Diary of a Human Zoo Animal

By: | March 31, 2017

Last week I roamed the trails of the Zurich Zoo with my son. The new elephant exhibit, we heard, included an underwater window in which one could watch the elephantine legs paddling. As a tourist attraction, though, a world-class zoo is pretty much the same wherever you go, and it wasn’t exactly a thrilling day. More eerie was the thought that the ghost of zoos past haunt these exhibits.

For one thing, the treatment of captive animals has been subject to changing values, but the definition of an animal suitable for captivity has also changed. Along with many other European cities, Zurich in the 19th Century – though not this particular zoo, which opened in 1929 – played host to “anthropo-zoological exhibits” alongside their animal exhibits. People, in other words. As zoo animals.

More than 35,000 Indigenous people, over the course of 50 years, were recruited from around the world and displayed in enclosures for the satisfaction of thousands of top-hatted European zoo visitors. One of these human zoo animals, an Inuk named Abraham Ulrikap, kept a diary.

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The Sock Barometer

By: | March 30, 2017

 

 

I’ve been losing socks lately. One at a time.

I correlate this with my state of life and work: picking up and dropping off kids, scheduling plane flights and cross-country drives, article deadlines, a final book manuscript due tomorrow, a blog post tonight. This week, I’m teaching 15 high school classes on the writing process, why we think about time, and the nature of science. I’m sleeping in a room they gave me.

Not complaining, mind you, but I’ve noticed socks have gone missing. Continue reading →

TSA’s Gratuitous Bun Squeezing

By: | March 28, 2017

I have a friend named Neda. She is known for many things, but her most striking physical feature is her hair. It is explosive. Thick black curls billow from her head and intertwine to form a wild thicket. Her hair has the tensile strength of woven steel. If it were long enough, it could support the weight of a prince. It is alive, almost a separate being. There is Neda. And then there is her hair. They’re like conjoined twins.

On Sunday night, Neda coaxed her hair into a bun and headed to the Los Angeles airport. She was booked on the redeye back to New York City. And everything was going smoothly until she exited the body scanner.

That’s when a TSA agent stopped her and said, “I need to check your hair.” The agent donned blue latex gloves. And then she cupped Neda’s bun. “She squeezed it a couple times,” Neda says. “And then she said, ‘You’re good.”’ Continue reading →

Redux: You’ve got mail, you idiot!

By: | March 27, 2017

This post originally ran on October 26, 2011, back when Donald Trump was relentlessly propagating an easily debunked conspiracy theory about President Obama. As we ponder the triumph of “alternative facts,” it’s worth considering what makes bullshit so appealing and why it’s so hard to debunk.Earlier this month, I gave an Ignite talk at the National Association of Science Writers meeting.

(I also organized a panel on covering scientific controversies–click here to listen to/download mp3s of my interviews with panelists Gary Taubes, Jennifer Kahn, Jeanne Lenzer and Brian Vastag.)

I’ve had numerous requests to share my Ignite talk, and so in an attempt to replicate the experience, I’ve put together a storyboard/slideshow.

Here it goes…

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The Last Word

By: | March 25, 2017

March 20-24, 2017

Helen gets thirsty when she sings. Good thing, too, because she spots an interesting bug: One of those times, when I was unscrewing the top of my water bottle, I noticed a brown spot on the chapel wall. I checked again–it was there every time. It looked bug-shaped. True-bug-shaped, I mean, a member of the order Hemiptera, many of which are kind of shaped like a shield, like this one.

Michelle tells a story about immigrants, racism, and resistance in Hood River, Oregon: When fruit packers refused to buy from Japanese-American orchardists, League members picked up their produce and took it to market themselves. They responded to racism as if it were a death in the family, making sure the bereaved were fed, warmed, and steadily kept company.

Jennifer has a little friend named Gus. Gus is a hepatic hemangioma: Things that end with “oma” aren’t usually good things. Glioma. Glioblastoma. Sarcoma. Roma tomatoes (which just aren’t that flavorful). Then again, He-Man is a superhero.

Sarah has her family map their memories of home, and each map looks different: In his own map, my brother ends up sketching out the once-undeveloped swath of our mesa where the ruins of a fish farm used to be, and where he found a cougar-killed deer once – a story that looms large in the mythology of his childhood.

I redux a post about Diane Kelly studying alligator penises, because TGIPF: She covered her camera in a plastic bag with only the lens poking out. That way, she didn’t have to take off her gloves to change the settings. This was gross anatomy—she would do the detail work later in her lab in Amherst. Gross means big, Kelly says, “but sometimes, gross is gross.”

**

He-Man image from http://clipart-library.com/

TGIPF: Alligator Awesome Redux

By: | March 24, 2017

Today really feels like Thank God It’s Penis Friday, doesn’t it? This post originally appeared in February 2013.

The alligator harvest at Louisiana’s Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge happened every September, so in the fall of 2007, Diane Kelly packed her bags. She wasn’t hunting, but she still had to put her scalpels and knife blades and the rest of her dissection kit in her checked bags. Explaining to TSA that she was going to figure out how the alligator penis worked wouldn’t fly.

Kelly, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has studied how penises work in everything from rats to turtles, looking mainly at what makes the penis stiff. During graduate school, she scavenged roadkill in Florida to learn more about armadillo penises. Why roadkill? As she told a Story Collider audience this fall, she was a life-long animal lover who was squeamish about sacrificing animals just so she could study them. Then she realized that using animals would be an essential part of her work—and she studied how to do it humanely and to learn the most from each animal as possible.

But still: alligators. She was relieved she didn’t have to hunt for them herself. “When they brought them back they were huge, they were dead and I found them frightening,” she says now. “If I had gone out myself, I would have been lunch.” Continue reading →

Where is here; here is where

By: | March 23, 2017
Isaiah’s map.

Isaiah grins at me across the dining room table and more than 1,000 miles.

In my nephew’s small, pale hand is an outsized Crayola marker, to match the pencil in my more gnarled fingers. We both lean over rectangles of paper—his in Colorado, mine in Oregon, now occupying the same virtual space, thanks to a slightly jumpy Skype connection.

My brother pops into the frame, revealing a bushy beard that he didn’t have when I saw him over Thanksgiving. “What’s another thing that you remember from our walks?” he asks Isaiah, who is four and half. Isaiah thinks for a minute and announces, “The brown truck!” He takes a moment to scribble on the paper, then holds it up for Patrick and me to admire.

I had asked Isaiah and my other family members in Boulder to help me with a basic experiment: Draw a map of the neighborhood where my parents have lived for decades, where my brother and I spent the first 18 years of our lives, and where Isaiah lived for a time with my brother while he was looking for a new apartment. But instead of being a regular map, with meticulously labeled streets and platted homes, drawn to scale and placed in context with relevant landmarks, my instructions were simply for each of us to identify the five most memorable things from the neighborhood that come to mind, and situate them in space in relation to my parents’ house.

In Topophilia—literally, love of place—Yi-Fu Tuan’s 1974 book on the way people relate to their environment, there is a chapter on ethnocentrism and space. In early maps and mapping experiments, cultures from across the globe have tended to place themselves and their known home landscape at the center of the world. Surrounding landmasses are secondary, smaller, distorted, or don’t exist at all—giving way to sea, or more mystical conceptions of what lay beyond it.

Might the same be true of us as distinct individuals, I wondered, each our own little countries with separate interests and histories? And would these little memory maps reveal a flicker of how we had experienced the same place differently? Continue reading →