A Baffling Curio

By: | August 28, 2015

quodlibet1 croppedInvestigative journalists seem awfully glamorous – delving into mysteries and catching those liars at their game. Unfortunately, I don’t have any of the aptitudes involved, so I steer clear of it. But recently I’ve had the thrill of that hunt in miniature.

It all began when an editor sent me a link to the check above, to illustrate an assignment about in-kind payment. Newfoundland was the last colony to join Canadian confederation (in 1949) and before it did, there was a currency shortage, so people kept credit accounts in the form of their primary export: cod.

The text of this check, if you can’t make it out, reads as follows:

Cashier of the Bank of Newfound land please pay to bearer seventy five quintals fourteen pounds of uncured codfish 75—14

Quodlibet Hookem (Hoskem? Hoskim?)

March 14 1689

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A Singular Data Point Is A Datum, You Idiots!

By: | August 27, 2015

data_JustGrimesThere’s a moment when you realize that you’ve become the person you hate. For me, it happened at the dinner table.

I was telling (ok, ranting to) my husband about how my employer, FiveThirtyEight, has chosen to adopt as its house style the usage of the word data as a singular noun.

“So you’ve become a pedantic asshole?” he said.

He was right, of course. It was time to let it go. My snobbery over the usage of the word data dates back to my senior year of college. In my honors thesis, I described the results of my summer research project by using the word as a singular noun (“the data is,” as I recall) and one of my committee members had crucified me for it. His was the only negative comment I received, and it stung. I was never going to make that mistake again. Continue reading →

Prescription for Tragedy

By: | August 26, 2015

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Not long ago my father, who is 84, had a great fall. Great meaning bad.

He doesn’t remember tripping on anything, just that suddenly he was on the floor of his bathroom. He’d hit his head on the corner of the sink. There was a lot of blood. A long hospital stay followed after surgery to drain the blood that had pooled on his brain. He recovered, with a hole in his head as a constant and ugly reminder of his unexplained collapse.

The surgeon came to see us in the recovery room. He said “Martin, no more falling. If you hit your head again it will probably kill you.”

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Story, History, Story

By: | August 25, 2015

4932044252_5fc01f798a_bAnn:   Some time ago, I got interested in why European languages so often use the same word for “story” and “history.”  Every English speaker knows that having one word for two such different things — fiction and truth, respectively — is anathema.  But my thinking didn’t go much farther than that, it rarely does.  So  I found a couple of actual, practicing PhD historians, Audra Wolfe and Alex Wellerstein (bio’s below), and asked them: what’s story, what’s history, are they the same, and if not what’s the relation between them?   

Audra: Of course histories are stories. History is the study of change over time, which means that it’s an inherently narrative enterprise, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. To be sure, it’s possible to write a history of a given moment in time, a more static account that tries to capture a particular Zeitgeist. But even then, the author has made certain decisions about how that moment of time is defined. Something happened beforehand, to start the era under question, and something happened at the end, to close it.

Ann:  Boy, does that sound exactly how I see my own stories: I’m taking the real world and assigning beginnings, middles, and ends.  It’s also why I get so worried about using the techniques of fiction in nonfiction.

Audra:  But “story” doesn’t necessarily mean fiction! At least colloquially, we describe all sorts of things as “stories”: New Yorker articles, documentaries, and even prizewinning nonfiction books. Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control, for instance, about the oh-so-thin veneer of nuclear safety, is nothing if not a great story. It’s also true. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Postcard from El Salvador

By: | August 24, 2015

20150729_144035Agricultural engineer Irene Varela is a compelling presence. Six farmers are gathered on the patio of a church library in Santiago Texacuangos in El Salvador, about an hour outside the country’s capital for a workshop she’s leading.

“What’s the soil like when you have worms?” Varela asks in Spanish.

“Moist,” says one famer.

“Rich,” says another.

It’s the last Wednesday in July, and my second week in El Salvador. I’m here on a fellowship to work with the Asociación Pro-Búsqueda de Niñas y Niños Desparecidos (Pro-Búsqueda), an NGO that helps parents search for children who were abducted during the country’s civil war. (The official dates of the war are 1979 to 1992—so today, those children are young adults.) Until I met Varela, that was all I knew of Pro-Búsqueda’s work. Intrigued to learn that the group offered an agricultural education program as well, I’d asked her if I could tag along the next time she went into in the field.

The training is titled Lombricultura, a play on the Spanish words for worms (lombriz) and agriculture. The farmers are mostly middle-aged men from the community who clearly know their local land. And worms. Broadly speaking, the presence of worms is a marker of healthy soils. Their burrowing aerates the soil, and their digestive systems turn organic scraps into natural fertilizer. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | August 22, 2015

8206069_da9ea32cd3_oAugust 17 – 21, 2015

It was a week of people changing their minds.  Except for Cameron’s kids, they didn’t budge.

Magical thinking works, says guest Heather Abel.  For decades, she was able to stop tsunamis before they hit her. Now, though, the grand and calming ocean stops them for her.

Even out in the back of beyond, Craig wouldn’t use satellite phones.  Now he does, he says, because this is what we do: “we find the sharpest stones, we make fires, we reach to space and call home.”

No, Helen’s not going to get a U2 tatoo.  She does love that band, it makes her happy; but she’s not one of those people who get tatoos, isn’t seduced by the U2 Tatoo Project.  Now she wonders what U2 tatoo to get.

Cameron is fascinated by Cat’s Cradle.  So is her mother; so in fact is the whole world past and present.  Her kids aren’t fascinated.  Then she learned to do Jacob’s Ladder, but they’re still not.

Michelle’s neighbors are Mt. St. Helen’s and Ursula LeGuin.  LeGuin loved the mountain but once is started smoking, was scared to camp on it.  The mountain didn’t mind, though, so Leguin didn’t either.

 

 

The Lady and Le Guin

By: | August 21, 2015

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Late last month, I got to camp with a group of ecologists at the base of Mt. St. Helens, in southwestern Washington state. Some of the scientists had been studying the mountain since shortly after it erupted on May 18, 1980, and they were full of stories about the changes they’d seen over the past thirty-five years. They told me that someone else had been watching the mountain just as long as they had, and that she still watched it every morning. Her name was Ursula Le Guin.

Ursula Le Guin? I said. The Ursula Le Guin?

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Gathering String

By: | August 20, 2015

8206069_da9ea32cd3_oI often buy presents for my kids that are really for me. This time, it was a special string for doing Cat’s Cradle. (Of course, it’s funny that I even bought a string, instead of tying a piece of yarn into a loop like I once did.)

When they unwrapped it, they saw a rainbow piece of silk, one solid knotless loop. This is a loose rendering of the conversation that followed:

Oldest son: “What is this?”

Me: “It’s a game.”

OS [disappointed]: “Oh.”

Middle son is about to throw a tantrum. Enter Grandma.

Grandma: “Oh! Cat’s Cradle! How fun!” Continue reading →