The Placebo President

By: | March 11, 2016

Screen Shot 2016-03-10 at 10.41.41 AMAs I have occasionally mentioned on this blog, I am currently working on a book on the many ways that our own brains can deceive ourselves. Placebos, hucksters, healers, hypnotists, and con men – it’s all in there.

It’s a fascinating subject and one that constantly reminds me to be careful about what I think I know. Our brains are wired to be accept what we see based on the things we expect to see. And sometimes, like with the gorilla in the basketball game, the most obvious thing can slip past our eyes just because it’s not what we were expecting.

Such as the fact that Donald Trump is actually a brilliant 1970s-era comic in disguise.

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Crackle, Hiss, Pop

By: | March 10, 2016

IMG_6103March showed up last week, on little cat feet rather than lion paws. A gentle snow jacketed the crocuses before watering their roots. The least patient daffodils opened, heads dipped against any last-ditch icy gusts. Spring’s legs are wobbly, but she’ll find her stride soon enough.

Still, at my little cabin in the Virginia woods, the nights remain cold. So we keep working our way through the woodpile, building the season’s last fires. We stack a trio of big, dry logs in the fireplace before bed, so the heat rises and swirls around us as we sleep. In the wee hours the fire slows to a simmer, and when we get up we stir the hot embers and feed them fresh wood, and ourselves fresh coffee, enjoying warmth through to our aging bones for one more day.

This my favorite turning point of seasons, the transition from hunching by the stove to cracking winter’s glue where windows meet their wells. Opening to those first warmish breezes and hearing the crosstalk of so many birds is a happy, cleansing ritual for me. And nothing feels better than the morning sun on a winter-weary face.

But spring’s stirring means my parting with other favorite ritual: watching fire burn. Continue reading →

Homeopathy Part One: Rebels of Medicine

By: | March 8, 2016

Screen Shot 2016-03-07 at 10.00.23 PMToday’s post is the first of a two-part series on homeopathy. Look for another tomorrow by LWON’s own Sally Adee. 

In 460 BCE, a rebel was born. Ruggedly handsome, fluffy hair that drove younger girls crazy and a gleaming bald pate that made the older ones swoon.

His buddies called him “The Father of Medicine,” “Ἱπποκράτης” or just “The Hippo.” His enemies called him that “that bald guy who gets angry whenever I beat my patients with a flaming branch to appease the god Hephaestus.”

He was Hippocrates of Kos and he rocked the Western world like almost no other human being in history.

Twenty-two centuries later, another rebel was born just a short 1,000 miles to the north. Samuel Hahnemann was equally popular with the ladies (or lady – he had eleven children) and had similarly luxurious hair on some of his head.

What did these two rebels have in common? It turns out quite a bit.

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Guest Post: The Dirty Bomb of Nutrition

By: | March 7, 2016

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The hard thing about teaching nutrition to college students is that, as far as eating healthy is concerned, they’ve heard it all before. In fact, Michael Pollen’s phrase, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”– is about the best 3-second nutrition message around. I find myself wanting to repeat this phrase to my students and dismiss class for the semester.

I don’t, though, because “Not too much” is the dirty bomb of nutrition. Whenever I ask my class if they have eaten a Hershey’s Chocolate Kiss in their lifetime, I already know the answer. It’s always 100% hands raised.

Hershey’s has our number. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | March 5, 2016

shutterstock_156034427February 29 – March 4, 2016

This week, Helen and her friends became famous using nothing but some marshmallows and an idea. Here’s the blow-by-blow of her brush with celebrity.

Craig reports from the Bering Strait where, as ever, he walks in two overlaid landscapes, separated by thousands of years.

Rose has a fantasy life in a town she’s never been to – one that shares her last name. Should she dare to go and face the reality?

Michelle follows developments at Project Puffin, which not only restores the range of seabirds in Maine but provides valuable insights into their marine environment.

My ancestors, the Holland Brothers, brought the first motion pictures to North America. And little old Ottawa was in the middle of it all.

Image: Shutterstock

The Holland Brothers

By: | March 4, 2016

Blacksmith Scene (1893), thought to be the first staged narrative in film

Last summer, after a decade in Canada’s Northwest Territories, I moved south to Ottawa. It is a city that holds deeper roots for me the longer I dig. Every day, I pass the park where my high school friends used to hang, and I pick up my son from an after-school program in the church where my parents were married.

Here, the experimental farm where my mother had her first summer job, picking strawberries. There, the yellow thing that has usurped the lot of my grandparents’ house. Its windowpanes have prominent Xs instead of + shapes. (Actually, maybe I like it.) We play at the beach in Britannia Bay, where my great-great-uncle drowned in a sailboat accident. His body was never recovered, so presumably he’s still there.

But there are clear familial voices from still further back – ones that blend with the ghost of another city in the same place. It wasn’t Ottawa in the early 1800s when my four-times-great-grandfather arrived from Montreal – it was a timber hub called Bytown, and Confederation was yet to bring Canada into being. Continue reading →

The Puffin’s Progress

By: | March 3, 2016

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Stephen Kress has studied Atlantic puffins for more than forty years, so you might think that he knows everything there is to know about them. He’d be the first to admit that he doesn’t. Until very recently, in fact, neither he nor anyone else even knew where the little rascals were most of the time.

Puffins used to be common in Maine, but the population was almost wiped out by hunters in the early 1900s. When Kress, a wildlife biologist, arrived in the state in the 1970s, puffins lived on only one island. At the time, most biologists thought seabirds had an unbreakable connection to their birthplaces, but Kress wondered if young birds could be taught to accept another island as home. He and his fellow members of the Audubon Society-sponsored Project Puffin transplanted puffin chicks from Nova Scotia to Maine’s coastal islands, spent a summer raising them by hand, and watched as they left for the open ocean, hoping that they would eventually return to Maine to breed.

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Do I Stay Or Do I Go? The Eveleth Conundrum

By: | March 2, 2016

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Two years ago, I wrote a story for The Atlantic about my obsession with the town of Eveleth, Minnesota. I’ve never been there. But I’ve visited it often on Google Maps. Often enough to know the town really well. To know the giant hockey stick, the city hall, the big church, the tattoo shop where the Google car has captured a woman giving it the middle finger.

I thought it was just going to be some fun story to write and then it would be over, but once the story was up I started getting emails. Lots of emails. The fine folks of Eveleth had found the piece, and my inbox was suddenly full of messages from people who currently and formerly lived in Eveleth. They sent me photos of the town and their stories of growing up. They offered to take pictures of anything I wanted to see that I couldn’t see on Google Maps. One of them even scanned and sent poetry that her father wrote about how much he loved the town.

Eveleth is a darn good city

Not a big or fancy place

Eveleth is a friendly city

With friends who are tough to replace

It goes on from there. Continue reading →