Redux: How an internet quiz put me in my place

By: | June 13, 2016

This post first ran on January 7, 2014.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

I am from nowhere.

Until my husband told me this — stated it as a fact, like “it’s raining” or “the sky is blue” — I’d never had a truthful answer to a question that has always given me pause: where are you from?

“You’re from nowhere,” Dave said. His words hit me like a punch in the gut. He’d meant it as a joke, a clever way of stating the obvious. To him, my lack of roots was a sterile fact. To me, it was a gnawing wound, a loneliness I could never shake.

As an Air Force brat, I moved every few years. Before settling in Colorado, I had lived in three countries and more than a dozen towns. I was born in Texas, but we moved on before I formed a single memory of the place. My earliest recollection is of landing at a military base in Greenland and wondering who would give that name to such an icy place. I remember the swing set outside my kindergarten classroom near the Air Force Academy and the blue swimming pool in Phoenix that summer before we moved overseas, but the first place that feels anything like mine is a tiny village in West Germany—a town where I’m now a stranger, in a country that no longer exists. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | June 11, 2016

Author photo on Ice

June 6-10, 2016

Rose spends a month on in a ship in the North Sea, and finds herself engaging deeply with issues of scale.

A prominent naturalist lives a quiet life in small-town Washington – amassing 150,000 specimens – and his neighbors have no idea who he is until after his death.

“There ain’t nothing out here,” remarks Craig as he voluntarily skis out of sight from his tent during a whiteout.

Rose puts in a plug for animatronics, the most relatable form of robot.

Sarah keeps a box of wilderness maps, a reminder in her indoor life of a world that cannot be contained.

Photo: James Q Martin

The Map Box

By: | June 10, 2016

Scrap mapI keep a wooden box on my bedside table.

It’s cheap – an old Yalumba Wine case that I found on a curb somewhere, with a hinged lid and a shred of price tag still attached. Usually, it’s stacked high with magazines half read, a thing seldom opened and often dusty. But in all of the houses where I’ve lived in two states, I’ve kept it within hands’ reach of where I sleep.

What it contains is difficult to describe.

Nominally, it’s a collection of maps. I found the first in 2007 at an Aspen, Colorado thrift store – a treasure of a place where you could pick up the castoffs of the rich with the scrapings from your pocket. Designer dresses crammed in the back of the 50-cent bin; $300 jackets for the price of a sandwich. Rifling through the shelves of the basement book room, my hands closed on a gallon ziplock so fat it couldn’t seal. Old topographical maps of the surrounding warren of peaks and redbanked creeks spilled from its mouth, along with several hand-drawn novelty maps of the same, and giant dog-eared Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management maps of deserts further west, all the way into Utah.

From then on, every map went into the box with this stack. I added the Adirondacks and the Boundary Waters. I added my own carefully folded routes from different Colorado valleys and ranges – a random scrap from a backpacking trip that passed by a steep waterfall and a beaver jaw, another from a summer of careful plant transects in alpine meadows that sparked with paintbrush and phlox. When I left Aspen for a valley across the mountains, a friend sent me half a quadrat in the mail as a goodbye. It was stained with blood, torn along the creases and marked with a terse set of instructions: Continue reading →

In Defense of Bad Robots

By: | June 9, 2016

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The robots are coming. You know this. You’ve read the headlines, you’ve seen the movies. Her, Ex Machina, Terminator. You’ve seen the sleek, lithe, brilliant bots of the future. They’re sexy, even the ones that aren’t explicitly meant to be. We fear them, we’re drawn to them. Look at that smooth glass, that chrome, that unparalleled intellect, that limitless processing power.

Screw that.

Continue reading →

I Am Tiny Or Very Large

By: | June 6, 2016

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In the summer of 2012 I lived on a ship called the R/V Knorr for a month. I was there to document the scientists on board, and they were there to gather plankton samples from the North Sea to study a virus that attacks those plankton. I was recently organizing my office, and I found the notebook that I used during the trip.

It’s always interesting to revisit notes from a trip, because (at least for me) often what I remember most about the trip isn’t usually the things that I think are important at the time. In my notebook I wrote a lot about sea sickness. For the record: I never actual got sea sick. But according to my notebook I worried about getting sea sick a lot.

But one thing I that I do still think about from the trip, and that I wrote a lot about in my notes, is scale. Here’s a segment from my notes from 2012:

Continue reading →

The Limits of Exhaustion

By: | June 3, 2016

burnout

Recently I had cause to wonder whether I was experiencing the famous “burnout syndrome”. I had been asked to give a talk to an auditorium full of gifted high school students. As I hurriedly prepared the speech – wondering what one should say to gifted children about their own giftedness – all I wanted to tell them was that being an adult is so hard, I don’t know how anyone who’s not gifted even survives in the world. Just being a person is going to be crazy difficult for all of you, I wanted to say.

And if you set your standards to any kind of reasonable level, every week will look like mission impossible, and you will have to run at it full tilt and try to do all the things. If by some miracle you manage it, you will just have to turn around and line up the hurdles for the next week and do it all again.

When you’re an adult, I wanted to say but didn’t, not ten minutes go by when you don’t think, “Man, I gotta get this stupid thing done or I’m so dead.” And if you’re sick for more than a day, the world breaks. I felt myself morphing into the image of the care-worn woman from the Dust Bowl photograph. It was not going to be a barn-burning performance. Continue reading →

Controlling Cancer with Evolution

By: | June 2, 2016

evolutionIn 2001, Dean Spath was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. He had surgery to remove his prostate, and for nearly a decade, Spath appeared to be cancer free. Each year he would visit the doctor to have a blood test and a scan, and each year the tests came back clean. “They thought they got it all,” Spath says. “I was hoping I was cured.” In January 2011, however, a blood test revealed that Spath’s PSA level, a marker of disease progression, was on the rise. By June a malignant spot had appeared on his rib. The cancer was back.

First, Spath underwent eight weeks of radiation. And then he began receiving an injection to suppress testosterone, a hormone that fuels prostate cancer. Next he tried a new kind of immune therapy. But no matter what Spath’s physicians gave him, they couldn’t eradicate the cancer.

Spath is far from alone. All over the world, people with metastatic cancer are fighting a losing battle. Even when oncologists use the most targeted, cutting-edge therapies, patients develop resistance and their cancer comes thundering back.

The problem is that cancer is so monumentally diverse. Tumors begin as a single cell that keeps dividing. The daughters should be perfect clones, but some pick up genetic defects that make them distinct. This genetic diversity allows the tumor to evolve. Resistance is inevitable, says Bert Vogelstein, a cancer geneticist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “All of the mutations that are responsible for resistance are already present in each metastatic lesion before any treatment is begun,” he says. “It’s a fait accompli.”

But Robert Gatenby, a molecular oncologist at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, thinks he may have a fix. What if we lower the bar? Instead of trying to cure individuals with incurable cancer, what if we help them live with their disease? Could we stave off resistance and buy more time? Continue reading →