Willow Defebaugh

And I remember after reading it out loud, I passed by you and you were like, very Mary Shelley.

Wow.

I have to find it.

That's what science does.

And you can subscribe to it with a link in the show notes.

It's been such a wondrous process for finding linguistic inspiration everywhere.

I mean, it's not just scientific articles.

Now when I read anything, I feel like my mind is trying to arrange every word.

Yeah, I went through that phase.

I wanted to circle back to traversal.

And I think probably anyone who's listening can get a sense by now that you have a remarkable ability for creating an atlas from historical events of connecting the dots between even, I think, seemingly disparate moments in history.

And as an example of this,

I'd love for you to talk about the eruption of a volcano in 1815 that sent the world into chaos.

What are some of the ripples of just that one rupture?

As all disaffected youths do.

No one understood the source of this, really.

It was impossible to conceive at that time that something that happened in Indonesia in one part of the world...

could have a ripple effect so vast, right?

I mean, imagine the pandemic of 2020 unfolding without the internet and no one knowing why this was happening, right?

So one event produces the bicycle, legitimizes meteorology, births Frankenstein and arguably all of a genre that would one day be called science fiction.