I Finished An Abandoned Craft Project (So Proud)

By: | August 29, 2019

I have a bit of a t-shirt problem. I love the graphics. I like how someone at the gym will say, “Hey, I was at that concert, too! Wasn’t it great?” I love wearing something that represents my neighborhood when I’m traveling far away. I love how, every time I take a t-shirt out of the drawer, I remember the event or place where I got it, and how that place made me feel.

T-shirts have their limits, as external memory devices. They wear out. And, no matter how many times I tell myself I have enough t-shirts, they pile up. A reasonable thing to do would be to give them away. And I do, sometimes. But what if I forgot the thing forever? Anyway, nobody wants my old t-shirts.

So I chose shirts that I loved, but didn’t want to wear anymore, and I cut a big square from each one. My mom probably helped; she’s made several quilts. With a sewing machine, I assembled the 49 blocks in rows and columns. Then the sandwich: the sewed-together t-shirts, a layer of fluffy batting, and a piece of backing material. I pulled the whole stack loosely together with long lines of big stitches.

Then I quilted. And quilted. And quilted.

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Summer Feet

By: | August 28, 2019

At the beginning of summer, my feet often feel tender. There is a particular stretch of asphalt between the university parking lot and the beach that is especially pitted, and the sharp dark bits of broken ground make me cringe even before I step onto the road.

I often choose a different route to the beach, down the steep steps that are soft wood, worn by salt air and waves. But one of my friends likes to walk the bumpy path. While I dodge back and forth, taking a few steps on a curb, another on a small island of sidewalk, she charges straight down the bumpy asphalt. “I’m working on my summer feet,” she told me once. How good would that be, I thought, to have soles so thick that I didn’t feel anything?

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The Misadventures of Garbage Dog

By: | August 27, 2019

Yesterday was National Dog Day, so I thought it only appropriate to repost this story about my dog and her insatiable appetite. She’s five now, and still insatiable.

Perhaps there was a time when our dog, Bea, didn’t eat everything. If so, I don’t remember it. At first, we thought it might be a puppy thing. But this month she turned two, and it seems clear that her insatiable appetite is a permanent part of her personality. Dogs aren’t known for their discriminating taste, but most dogs will balk at . . . well . . . something. Not my garbage dog. She is happiest when her mouth is full.

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Flora sapiens

By: | August 26, 2019
A soft green plant with many tiny leaflets.

Can plants behave? Can they weigh risk against reward? Do they have personalities? At least one study suggests they can and do—and that we’ve missed their complex behavior in part because they live life at such a different pace.

Mimosa pudica, or “sensitive plant” is a frilly plant in the pea family with a wonderful talent—when touched, its leaflets fold up, demurely and rather sedately (but fast as all-get-out by plant standards) as if to say “I’m too proud and reserved to be eaten.”

The plant, despite its rather refined air, has weedy proclivities and has naturalized across the tropics, so its party trick must be adaptive. But the “touch-me-not”, as it is also called, has to do a bit of cost benefit analysis when deploying its rapid-fire defensive mode. You see, although closing the leaves reduces the area available to munching herbivores like insects, it also reduces photosynthesis by about 40%. Much like an animal that cannot forage or hunt for food while it is hiding, the plant can’t eat while it is tucked away. So how does it decide how long to keep those lovely bipinnate leaves hidden?

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Some Web

By: | August 23, 2019

May I ask a favor? If you spot a spider web today, avoid barreling through it and take the time to look it over. Crouch down, really examine it. Imagine the making of it, that Sisyphean task that the web builders face day after day. Say hello to the spider—she’s around there somewhere, hiding off to the side if not smack-dab at the web’s center–and wish her well in her hunt for a meal. Appreciate her tireless persistence. Who among us humans is as committed to work? A spider is, after all, always on the job. And for any species that makes one, a web is both its greatest asset and, familiar to every homeowner, its most time-consuming project.

I’m taking my own advice this morning. The spiders in my yard work through the night, some in two dimensions, others in three. By dawn there are silken purses, spirals, and mad scribbles filling otherwise empty spaces, with connective strands reaching every which way. Sheet webs bind up the grass. Dense silken layers fill corners with wide-mouthed funnels and miniature tents. And the orbs–so many orbs!–are perfect, still fresh and whole. The display is testimony: Nature’s best architects are artists with a flair for math.

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Chris Arnade’s Book: Dignity

By: | August 22, 2019

Ann: The first thing I have to say is, that is a glorious title. Was it yours? I ask because with every book I’ve written, the title was a matter of intense negotiations which I usually lost, and I wonder how you got away with such elegance and relevance both.

Chris:  It was my editor’s choice, despite it being one of two words on a post-it-note attached to my computer I used to remind me while writing (the other was Humility). We went back and forth for weeks with me in denial about how important a title is and also being cynical in assuming it would have to be something I hated.  All along I was fortunate to have an editor (Bria Sandford) who not only got what I wanted to write, but helped me write it, even though I think some of the decisions we made wouldn’t have been approved by marketing worried only about increasing book sales.

Chris: I wrote most of the book sitting in the back corner of my local McDonald’s and that of course attracted lots of questions. When I told people I was writing a book they just looked at my blankly, like I was crazy, and then would ask me what was it about or the title. I tried various things, and eventually found what resonated most was, “You can learn everything about America in a McDonald’s.”  So that was also my working title in my head for much of the process.

Ann:  And I know, because you’ve guest-posted on LWON several times, that this preoccupation of yours with the south-side of the class divide started pre-Trump. So you’ve spent years, looking with your ex-physicist, ex-Wall-Street-quant’s eye at people you call the back row — who are not the kids in the front row waving their hands because they’ve got the answers, who are also people you grew up with.  And you called what you saw, Dignity.

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A real cancer hero

By: | August 21, 2019

Fucking cancer. It just killed one of the finest editors I’ve ever known, and the sadness weighs on my heart like an anchor to this terrible world. Cancer also claimed the life of my dear friend Karen Hornbostel. I’ve been thinking about Karen lately, and what she might have thought of Lance Armstrong’s recent comeback. (Various media outlets are offering him a platform from which to spew his opinions. Apparently his doping and general terribleness are not a reason to turn away clicks.) This post originally ran on October 12, 2012.

In the photo, Karen is smiling. We’re clowning around, engulfed in a spring day with nowhere to be but out on our bikes. Breast cancer has already pushed its way into Karen’s life, but the demon is on hiatus, and she has gleefully stuffed her bra to announce that cancer can take her breasts but never her sense of humor.

This month marks six years since Karen Hornbostel died. I’ve been thinking of her this week as the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency released 1,000 pages of evidence showing a vast doping conspiracy by Lance Armstrong and his entourage. The affidavits, emails, bank records and other documents paint a picture of Armstrong as a bully and a cheat.

I wish Karen was around to discuss Armstrong’s downfall. She admired Lance, and in many ways, she modeled her cancer fight after his. In 2003, the Lance Armstrong Foundation (now Livestrong) awarded Karen its “Spirit of Survivorship” award. It was an honor she proudly accepted from Armstrong himself. Like him, she vowed never to yield to cancer, and indeed she fought it to her last breath.

The USADA documents show that Armstrong cheated to win his seven Tour de France victories. The evidence is now overwhelming. The heroic, triumphant tale he (and Sally Jenkins) depicted in his books was a fraud. As Bonnie Ford explains at ESPN, “anyone who remains unconvinced simply doesn’t want to know.”

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Whispering Walls and the Nature of Acoustic Geometry

By: | August 20, 2019

I was at the Getty Museum in LA not long ago, and inside its cavernous entrance my kids and I found a spot where we could stand one at a time, speaking, making sounds, snapping, clapping, and hearing ourselves bounce back in surround-sound. Since this post originally ran November 21, 2017, I’ve found numerous more places like this.

In caves and rock walls of the southern Utah desert, pictographs have been painted, added to the backs of clamshell-shaped sandstone enclosures. Many are noted to have acoustic properties, meaning these ancient, Indigenous images seem to be correlated with the way sound reflects around them. I’ve spoken in a normal voice back and forth from one sheltered rock art panel to another an eighth of a mile downcanyon. The way sound spreads and is refocused, we could hear each other’s every word.

James Farmer, from the Utah Rock Art Research Association, wrote that panels from the ghostly and enigmatic Barrier Creek tradition in Utah (pictured above) contain what he sees as thunderstorm motifs. At one of these Barrier Creek panels, he witnessed a cloudburst with thunder, waterfalls, and falling boulders. He wrote about the intensification of sound from the storm around the rock art, “it seems inconceivable to me that any ancient archaic hunter-gatherers witnessing a similar event would not have been just as astonished as me, and would have naturally invested the location with divine, supernatural powers.”

The nascent field of “archaeoacoustics” studies the way sound and archaeological sites interact. I look at this as not just an ancient feature, but one that we walk through everyday. Cathedrals and capital domes have been noted for the way they capture and amplify sound. By happenstance or not, resonance is part of the way we relate to architecture, whether human made or carved by nature.

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