Redux: Newsprint is dead. Long live newsprint!

By: | May 18, 2017

This post first ran in 2013.men walk on moon

I died a little inside when I heard about the recent Today Show interview in which Jeff Bezos said, “I think printed newspapers on actual paper may be a luxury item. It’s sort of like, you know, people still have horses, but it’s not their primary way of commuting to the office.” As founder of Amazon.com and the new owner of The Washington Post, Bezos’s opinion on this matters. (Disclosure: I write a health column for the Post.)

I’m no luddite. I read Bezos’s comment on Twitter. I own two Kindles, and more than once, I’ve pulled up an electronic book on my iPhone while standing in line at the grocery store. I understand the convenience of reading news electronically — the news arrives instantly, snow or shine, it fits in your pocket, and there are no recyclables piling up on the kitchen table.

Like most of my peers, I read news online, but I still have three newspapers delivered to my house — the local daily, the weekly paper covering my rural county, and the Sunday Denver Post, which I read daily until they stopped delivery in my part of the state a few years ago.

Reading the newspaper has been my morning ritual since I could read, and online news has yet to replicate the experience in a satisfying way. I know what all you 20-somethings are thinking — oh, another curmudgeonly rant about new technology —  tl;dr. And it’s true that I’m nostalgic for a way of delivering news that’s probably hopelessly impractical in the digital age.

A story in newsprint has a genuine quality to it — a paper’s signature columns and font make the words seem weighty and bona fide. It exists in the physical world, not just the cloud. Continue reading →

Stuff Chris Found

By: | May 17, 2017

 

Chris Whitaker, a neighbor, retired with a plan.  Most retired people’s plans are to travel or to follow up on a hobby or to have no plan at all – all of which seem to make these people happy — but as one self-educating photographer said to me, “You can show your wife just so many pictures and she can say, ‘how nice, dear,’ and then it starts to get old.”  You retire, you’re finally able to do exactly what you want to do, live for yourself only, and you might run into the problem of uselessness, meaninglessness.  Anyway, this was not Chris’s problem; he had a plan.

He’d go to second-hand shops – he’s near a neighborhood rich in them – and find boxes of old photos.  He’d look for photos that had names written on the back, that were dated such that the people in it were clearly long gone, and that sometimes were of pretty women in fancy hats, or cute kids.  Then he’d buy those photos and track down those people.  That spiffy little delight in the photo up there is Lee Feete, born in 1899. Continue reading →

On Taphonomy

By: | May 16, 2017

An elk skull nestled in dewy grassTaphonomy is the study of what happens to bodies, especially bones, after death on their way to fossilization. Few remains make it that far, but when they do, taphonomy is the journey through which the biological becomes geological.

In life, bones are tissues, despite their rigidity. Calcium flows in and out of the bone bank as the body requires. Blood vessels feed bones; bones grow and heal. After death, if they escape immediate destruction through fire, mechanical pulverization, consumption by rodents, invertebrates or microbes, they can mineralize, becoming bone-shaped stones.

Continue reading →

Sketches of Panels

By: | May 15, 2017
A drawing of a microphone with a chair in front of it
I’m sorry about the handwriting. It says “chickenpox was licensed mostly because of parent days lost from work but there turn out to be other benefits.”

Every year, Johns Hopkins Medicine runs a boot camp for science writers in Washington, D.C. They cover some topic in science. For science writers, it’s a free introduction to a hot area of science (with breakfast, lunch, and tasty snacks). For Hopkins, there’s a chance someone will decide to use one of their experts in a story. Everybody wins, especially those of us who like cookies.

This was the first year I went to the boot camp; my employer sent several of us to spend the day learning about the latest research on the immune system.

The immune system is fantastically complex. I took a whole class on it in college and still have a weak grasp on how it works. I have a weak grasp on a lot of things from college. In fact, I just now started questioning whether I’d even taken immunology, so I checked my transcript, and don’t worry—I did. I even got an A.

From my seat of amazing immune system expertise, I can tell you that it involves a lot of kinds of cells, some of which produce antibodies, some of which respond to antibodies, and some of which have absolutely nothing to do with antibodies. It is very good at protecting you from stuff.

Including pollen. I would prefer mine to stop trying so hard to protect me from pollen. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | May 13, 2017
Us

In the run-up to Mothers’ Day, we at LWON honored motherhood and, in some cases, the amazing women who gave us the gift of life. (Some of us might have preferred a new bike, but we got what we got.)

It all started with Michelle getting to know the Perfectionist (purposeful capital P) in her daughter, a character with whom she herself has had a perfectly love-hate relationship.

Then it was my turn. I (Jenny) shifted gears as I recalled preparing for my mother’s death, as if being organized could somehow ease the pain of her departure. (It didn’t.)

Sarah then shared an interview she did with very cool mom, a remarkably down-to-earth woman despite her sky-high achievements and stormy adventures studying the weather. She’ll blow you away. (Sorry. Repeatedly.)

Next up was Craig, who wrote about how motherhood and fatherhood are necessarily different animals—we know its true—even if science says they’re just slight variations on a theme.

And finally, Cassandra, who wasn’t sure she even wanted one child, contemplates having another. The mental clutter of motherhood, a blessing worth the burden for a second round? Stay tuned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Motherhood Week: Indecision 2017

By: | May 12, 2017

I wasn’t sure I would become a mother. I struggled with the question for years. I fretted about the loss of freedom. I worried I would become someone I didn’t recognize. And then, I found myself pregnant. Nine months later I had a daughter.

The early months were harder than I ever could have imagined. There is nothing that can prepare you for a newborn’s raging neediness. But eventually we settled into a rhythm, and I began to feel human again.

Still, I knew I wouldn’t have another kid. More kids mean more work, work I wasn’t sure I wanted to do in the first place. I love my daughter fiercely. I am eternally grateful that she exists. But the labor of raising a young child is grueling.

Magda Pecsenye of AskMoxie phrases it this way. Motherhood is a relationship, she says. “All the stuff that has to be done for kids, though, those things are jobs.” And those jobs aren’t valued. No one applauds you for changing diapers, buying car seats, wiping noses, washing bottles, making meals and then cleaning them up. No one gives you a promotion because you are especially good at scrubbing poop stains out of onesies.

With one child, I thought, I could experience the relationship of motherhood without being entirely consumed by the chores. It seemed like a nice compromise. Continue reading →

Motherhood Week: O Mother, How Art Thou

By: | May 11, 2017

“There is something to be said for being with your teenage daughter and not showering for six days,” a mother told me recently.

Daiva had just gotten back from a trip to Death Valley with her 16-year-old daughter where they cooked on a backpack stove and climbed over dunes. They drove to the farthest ends of nowhere, setting lone rooster tails across the desert together.

Daiva said, “I handed over the keys to my beloved Subaru and said, Time to learn washboard, honey.”

Her daughter now has 180 miles of jarring dirt roads under her learner’s permit. She lives with her dad, going to school a plane flight away in California. Daiva, who lives in Colorado, said, “She’s not in my life on a continual basis, but to be with each other exploring new things like that, you can’t put a price on it.”

Daiva owns and runs an independent bookstore. She works her ass off, always has. Being a busy mother can be a different experience than being a busy father. She owned the bookstore when she was an unmarried full time mom, well before her daughter moved out of state.

“Why can’t we look at our busy lives and say, look at the shit I’m pulling off?” she asked. Instead, she thinks of herself as flailing, taking on more than she should or can. A successful business woman, a strong, wild mother, a traveling poet, and local organizer, she says she feels like so many women, overloaded, carrying more than she’d like.

“Do we have to, or do we just do?” she asked. “Am I just not seeing that men are doing as much, or taking on as much? Can we finally say we are two different species?” Continue reading →

Motherhood week: The saga of Bubbles LeMone

By: | May 10, 2017
My mom walking across the tarmac in Dakar, Senegal during a field research program in the summer of 1974. Giraffe addendum by my brother Patrick, sometime after his birth in 1979.

The night before I wrote this, I couldn’t sleep. There was a halfmoon beaming into my face through the windows, thrown open to diffuse the 90-degree heat that had collected like smoke in the eaves of my bedroom. There was my restlessness from poring through notes for a feature that I was trying and failing to write. But it wasn’t either of those things. I couldn’t sleep because I was counting.

Every few minutes, the windows burned bright, then flared out: Lightning. In May. In Portland, Oregon. That NEVER happens.

One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand, four-one-thousand, five … RRRRUMMMBLLE.

Flasher-flash-flicker-flash. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three… BOOOOM.

My mom is the one who first taught me that the number of seconds between bolt and thunder tells you how distant lightning is: Five seconds for each mile. Collect counts for a number of strikes, and the series of data points will tell you whether the storm is approaching or sweeping away. It’s been a good rule to live by. For safety, working and playing above treeline in the mountains. And for wonder, to remember to pause, open up my eyes and ears and let the world roar in.

My mom – Peggy LeMone – is really good at that sort of thing. She and my dad used to drive us out on the plains east of my hometown in Colorado to watch storms roll through from the safety of our car, which was, she pointed out, a Faraday cage. This wasn’t just a hobby, though. It was her life’s work. She chose to study the weather at a time when there were almost no women in the field, for the simple reason that it fascinated her. She went on to be the first female senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, and just a few years ago, the third female president of the American Meteorological Society. And through all that, she’s accumulated some pretty good stories, which helped shape my expectations of what kind of life I might be able to have, both as a woman and as a kid who never quite fit in. So I called her up the day after my sleepless night and asked her to share some of them with you during LWON’s week of moms.

Sarah G.: What kind of kid were you growing up, in Columbia, Missouri?

Peggy LeMone: I loved to go outside, and I loved art, loved to draw. I loved science and I had an older brother Charlie who was into making radios and television sets and stuff, and I loved to hang around and watch. Then when I was in third grade, lightning struck our house. It was the loudest noise I had ever heard in my life. It blew a hole in the roof 5 feet across, and the wood of the beams into splinters two inches long, along the grain. It exploded the chimney, and bricks fell off and tore up some of the deck chairs. So I took some bricks and some pieces of chair and some splinters of wood to show and tell the next day. It was my first weather talk.

Until then, I had wanted to be a fireman. But after that, the weather seemed more exciting. There was a crazy summer of severe weather in 1956 or 1957 – hail, 80 mile an hour winds – and I started keeping weather records in notebooks. The high and the low temperature, the barometric pressure. I was always into clouds, so I would draw the clouds, and draw weather maps of the United States, with weather fronts on them.

I was considered kind of weird, probably. Continue reading →