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 →

I Need A Hobby

By: | October 3, 2018

Hello. My name is Rose. It’s nice to meet you. I am an adult woman with a moderately successful career, a set of friends I love, a dog that is very cute, and a relationship that functions quite well. I say all of this because what I’m about to admit feels very strange and might make you think I’m not well adjusted. So here we go.

I don’t have a hobby. Continue reading →

A Weekend at the Club

By: | October 2, 2018

I spent this Labour Day weekend at a hunting and fishing club of which my father is a member. The Dumoine River Rod and Gun Club was celebrating its 100th anniversary, and forty-or-so members and relatives careened their way up the hills and dales of the old road to the club lodge for the gathering.  Most of the members come to the club and stay just with their families, or in small groups, enjoying trout season, or grouse season, or the moose hunt in November. This time, they were there for each other.

The club is in Quebec, but the majority of its members are American, and this has always been true. It was founded by Lake Placid businessmen; a photo of one early club meeting shows a black tie affair in a New York ballroom. Over time, some of the staff from the Chalk River nuclear laboratory just across the way in Ontario took an interest, and they make up some of the mix in members today. Dad joined when he wandered into a canoe trade show to get out of the rain and came upon the club’s display table. Continue reading →

Short, and on the Battle of Maldon

By: | October 1, 2018

One morning in my usual small coffee shop with the usual people, a young woman walks in, long straight hair of varying colors, flannel shirt, ill-advised leggings, you know the look.  An old guy at the table of regulars – the regulars tend to have been living in the neighborhood for generations – says to the young woman, “How ya doin’, hon.  You look tired.”  Hon flips back her hair and says, “I am.  I don’t want to go to work.”  The old regular says, “But ya gotta.  Ya gotta go to work.”  “I don’t want to, says Hon.  A woman, back-combed maroon/pink hair and heavy on the eye liner, coeval with the old regular, says “I know, hon.  But it don’t get easier.”  The old regular agrees, “No, it don’t.”  “It gets harder,” says the older woman.  Hon looks disbelieving.  I, coeval with the regulars, can’t keep my mouth shut:  “You’ve gotta be strong,” I yell across the room, “you’ve gotta build your strength up.”  The older woman nods her head at Hon, says, “You’re gonna need your strength.”  Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | September 29, 2018

September 24-28, 2018

This week, Sally lets us in on some tech news: 2018 is the Cambrian Explosion of Steganography. Messages can be hidden in a variety of media, and it’s very hard for law enforcement to find. “Jpgs, gifs, pngs, mp3s –all of these have loads of storage space just begging for stowaways. They just weren’t designed to resist embedding.”

You may think you’ve seen most of the fruit there is, but global trade only carries transportable, storable food, says Helen. In her neck of the woods, the pawpaw has been right in front of her nose all along. “The first one I ate mostly tasted sweet and delicious. The second and third I’m calling pineapple custard. The others are still ripening on my counter.”

For the real scope of a hurricane in our Anthropocene era, mapping satellites offer the best perspective, says Rebecca. “The magnitude of a monster like Florence comes into full relief through facts that can only be delivered by something not on Earth.”

The idea of a ghost town says a lot about our wish to move freely in the world, unencumbered by the existence of others, says Sarah. “However ravenous time’s appetites, if Cisco has taught me anything, it’s that no place is “empty,” nor has any ever been.”

And finally, Craig introduces us to a born storyteller who put his own lived trauma to good use in binding a traveling group together. “In this way, storytelling tightens the weave of social fabric, bringing in lessons as if by proxy.”

 

Image: Astronaut Alexander Gerst, from the International Space Station

Redux: A storyteller, a shooter

By: | September 28, 2018

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This piece originally ran a year ago, Sept 22, 2018. Right now I’m in the bowels of the Grand Canyon, sending up a flare of a redux. I often think back to this story, especially when violence swells in the world. This is one small antidote.

I was with a group kayaking and camping on the coast of south-central Alaska — seven adults, five kids from four years old to twelve. One of the adults was a muscular late-20s man named Everett, a friend who came along to get out of the city for an adventure. A street cop from Aurora, Colorado, Everett quickly became the favorite of the children. They hung on his arms, begging for a lift or a twirl.

Everett wouldn’t tell them he was a cop. He kept his work a secret.

Called uncle by the kids, he was soon the group story-teller. For hours they gathered all over him as he spun story after story to their breathless anticipation. He became our babysitter. The rest of the adults were free to hike or start food cooking in our mobile kitchen, while Everett picked a rock outcrop near the water’s edge and kids crawled onto him as if he were a bean bag.

Everett happened to be working the intersection in front of the Century 16 Theater in Aurora the night of July 20, 2012. He was the first law enforcement on the scene of a shooting that left 12 dead and 70 injured. He had run into the thick of it, blood and smoke, the movie playing at full volume, the killer still present.

He didn’t tell the kids this either. Continue reading →

No empty earth

By: | September 27, 2018

I don’t know when I first saw Cisco, Utah. My early memory of it is imprecise, gathered from a series of impressions over years into one blurry composite. A crumbling edifice of corner store, covered in a mural of eagle and mountains that is in turn covered in black scrawls of graffiti. Dead cars. Piles of brick, concrete and twisted metal. Great expanses of balding, cracked earth scattered with gunshot glass and rusted cans. Little shacks of gapped, silvered wood, standing like ribcages picked clean of meat by some scavenger. The wind, maybe. Or time. There is no hungrier thing lurking in the desert that surrounds that place. Continue reading →

Landsat Is The Perspective We Need Right Now

By: | September 26, 2018

This is an image of a deluge, an absolute inundation, a drainage basin filled to the brim, a coast whose cup runneth over, total saturation, a scene that would make Noah cringe. This is, as my friend pointed out, a f*@kload of water.

This image shows how the land changed after Hurricane Florence was done, after the slow-moving storm finally spun out into meek wisps of white and the blue sky returned. It was made by a thinking box flying 440 miles above us. The box is called Landsat 8, and its job is to show us the terrestrial planet we live on, so we can understand it a little better. Its perspective is one that I think we could all kinda use right now. I don’t see any red or blue here, or BS on Twitter, ok? It’s just a picture of a chunk of this tragically beautiful planet that we have to share.

Here is what this imagery shows. According to an early estimate from the National Weather Service, nearly 8 trillion gallons of rain fell on North Carolina Sept. 13-17. That was a T. That’s an 8 with 12 zeroes after it.

We witnessed that unspeakable volume of water as catastrophic flooding — boats under oar floating through neighborhoods, whole interstates drowned, porches and pigpens submerged, homes and mementos washed away. Satellites witnessed it as a literal reshaping of the Earth’s crust.  Continue reading →