“Casey at the Bat” is one of America’s best-known poems. Surprisingly, even operas have dramatized the story of Mudville Nine’s baseball slugger. In Ernest Thayer’s 1888 poem, a smugly overconfident Casey was ready to wallop a game-winning home run, only to dash the hopes of Mudville by totally whiffing the ball with a massive—and embarrassing—swing-and-a-miss.

A Chinese famine was so severe that 35 million lives perished between 1958 and 1962 due to the state's agricultural mistakes.¹ Interestingly, this tragedy highlights an unseen biological relationship between organisms and their environment over multiple generations.