Quiz Time

By: | February 27, 2015

running muskox

The utterance, “There will be a quiz on this” is notorious for striking panic into a roomful of students, but for me it holds the key to my strongest motivation. I am so much more likely to read a textbook chapter that will be followed by a pat on the back in the form of smug circling of correct letters. Not a test, mind you – not an essay, not an exam – but a quiz. Preferably of the multiple-choice variety.

Perhaps it’s the comparative ease of recognition – identifying the correct choice – over recall (coming up with the right technical term to fill in a blank) that provides what enigmatologists have identified as a primal reward. Behavioral game designers schedule these rewards optimally – a bonus round here, an achievement unlocked there – so that the brain never suffers the frustration of dopamine withdrawal during game play, and that iPad becomes nigh on impossible to put down. Continue reading →

Plan UVB

By: | February 26, 2015

You may have read last week that you should start wearing sunscreen at night. This was bad news for me: I’m already a hopeless victim of sunscreen marketing, slathering the stuff in rain or shine, in London fog, at dusk. I just can’t stop, despite mounting evidence that regular sunscreen may be less protective than advertised, and may even help cultivate a Vitamin D deficiency. And then, last week, Yale researchers found that UV rays keep wrecking skin cells up to three hours after the last photon has hit the skin. This implies that in addition to the SPF 45 I use during the day, I should stock my night table with an “ex post facto” overnight sunblock. With ingredients like vitamin E and antioxidants, this hypothetical cream would act like the Plan B of sun protection, undoing damage after it had ostensibly already been done.

While “night-time sunscreen” was an arresting image, though, that product (which is probably more like an aftersun) wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem: how do I get enough sun to be healthy without getting enough sun to give me cancer? What I really want is something that amps up my skin’s natural sun defenses 24-7 from the inside out. Many different ideas are knocking around various labs, and some might be on the market soon. The best ones manipulate melanin, so in addition to letting me ditch the goopy creams, they’d give me the Mediterranean glow I’ve always been so careful to avoid. Continue reading →

Dreaming in the Pleistocene

By: | February 25, 2015

Mammoth dreamIt would have been different if it hadn’t been a cave, if the excavation had been out in the daylight where mystery more easily washes out.

The darkness helped, nothing but my headlamp to show the way. Every morning we’d suit up at the cave entrance. A group of scientists descended a ladder one by one, packs filled with notebooks and tools. I had gotten onto the excavation by working at the base camp as a cook. They let me dig because they needed all the hands they could get. Bones were coming out of the cave by the thousands, a rich Pleistocene horizon. Continue reading →

Flabbergasted By the Real World

By: | February 23, 2015

???????????????I grew up on a small farm and among other creatures, we raised chickens. Every day they had to be fed and watered and their eggs, warm from their bodies, had to be gathered. When the chickens got old enough to stop laying regularly, we’d turn them into stew: we’d kill them and dress them, “dress” meaning take off their feathers and feet, and take out their innards. As a kid, all the blood and guts didn’t bother me, I had an operating knowledge of chicken anatomy, I’d seen it all before.

In fact I was pretty cynical in general, especially about things the grownups said, which I thought were mostly theory or flat-out propaganda. Except for one memory that can’t be entirely right but I’m sticking to it because it was something our mom showed us and for once, it was interesting; in fact, it was a miracle. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | February 21, 2015

February 16 – 20

Helen:  “Why, 18 degrees isn’t bad, I thought to myself. All you need is…I did some math in my head and realized I was wearing about $350 worth of specialized clothing, while occasionally passing some poor soul hunched down in a hooded sweatshirt.”

Cameron reduxed, updated: “I must confess now that, three years later, all the seed catalogs that  arrived this winter have gone straight to the recycling bin. Last year I tried to grow Michael Pollan and several other tomato varieties from seed; only one of the 50 or so seedlings that emerged resulted in actual tomatoes. When it’s tomato season, I’m going to the farmers’ market instead. But I did just get these apple trees . . .”

Guest Judith Lewis Mernit:  “Poor Isis! She died in such beloved company, but lived without much purpose. That’s the final anachronism: Among England’s aristocrats between the wars, a lazy Lab kept for show by the fireside would have been odd indeed. The fantasy dog named Isis may have enjoyed a long and comfortable life, but for a dog presumably bred to fetch ducks from icy rivers, it couldn’t have been much fun.”

Sally:  “The French language – and thus how the French think and speak, their worldview – is controlled by the state. English is a free-for-all. Is there a middle ground? I don’t want to get all Hitler about it, but it wouldn’t kill us to have a bit of border security.”

Guest Stephanie Paige Ogburn:  “The mailman hustles down the stairs. The watcher makes his move. A quick flip of the clip, and he’s in. The mail slot’s inner door creaks closed behind him, swinging back and forth. He lands on the small table that catches the mail, sits for a minute atop the Christmas cards and grocery store ads, then looks around, stealthily.”

A Visit From the Christmas Squirrel

By: | February 20, 2015

Squirrel1He must have come in through the mail slot. I imagine him watching the mailman stride up the front steps Christmas Eve, flipping open the metal flap and thrusting the envelopes inside. The flap is propped open a smidge by the metal binder clip we use to hold outgoing mail. It is snowing — cold. To him,* this unknown land inside the mail slot must have seemed warm, inviting, perhaps full of food.

The mailman hustles down the stairs. The watcher makes his move. A quick flip of the clip, and he’s in. The mail slot’s inner door creaks closed behind him, swinging back and forth. He lands on the small table that catches the mail, sits for a minute atop the Christmas cards and grocery store ads, then looks around, stealthily. Continue reading →

Do you speak English?

By: | February 19, 2015

“The problem with France is that there’s no French word for entrepreneur.”

It’s tragic that George W. Bush didn’t actually say this, because it perfectly illuminates the stealth with which languages insinuate themselves into each other. If you speak English, you probably know that when you say sans and en vogue you’re using import words. But you might also think you’re speaking English when you refer to a blonde or a brunette.

Recently there’s been a lot of interest in untranslatable loaner words. These get passed around the internet as linguistic amuse bouches. But it might not be long before you’re throwing iktsuarpok around in your daily bants. The permeability of the English language is part of what has ensured its higgledy-piggledy rise to global dominance. This feat of linguistic and cultural assimilation becomes even more impressive when you consider that it couldn’t be repeated even when exactingly planned — and when you consider how strenuously other cultures have resisted the same fate. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Isis, a Dog Out of Time

By: | February 18, 2015

WARNING: If you are not up-to-date on the most recently aired episode of Downton Abbey on PBS, and you actually care what happens, read no more. Spoiler, though hardly a shock, within.

“I’m worried about Isis,” Downton Abbey’s Lord Grantham told his daughter Mary the other night. “She’s not looking too clever.” ‘Tis true: Isis, the yellow Labrador Retriever whose ample rear end has long graced the opening credits of the show, is about to die. It’s nothing to do with the recent and awkward association of her name with Islamic terrorism, though: Isis has lived at least eight years since she appeared as an adult dog in Season Two. She has lived through the Great War, the Spanish flu, and Matthew Crawley’s histrionic car crash; she has lasted longer than some of the series’ devoted viewers. Isis has simply grown old.

Not that we aren’t sad to see her go. When Lord Grantham carried Isis into the bedroom wrapped in a blanket and settled her down on the bed next to his wife—the dog’s impending death mending the rift that had yawned between the couple for the last few episodes—I actually cried. But not much, really, and not for long. Because not only has Isis done quite well by the standard of yellow Labrador movie stars, expiring with less cloying indignity than Marley and less violence than rabid Old Yeller (actually a yellow Lab/Mastiff cross), Isis is also a perversely modern dog, and one that I never considered quite real.

Continue reading →