Redux: The Financially Damaging Myth of No Effort

By: | November 27, 2018

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It’s the end of the year, which is a time that I generally spiral into complete crisis. Did I do enough this year? Did I produce enough? Did I spend too much time on Twitter? Did I meet my goals? What the hell did I even do for the last 11 months? What do I have to show for it? And so on and so forth. I look around at all my peers and role models, and it always feels like they’ve done so much more than I have, and yet also managed to make it look effortless and cool. In an attempt to remind myself that in fact, hard work is hard and pretending it isn’t is detrimental, I’m here to revisit this post from 2016. Hopefully it helps name something you’ve experienced too. 

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A few weeks ago now I went to something called XOXO, a festival for independent artists. There are lots of recaps of this conference on the internet so I won’t try to add to that pile. But I did want to tie together two things I heard that I think are intrinsically related, and that I have been thinking a lot about myself: the ways in which money and work and public persona all intersect. I don’t have a fancy name for this, but let me explain. Continue reading →

Fellowship #2: Calibration

By: | November 26, 2018

Jessa Gamble is embedded in an experimental evolution lab at the University of Ottawa.

Hope Jahren writes that you can hear corn growing in the Midwest. It sounds like the collective rustle of husks adjusting to accommodate the day’s inch of growth. I am tempted to put a microphone in the incubator. Would my bacteria whine or hiss as they grow? Amplified, would there be a little crackle or snap as daughter cells break free of each other?

The incubator is the one place we want things to grow. Everywhere else those same organisms become weeds. “Contamination” is another word for growing in the wrong place, and fighting it is the whole game in this lab. Our implements of war are open flame, alcohol, and paranoia—the stuff of revolution.

Continue reading →

Redux: Weapons-Grade Private Enterprise

By: | November 23, 2018

A little while ago, I was talking casually to an old arms-controller.  “What have you been up to?” I said.  “Talking to the Russians,” he said.  The Russians he would have been talking to were probably nuclear policy experts or nuclear weapons scientists and they probably would have been talking about ways of controlling international nuclear stockpiles.  I didn’t ask for the specifics of what they talked about because 1) this was a social occasion; and 2) 30 seconds into the answer, I would have been in right over my head anyway. My point is, this particular arms-controller is 90 years old.  His colleague in arms control, William Perry, ex-Secretary of Defense, is 91 and all over Twitter,  e.g., last week: “I personally experienced 2 nuclear false alarms in a period of 4 years – if those alarms had been brought to the President, he would have had 7-10 minutes to make a decision whether to launch our own land-based missiles in retaliation.”  Smart, educated, experienced guys.  They’re old enough to know about nuclear weapons first-hand; they’re not yet old enough to stand down. You don’t have to think hard to know why.

This was first published September 23, 2014.Spent_nuclear_fuel_hanfordOver the years, I’ve met a number of physicists who had direct or indirect connections with the Manhattan Project and who then spent the rest of their lives trying to get the nuclear weapons genie back into the bottle and the bottle corked.  I think of these physicists as the old arms-controllers. They’re impressive people. They’re not so much uncheery as they are highly focused on the job of corking the genie.  Like, they’re pushing 90 years old and still stumping around full of current and complex information, giving talks and publishing things and backing politicians into corners.

I’ve just read about one (I’m pretty sure he qualifies as an old arms-controller though like others of them, he’s a little opaque to the all-seeing eye of Google) named Thomas Neff.  I’m reviewing a book about nuclear weapons. I learned that during the Cold War, the world had 65,000 nuclear warheads and around 2,000 tons of the fissile stuff – mostly weapons-grade uranium and some plutonium — that make nuclear warheads so effective.

All this stuff had to be made:  weapons-grade uranium is processed, or enriched, from lesser uranium; and plutonium is manufactured outright.  God didn’t make this stuff; we did.  It’s all over the place; it’s proliferated to all corners of the earth; most of it is in Russia, the U.S. comes second.  And once made, the stuff can’t be unmade; it can’t be destroyed.  We’re stuck with it.  You have to wonder why God doesn’t get disgusted and just shut down the whole stupid human endeavor, another Flood maybe.

Until Thomas Neff, a physicist/non-proliferation expert at MIT, figured out how the situation might be improved with a little private enterprise. Continue reading →

Redux: The Mark We Leave

By: | November 22, 2018
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A friend, author Ginger Strand, recently took this picture of a handprint I spray-painted on a wall in Manhattan. When I put it up a few years ago, the wall was blank, and she wanted me to know that graffiti has bloomed around it, along with this sweet little cluster of stars somebody put there (how I love you, whomever you are). On Thanksgiving, when in school we used to trace our hands onto construction paper and turn them into turkeys, I thought this would be a fitting post. The post originally went up in the winter of 2016.

Rounding a corner in Manhattan, I saw a handprint spray-painted on a wall. It was my hand. I had put it there last summer, my first and only piece of graffiti. It was nothing special, no artistic flair other than my five fingers. I had gloved my hand in plastic wrap and waved spray paint over it, creating a simple stencil out of part of my body, one of the oldest forms of enduring human expression.

The wall of the building had originally been a sprawling gallery of graffiti until, against the wishes of those living inside, the city whitewashed the whole thing. I was staying with one of the residents when the white-washing occurred. She invited me to go to the wall and plant a new seed. She was hoping graffiti artists would soon return and start the process again. A print was needed to kick off the next wave.

The oldest known rock art of a handprint was recently dated at 39,900 years ago in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The technique was more or less the same as mine. Wet pigment had been blown across and hand pressed against the rock to leave a negative impression.

Is there anything more indelible and primally human than the image of a handprint? The oldest print in the cave on Sulawesi is part of 12 prints painted at different times around images of animals. What was on their minds is hard to say, but it is a sentiment that is seen around the world. Other Paleolithic stencils of hands have been found throughout caves in Southern France, the oldest in Chauvet Cave dating to 31,000 years ago. El Castillo Cave in Spain has handprint stencils in red ochre dating to 37,300 years ago. From Indonesia to Europe, give or take 10,000 years, people were leaving the same expression. Continue reading →

We walk on waves; they fly below

By: | November 21, 2018

It has been said that penguins appear to be wearing tuxedos—crisp and elegant in their blacks and whites. This is not so of Humboldt penguins. If Humboldt penguins are wearing tuxedos, then they have been wearing them to jump trains for a couple of weeks, sleeping atop coal slag or down in the dingy corners of yawning boxcars. The birds are gray and ragged around the edges, their white chests flecked as if with cinder burns. And their eyes look like the last edge of a hangover receding—bloodshot, merry, curious. They look like they have seen some things.

These are the eyes that peer up at me through the wire-grate door of an upended cat carrier, on the deck of a boat, 35 miles offshore of Chile in the southeast Pacific Ocean. Continue reading →

Mary Poppins Is An Anarchist In Strict-Nanny Disguise

By: | November 20, 2018

“If this was a democracy, you would still lose,” is something my husband has told our 3-year-old after she objects to our decisions. I can feel the frustration build in her as though it were tightening my own chest. But in the world of Mary Poppins, she doesn’t have to take that kind of adult treatment. In that world, authority figures seem strict, but they are actually magical beings who provide weird and happy experiences, usually including animals. In that world, a kid can clean up her room by sheer magic! Cast off the shackles of yesterday, indeed.

I have watched Mary Poppins with my daughter approximately 367 times since March, and I’ve realized something. My daughter loves it for more than the animation, the silly songs, and the grace and wit of the inimitable Julie Andrews (whom none of us deserves). I think she loves it because the movie appeals, in grinning Technicolor, to a kid’s natural sense of anarchy. Mary Poppins is a gloriously leftist fantasy and I am here for it. Continue reading →

Singing Our Hearts Out

By: | November 19, 2018

This was originally posted August 5, 2013. I just spent all weekend singing with many of the same people I was singing with then, so I thought this – my first post as a person of LWON – was worth sharing again. 

That's me in the red jacket.
That’s me in the red jacket.

Recently I was rehearsing a glorious 16th-century motet with a group of 20 or so people. Haec dies quam fecit Dominus, the song begins. This is the day that the Lord has made; let us be glad and rejoice in it. It’s an Easter text and a lovely thought, whether or not you think the Lord actually made this day or whether the day made itself, thank you very much, from the rotation of the Earth. This is a day; let’s enjoy it.

The piece is by William Byrd, an English composer of Shakespeare’s time—yes, he’s wearing a ruff in his portrait—who wrote a lot of sacred music like this. The idea that different people could sing different things at the same time was fairly new in the Renaissance, and composers like Byrd went to town with it. Continue reading →

Elves in the Balance: An interview with naturalist David Mizejewski

By: | November 16, 2018

I first saw the elves on the floor of my best friend’s station wagon when I was seven. Grinning up from the back of a big book, these elves looked different from any other elves I’d seen. I’d always thought elves were a little wimpy, but instead of being fragile fey, these elves seemed fun. Even better–they had wolves!

This was my first experience with Elfquest, a fantasy comic series that is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. The series, created by Wendy and Richard Pini, chronicles the adventures of an elfin tribe that has a deep connection to their landscape and to wolves. Years ago, I read and re-read the first four graphic novel compilations so often that the pages grew soft. Recently, I came back to Elfquest after a long absence to find that not only had new installments had appeared, but that an extensive community of Elfquest lovers was frolicking (and also, delving into extensive analysis and speculation) online.

One of these Elfquest superfans is David Mizejewski, who has been the co-host of a podcast dedicated to the most recent part of the series, Elfquest: The Final Quest. He’s also a naturalist who works for the National Wildlife Federation and he appears regularly on television and radio shows to talk about wildlife.

As I listened to the podcast, I found that Mizejweski was sprinkling in details about altruism in nature and wolf social structure as he discussed the latest cliffhanger with co-host Ryan Browne. Last month I talked with him about the connection between his work as a naturalist and his interest in the series. The following is a condensed and edited version of our conversation. Continue reading →