Simply Fresh

A book review from the South African Medical Journal, 1924

Black-and-white woodcut of a 16th-century bakery interior. On the left, a woman in a long dress and headcloth carries a long plank on her shoulder. In the centre, a male baker in a long tunic and cap uses a long-handled peel to slide loaves into a domed brick oven. Loaves rest on a sloping board behind him. Swarms of insects — crickets or cockroaches — pour from cracks in the wall and ceiling above the oven. To the right, shelves hold pots and jars, and a candle burns in a wall niche. Hatched lines shade the walls and floor.

Bakery infested by crickets or cockroaches — woodcut from Olaus Magnus, Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555).

Reproduced in the Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 2 June 1924, for an article on the antiquity and life history of the cockroach.

This was certainly a highlight of 2026.

Here are a couple of examples. Lung cancer survival rates for EGFR+ mutated Lung cancer.

Glad to be helping putting this together. Do come along if you are in Cambridge.

This week @nickfitzhenry.bsky.social, class teacher on the course "Economic History of the Middle East and North Africa", took his students on a field trip to see the Cambridge Cairo Genizah collection - famous from Greif's paper on The Maghribi Traders' Coalition - and the Fitzwilliam 📜🔎

Agreed! Related - a fun collection of seasonal papers I share with my students. cepr.org/voxeu/column...

Was there a few years ago. I hitchhiked up from Abergavenny & had a wonderful afternoon there.

High rates of polygyny do not lock large proportions of men out of the marriage market | PNAS There is a widespread belief, in both the scholarly literature and the popular press, that polygyny prevents large numbers of men from marrying by ...

🚨 The Economist has been telling you for years that polygamy causes civil war by locking men out of marriage. A new article with @rebeccasear.bsky.social and @anthrolog.bsky.social explains that the demography of marriage markets doesn't actually work that way. 🧵

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I'm submitting my PhD dissertation today, with the defence scheduled in early December. Long years of work, but proud of the outcome and excited to develop it further. Thought I'd share the first few pages of the front matter:

UNTIL IT'S DONE, Ep. 2

When the Brownsville Clinic opened in 1916, it was the first birth control center in America. Its very existence felt impossible. For young women, it was a lifeline.

109 years later, the Clinic is long closed—but Brownsville mothers are still struggling.

Facebook reminds me that a year ago I started a project of scanning the journals of the Central African Historical Association, based at the University of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, which ran from 1970 to the early 1980s. I have uploaded my scans to Dropbox here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/ruzbp...

Under-5 pneumonia and influenza deaths decline concurrently with diarrhoeal diseases, as observed in other countries. I suspect the spikes in the early 1970s are due to local waves of the H3N2 global (Hong Kong) flu pandemic.

The decline (while far from fully converging) is also mysterious, especially given the Group Areas Acts, worsening economic conditions, and political unrest. ORT might be part of it, but it became readily promoted only in the late 80s.

Under-5 diarrhoeal disease death rates in South Africa during the 70s and 80s for coloured (mixed-race), indian and white race groups (apartheid state did not collect complete data for the black majority).

The seasonality and heightened rates for the coloured population are quite shocking.

Two come to mind, I’ll pass it on :)

the cover of the album, which is cream white and in the middle, a square image of 15th century Ethopian art depicting St. George, the Patron saint of ethiopia. The image is a cool piece of art, not as psuedophotorepresentative like you'd see coming out of europe at that time, it's been characterized as "proto-cubist" and it will make you want to look at more ethiopian art from that period of time, at least it is for me now after I looked this up to fill in the alt text.

When was the last time you've listened to Graceland. You might want to listen to Graceland again. It's really good.

David Byrne came to my band’s show at a gay bar in Bed-Stuy and sang This Must Be The Place with us and I still haven’t processed it

Source: Strebel P, Hussey G, Metcalf C, Smith D, Hanslo D, Simpson J. An outbreak of whooping cough in a highly vaccinated urban community. J Trop Pediatr. 1991 Mar;37(2):71-6. doi: 10.1093/tropej/37.2.71. PMID: 2027168.

The graph shows high mortality rates among 'non-white' populations (solid line) with significant peaks in the 1930s-1940s, followed by a sharp decline after the introduction of the DP vaccine in 1950. The dotted line represents White populations, which had much lower mortality rates throughout

A striking visualisation of vaccine impact: Cape Town whooping cough deaths plummeted after DP (diphtheria and pertussis [whooping cough]) vaccine introduction (1950). Also reveals stark racial health disparities in South Africa, particularly in the first half of the 20th century.

Archaeologists identify 250-year-old Shipwreck in Orkney Scientific analysis and community-led research led to the identification of the Earl of Chatham, which was found last year.

The shipwreck uncovered in Sanday, #Orkney last year has been identified as HMS Hind, later the Earl of Chatham which was wrecked in the Bay of Lopness in 1788.

More than 230 years buried in the seabed, before being released by a storm in 2024.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Chloe Kelly and Agyemang

That's the post !

Clioguesser: guess the year based on a political map, ranging from 1000 BCE to 2024 CE.

I am 15th on the leaderboard ;)

clioguesser.azurewebsites.net/leaderboard

Congratulations to @nickfitzhenry.bsky.social and Mina Ishizu for receiving the 2025 #LSE Class #Teaching Awards 🧑‍🏫🥳
info.lse.ac.uk/staff/educat...
#econhist #education

Nick Fitzhenry - PhD Summary YouTube video by Nick Fitzhenry

A video I made for a job interview summarising my PhD work and its relevance to students of economics. youtu.be/r4U07e00oY0?...

Tom Hollander's is the best of the genre

Screenshot of the linked Quarto website, with input checkboxes to change different conditions for a regression model that predicts economic performance based on US political party, with a reported p-value

I’ve long used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive “Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory” to illustrate the idea of p-hacking when I teach statistics. But ABC/Disney killed the site earlier this month :(

So I made my own with #rstats and Observable and #QuartoPub ! stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way/