Pulse: Origins

BBQ — Act 1

The word barbecue began as a piece of furniture, not a flavor. A Taíno preservation rack called barabicu kept meat from rotting within hours in Caribbean heat, and the smoke compounds that did the work are antimicrobial chemistry, not culinary craft. That rack traveled through four languages, a pirate economy built on smoked feral cattle, and a presidential political attack before the folk etymology most people repeat today was invented whole cloth. 01:28 — Cooking as biological inheritance, not cultural invention 04:28 — The barabicu: Taíno rack technology and the first written record of barbacoa 07:18 — The same infrastructure that preserved meat also served as a sleeping platform 10:23 — The word enters English through Virginia, not the Caribbean, via a 2023 peer-reviewed finding 13:16 — Samuel Johnson defines barbecue as "to cook a pig" while America has already moved on 16:15 — The fake French phrase barbe à queue and how the Taíno disappeared from their own origin story ---------------------------------------- New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN [https://x.com/ThePulseSPN] singularitypulse.substack.com [https://singularitypulse.substack.com]

BBQ

The word barbecue came from a piece of furniture. Roman introduces BBQ — a four-part series on the hidden history of America's most argued-over food. Four acts, starting Sunday July 5th. ---------------------------------------- New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN [https://x.com/ThePulseSPN] singularitypulse.substack.com [https://singularitypulse.substack.com]

1347: What the Plague Built — Act 4

What Didn't End in 1353: The Second Plague Pandemic ran from 1347 to 1815, and a Sicilian child born in the generation of the American Revolution grew up with the Black Death as a present danger. Humans cannot acquire long-term immunity to Yersinia pestis, meaning every generation born after 1347 was as vulnerable as the one that lived through it — and in Bombay in 1896, human mortality rates increased for a full decade before falling, not because the human population had changed, but because the rat population had. Austin and Roman trace what the plague's wrong explanations left standing: legal records of exclusion that correlated with Nazi-era violence in cities with no Jewish community for six centuries, secular universities founded to solve a clergy shortage, and a vernacular literature whose argument about whether it should exist was already lost before it was made. 00:00 — Pandemic continuity: the Second Plague Pandemic runs to 1815 04:10 — Human immunity failure and the Bombay 1896 mortality curve 08:45 — Florence's quarantine: correct practice, wrong theory, five centuries of use 13:20 — Secular universities as workforce responses to clerical collapse 18:00 — Boccaccio's Tuscan vernacular as a statement about institutional access 22:30 — Jewish migration east and the second serfdom converging in one geography 27:15 — Voigtländer and Voth: pogrom correlation persists in cities vacant of Jews for 600 years 33:40 — Institutional inertia: structures outlasting every carrier who built them 38:55 — Rats acquire resistance; the pandemic ends through a mechanism nobody could see 43:10 — The plague ended. What it built did not. ---------------------------------------- New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN [https://x.com/ThePulseSPN] singularitypulse.substack.com [https://singularitypulse.substack.com]

1347: What the Plague Built — Act 3

The Statute Nobody Could Enforce: Farm wages doubled in England and stayed doubled for 450 years. The Statute of Laborers tried to freeze wages at 1346 levels and failed fastest where no one was watching — while a Westminster Abbey auditor crossed out inflated payments right next to the seat of power. Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, the plague produced the exact opposite result: intensified serfdom, divergent political economies, and a fracture line that historians trace to the 20th century. ---------------------------------------- New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN [https://x.com/ThePulseSPN] singularitypulse.substack.com [https://singularitypulse.substack.com]

1347: What the Plague Built — Act 2

The Thing Itself: Where the plague actually came from (Kyrgyz cemeteries, 1338 tombstones, severe drought), why the Caffa catapult story is almost certainly fiction, and what we know — and don't know — about the pathogen: one mile per day overland, 24 by sea, doubling infected populations every 43 days, and possibly not even Yersinia pestis. ---------------------------------------- New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN [https://x.com/ThePulseSPN] singularitypulse.news [https://singularitypulse.news]