Free The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 by Mary Roach Page B

full-time work or a single residence, and was, by all accounts, an uncommonly gifted teacher. (He and Katz often taught seminars together.) As a patron saint, though, Cook had left his flock with an uneasy legacy. When he died at forty-six, it was owing to a tapeworm infection acquired on his travels. Antibiotics might have cured him, but he mostly avoided them. By the time his mother and friends forced him to go to a hospital last spring, his brain was riddled with tapeworm larvae and the cysts that formed around them. "Frank was pretty dogmatic about Western medicine," Katz said. "And I really think that's why he's dead."
    Around the bonfire that night, I could see Katz on the other side of the circle, holding hands with his neighbors. After eighteen years in the wilderness, he couldn't imagine moving back to New York City—a weekend there could still wear him out. Yet his mind had never entirely left the Upper West Side, and his voice, clipped and skeptical, was a welcome astringent here. After a while a woman stepped into the firelight, dressed in a long white gown with a crown of vines and spring flowers in her hair. Beltane was a time of ancient ferment, she said, when the powers of the sky come down and the powers of the earth rise up to meet them. She took two goblets and carried them to opposite points in the circle. They were full of May wine steeped with sweet woodruff, once considered an aphrodisiac. On this night, by our own acts of love and procreation, we would remind the fields and crops to grow.
    There was more along those lines, though I confess that I didn't hear it. I was watching the kid to my left—a scruffy techno-peasant dressed in what looked like sackcloth and bark—take a swig of the wine. The goblets were moving clockwise around the circle, I'd noticed. By the time the other goblet reached me, thirty or forty people would have drunk from it.
    I heard a throat being cleared somewhere in the crowd, and a cough quickly stifled. Embracing live cultures shouldn't mean sacrificing basic hygiene, Katz had told me that afternoon, after his sauerkraut seminar. "Part of respecting bacteria is recognizing where they can cause us problems." And so, when the kid had drunk his fill, I tapped his shoulder and asked for the goblet out of turn. I took a quick sip, sweet and bitter in equal measure. Then I watched as the wine made its way around the circle—teeming, as all things must, with an abundance of invisible life.

The Chemist's War
Deborah Blum
FROM
Slate
    I T WAS CHRISTMAS EVE 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.
    Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcoholinduced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than sixty people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another twenty-three people died in the city from celebrating the season.
    Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, a routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskeys and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.
    Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up