National Geographic
Article
National Geographic is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between May 24, 2022 and April 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “She sold the footage of her trek to National Geographic, who turned it into a special called Alaska Revisited”; “A National Geographic article claims that a newly-discovered rare plant may be the long-thought-extinct ancient miracle herb silphium”; “according to the National Geographic article, they tried the plant as a spice”. It most often appears alongside America, Brazil, California.
Metadata
- Category: Publications
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: May 24, 2022
- Last seen: April 09, 2024
Appears In
- California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z
- Links For October
- More Memorable Passages From “The Man Without A Face”
- Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate
Related Pages
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- America (2 shared issues)
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- Brazil (2 shared issues)
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- California (2 shared issues)
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- COVID (2 shared issues)
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- COVID-19 (2 shared issues)
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- Less Wrong (2 shared issues)
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- Supreme Court (2 shared issues)
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- Trump (2 shared issues)
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- Twitter (2 shared issues)
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- Wikipedia (2 shared issues)
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- Abolitionist (1 shared issues)
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- AntiNazi (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Reinette Senum was the first woman to successfully cross Alaska alone in the winter. She said that “I could handle the 55-below cold, but I could not handle the loneliness”. Partway through her journey, she found a sled dog named Diamond, whom she rescued from death and befriended. She had to leave Diamond behind at the end of her journey, which bothered her so much that she decided to go back and get him. She sold the footage of her trek to National Geographic, who turned it into a special called Alaska Revisited, and with the money she flew back to Alaska and rescued her dog friend a second time. They moved to Nevada City, California, where unfortunately Diamond was killed by a car. If you don’t vote for her after hearing this story, you have no soul.
32: A National Geographic article claims that a newly-discovered rare plant may be the long-thought-extinct ancient miracle herb silphium, which the Greeks and Romans used for cooking, medicine, etc. Only problem: the plant is in Turkey, and all the ancients agree silphium grew in North Africa. The article suggests that maybe Greek traders transplanted some to Turkey successfully (even though the ancients all said silphium couldn’t be transplanted). But according to Wikipedia, genetic studies show the Turkish plant is related to other Turkish plants and not to North African plants, which I think is near-fatal for this theory. Still, according to the National Geographic article, they tried the plant as a spice, and it tastes amazing (as the ancients say silphium did). Confirmation bias, or extreme good luck?
Too long for me to quote in full, but there is a postscript for this second edition with the story of the one time Masha Gessen met Vladimir Putin. Putin shut down the pro-democracy paper Gessen was working at, so Gessen got a new job editing Vokrug Sveta - if you’re American, think National Geographic: a nice, apolitical magazine with pretty pictures of wildlife. One of Putin’s lieutenants, Dmitry Peskov, thought it would be nice for the regime to patronize it and make it the official geographical magazine of the Russian government.