If there’s any animal that could use a new PR agency, it’s got to be the electric eel. I mean, think about it – what other animal doesn’t even have its own correct name? You’ve probably heard that an electric “eel” is no eel at all but rather a fish (a knifefish, to be exact). From this basic signal that we couldn’t care less, the list of insults continues: for centuries we figured “the” electric eel was a single species. When we finally bothered to check, it turned out there are actually three.
But who cares? Electric eels are just slimy things that will zap you to death, right?
When LWONers aren’t writing LWON posts for your edification and pleasure, some of them are writing books. Excuse our self promotion, but we think our books are pretty good, and as it is the holiday season, we wanted to make sure our dear readers are aware of the latest ones. See below for the books we’ve written this year (also other years), one or more of which might make the perfect gift for someone you know. You’re welcome.
The Trouble with Gravity: Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feet (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), by Richard Panek. Nobody knows what gravity is, and just about nobody knows that nobody knows what gravity is. The exception is scientists. They know that nobody knows what gravity is because they know that they don’t know what gravity is. A brief history of a big idea.
“Richard Panek takes us on a journey that is original, brave, and ultimately very beautiful: a reminder that sometimes science isn’t a solution but a search.” — James Gleick, author of Time Travel: A History
Virga & Bone: Essays from Dry Places (Torrey House Press), by Craig Childs. This is a short, pocket-sized book (think stocking stuffer!) of experiences in North American deserts, flying through a sheet of virga over Monument Valley, walking along routes of ancient shell traders in the dunes of northern Mexico.
“In the actual Southwest, blemishes count as much as beauty. Character abides in both, which is how Craig Childs sees it. And to see the desert through his eyes, as Virga & Bone allows us to do, is to glimpse its tangible, imperfect glory. This is a bright hard gem of a book.” — William DeBuys, author of A Great Aridness and The Last Unicorn
Good To Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery (W. W. Norton & Company) by Christie Aschwanden. Named to Science News’s top books of 2019 and NPR’s favorite books of the year.
“This authoritative, delightful, and much-needed book slices through the hype around athletic recovery, and will surely cement Christie Aschwanden’s status as one of the world’s top science writers. I laughed a lot, and learned even more.” — Ed Yong, best-selling author of I Contain Multitudes
Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018), by Ben Goldfarb.Eager reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat. Today, a growing coalition of “Beaver Believers”―including scientists, ranchers, and passionate citizens―is hard at work restoring these creatures to their former haunts, from the Nevada deserts to the Scottish highlands. Eager is a powerful story about one of the world’s most influential species, how our landscapes have changed over the centuries, and how beavers can help us fight drought, flooding, wildfire, extinction, and climate change. Ultimately, it’s about how we can learn to coexist with our fellow travelers on this planet. Winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and named a best book of 2018 by the Washington Post.
Unlikely Heroes (Workman) by Jennifer S. Holland. Full disclosure, this book has been around for a while. But it makes such a great gift that we’ve decided to include it here anyway. It’s part of a series that began with the wildly popular Unlikely Friendships, the New York Times bestseller packed with true stories of unexpected bonds between different species. This third book in the series, also a best seller, features animals doing equally remarkable things for others–helping, adopting, nursing, saving lives. Perfect for children, teachers, friends, mothers-in-law, even the surly kid who mows your lawn. As one fan on Amazon commented: “OMG these stories are amazing!”
Suggestible You (National Geographic) by Erik Vance. Also not new. Also a pretty good gift for that crazy family member who swears echinacea and crystals are the secret to a healthy happy life. Interestingly, it’s also the perfect gift for that stubborn loved one who just won’t stop making fun of your echinacea and crystals. This book steps past all the Twitter fights of whether alternative medicine is effective or not and digs into exactly what happens when your belief changes your body. And it’s not what you think.
You finish the book, you don’t want it to be over with, there’s still one more printed page, so you read it. “A Note on the Type,” it says, and heads off into the highest weeds: the name of the font in which the book is printed, then the font’s forebears, its continuing history, its inventor, its inventor’s history, and sometimes its virtues. This is blindingly irrelevant, unsatisfying, and irritating, and so on purpose I never read it.
Until the book I just finished, Imogen Gower’s The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, when I hit the “Note on the Type” page and kept on reading:
This book is set in Caslon, a typeface named after Willliam Caslon (1692-1766).
Aaaand it just goes on from there, the better part of a page. The voice was slightly prissy and assumed I wanted to know a great deal about the William Caslon and his adventures in, as it said, “typefounding.” Caslon founded a family of typefounders but before that, he was apprenticed to an engraver of gunlocks (and of course gun barrels too) in London, then opened his own shop for silver chasing. I don’t know the meanings of: typefounding, gunlock, silver chasing, and a part I left out, bookbinders’ stamps. Caslon’s skill in cutting letters – I don’t know what that is either – attracted two printers whose names I’ll furnish if you need me to and who backed him to buy typefounding equipment. The fonts Caslon cut for a folio edition of John Selden – of whom I’ve never heard – “excited great interest” and thereafter Caslon just went from strength to strength. His font has many virtues, each ennumerated, and its “general effect is clear and open but not weak or delicate.”
WHY is this interesting? WHY? And who thinks I want to know? And who in the name of the sweet baby Jesus writes these things?
At a biological field station in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeast Arizona — towering canyons and clear-running creeks — a Stanford scientist attending a poetry workshop volunteered to get up for an evening reading. He’d spent the week studying with poet Sherwin Bitsui in an environmental writing program put on by Orion magazine, using specimen labs and the cafeteria as workspaces, people sitting outside in sun and sycamore shade with their notebooks. He explained to the audience in folding chairs that as a climate scientist, he grows frustrated communicating empirical thought and seeing little result in the real world, which is why he chooses to practice a different kind of writing. With a page in his hand, he came to exercise his poetic side.
He’s “still learning to write,” as he puts it, but has published poetry in more than a dozen literary journals. In Cold Mountain Review, from his poem “White Noise,”
The sound of glaciers melting isn’t towering cliffs of ice thundering into the azure sea or the crescendo of meltwater swelling from purl to torrent. It’s the pop of gunshots, bubbles snapping free from frozen translucent cages.
A few months ago, I visited the Pasteur Institute, a research center in Paris dedicated to the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases. The trip included a tour of the apartment and crypt of Louis Pasteur, the 19th century French chemist and microbiologist who developed vaccines against rabies and anthrax.
My favorite part of the tour was Pasteur’s bathroom. I thoroughly enjoyed imagining Pasteur splashing about in his porcelain basin, or soaking in the bathtub supplied with hot water from impressively modern plumbing (for the 1800s). It must have been nice to take a hot bath after a long day harvesting spinal cords from rabid rabbits.
From the rabbit spinal cords, Pasteur extracted a weakened version of the rabies virus which he used to develop a rabies vaccine. In his crypt, where he is buried with his wife, gilt mosaics depict the rabbits and dogs Pasteur used in his experiments, as well as a 9 year-old boy who received the first human dose of the vaccine, after being mauled by a rabid dog.
The campus of the National Institutes of Health is in Bethesda, Md. In the 1930s, the kernel of today’s NIH was part of “Tree Tops,” the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Luke I. Wilson. It has lots of lovely old brick buildings and squeezed-in bits of lawn. Lots of nice big trees, too.
One day in late October, I was on the NIH campus, spending the day at a meeting where my job was to sit at the end of the long table and take notes. (The life of a science writer is not always full of glamour.) At lunchtime, I guided several of the meeting’s attendees to the nearest cafeteria.
In front of NIH’s Building 1, I stopped for this: A carpet of acorns along the edge of the sidewalk. Oaks and some other tree species do something called “masting”–they make few or no seeds some years, and throw all of their babies on the ground at once in other years. This is thought to help them avoid predators; the squirrels that run around the NIH campus can eat a lot of acorns, but not this many acorns.
I first wrote about our old, scared dog five years ago in the summer. He’d had a hard life before he got to us, and as he got older, he seemed to get more and more anxious. Last month while we were traveling, we got a call from our dear vet that it was time. Here’s to Hamish–may he have nothing to fear anymore.
These are the dog days. Hot as a dog, lazy as a dog, wanting to curl up and take naps like a dog. Please, let us lie, sleeping like them, on these summer afternoons.
But the phrase didn’t originate from the habits of our earthly canine
companions. Instead, it came from Sirius, the dog star. In July and
early August, Sirius rises and sets with the sun. People once thought
that the combined power of our daytime star and the brightest one in our
night sky brought the full heat of summer.
Here below, our own dog star’s light has started to dim. We got him
from a rescue group nearly six years ago. He’s a strange brew of
Labrador and possibly Great Dane—100 pounds with an enormous head—and
somewhere between eight and ten years old. We might be seeing the shine
from Sirius, 8.7 light years away, from around the time he was born.
