The Last Word

By: | March 11, 2017

March 6-10, 2017

This week at LWON:

If it feels to you as if the world is losing its collective mind, perhaps some a history lesson can clarify the current political climate – specifically, the history of the Renaissance. We may be living through another version of it, says my friend Chris.

What people are calling “de-extinction” doesn’t really reverse anything. So let’s stop doing the extincting – it’s irreversible, says Michelle.

Craig spends nights in the open air, surrounded by early Pueblo artifacts. He enjoys the cold more for the fact that he’ll one day miss it, whether this summer or even in the climate-altered winters to come.

Erik’s family history is a riot of clashing cultures and striving survivors. It’s exciting to consider that these intergenerational stories are far from over. This one continues with Erik’s son, who adds Mexico to the long list of nationalities in the Vance family.

Helen caught a rare glimpse of the back rooms in the National Museum of Natural History. She even heard the rattle of 4000-year-old scarab larvae encased in dung. They came from an Ancient Egyptian tomb and are presumably scuttling around now in some pharaoh’s afterlife.

Photo of thousand-year-old Utah cliff dwelling by Craig

Beetles, Time Travelers

By: | March 10, 2017

Baseball-sized brown balls in a brown box

In the summer of 2011, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History was in the process of doing some bug relocation. Specifically, they were moving some of their beetles from the museum building downtown out to a storage facility in the suburbs—specifically, the non-plant-eating scarabs.

It was a lot of scarabs. The museum has a lot of bugs and a lot of them are beetles, and 696 drawers full of them were being moved. In the last cabinet, at the bottom, collections manager Floyd Shockley noticed an odd box—not any of the standard containers that the museum uses to store bugs.

Inside were the brown, dirty balls pictured above. An abandoned papier-mache project? Nuts? Hairballs?

None of the above. Shockley, who is a beetle guy, knew instantly what they were: poop.  Continue reading →

Dirty Norwegians

By: | March 9, 2017

Having a child changes a man. Perhaps not as much as it changes a woman but a fair bit. A friend of mine recently had his first kid and decided to take up hunting. He’s a successful nurse in a big-time hospital but somewhere deep inside him, he wanted to know he could provide meat for his wife and child.

Me, I got into genealogy. In my mind, I wanted to be able to tell my son who he is and who came before – to reach back through time and find our places in the unending line of history. I guess having a child has made me want to understand where he comes from.

What I found amazed me. The family I thought were Irish were actually Scottish colonizers – hated by the Irish. An ancestor’s half-brother married Henry VIII’s sister. A branch of my family even fought in the famous Appalachian feuds between the Hatfields and the McCoys.

But in this new era of immigrant distrust and isolationism, my favorite branch has become my “dirty Norwegians.” Continue reading →

Holding the Last of Winter

By: | March 8, 2017

You’ve noticed the cold starting to leave. The light has been strengthening, sun lifting every day, and the wind has lost some of its bitterness. Twenty-three and a half degrees of tilt to the planet, you can feel every degree.

Two mornings ago a blizzard hit where I live in Colorado. It was a fierce one with hundred-mile-an hour winds. Snow sprayed up the door frames and blasted in through cracks. As I closed the front door, stomping off the cold, I thought that one day very soon my arm would be out the window as I drove down the highway, crisp wind and warm sunlight, which happened to come yesterday, the day after the blizzard. Continue reading →

Don’t Think of a Mammophant

By: | March 7, 2017

 

Let’s talk about de-extinction. Actually, let’s not. Let’s talk about what the as-yet-unrealized technology known as “de-extinction” really is, which is the creation of hybrid organisms using genetic material from both extinct and extant species. Last month, a team of scientists announced that a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo—”more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits,” said the team leader—could become a reality “in a couple of years.”

The notion of resurrecting extinct species is fascinating—it’s one of the ultimate what-ifs—so it’s understandable that even this somewhat vague statement made international headlines. But let’s say these scientists succeed. Let’s say that in 2019 or thereabouts, they’ll be able to produce, in the laboratory, a viable elephant embryo containing some mammoth DNA. To be clear, that’s not a mammoth. It’s not even a mammoth embryo. There are no guarantees that this theoretical embryo would survive to adulthood, or be fertile, even in captivity. It’s even less likely that an organism that developed from this embryo could survive in existing habitats, or alongside existing species.

Continue reading →

Our déjà vu moment in history

By: | March 6, 2017

Very few of my friends—I, least of all—correctly predicted Donald Trump’s victory in the polls. The handful who gave him a good chance of winning did so in the wake of Brexit, with a view to the parallel factors both elections shared. The exception in my life is my friend Chris Kutarna. Here he is on stage in June 2016, having been asked whether Trump will become President. His answer: “The history of the Renaissance says, Yes.”

The lens through which Kutarna analyses our time is the period of history when Classical Greek and Roman ideas were revived and built upon during a rare peace time among the Italian states. He argues in Age of Discovery that, 500 years later, we are now living in a second Renaissance.

If your image of the Renaissance comes from the Netflix original series Medici: Masters of Florence, you may be missing the parallels with our post-truth world of Fox News and xenophobia. But with great technological, scientific and artistic innovation comes social stress that manifests itself in populist revolts, like the Bonfire of the Vanities and Brexit. The politics of fear emerge, perhaps in the form of the Inquisitions—an effort to purge Christian Europe of Muslim and Jewish influence—or in the form of bigoted executive orders from the pen of an outsider politician. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | March 4, 2017

February 27 – March 3, 2017

In uncertain times, Michelle turns to crime novels, the one certain world in which reasoning is logical, evidence is crucial, mysteries are solved, and the good guys win.

Jennifer calls her Aunt Judy (famed commenter on LWON), asks how she’s doing.  “Terrible,” she says.  So Jennifer calls her dad, asks how he’s doing.  “Terrible,” he says.  You don’t want to know.

I complain about good people — not people who are ordinarily good, but people who are good of their own necessity.  The problem is, you can’t write about them.

Sarah is not only a writer, she’s a painter.  She’s been looking for a particular shade of blue all her life: “the bruised underside of a storm when the sun is at a 4-o’clock slant.”

Cassie, doing nothing in particular, gets MRSA.  You don’t want to know about that either, just stay away from it.  The good news is, lots of times you recover.

________

watercolor by Sarah Gilman using tiny brush

My Unlovely Lady Lump

By: | March 3, 2017

Last September, a tiny, itchy welt appeared just above my left hip. I thought I had an insect bite. I was visiting New York City at the time, and I worried it might be a sign of bed bugs.

But after I flew home, the welt began to swell. Soon it was big as a blueberry. But rather than being blue, the lump turned scarlet. Because I am the type of person who can’t leave well enough alone, I tried to pop it. That just made the lump angry. It began to ache.

This is bad, I thought. This is not good at all. I worried that my bite had become infected. I thought about trying to lance the lump with a sterile needle. But what if I had necrotizing fasciitis, a disease caused by flesh-eating bacteria. I googled ‘necrotizing fasciitis.’ (Do not google necrotizing fasciitis.) I snapped a picture of my lump and sent it to a friend who also dabbles in self-diagnosis. She told me a story about a friend of a friend whose brother was bitten by a poisonous brown recluse spider in Brooklyn and developed necrotizing fasciitis. I googled ‘brown recluse spider necrotizing fasciitis’. (Do not google this either.) When the throbbing lump reached the size of a plump grape, I went to the doctor. Continue reading →