Announcing: A Science-Themed Peeps Contest

By: | October 12, 2018

A bunny peep looks through a microscope at a chick peep.

I’m not sure where the idea first came from. I think it was tossed around in a comment section – here on LWON, maybe, or on a Facebook post. And it seemed like a great idea. But it also seemed like a lot of work.

It turns out, if you want to do something that seems like too much work to even bother with, you get Siri Carpenter on board. Siri is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Open Notebook, the website that helps science writers be better at science writing, and as of this weekend she’s the new president of the National Association of Science Writers.

And that’s why I’m proud to announce today: The World’s Finest (and Only…As Far As We Know) Science-Themed Peeps Diorama Contest! It’s sponsored by The Open Notebook, me (Helen Fields) and my peeps-diorama-making teammates, Joanna Church and Kate Ramsayer.

Head on over to The Open Notebook to read about it, or behold some of our past Peeps dioramas for inspiration: Hamilpeep, Moby Peep, Sweaters for Peepguins, or Mary Anning: Paleontolopeep. Or ask Dr. Google for many, many other Peeps dioramas. We’re not accepting entries until February, which means you have plenty of time to come up with the best idea ever. We look forward to peeping it.

Peep with lab goggles; geologist peep; entomologist peep; astronomer peep

Illustrations: Helen Fields

Green

By: | October 11, 2018

It’s embarrassing enough that it took me 12 years to go to Channel Islands National Park, especially since I see the islands almost every day. Last month, I got on board the dive boat that would take us to the place they call the Galapagos of North America. At last! The captain said something about Dramamine, but I didn’t really pay attention.

The trip takes about two and a half hours. After the first 30 minutes, I stood white-knuckled at the railing until the islands appeared. There were dolphins. I love dolphins! I hardly looked at these ones, even though there might have been three dozen of them. Instead I stared at the horizon as if it was an oncoming lifeboat.

When we finally anchored in a cove. I went downstairs to change into a wetsuit. Another passenger asked how I was doing. “Fine,” I said. Then I started losing my breakfast, and possibly the previous dinner as well. Later, once it was funny, my husband told me he was impressed with the force and the volume that I managed to vomit. At the time, he kindly got me a trashcan and brushed my hair away from my mouth. Continue reading →

Everything Is Terrible So Here Are Some Animals Playing Fetch

By: | October 10, 2018

Dear readers: Everything is terrible. It feels like the beginning of the end of the world. Or maybe the middle of the end of the world. My brain spends its days vacillating between wild panic and stubborn denial. My denial actually takes the form of obsessive online research, which is why I have wasted approximately 49 hours shopping for the perfect twin bed for my toddler. I guess what I’m saying is this: I’ve got nothing for you unless you want a funeral wail or a detailed map of the excruciating decision tree that landed me on a web site called Planet Bunk Beds.

I’m assuming you don’t. And I refuse to subject you to more of my musings on mass shootings or German words that describe my despair. So I will give you this instead: two videos of unlikely animals playing fetch. You have permission to watch them both as many times as you want.

 

An Open Letter to Whoever the Hell Is In Charge of the Green Stuff in My Backyard

By: | October 9, 2018

I began my undergraduate studies in 1995. I completed them in 1999 and moved into a shared apartment overlooking the San Francisco Bay surrounded by a mix of native plants and xeriscaping. Since then, I have lived in South Africa, Santa Cruz, Mexico City, DC, and even spent a year on the road.

Never in all that time have I had to mow a lawn.

There are many things that you do not know you missed until you come back to them. The smell of star jasmine in the summer. A fresh winter rain in the redwoods. The song of a cardinal in spring. English bracken in the fall. It’s like seeing an old friend you haven’t thought about in years.

Lawn mowing is not one of these things. Lawn mowing is the opposite of these things. It’s that thing that you never realized you hated until you had to do it again. It’s like seeing that prick you knew in high school 20 years later and realizing that he’s still a prick.

Now that I have moved from the hemisphere’s largest city to a small suburban community outside Baltimore, I have had to mow my first lawn since Clinton was in office. The last time I fired up a mower, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was still running. Continue reading →

Redux: A Death In the Forest

By: | October 8, 2018
A beautiful old woman
My grandmother, Jean Beck

Note: This post originally appeared in December of 2016.

I find a stick and use it to break up the dry twists of coyote scat I have found on the trail. Shit is nature’s obituary page. In each pile are the traces of lives recently lost.

In this particular excreta I find a sprinkling of little white brittle bones—bird bones. And then I pull out a whole bird’s foot, about the size of a quarter: yellow and reptilian with three forward toes with serious looking claws, and one backward toe, higher up on the ankle, also clawed.

I email a picture to my brother in law, Vanya Rohwer, now the Curator of Birds & Mammals at Cornell University’s Museum of Vertebrates. He guesses it was a Steller’s jay or varied thrush. Then he adds, ‘The jay falling prey to a coyote seems a little dubious though—trickster vs. trickster—and i think the jay would win…. If it is a jay, perhaps the coyote found an old hawk kill and scavenged the foot.”

Continue reading →

Editor’s Note

By: | October 7, 2018

Every week we’ve posted The Last Word, a quick summary of the week’s post.  This is our official notice that we’re not going to do that any more.  If you really want us to, we’ll consider doing it again.  If you want a weekly notice of LWON’s splendid posts, you could if you like sign up for the newsletter:  home page, upper right corner > About Us > scroll down, right panel, Email Newsletter, sign up.  OK?  OK.

 

Pink Is Not Her Color

By: | October 5, 2018

 

 

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It’s October, which means pink ribbons everywhere you turn. These breast cancer awareness campaigns can be hopeful and empowering, but they can also be deceptive and unscientific and can mask the realities of what it means to live with cancer.

Catherine Guthrie’s new memoir, FLAT: Reclaiming My Body From Breast Cancer offers an honest, sober, yet ultimately uplifting look at her experience navigating breast cancer. FLAT is an antidote to the “implacably optimistic breast-cancer culture” Barbara Ehrenreich describes in her famous Harper’s piece, “Welcome to Cancerland.” Which probably sounds horribly depressing and sad, but it isn’t. FLAT is a tale of love and resilience. It’s also a story about how doctors and journalists get cancer wrong and how they could better listen to the people who are living it day by day.

I’ve known Catherine since the early 2000’s, when we were both writing for some of the same magazines. I invited her to LWON to talk about her book, which came out September 25th.

Christie: Let’s start with the ribbons. In your book, you have a character, a neighbor, who finds comfort in pink ribbons, and you treat her outlook with great respect. At the same time, you had a blog titled “Pink is Not My Color,” in which you wrote, “I am post-pink ribbon.” What did you mean by that?

Catherine: I love that you’ve known me long enough to notice that shift in my thinking! You’re right. When I was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009, I had a knee-jerk reaction to pink. I saw it as infantilizing. A sign of Western medicine’s paternalism. A warning that I was going to be seen as a gender, not a person. And, as readers of the book know, that’s exactly what happened. (#surprise!)

Early on, I called my breast cancer blog “Pink is Not My Color.” But I’ve let that name go, and while pink-washing, the commodification of breast cancer, still makes my blood boil, my feelings toward women who embrace the pink ribbon have softened.

What changed was that, during the course of my treatment, I befriended one of my neighbors. She was diagnosed with breast cancer a year before me, and she never met a pink ribbon she didn’t like. For her, it was a symbol of identity, community, and hope. In seeing her allegiance to the pink ribbon, I was reminded of a time in my life when I adopted a different symbol for a similar reason. Continue reading →

Neurowars

By: | October 4, 2018

Last week, someone posted a notice for a new meetup on Twitter.

Not really an announcement anyone could take exception to. Until someone did:

“This neurodiversity business is getting a bit out of hand IMHO,” wrote the neuroscientist and writer Mo Costandi, quote-tweeting the announcement.

If you find yourself bracing for impact, you are correct.

Things went pretty much the way you’d expect. A posse was summoned, outrage was ginned up, motives assigned – most participants interpreted Costandi’s tweet as an attack on autistic or queer people. Characters were assassinated, and qualifications impugned: internet sleuths showed up with unsourced oppo research claiming to unmask Costandi as “a high school teacher and a security guard” rather than a credentialled neuroscientist (N.B. he is a neuroscientist). Costandi rolled up his sleeves and responded in kind.

I barely have any business writing about this. My unseemly Twitter rubbernecking stems from the fact that as science writers, Costandi and I travel in adjacent circles. Why was this person, whom I’ve known to be rational in other contexts, choosing this incredibly unreasonable hill to die on? Was he having an Elon-style publicly-traded nervous breakdown?

He wasn’t. In tweet after tweet, Costandi insisted that he was not attacking people who identify as queer, people with autism, or anyone who wanted to attend that meetup. Rather, he was going after its organiser, a proponent of the idea that autism is not a disorder to be cured.

And that’s how I fell down the rabbit hole of an argument that has been raging for years, one that I had no idea existed. At issue is an intriguing question: is it time to rethink “disorders” – including autism, bipolar, and schizophrenia – that have traditionally been dismissed as precluding people from having agency and serving a useful purpose in society? A growing number of people say we should instead redefine these disorders as valid, alternative ways of experiencing the world. Including them could even improve society itself. So, they say, it’s time to adapt society to these differences instead of forcing people with these differences to adapt to society. Continue reading →