Holiday Reading

By: | December 16, 2016

Every year, the People of LWON bring you their book choices for the holidays. If you don’t find what you’re looking for below, try last year’s list or the one before.

JENNY: I have a neighbor, Keith Donohue, who, it turns out, is a lovely novelist. I’m now reading his latest, called The Motion of Puppets, and it has carried me to a dusty, mystical place where people are turned into dolls. A poetic and spooky read with a mythical twist. Good fun. Oh, and I finally got around to the beautiful Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd). Loved it. Finally, on a completely different note, get your learn on while enjoying fine prose and true drama from the latest Candice Millard joint: Hero of the Empire: The Making of Winston Churchill.

MICHELLE: I can’t think why, but lately I’ve been reading and watching stories about lousy leaders of the distant past. (Look, humanity somehow managed to survive Caligula and Richard III. We can do this.) I, Claudius and its sequel, Claudius the God, are classic fictionalized accounts of the early Roman Empire, told from the wise and often wiseacre perspective of Claudius, the sickly, overlooked noble son who unexpectedly became emperor himself. The Plantagenets by Dan Jones is a ripping popular history of the mostly terrible kings who ruled England during the mostly terrible fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; A Distant Mirror, by Barbara Tuchman, is the story of ordinary European life during the same appalling era. Finally, Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks is a wonderful novel based on the true story of Eyam, an English village that, during an outbreak of bubonic plague in the seventeenth century, voluntarily isolated itself from its neighbors to protect them from the disease. Horrible times, heroic people. Continue reading →

Redux: Water Year

By: | December 15, 2016

This post first appeared on October 8, 2015, when I was still hopeful that a good strong El Nino could hold off California’s water problems a while longer. Where I am, it didn’t work. One of our reservoirs is now at 7 percent capacity. At another, the dam worker now needs water trucked in to where he lives onsite. Still, there’s a big storm that’s supposed to arrive today, and it’s hard not to keep hoping that this time–this storm, this winter, this water year–will make a difference.

I think I’ve been stuck in this place for a while, hoping that some powerful outside force will sweep in and make things right, or that changing the way I measure things will give the results I want. I’d like to find somewhere where there is still hope, but where the storm that is coming is me. Anyway, here’s the post.

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Image by Ted Zapasnik via Flickr/Creative Commons license

Cicada On My Window

By: | December 14, 2016

a pretty gray cicada on a wooden windowsill

I’ve written before about how much I like seeing a bug on a window. Usually I see those bugs on the outside. This is a story about a bug that I saw on the inside.

It was a chilly morning in November. I was in a hotel in Tatopani, a Nepali town along the Kali Gandaki River, around the west side of the Annapurna Massif. Tatopani is a common Nepali place name; “tato” means hot and “pani” means water. It was breakfast time and I was waiting for my pancakes and bacon when I noticed this cicada on the windowsill.

I first fell in love with cicadas in 1987, when the 17-year cicadas came out in my hometown. They’re enormous, bumbling, and harmless, and they sound like summer. I welcomed them back happily in 2004. I also associate them with Japan–I don’t remember hearing them when I lived there, but in Japanese movies, it’s the ebb and flow of the cicada buzz that alerts the viewer that the action is happening in summer.

So seeing one in Nepal–and near a window, my preferred place for observing bugs–it was a little like meeting an old friend, or an old friend’s distant cousin. Continue reading →

Thanks, Kids

By: | December 13, 2016

The girl sits on the edge of the chair with her knees pressed together, hands twisting in her lap and chin jutting out slightly. Her braids are tight and smooth, hanging just past her shoulders and secured with matching red bands. A little comic strip kid, neatly drawn, eyes big and sparkling.

“I can’t believe it’s you,” she keeps saying. “I’m so honored to meet you.” She smiles and smiles some more. Then: “You’re my favorite author!”

I am tempted to turn around to see the great scribe about whom this precious girl is gushing. But oddly, she is staring up at me.

It’s me! I’m her favorite author!

 I never saw myself as a children’s writer. I still don’t. Before books, I wrote serious magazine articles about natural history and conservation, and sometimes health and medicine, for a college-educated audience. My Unlikely Friendships series is aimed at animal lovers of all ages. But it skews young, and my publisher has been capitalizing on that. Which means I rarely dress up in evening wear to schmooze with adult readers over wine and cheese at a bookshop.

Instead, for my book tours I visit elementary schools. One after another. Hundreds of kids file into cafeterias and libraries and auditoriums just to hear me talk about how much I love animals, to tell stories about my experiences. I try to sneak some science into my talks—about what makes wolves different from dogs, about the panda’s unique digestive system, about the medicinal value of reptile venom, for example. And I talk about the science of emotions—the brain structures that make us feel and that we share with other mammals. Geeky stuff that I hope they’ll tell their parents at dinner when asked “what did you learn today?”

Continue reading →

Goodbye, Home

By: | December 12, 2016

I close on a house this week. I’ve never done this before, not quite sure how the paperwork is supposed to happen.

It’s not much of a place really, almost a thousand square feet and a loft with spaces between the planks where my older boy pressed his eye, watching his brother being born on the couch next to the wood stove downstairs.

Few people live in these high river forks in the West Elk Mountains on the Utah side of Colorado. Forty houses are connected to the same spring coming off the pyramid of Landsend Peak, one of several mountains that gather around the watershed like a cradle. The nearest town is Crawford, CO, population 422. My mom and stepdad live down the road, and the Clarks, who’ve been here forever, still have dogs that come running at you out of the bushes.

The New York Times sent a reporter to do a spread on us: a writer, his wife, and two kids living off the grid beneath a pike of gray, igneous rock sticking 600 feet in the air. This seasoned Times reporter was terrified by the rock towering over the house. She had trouble not staring at it, unnerved by the way a mass of incomprehensible stone took up half the sky, its blank face not noticing us below. At one point she told us we could be called negligent for having children here, which thankfully she didn’t print. She could imagine our house crashed in as if by a meteor similar in size to any one of these half-ton lichen-decorated boulders lying around the property. We lived in a rock heap, an old one, thus the lichens, while she didn’t have a good sense of geologic time. The house was not going to be destroyed. Probably not for a good, long while.

When she said negligent for having children here, we stared back at her perplexed. “You live in Manhattan,” one of us said. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | December 10, 2016

December 5-9. 2016

At a writing residency in Oregon, Emma finds a bird foot in coyote scat, and then sees death all around her in the forest. When I stopped for lunch, I took out my notebook and wrote, “Thinking mostly about nothing much except how the forest is death, death, life out of death, death accumulated so it seems to become life.”

In Canada, Sylvain Martel is developing bio-bots to carry drugs to tumors, writes Jessa. The microbiologists in Martel’s lab are the only ones who know how to cultivate this bacteria. “I tell them to be careful crossing the street,” he says.

Michelle writes about the Wellcome Collection, a medical museum in London that displays an extensive collection of forceps, which were invented in the 1500s and remained the primary tool to assist with delivery until the 1950s. The obstetric armamentarium has expanded, on average, once every 228 years. Women—and babies—pay the price for the difference.

Ann did not want to join a yoga class, but lots of things hurt and her brain would not shut up. She applies Michelle’s Bullshit Prevention Protocol, gets nowhere, keeps going to yoga. . . not because it’s not bullshit but because I like occasionally painless stairs and quiet brains.

Full of “weird, mostly bad business ideas,” Rose presents her latest: custom, personalized 3-D printed menstrual cups. For some people, one cup might fit just right, and for other people that cup might be far too big or too small. Yes, it’s like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but with vaginas.

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Photo via Wellcome Images, Creative Commons license

 

 

 

My Latest Bad Business Idea: 3D Printed Custom Menstrual Cups

By: | December 9, 2016

Friends of mine know that I’m full of weird, mostly bad business ideas. There was the science tattoo consultant service, to help fact check your tattoo before you put the wrong DNA sequence on your body. There was the Brooklyn dog running company, that would go for runs with your dog. There was the proposal to retrofit all the cabs in New York City with my bike-alert system. (For the record, if you would like to invest in any of these businesses let me know I am still accepting offers.)

And now I am here to present to you my latest idea: custom, personalized, 3D printed menstrual cups. Hear me out.  Continue reading →

Yoga & the Bullshit Prevention Protocol

By: | December 8, 2016

I did not want to join yoga class.  I hated those soft-spoken, beatific instructors. I worried that the people in the class could fold up like origami and I’d fold up a bread stick. I understood the need for stretchy clothes but not for total anatomical disclosure.  But my hip joints hurt and so did my shoulders, and my upper back hurt even more than my lower back and my brain would. not. shut. up.  I asked my doctor about medication and he said he didn’t like the side effects and was pretty sure I wouldn’t either.

So I signed up for Gentle Mind and Body Yoga, the pre-K of yoga classes. Continue reading →