The Last Word On Nothing | "Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing" - Victor Hugo

Waterpocket, Tinaja, Kissing Pool

By: Craig Childs | December 27, 2019

Yesterday, I took a walk in the winter desert where snow on sandstone melted and filled dishes eroded into rock. A common local name for these shallow catchments, just enough to drink, is waterpocket. You’ll also hear kissing pool. That’s how you access them, down on your knees, lips touching the surface.

Water conveys itself into rock. As if matching the spherical, beaded will of fluids, holes form into bowls and circles. In ragged terrain, they are like seeds. I shouldn’t recommend you drink from them, and I’ve never gotten sick from doing just that, but it’s worth a try, good for the stomach. Running water concerns me. You rarely know what it’s been traveling through. In these holes, you can tell where the water originated, a watershed of only immediate vicinity.

In the southern desert, northern Mexico and southern Arizona, they’re called tinajas, and some are deep enough for a cannonball dive. They form where rainwater cascades across bedrock, eroding holes that grow as sand and smaller rocks tumble inside the space, nicking and scraping. The can be the size of rooms, deep enough a swim to the bottom hurts your ears. Water and sediment polish them into fluted shapes, elegant necks and lips as smooth as ceramic pitchers.

Decades ago, I mapped and measured tinajas near the Arizona border with Mexico, where I found water hidden in one of the driest parts of North America, sometimes hundreds of gallons of old precipitation protected by shade, depths patrolled by swimming fairy shrimp, floors populated with shelled crustaceans the size of poppy seeds, called ostracods. To find these sites, I followed ancient, broken potsherds and read through the journals of a 17th century Jesuit missionary who made forays across this desert, recording tinajas wherever his team took water. The missionary discovered thousands of gallons glowing in moonlight, and called it Aguaje de la Luna, the watering place of the moon. It is rumored to be any one of a number of holes, some of which I found, and some remain a mystery.

The ones I found yesterday were simple, nameless, a gallon or two at most, enough to skim a kiss. They were not formed by running water as much as slow, molecular picking, the sandstone coming apart grain by grain. For me, they are a way of measuring the desert. To see them gleaming miles in the distance means abundance in small packages, places to come to your knees and drink.

Photo of one of yesterday’s waterpockets in western Colorado, by the author.

Children Like Sand

By: Craig Childs | December 26, 2019

This post originally ran October 30, 2017

Sand blowing and grains hurdling over each other, landing and knocking the next, is called saltation. This is how dunes move, not sheering chaos, but each grain effecting the other, billiard balls knocking each other down the line.

Kids found that if they stood on a dune crest, there was so much saltation, sand blowing in the wind, that they could cast shadows of themselves into the air, making holograms of their bodies in airborne particles.

This was a couple weeks ago in the tallest sand dunes in the United States, their biggest sand features rising 750 above the floor of the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado. Saltation was everywhere around us, wind whipping, scouring our bare feet. We loaded packs and headed in, planning for three nights in a realm of sinuous snake backs and ripples.

Great Sand Dunes National Park is what is known as an erg, a sand sea, a small one on the global scaled, 30 square miles compared to 255,000 square miles in the Empty Quarter of the Middle East. The dunes came from river sediments and dried lake beds blown toward the Sangre de Cristo mountains and stacked up into the only erg for more than 300 miles (the nearest other is White Sands in southern New Mexico).

Our entry was sunny, winds hard out of the west, but weather would turn by morning, temperatures forecast for ten below freezing and higher winds, snow likely. But the sand was still warm, the sun still out. When your kids have a week off, that’s your window, you go. Continue reading →

End of Decade Viewing

By: People of LWON | December 25, 2019

Our first love may have been the written word, but the People of LWON are also avid watchers of film and television. Here’s what has been flickering across our screens this year:

Jessa: My most moving television experience of 2019 has been the BBC and HBO co-production Years and Years. The inciting incident is that in his last days in office, an embattled and nihilistic Trump fires a nuclear weapon, precipitating an entirely believable dystopian near future. This drama series includes the amazing Rory Kinnear, whom I would watch in anything, as well as Emma Thompson in the role of a populist UK prime minister. I found the whole thing disturbing in a useful way. Do persist beyond the first episode, which feels a bit didactic.

Jenny: I’ll admit it: I love the whodunits, but I find the most popular police shows to be trite and painfully tidy (I’m looking at you, Law & Order. Dun Dun.). Recently I clicked on CRIMINAL (Netflix) and was pleased to find a short interrogation-room psychological drama, really interesting and well-acted stuff, messy like real life. And the show happens to come in four languages with four casts. The little series of 3 episodes–one in English, one in German, one in French, one in Spanish–use the same story template, and even take place on the same set. But each is its own narrative, and each lets dribble some behind-the-scenes messiness that paints the “good guys” gray. Take one miniseries as a slice of pie–nibble at it, savor it–then move on to the next for a very different flavor.

Meanwhile, if you never got around to watching Fleabag, get to it.

Cameron: I went on a cross-country airplane flight by myself this year for the first time in . . . ah. . . a decade? And I would basically recommend watching any movie, by yourself, on an airplane. It was truly delightful. I loved Booksmart, about two girls on their last night of high school. The truth is, I loved everything. I loved Yesterday, because I do remember the Beatles even though I don’t know who Ed Sheeran is. I loved The Biggest Little Farm, a documentary about a couple starting a sustainable farm. I loved The Imitation Game, which about Alan Turing (who is played by Benedict Cumberbatch). And then I also loved Mamma Mia, Here We Go Again! Seriously, I liked it so much I cried at the end. Because I was alone! On an airplane!

Emma: I like space shows, and The Expanse on Amazon is a really good one. It is set in the future and is more ‘realistic’ than the average. In particular, I love their loving attention to the physics of spaceflight and zero-gravity environments. Early seasons focus on political tensions between Earth, Mars, and the outer planets. The casting is excellent, and I live for the wardrobe of UN politico Chrisjen Avasarala. I also recommend Russian Doll on Netflix. Natasha Lyonne is wonderful as a selfish, confident, lovable woman stuck in a time loop, and the supporting cast are all compulsively watchable. Plus the entire show clocks in at less than four hours, so it is perfect for those, like me, who are basically stuck in our own time loops.

Cassie: Fleabag. Fleabag Fleabag Fleabag. Best thing I’ve watched. So I’ll enthusiastically second Jenny’s recommendation on that. (A warning: it did take me a few episodes to get over the raunch and into the show.) And then I’ll second Emma’s Russian Doll recommendation. SO GOOD. And I’ll add one original recommendation: GLOW. This Netflix series about lady wrestlers in the 1980s is so smart and entertaining. I binged. And then I finished the most recent season. And now I will remain in mourning until they release Season 4. And one final note: they released Deadwood: The Movie this year. It’s unfortunate timing. Deadwood (the series) ended in 2006. Watching the movie, I struggled to remember all the characters and their various rivalries and grievances. It made me want to re-watch the series and then re-watch the movie. So if you DO want to watch and enjoy the movie, maybe watch at least some of the series first to refresh your memory. That will also give your brain time to re-accustom itself to the odd Shakespearean dialogue.

Michelle: Almost as brilliant as Fleabag and Russian Doll is The End of the F***ing World, another coal-black comedy with a hidden sweet heart. It stars Alex Lawther’s microexpressions. May there never be a third season—the end of the second is perfect. I also really enjoyed the Criminal series: three episodes in each of four countries, all set in the same interrogation room and in front of the same coffee machine, add up to twelve very satisfying one-act plays. Right now, though, my family is passing the time before the final episode of His Dark Materials by wondering how each of our daemons would settle.

For more recommendations, here are the previous five years’ film & TV lists:

2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014

Also, Merry Christmas, LWON readers! We appreciate you.

End of Decade Reading List

By: People of LWON | December 24, 2019

Every year, the People of LWON reach into their bookshelves and Goodreads lists and towering intellects to tell you what you should be reading in the holiday season–or any other free time you may be gifted with. This is our sixth year of such pontificating. Among the books below is your next favorite:

Ann: As always, what I read for work is usually not what I’d read if I didn’t have to. So when I read for just reading, it’s almost always fiction. This year, I went through a bunch of Rumer Godden who belongs, in my mind, to the group of intelligent, literate, elegant (usually women) authors (Hilary Mantel, Penelope Fitzgerald, Jane Gardam) of books which have plots plus characters you’re interested in and in which nothing expected happens. Godden is especially good at slightly unsympathetic children and people whose faith drives them, with varying consequences. Her last book, published at age 90, had the excellent title, “Cromartie versus The God Shiva Acting through the Government of India.” I haven’t read that one. You read these books for the reason that people have always read books, to meet the people in them and hear what happened next and how it ended. So I recommend them all.

Jenny: You know what was a lovely read? The Cat’s Table by Michel Ondaatje. It’s the story of a Sri Lankan boy on a boat crossing the Indian Ocean in the 1950s with a cast of eccentric, mostly lovable characters (plus a mysterious prisoner) who help shape how he sees and experiences the world. It’s vivid and lyrical and kind of magical, a childhood adventure–a sort of circus on the sea–unlike any other I’ve encountered in literature. I was sad that it had to end.

Emma: For fiction, I recommend Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice, an apocalyptic tale set in a remote Anishinaabe community that shot through with both dread and hope. I loved his writing style–as crisp and clear as new-fallen snow. An excellent winter read. For non-fiction, I recommend How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. What sounds a bit like a guide to becoming more productive by wasting less time on social media turns out to actually be a fairly radical argument against being more productive in the first place. Using art, nature, and the hijinx of urban birds, Odell makes an exciting case for resisting our current digital capitalist system without withdrawing and for connecting to one’s bioregion in emotionally meaningful ways.

Jessa: Having read all 3,000 pages of the CFA level 1 curriculum this year in preparation for a 6-hour finance exam, I had decidedly less time for recreational reading, but I did manage to catch up on some of the works people had been raving about—Tara Westover’s Educated and Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl both more than lived up to their respective hypes. But if I cast my mind back to the last ten years of reading, the book that reliably delivers is the one I search out from the news agent’s every three months—Lapham’s Quarterly. It’s the sort of thing where everyone in some circles knows it, and in others, nobody does. You could think of it as a sort of themed, global, pan-historical Reader’s Digest. All I know is that several times over the course of reading a Lapham’s Quarterly, I will raise my head from its pages and say to myself, I F-ing love Lapham’s Quarterly.

Cassie: You’ve no doubt read Educated: A Memoir. Or someone has told you to read Educated. But if you haven’t had the chance yet, GO READ IT! Enthralling. I could not put it down. I’ll also recommend Fleishman is in Trouble. I can’t promise you’ll love it (I did. Others didn’t.) But it will keep you interested and you will have feelings about the characters. Strong feelings. Shifting feelings, perhaps. And then you’ll be able to discuss those feelings with all your friends.

Cameron: Lost and Wanted, by Nell Freudenberger. It’s a novel about theoretical physics + grief + friendship + the uncanny, which is my happy place. (Not the theoretical physics, really. But the combination.) I also sunk deep into Barbarian Days, by William Finnegan. This one is about surfing–but I think you don’t have to be interested in surfing to enjoy it. I read it before bed every night and dreamed of waves.

Sally: I spent the year in a state of numb horror about the world. It’s a little rough to watch the slow dissolution of the future I was raised to believe in. But just because hope doesn’t follow the old narratives doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist! What are the new futures no one has thought of yet? I went on a science fiction and fantasy binge, not to escape but to find stories that would spark new hope. Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse, is a cracking new take on a familiar fable. It takes place in a world drowned by the climate flood that we are all now living in vague fear of. The Native gods have returned to North America to protect the First Nations from its worst effects. But they have brought ancient monsters with them too. The story follows a young woman with a terrible power she has gained at great cost – isolation from anyone who could possibly help her to cope with it. Roanhorse’s is the kind of writing that makes you dread the dwindling number of remaining pages. Luckily, the sequel – Storm of Locusts – kicks exactly as much ass as the original.

Fans of lonely kickass protagonists might also enjoy the Murderbot Diaries, a series of novellas by Martha Wells. Her protagonist is neither a he nor a she, but a biohybrid creation of neural circuits grown around a robot chassis in order to maximise its lethality. The builders left out the unnecessary bits that make you adept at empathy and social connections and social triangulation, fluff like that. So when it accidentally achieves self-awareness, instead of going full Terminator, its primary objective becomes self-care by isolation and binge-watching box sets. Wells’ prose is so funny, moreish and relatable (chicken soup for the socially anxious soul) that I couldn’t help imbuing the murderbot with my own gender. To me, she’s a she and possibly a me.

The closest thing to a blueprint for navigating our uncertain future is Gamechanger, by L.X. Beckett, an uneasy meditation on how the fascism of the social media hive mind might be the only thing that gets us out of the ecological mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. A truly Faustian bargain. You can read the prequels for free.

Michelle: I listened to the audiobook of Milkman during a long flight, and months later I still miss the main character. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead made me laugh—right before it sent an actual chill down my spine. The Testaments stole me away for an entire day, and I’m not sorry. White Bird, a graphic novel by R.J. Palacio, the author of Wonder, made my whole family cry—after which we read it again.

Want even more suggestions? Here are the previous years’ book recommendation lists:

2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014

Image: The Scholars, by Ludwig Deutsch, 1901

Ice skating: an overanalysis

By: Emily Underwood | December 23, 2019

Skating monster, Hieronymous Bosch, Wikimedia Commons

This post appeared about a year ago, when I first joined LWON. I’m reposting it now because the Boschian horror that is ice skating season has crept up on me again, and I still don’t have disability insurance.

“This is a nightmare,” I said to my boyfriend as we walked up to a skating rink in El Dorado Hills, California. The “Family Friendly Winter Wonderland” was in a shopping mall surrounded by faux-Tuscan mansions, and the rink was packed from barrier to barrier. Pete promised peppermint bark and beer if I stuck with our plan, though, so we went ahead and rented skates.

A miniature choo-choo train chugged around the perimeter of the rink, packed with gleeful little boys. Parents lounged around the rinkside bar, day-drinking under heat lamps. No one else seemed concerned about the list of sponsors on the rink’s barrier: Marshall Medical Center, Thayer General Surgery, the West Coast Joint and Spine Center.

When Pete asked me to go ice skating with him over the Christmas holiday, I feigned excitement. Pete grew up in rural Pennsylvania and learned to ice skate as a kid. I grew up near Sacramento, California, where it hardly ever snows. Despite living an hour away from ski resorts in Tahoe, I have never mastered any sport that involves attaching blades, boards or wheels to my feet.

I wanted to be enthusiastic. But then — perhaps my fellow science journalists will relate to this — I made the mistake of entering “ice skating” into PubMed, the United States National Library of Medicine’s online database.

“Did you know that hundreds of people have been poisoned by carbon monoxide emissions from Zamboni machines at indoor ice rinks?” I asked Pete one evening, as I downloaded a case study about a girl who got impaled with an inline skate in the vagina.

There were dozens of epidemiological studies tallying the injuries associated with ice skating, ranging from broken wrists to fractured skulls to infectious warts of the feet. Many had clever titles like: “A chilling reminder: Pediatric facial trauma from recreational winter activities,” and “Skating on thin ice: a study of the injuries sustained at a temporary ice skating rink.”

Temporary ice rinks like the one in El Dorado Hills, I found, can seriously strain the capacity of local emergency rooms. Going to a rink where alcohol is served increases injury risk, as does being an adolescent boy or a beginner. “The research suggests it’s my civic duty not to go ice skating,” I told Pete.

He wrapped compression bandages around my wrists and helped me hobble onto the ice. “This is going to be the longest hour and a half of my life,” I thought, clinging to the barrier. Kids were hurling themselves across the skating rink at knee-height, apparently intent on taking down as many adults as possible. From the vantage of the beer garden it must have been hilarious. (See Christie’s post on why falling is so funny.)

Remembering the boy with undiagnosed hemophilia who hemorrhaged after a freak skating accident in New Hampshire, I focused on not slicing any of the children with my skates. Pete glided up beside me, looking composed and carefree. He tried to start a conversation. “Can’t talk,” I growled. “Ice skating.”

Some of my apprehension came from chronic lower back pain, which developed in my early thirties and may have started with a hoola hooping accident. I was at a party watching a twenty-something levitate the hoop with her hips and got a little competitive. “Hold my beer,” I said to a friend, and threw my back out with the first gyration. Sometimes, when the pain flares up, it’s excruciating to reach the toilet paper.

I contemplated the children tumbling across my path. They were not focused on preserving their ability to walk or go to the bathroom. They were not thinking about their anemic health insurance plans, or mentally calculating what a 40% copay for a wrist fracture would cost. Ah, to be young, and let parents pay for emergency room visits!

So focused on not falling was I that the power ballads blaring from the rink’s loudspeakers barely penetrated my consciousness. By a third lap I had gained some balance, however, and started listening to the music. I hummed along to “Friday I’m in Love,” summoning my inner teenager. Humming helped tune out the voice in my head screaming HOW WILL YOU TYPE IF YOUR WRISTS ARE BROKEN?! , and I let go of the barrier.

By the end of “Born in the USA” I had completed a full circumnavigation of the rink, unsupported. As I completed a fifth loop, Pete zoomed up beside me and offered me his hand. We skated until the sun went down and the neon rink lights came on, turning the ice lurid purple. As “Don’t Stop Believing” exploded from the loudspeakers, I released Pete’s hand and did a final victory lap. I made my New Year’s resolution: In 2019, I’ll buy disability insurance.

Not me — Sasha Cohen. Photo credit Rich Moffit, Wikimedia Commons.

A Little Storm Crosses the Mountains

By: Helen Fields | December 20, 2019

tall storm cloud over a green mountain, with a rainbow

One day last summer I went for a late-afternoon drive with my parents into Rocky Mountain National Park. From the safety of the rental car, we drove into a hailstorm, then into a parking lot to wait out the hailstorm–which stopped, so my dad pulled back onto the road, and it immediately started again, and finally we found another safe spot to pull off while the ice balls plonked on the car and bounced off the pavement.

A little farther along, we stopped at this curve and watched as the storm made its way across the resort town of Estes Park. It was a tiny storm but its route happened to coincide exactly with ours, as we traveled in opposite directions.

I don’t have anything profound to say about it. It was just a productive little storm cloud on a beautiful July afternoon. I was glad I was inside something with a hard roof instead of outside on a trail. And isn’t it a pretty picture?

Photo: Helen Fields (me)

Golden Boy

By: Cameron Walker | December 19, 2019

I fell in love in Japan. He was older, and so very tall. There was a glow about him, warm as sunshine. I could have sat and watched him for hours. Even though we didn’t have that much time together, I knew I would never forget him. He was so present, so grounded. Resilient after years of living, marked by all of the storms, both meteorologic and political, that he had weathered.

And so alone—not just on that path near Nijo Castle, but in the world. He had no living relatives. On a family tree, he would sit on a distant, dangling branch, separated from his kin by millions of years. And there was something about this solitude that was irresistible, too.

Continue reading →

A year in marsupial review

By: Ben Goldfarb | December 18, 2019

We’ve reached the end of another trip around the sun, which means Twitter is chockablock with year-end round-ups — here’s what I wrote, read, accomplished, etcetera — a phenomenon that generally leaves me feeling like a feckless, uncultured slacker. This December, though, I’ve resolved to celebrate my experiences rather than wallow in retrospective regret. For in 2019 I traveled to Australia and fell, head over heels, for marsupials.

To know marsupials, I’m convinced, is to love them. First are their delightfully mellifluous names, most of which have Aboriginal origins: bilby, bandicoot, quoll. (It’s high time the Tasmanian devil, that noble recycler of offal, was rechristened the purinina.) There’s their tangled, engrossing biogeography — they evolved in North America, believe it or not, before following a land bridge to South America, traversing modern-day Antarctica, and settling happily in Australia, where they speciated wildly. (South America is still home to a third of the planet’s marsupials, and is also the source of the United States’ only native pouched critter, the opossum, which at some point wandered up the Central American isthmus and into the unlatched dumpster of our hearts.)

And then, of course, there’s the pathos of their reproductive strategy — the blind, pink joey, an embryonic jellybean that by all appearances should absolutely not be finished gestating, tenaciously clambering from cloaca to pouch, locating a teat in the warm dark, and fusing itself to its mother like a vestigial limb. The offspring of placental mammals — floating lazily in hermetically sealed comfort — are mollycoddled by comparison.

The European colonists who invaded Australia, alas, didn’t afford marsupials the respect they manifestly deserve. Settlers dismissed the continent’s fauna as stupid and maladapted — a form of prejudice dubbed placental chauvinism — and opened a Pandora’s box of non-native predators and competitors (cats, foxes, rabbits, sheep). Since colonization, twenty-nine species have vanished from Australia’s ecosystems, the world’s highest extinction rate. If ever there was a mammalian infraclass in desperate need of recognition, then, it’s Marsupialia.

So without further ado: Here, in no particular order, are the Five Best Marsupials of 2019, each accompanied by a celebratory haiku. (Don’t most year-end lists feature haikus? No? Let’s move on to some photos before the internal logic of this post deteriorates further.) Note: These selections are objective and incontrovertible. All pictures by yours truly.