I figured it was a wrong number, and didn’t think anything more of it, until I got another call from a guy asking me if this was Orkin Pest Control. I told him it wasn’t and by the way, how did you get this number? “It was the second thing that came up on Yelp when I searched for ‘pest control in Greeley, Colorado,’” he said.
The idea that my unlisted number was now featured on Yelp as the place to call when you’re looking for an exterminator made me want to bury my phone in a deep hole. But when I went to Yelp and did the search the guy had described, my number was nowhere to be found. In fact, it was nowhere on Yelp. It wasn’t coming up on google searches either. Good news, but also puzzling. How was he getting my number from Yelp if my number wasn’t listed on Yelp?
I’ve been making candied orange peel regularly for some time now and I say this fearlessly: I have nailed it. The second secret (the first is, never trust sugar chemistry), which I sensed only dimly when I first wrote this, back on May 15, 2014, is that the orange peels have to be thick and taken off the heat early: see the bottom of this post. They’ll still be thickly drippy and will bond to a china plate, so I let them cool on one plate, wrestle them out of their sugar puddles, move them to another plate, repeat until they stop bonding to the plates. The Hungarians do not keep them in the refrigerator; I do, but I have no good reason. A lot of fussing but it ends in revelation. Not that the universal forces can’t shift again and make the whole recipe useless.
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The neighbors came over, maybe a year ago now, and one of them, a Hungarian physicist, brought along candied orange peel he’d made from his grandmother’s recipe. The physicist is the nicest human on earth, but his grandmother is the one I love; I’d love anyone who thought up those orange peels, their orangey goodness and little spike of bitter, the soft white sweet pith and the dense, bitey, red-golden skin. I had raptures all over the dining room table. “Yes, of course you can have the recipe,” said the physicist. “But I must tell you, you need to be careful how you make them.”
“Oh I know about sugar,” I said, and told him about the hot fudge sauce I made once and reheated twice, and the second time, it made a standing cage over the melted ice cream and when I ate it anyway, I chipped a tooth; and the little left in the pan had bonded to the metal and the pan had to be thrown away. So the physicist gave me the recipe and the most careful directions, and I made the orange peels and they were perfect, as good as any Hungarian grandmother’s. Then I made them many more times until suddenly, one day, some mysterious force in the universe shifted.
Here’s what I remember eating as a kid: Oscar Mayer bologna and American cheese (the individually wrapped slices) on white bread. Peanut butter and jelly on white bread. Honey and butter (yup!) on white bread. Grilled American cheese on white toast. Hot dogs on white buns. Deli ham on big puffy white Kaiser rolls.
Why not? After all, white bread was “enriched”! Doesn’t that sound healthy? Never mind that the bread-refining process that made Wonder such a wonder got rid of the naturally occurring nutritious bits (e.g., the mineral-rich grain coatings); “enriching” the bread was the industry’s attempt to put some of those nutrients back. I just remember how pure and soft and spongy the slices were. And it never went bad. And the label promised a loaf full of vitamins and minerals. It didn’t occur to us we were being deprived of anything, or that we were swallowing anything but good nutrition.
The other day I opened the “notes” app on my iPhone and recognized almost nothing I had written there. Scraps of thoughts, reminders, the titles of books recommended. Their context long gone, they lost their meaning and became something else. Scraps of half-drunk poetry, maybe, that begged for some pictures to renew their purpose.
I’ve prayed for rain many times, thirsty in the desert, craving a flash flood in a remote canyon. Watching rain fall, silky virga growing legs and touching ground, is worth any petition.
I don’t know if prayers work. I’ve been a supplicant in the face of an oncoming thunderstorm only to see it make a hard turn at the last moment and avoid me entirely.
What I do know, born and raised in dry country, is that you don’t curse precipitation. If it rains on your parade, consider yourself blessed.
This has been a big water year in the Southwest. Winter has kept on through spring and is touching into summer. Last week I woke to a couple inches of snow at home in Colorado. Local reservoirs are topping off, rivers are running high, and the green of spring makes me think I’m living in the Pacific Northwest, not in an arid, bony piñon and juniper woodland.
In 124 years of record keeping, the last 12 months have been the wettest in US history, a lot of that focused in my region where local snowpacks are exceeding 700 percent. In the desert, the difference is beyond profound.
Before my sophomore year of high school, I went to Sea Camp, a week-long summer program in La Jolla, Calif., for (privileged) kids like me who were interested in marine biology. We learned about fish biology during the day. At night, we roasted marshmallows under the stars before falling asleep in our bunks. I was 15. It was amazing.
One day we went to Sea World, that most controversial of theme parks, for a behind-the-scenes tour. I remember being awed by the veterinary tanks and the training pools and the vast volumes of water, into which I stared, hoping to see something dark and moving. Our tour guide was a dolphin trainer.
At one point, we came to a raised holding pool where a newborn bottlenose dolphin, days old, was swimming with its mother. I lay my hand on the side of the pool and pushed up on my toes, trying to get a better view, and both mother and baby swam toward me. They were probably hoping for a fish snack. I was breathless.
Apologies in advance, but I’m a person who quit Twitter for a month and now you’re going to have to endure the lessons I learned from my time away. Don’t worry: this post contains 0 percent yoga. And I’m still on Twitter.
Look, you may not care about Twitter, but I had a problem. I’m not going to trivialise actual addiction by comparing it to my bad habit, but the rituals were familiar. I had three different Twitter blockers installed on my phone, and I spent my days shuffling them on and off and back and forth in an intensifying game of three-card Monte, complete with regular vows that this time abstinence would follow.
Luckily, a friend had just come off a Twitter detox. He saw my increasingly prolific feed and recognised a problem, so he persuaded me to hand him my keys – password, two-factor authentication, all of it. And that was it. No more Twitter. I was cut off.
From olden days of secrets, lies, conspiracies, Russians spies, bad things going on in a good world, and increasing numbers of people FOIA-ing the hell out of things, I bring you the case of a science historian going about his business of looking behind walls and under rocks and finding a story called Dead Atom Bomb Expert Carried From Home.
This first ran March 18, 2013
Alex Wellerstein is an historian of science at the American Institute of Physics [update: at the Stevens Institute of Technology] with an obsession (ok, an academic interest) about the atomic bomb and in particular, about the patents taken out on it. Patents on the atomic bomb seem odd: apparently the government wanted to be sure it owned the rights, and not the “private contractors, private scientists, and universities” who actually designed and built the bomb.
Anyway, in Wellerstein’s researches into the Manhattan Project’s patent office, he saw the name of a staffer named Captain Paul P. Stoutenburgh. Not that the name stood out, Wellerstein says. Stoutenburgh was a guy doing his job, which would have entailed knowing the patentable details of the bomb. Nevertheless, as a good historian does, Wellerstein tracked down the documented particulars on Stoutenburgh from his birth, through his education, jobs, etc. etc., until his death. And then he did stand out. On April 1, 1946, he apparently shot first his wife and his 12-year old daughter and then himself. Word was that he had a “phobia,” that he’d been warning the War Department (the one we now call the Defense Department), that he was worried sick that bomb secrets were being leaked.
Which they were. At the time, Klaus Fuchs, among others, was at Los Alamos working on the bomb and sending secrets to the Russians as fast as he could. Fuchs’ spying wasn’t discovered until much later but in that spring of 1946, a good bit of media coverage was about Russian-paid spies.
The press coverage of the Stoutenburghs’ deaths implied that Stoutenburgh, who may have tried to commit suicide the month before, was depressed, paranoid, and “couldn’t take it anymore.” But Wellerstein is an historian — “I poke around in these things compulsively,” he says, “it’s sort of my job” — and has a working knowledge of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which he began using. The FBI’s reply was, he said, “Kafkaesque”: they had a file on Stoutenburgh but they destroyed it so they now don’t know what was in it. “Not so helpful,” says Wellerstein. The Washington, DC, Police Department also destroyed old records, as did the DC Coroner’s Office, case closed. “Army Intelligence had nothing on Stoutenburgh,” he said, “a FOIA to the National Archives turned up nothing.”
He thinks it odd, the lack of official reports of the death; he thinks that officials must have been “poking around” into an unusual death — “If you even sneezed near Los Alamos during World War II, the Manhattan Project security people would have opened a file on you” – and he should have found those reports. He did find two references to a possible conspiracy/cover-up. After the deaths, a contemporary former Marxist, anti-Communist, neo-conservative, political pundit was looking into the Stoutenburghs’ deaths and in the pundit’s papers, Wellerstein found reports of a phone conversation with someone whom the pundit believed knew a lot more than he was saying. And in other papers, Wellerstein found that some friend of some physicist had called a Congressional staffer, saying the physicist knew Stoutenburgh, knew that he had a gun that wasn’t the same calibre as the one used, that he was a poor shot, and that Stoutenburgh had told somebody who told somebody else that papers from his desk would disappear and then be returned. Not a 100-percent air-tight convincing case for a conspiracy, is it.
Wellerstein says, as does everybody else, that classification and secrecy come accompanied by talk of conspiracies. Inevitably, he says, the kind of secrecy that accompanied the building of the atomic bomb and secrecy in general “engenders this kind of speculation,” and “I wouldn’t be sending out Freedom of Information Act requests left and right if he didn’t have an atomic connection, either.” But any alternative conspiratorial scenario that he can think of for the Stoutenburghs’ deaths wouldn’t have a 100-percent air-tight convincing case either.
In the end, he thinks it’s just another sad story in a world of sad stories. “One almost hopes there was something more sinister to it,” he says, “because it would keep it from seeming so pointlessly tragic. But pointlessly tragic is probably just what it was.”
And my own interest in it? I interviewed an old physicist who knew Klaus Fuchs, who had been at Los Alamos with him and who, along with a group of seven other scientists, for a year and a half ate three meals a day with Fuchs. “He was perfectly ok,” the old physicist said. “I mean, he wasn’t the funniest guy or anything. But I wouldn’t have suspected.” That is, sometimes bad things really are going on under the usual world.
Another reason I’m interested: Wellerstein is a beautifully-educated beautiful writer who calls himself an “archive rat,” and I love following somebody like that — with his FOIA’s and his documentary evidence and his common sense and his persistence and his taste for good stories even when they’re sad – down the rabbit hole.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Summary Brief on Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs” (12 February 1951), (Excerpt), in Klaus Fuchs FBI file, FBI Vault version., via Restricted Data
These photos are from Wellerstein’s blog, not because I didn’t try to find others but because the others, especially ones about Fuchs, I did find which were in Creative Commons were also impossible to crop. But if you’re interested, here’s the ones from the FBI and the British MI5.
