Secco Recit

This is a story about a sanitary engineer who made a career tracking and preventing epidemics -- especially epidemics which stubbornly refused to be tracked and prevented. This is also a story about checking and verifying sources, which features:  A 1903 typhoid fever outbreak at Cornell University and a conspiracy to cover up its cause. An abandoned hospital on a deserted island, where human entry is now forbidden. A mysterious casting change to a 1913 Broadway play. A conspiracy to falsify the results of an autopsy which never happened. Things that were cut from this story because it is already very long include: A 1912 preacher's calls to ban certain kinds of dancing. A 1908 study about the air quality of subway systems around the world that uses the brightness of meteors to estimate the height of the atmosphere. A speech inexplicably given by Alexander Graham Bell to the Biological Society A 1917 musical that probably made the aforementioned preacher very angry. ...

Preface One morning, several years ago, I thought it might be fun to figure out what the leading cause of death in sopranos is. In order to figure this out, I went to everyone's favorite opera statistics website  Operabase , pulled up their list of most frequently-performed operas, and set to work cataloguing the causes of death in the top fifty. I came up with some crude statistics, and this was all very hastily put-together. I made a mildly humorous Facebook post about it, and went along my merry way. Cue roughly three weeks ago, when the Metropolitan Opera announced that, for the duration of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, they would be streaming performances from their catalogue for free on their website, beginning with a performance of La Boheme , to be followed two days later by La Traviata . I was not the only one to note that it seemed a little lacking in tact for the company to begin their Coronavirus streams with the two popular operas whose plots can be explained by ...

This title is misleading, because it implies that there is a problem with the classic Cinderella story. But that would require there to be one definitive Cinderella , which there is not. There are countless variants on the story across many many centuries, independently evolved in many cultures, brought together by convergent evolution, split apart by divergent evolution, and so on and so forth. For this, and other reasons, I would like to take a moment to call out those who snarkily berate Disney and other adaptors for "sanitizing" the "original Brothers Grimm version" to make it more "kid-friendly," usually citing the part in the Disney movie where Cinderella's stepsisters conspicuously do not chop off bits of their feet to fit in the glass slipper. To that I say: The idea that Disney or any other adapter is somehow at fault for changing elements of a story in their adaptation is blatantly untrue. Every adaptation of every story ever by definitio...