The archive.org link doesn't seem to have captured TFA.

https://archive.ph/y543P

The geographical weirdness: left-handedness is much more widespread in Northeast, with some less prominent peaks in Florida, Arizona, South Dakota. The source is suggested to be genetic.

I wonder if there's information on how many passengers of the Mayflower were left-handed.

Quote from the article

One of the best available data sets on left-handedness comes from a scratch-and-sniff survey of olfactory ability mailed out to millions of National Geographic subscribers in the 1980s.

Go ahead and read that sentence again — it doesn't get any less weird the second time around.

founder effect, or bias of kindergarten teachers in that area having an outsized effect picking ambidextrous students to be left handed.

The areas with higher rates of left handedness on the map seem to correlate to the more progressive areas where you’d expect parents and teachers to not discourage it. Was kind of surprised they didn’t mention that, given they started with that anecdote.

I do recall preferring the left hand on my first day with a pencil. However, during that first day, I remember being able to switch to use my right hand as well and it started to feel more comfortable after a very short time. The tipping point was the frustration of using my right hand and failing to be able to control it correctly. I swapped to my (then-worse) left hand and was willing to deal with the frustration better. By the second day, my right hand was too alien and I only switched back briefly in my early 30s due to injuring my left arm/hand, where I basically had pre-school level right-hand cursive.

As far as I know, I'm the only left hander in my extended family.

My parents "retrained" me to be right-handed. All primary-school things like writing, using scissors, etc. I do right-handed. For the rest? All I am is confused - some things I do right-handed, others left-handed. FWIW I was a very awkward and uncoordinated kid, which...may be related?

After the resurgence of homophobia, racism, antivax, misogyny, I've been wondering if we're undoing the last couple of centuries of civilization. I never expected the next step to be left-handedness becoming associated with evil again.

Why is it that right-handed people play stringed instruments such that the strings are actuated with the right hand (finger picking, flatpicking, strumming, bowing), and fingered with the left? Many left handed players reverse the arrangement.

On the other hand (pun inteneded) left-handed pianos are almost unheard of.