Redux Because This Is Better Than What I Was Going to Write

By: | June 15, 2017

I had dinner the other night with, among others, a graphic designer.  He said he liked looking at contemporary photographs but to be honest, he didn’t know why he liked looking at them.  He knew they were better than snapshots, he said, but he didn’t know why they were.

I’m certainly the last person to have an answer to that.  But I remembered this guest post by Steve Smith, one of those contemporary photographers whose pictures look like somebody just sort of took them — no moody lighting, no startling contrasts, no obvious lines, just black and white pictures of people doing stuff.  When I ran Smith’s post, I was most interested in the stories behind the pictures because that’s the kind of person I am, a story-person.  And Smith graciously complied with a story that is sweet and surprising, and writing that’s direct and clean and personal. But after my friend the graphic designer asked his question, I went back and looked at Smith’s photos again.

I recommend you do this too.  I hadn’t seen how much was going on in them, how they seem mundane and still, but how full of movement they are.  Every single person in every single photo is intent on being his or her very own self, going on his or her own private trajectory. You know what every single one of them is thinking. You could write thought-balloons over their heads.  You know these people.

But also you don’t understand them.  And you have a million questions.  Why are the two listening women dressed alike, with their satchels uncomfortably across their fronts? How did the guy hurt his hand? And what’s under his other arm?  He’s talking friendly but the listening woman looks skeptical. Why are guys in the back having such fun?  Why, in what is clearly a white-peoples’ world, is one of those guys darkish? let alone the black woman sitting by herself? Where are they? Is it an airport? What in heaven’s name is that hot air balloon doing bobbing around up there?

And how does he DO that?  Have fun.  But it’s a little unsettling.

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Photo by Steven Smith, not included in the original post.

Not all stories are words, not all maps are pictures

By: | June 14, 2017

You know those sounds that slip across the senses until they settle, in the brain, on an association entirely unrelated to their maker? Those sounds that seem to almost synesthetically transform one thing into another? The way noise can be brilliant, or color evokes flavor, or a smell touches old dreams?

An unspectacular-looking, fist-sized bird called a hermit thrush makes a sound like that, when it sings. Its call is a variable set of layered chimings – like what water would be, if made into a bird, if you asked it to sing with a narrow feather-muffled throat instead of its own mud-and-cobble one.

Listen to this call for a moment, here. Consider that it has been transcribed as a sort of prayer: “Oh, holy holy, ah, purity purity eeh, sweetly sweetly.” I first remember hearing it in a sun-slanted aspen forest in Colorado, on my way up to a 13,000-foot pass and a hotspring on the other side. It seemed to descend through the glowing boles at the same stepped angle as the light. To come from all directions. To touch the surrounding talus fields and cliffs with little hands. It so filled me with listening silence that for years since, I have thought of tattooing a sound spectrogram of that song on my skin, to remind me of the places where I feel most at home in it.

Now listen to the song slowed, here: You will begin to notice the split in the hermit thrush’s voice, two notes carried by the dual voicebox that birds share, called a syrinx. Drawn out, his call becomes something that feels deeply Cretaceous, a dinosaur warbling through the jungle. Calling threat to his rivals, calling out his territory, calling plaintively for love.

A bird’s voice does all of that. It can also reveal other things: Where he is from, whether he is well or sick, whether he has been exposed to pollutants like PCBs and Bisphenol-A. And hermit thrush voices, it turns out, may also contain stories about the ancient movements of landscape and climate, and how these shape lives. Continue reading →

Redux: U2 Gets Onto People’s Skin

By: | June 13, 2017

U2 is touring again, and I saw them last week for the 12th time, so I thought now would be a good time to rerun this post from 2015 about a research project on U2-themed tattoos. Get your concert tickets here. 

Pat from Rogers, Arkansas

Once upon a time, I was a fan of bands that gave me some kind of alternative cred. I have been to a ton of They Might Be Giants concerts, which places me solidly in the ranks of the nerds. I spent many years in love with R.E.M. and have listened to all of their albums back to back in day-long binges, at least three times. That indicates a mild level of ’90s alternativeness—if somewhat less alternativeness than my cooler friends, who wrote FUGAZI on their notebooks or formed their own riot grrrl bands.

But about 10 years ago I got it in my head to go to a U2 concert. My friend Kate seemed to think they were worth seeing a bunch of times, and she’s got pretty good taste, plus I liked most of the U2 songs I knew, so I arranged to make a trip to visit friends in Brazil at a time when the band was touring there. After my first show, at São Paulo’s massive Morumbi soccer stadium, I was hooked.

I’ve seen the band nine times now. While I have always enjoyed the heck out of an R.E.M. or TMBG show, U2 concerts make me shriek and jump up and down and often cry, which, as anyone who knows me will attest, is not my everyday way of interacting with the world.

So what does U2 fandom say about me? What does it mean that the band that I will cross oceans to see live is also one of the world’s biggest rock bands?

Continue reading →

What I Learned About Interruption from Talk Radio

By: | June 12, 2017

I grew up listening to a lot of talk radio, thanks to a childhood spent in the car driving from this soccer tournament in rural Connecticut to that one in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania, all while listening to Mike and the Mad Dog, or Dr. Laura, or Opie and Anthony. I didn’t think it would do me much good, all this talk radio. And a lot of it probably did active harm. I’m still unlearning racist, classist, sexist jokes and phrases that have embedded themselves into my brain after hours of these shows. But there is one arena in which this kind of radio made me supremely prepared: talking to men. Or, more precisely, not letting men talk over me.

Continue reading →

Listening to the Lost Boys

By: | June 9, 2017

Last Sunday afternoon, I spent a couple of hours at a right-wing “free speech” rally in downtown Portland, Oregon. I described parts of the experience in a story I wrote earlier this week, but I’m still thinking about what I heard and saw.

The rally, organized by an area group called Patriot Prayer, was held in a small park across from City Hall, and it wasn’t large—I’d guess there were a couple of hundred attendees, not counting all the curious onlookers and the journalists like myself. The park was green and shady, and during the rally, it was an oddly peaceful place. The speakers were worked up, and they worked their crowd up, but they couldn’t hope to match the energy of the thousands of counter-protesters who surrounded them, and whose chants rolled through the streets like waves. The park, protected by a solid cordon of police in riot gear, felt like a tiny island of quiet in a stormy sea, sparsely populated by an isolated tribe.

I listened to the inhabitants of that island, and here’s what I heard: Praise for patriotism, for love, and for God. Praise for free speech. Praise for the police. Praise for one another, especially for their courage in gathering in the heart of liberal Portland. I also heard half-hearted calls for restraint (“Please don’t beat up anybody on your way out of here,” organizer Joey Gibson said in closing) and full-throated calls for violence (“I’ve heard live rounds work better!” one man yelled at the police as they used stun grenades to herd a group of counter-protesters away from the park). Over and over again, I heard bitterness and anger toward the counter-protesters and the left in general, and toward anyone who had labeled the islanders as racists or fascists or Nazis—anyone who had somehow made them feel ashamed of being conservatives, or white people, or Christians, or men. Continue reading →

Perspective, Perhaps

By: | June 8, 2017

Last week, according to some real news, Earth got a wave hello from far away, from some-3-billion-year-old vibrations that were set off when two black holes smashed into each other. (Really? There’s not room for both of you up there?) According to the New York Times, the collision—reported by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which felt the signal—resulted in “a pit of infinitely deep darkness weighing as much as 49 suns.” And this is old hat, because such gravitational waves have reached Earth two other times just in the last couple of years. Albert Einstein, that guy with the hair and the mustache, had predicted they’d come, after he figured out that gravity is just a warping of spacetime.

Though my mind exploded, I was relieved to read about the space-time crash and its resulting wave. Because just before that I had read about Donald Trump’s latest hideous gaffe/idiocy/embarrassment/middlefingertotheworld (the “I want to be in front” shove? Covfefe? Paris Accord pullout? Bullying of London mayor? So many to choose from that I can’t even pick a link to include, so here’s a video of funny cats). And I felt sick inside and worried for the future. I was, as I often am these days, angry and sad and baffled that it’s come to this.

After noticing the black-hole headline and clawing through the story’s first paragraph, though, I began thinking about the fact that I don’t even know how to think about this fact. I like pictures of animals hugging. My brain simply doesn’t do the gymnastics needed to wrap my head around holes in the universe that run into each other (isn’t a hole a lack of something? How can two lack of somethings collide?) and pulses traveling for billions of years that rattle an observatory in the U.S. and that scientists can point to and say, hey, there are those vibrations we’ve been waiting for! Einstein was right!

It made me try to imagine how I, were I this space-time bump in the night, might have signaled the Earth.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Ashes, Ashes

By: | June 7, 2017

We’re on vacation, kayaking through mangroves near Naples, Florida. My nine-year-old is in the bow, paddling like crazy, splashing me with his enthusiasm. My husband and six-year-old glide nearby.

My view is limited. Tangled mangroves line the winding watery path, obscuring what’s within and beyond. I want to go slowly, to gaze at every statuesque ibis, egret, and cormorant, but the boys seek speed. Just as we reach a lagoon, I look up to see a twirling wisp of black, about the size of a cigarette, but lighter, like a feather. Then I see another, and another. Some different sizes, some fringed with white. They fall and rise with the wind until they land in the water and disintegrate.

The air is distinctly smoky, and these black bits are ashes. Ten miles inland a wildfire burns.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Descent of the Testes

By: | June 6, 2017

 

I did not plan to write about testicles this week. And I do not recommend plugging the phrase “elephant testicles” into Google’s image search engine. But I had a nagging question about the fierce little mammal sketched above, and one literature search led to another. Before I knew it I was  — forgive me gentle readers — in balls-deep.

Backing up a bit: I went to visit some friends in South Africa this spring, and we spent about a week driving a popular stretch of coastline along the Indian Ocean. At nearly every rest stop we saw fat, marmot-like mammals called hyraxes — commonly known as dassies — sunning on the beach.  Dozens of dassies splayed on the rocks, just out of reach of the ocean spray.  Others nibbled grass or rummaged through trash cans. They weren’t aggressive, but had what my friend Lydia deemed Grumpy Old Man Face. If we got too close, they bared their tiny teeth.

Or tusks, rather.  The white protuberances that emerged from beneath the dassies’ whiskers were not fangs, but incipient tusks, like the ones elephants have. As it happens, dassies are the closest living relatives of elephants, aside from dugongs and manatees.  I tried to wrap my head around this strange fact by staring at diagrams of evolutionary trees on my phone in the back of the car, but it didn’t work — I just got carsick.  Later, when we actually touched elephants in a center that rehabilitates them, I looked in vain for any physical signs, besides those tiny tusks, that might have inspired scientists to connect dassies and the giant, rough-skinned, flap-eared beasts. My vacation-brain let it drop. When I got home, though, the question still bothered me.

Which brings me to testicles. It turns out that one sign of the kinship between elephants and dassies is something that you cannot see —internal testes. Most mammals have evolved testicles that dangle outside the body, for reasons that are still controversial. Some say external testes keep sperm cool. Others say they allow for movements such as galloping, which would rupture or damage them, though surely they are vulnerable outside, too. Others claim that, like fancy feathers, external testicles are made for display.

Male hyraxes, elephants and sea cows all store their testes inside the abdominal wall,  which some scientists interpret as a sign of shared aquatic origins, likely in the ancient Tethys Sea. This warm, shallow ocean — of which the Mediterranean is a small remnant — is thought to have been a cradle for the explosion of mammalian diversity that began 66 million years ago when dinosaurs went extinct. Why a dangling scrotal sac would be a disadvantage for aquatic mammals is not entirely clear to me, but some scientists speculate that it would cause unhelpful drag.

I failed to observe the missing testicles when I was comparing elephants and dassies, an easy mistake for the untrained eye.  Were there other obvious, shared physical traits I failed to notice, aside from the dassies’ frankly unconvincing  tusks? What could evolutionary biologists see that I didn’t?

Not a whole lot,  I learned by talking to an evolutionary biologist this week.  It took scientists until the 1990s to use genetic data to place hyraxes securely within the Paenungulate lineage, which includes elephants and seacows and belongs to the greater mammalian subgroup Afrotheria. The same line of research established a new order for other ancient African mammals, including elephant shrews, aardvarks, golden moles, and tenrecs — all of which I hope, someday, to see.

_________

Emily Underwood is a freelance science journalist and correspondent for Science, based in Coloma, California.

Hyrax sketch by the author.