealed to be far more harmful than we ever anticipated.

A Language Not Quite Universal

Contrary to what we learned in Mrs. Glickman's Algebra II class lo those many years ago, mathematics is not a language that transcends all cultural barriers. That's because tackling math problems requires a willingness to give in to abstraction, a leap that not all cultures are equipped to make. Just check out how the Saora people of Orissa, India, react to word problems:

Saora school children took more interest in mathematical problems that depicted actual local events/facts rather than...

Mad Scramble

We're in the midst of trying to close two Wired pieces, including the gargantuan epic that took us out to Kenya last fall. More soon, honest—in the meantime, a sonic rarity worthy of your highly valued ears.

This World, Then the Visigoths

Over the past several days, no ad campaign has been as inescapable as the one hyping Food Network's recently aired "Super Chef Battle". The innumerable commercials and Web banners that ran in support of the event made it seem like a culinary version of a Thunderdome match, crossed with the Apollo Creed versus Ivan Drago bout from Rocky IV. P.T. Barnum would be proud.

But whenever one of the Food Network ads popped up, we couldn't help but think of the decline and fall of ancient...

An Especially Tricky Lot

Back during our days writing Slate's "Explainer" column, we were once asked to tackle a statistically tricky question: Could self-styled moral watchdog William Bennett really have, as he claimed, broken even playing high-stakes slot machines for over a decade? (Quickie answer: Almost certainly not, unless the man is blessed with Ashley Albright levels of luck.) Doing the research on that piece led to an ongoing fascination with the psychology of slot machine players, a topic of much...

The Soviet Road Not Taken

For anyone with even a passing interest in cult psychology, San Diego State University's Jonestown Archive is well worth a thorough gander. Our favorite section, of course, is a compendium of primary sources that date back to Jim Jones's earliest days in Indiana. Among the choice morsels contained therein is a petition that all members of Jonestown were compelled to sign in 1978. Its title is fairly self-explanatory: "The Undersigned Desire to Emigrate to the Soviet Union." As the SDSU...