Hey folks! This month I learned why insulting your friends might bring you closer, why people mourn their chatbots and why you should pack a teddy bear when preparing for a disaster. Here are my discoveries from October:
Making fun of your friends might be one of humanityâs oldest ways of building relationships. A study of humour in ten hunter-gatherer societies found that 57% of 745 recorded examples involved teasing. Among the Andaman Islanders, exchanging rude insults signalled friendship. The Ojibwa had established joking relationships by sharing obscene remarks. Apparently, humour helps us test trust: if I can insult you without offending, we probably know each other well enough. But the same joke from a stranger might start a fight.
People can mourn the loss of an AI companion after a software update. When Replika removed erotic role-playing features in 2023 and OpenAI introduced GPT-5 in 2025, some users reacted as if they had lost someone close to them and expressed feelings of loss and distress. Some Replika users even reported feeling closer to their AI companions than to their human friends. By the way, AI girlfriend searches outpace AI boyfriend searches.
People who die suddenly seem to be âreincarnatedâ faster. At least according to a study of 1,678 children who claimed to remember past lives. When the person they remembered had died unexpectedly, the gap between their death and the childâs birth was typically 12 months, compared with 21 months for more expected deaths.
Londoners were eating curry in restaurants as early as 1773. The Norris Street CafĂŠ served Indian-style curries almost 40 years before the Hindostanee Coffee House opened in 1810. Indian-style pickles were also popular, made with turmeric, ginger, cloves and mustard. Even the future George IV ate chicken with Indian pickle.
The earliest known plague outbreak happened in Siberia 5,500 years ago. Scientists found DNA from plague bacteria in the teeth of 18 people buried near Lake Baikal. Many of the victims were children, some buried alongside relatives. These people were hunter-gatherers living in small groups, long before the crowded cities we usually associate with epidemics. I wrote about the discovery for Meduza, including how scientists reconstructed the outbreak from ancient graves.