That Old Cafeteria Smell

By: | November 7, 2016

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I’ve spent a lot of time giving talks at elementary and middle schools recently, as I’m touring for my new book Unlikely Friendships DOGS (yes, that’s yet another shameless plug).

Wandering those halls, with their shiny mopped floors and florescent lighting, draws up so many strange feelings—like that first-day flip-gut excitement (School! New books! Friends! Chalk!) followed by the inevitable rush of fear (School! Overdue books! Judgmental friends! Embarrassing chalk incident in 6th grade math!) topped off by a dribble of melancholy (I’m old now and everything hurts), plus a bunch of emotions that are too hard for this tour-weary writer to explain.

The most powerful moment of familiarity, though, comes with a smell. Humans, after all, can detect a trillion different odors with our six million or so odor receptors, of which there are 400 different types. So, even if dogs have something like 300 million to our six, a little schnoz hubris is in order. We have plenty of molecular know-how to pick up what’s cookin’.

What’s cookin’ in this case (see what I did there?) is whatever’s for lunch in the school cafeteria. It’s the “hot lunch,” as it was known at my ES. (“Cold lunch” meant you brought it in a bag or box [boy do I wish I’d saved the latter–Scooby Doo, of course] and had a blue token to get a milk. And whatever was in your bag, including the smushed PB&J, you probably traded for something else.) There is no odor quite like school hot lunch, and it seems to be exactly the same in every hall of education I’ve been in. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | November 5, 2016

img_7176October 31 – November 4, 2016

On Monday, our Tom Hayden reflects on sharing his name with the other Tom Hayden, who died last week.

Guest Laura Paskus has been trying to avoid the election. But the kids are asking questions—ones that maybe all of us should have to answer.

Say your friend is being harassed online, and you don’t know what to say (or you’re worried you’ve already said the wrong thing). Read what Rose wrote on Wednesday.

Ann and her siblings do an experiment: they try to describe their childhood garage. Confusion ensues (as does a charming conversation).

I have also been avoiding the election. But I could no longer avoid the seven-arm octopus. TGIPF!

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Photo by Laura Paskus

 

 

TGIPF: The Seven-Arm Octopus

By: | November 4, 2016

I’ve written about cephalopod penises before, but the time seems right to approach this subject (with extreme caution) again. You know, because it’s Friday.

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The octopus and the number eight seem inseparable. We have read children’s counting books that feature this cephalopod prominently between pages 7 and 9; we flip through under-the-sea books that rhyme “eight” with “great!” and carefully point out each of the felt legs. (Side note: why are the octopuses in our books always purple?) When we visit our local aquarium, we dutifully inspect that the resident octopus has all of its appendages intact.

Then I saw this video. Go ahead, count how many tentacles the octopus has.

Ok, it’s the cephalopod equivalent of a photobomb, so I can’t really count them very accurately. But this is the unusual Haliphron atlanticus–aka the seven-arm octopus–one of the largest octopus species in the world.

Something seems wrong about this, doesn’t it? Seven arms. Very, very wrong. Continue reading →

Experiment Regarding a Garage

By: | November 3, 2016

266488347_66da0f3ef8_zI’ve been reading a history book, this one on a subject with so little documentation it needs to rely on eyewitnesses remembering what happened 10, 30, 50 years before.  Which, honest to God, why would you even bother?

Science insists over and over and over, eyewitness testimony isn’t reliable – it’s influenced by stress, it conflates similar memories into one, it’s full of holes, it’s subject to our human love of narrative.  Even lawyers who have to rely on eyewitness testimony don’t like it.   It’s a problem of epistemology, no worse kind:  everything we know or think we know is based on memory of what we saw, heard, read, thought, felt.  And if memory is no good, then everything we know could be wrong.

What then?  I have all these old memories – what do I do with them? how do I trust them?  Check them out, right?  Find other people who were there and together create some sort of reality, that if not true, is then at least agreed-upon.  And how does that work out?  For your edification and delight, I have done an experiment.

I asked my two brothers and one sister (we span a range of 10 years) to remember our childhood (maybe 50 years ago) and suggest an event we could each describe.  We couldn’t decide: either the event was too personal for publication or at least one of us had no memory whatever of it.  So we lowered the bar and decided to describe the garage.

Picture, not a suburban garage but a farm outbuilding.  It looked nothing like the picture here – that’s there just for atmosphere – but it had the same air of remaining upright only out of habit.  I won’t trouble you with our four descriptions of the garage; instead I’ll tell you what, if you read only these descriptions, you’d know about the garage. Continue reading →

How To Be A Good Online Friend

By: | November 2, 2016

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For better or for worse, I have a lot of experience dealing with online harassment. I also have a lot of experience with friends who are kind and caring and largely oblivious to what online harassment looks for feels like. Which is good! I hope they never have to experience it. It is not fun. But when I talk about the harassment I get (usually to ask people to help me report a particularly terrible Twitter account) I hear a lot of these lovely people say things that are, at best, unhelpful.

I know these friends really care, and are trying to find something to say that will help. But sometimes what comes out isn’t so great. You might have been in this situation before! So here is a guide for how to (and how not to) help your friends. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Deep and Unspoken Hopes

By: | November 1, 2016

img_7176With fewer than a dozen days left until Election Day, I’m having a hard time looking at the news. The blurzy noise of the past few months has become unbearable: polls, rigged elections, pantsuits, emails, orange, yelling, balloons. I’m still processing some of the answers I gave my ten-year old when she blurted out at dinner last week, “What’s sexual assault? And what’s rape?”

I’m sure my household isn’t unique: In just six months we’ve gone from discussing what it will mean for her generation to come of age knowing that it’s not only white men who run for President to talking about the differences between sexual assault and rape.

Since this summer, she’s been obsessed with the election. Always a news hound – a few years ago, she was asking questions about “Mitt Rommanee” – she consistently pops on NPR as we’re driving to school and asks me about the latest poll results.

(Lately, I’m the one flipping the radio to pop music. I don’t want to start my day with news. I just want to listen to “What Does the Fox Say?” on repeat.) Continue reading →

The Othering of Tom Hayden

By: | October 31, 2016

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I need you to know this: I had my name before he was famous. And though my family moved from Detroit to Saskatoon during the Vietnam War years that made him so, I need you to understand that my father was never a draft dodger. I have no quarrel with the decisions, to flee conscription or, more improbably, to name a child after the author of the Port Huron Statement. But those are complicated life histories and they belong to others. Those are not my circumstances; that’s someone else’s Tom Hayden.

A name, presumably, feels personal to anyone. Writers’ names, though, are tied especially tightly to the work we do, printed as they are above the words we write, search-engine optimized to the good we hope we’ve done in the world. But for the 20 years that I’ve been a journalist, my name, my byline, and the assumptions about who I am that go with it, have never been exclusively mine. So even though he was older than me by decades, more famous by far, and died just last week, can we call him the Other Tom Hayden, just for today?

OTH’s fame, first earned as an American civil rights and peace activist of the 1960s and ’70s, was at once substantial and very specific to place and generation.  Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | October 29, 2016

mt-emily-pupsOctober 24 – 28, 2016

For signs of fall, you got your turning leaves, your pumpkin spice, your Halloween.  But Helen’s got crocuses, flu shots, and delight.

LWON is so happy that Emma Marris finally agreed to join it.  She’s been watching wolves for a while now, and wonders what will happen now that someone’s shot OR 28.

Cassie felt such empathy for that slow, hard-working kinesin molecule, she reconsidered scientists’ disdain of anthropomorphic descriptions of science.

Killing rats for science, says Jessa, is necessary and beneficial.  She seems to have been awfully good at it.  She just couldn’t do it any more.

Craig was innocently transcribing an interview done for a story on a haunted theatre when he hears a low rumbly boom on tape that wasn’t there in the theatre.  OR WAS IT?