Psychiatry without psychiatrists, in a tsunami’s wake

By: | March 16, 2012

One day last fall I stood in the middle of the meunasah, or community meeting hall, in a remote Indonesian village trying to explain who I am and what I was doing there. A few dozen people sat on straw mats sipping bottled water and snacking on fried plantain strips, watching me expectantly. The village leader, a thin man with intense brown eyes and bushy mustache, had asked me to address them, and in an act of hospitality, or perhaps sensing a comedic opportunity, he’d given me a smoked duck egg to eat while I spoke.

Through a translator, I told them I was a journalist from America, and that I was working on an article about the community mental health program that began here in Aceh province after the 2004 earthquake and tsunami. The idea of this program, which I describe in more detail in today’s issue of Science, is to shift much of the work traditionally done by psychiatrists to less specialized health workers: general practitioners, nurses, and even ordinary villagers. Continue reading →

Marilyn Hagerty’s Fleeting Fame

By: | March 15, 2012

First, a warning: Normally LaWonians talk about science. Today I failed. This post has nothing to do with science. I’m sorry. 

Marilyn Hagerty, a restaurant reviewer for the Grand Forks Herald, never expected to be famous. But then a new Olive Garden opened in Grand Forks. Hagerty reviewed it. And the rest is cyberspace history.

Someone sent the link to someone else, who posted it on Twitter. The tweet got retweeted, or maybe posted as a modified tweet along with a sarcastic comment. And then some blogger spotted it. He smacked his lips with glee and marshaled all his snark. And then he wrote a biting commentary on her review. That post delighted some other blogger and so on and so forth.* A day after Hagerty’s review went live, she was on Gawker, Boing Boing and The Village Voice. The Grand Forks Herald’s Olive Garden review is now on the cusp of garnering a million page views. Continue reading →

In Search of the Secret Garden

By: | March 14, 2012

When J. Allen Williams, Jr., was a boy in Chapel Hill, N.C., his mother loved to read the children’s classic The Secret Garden to him and his brother. The story, about an orphaned girl and her friends who restore an abandoned garden on an English estate, led Williams and his brother to dig and plant their own secret garden in the woods behind their house.

Williams, now an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, still remembers the experience fondly. He’s read The Secret Garden to his children and grandchildren, hoping to inspire the same sort of backyard adventures.

But The Secret Garden, bless it, was published in 1910. Where are its modern successors?

Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Fairy Tale

By: | March 13, 2012

Back at the end of the 19th century, when scientists were just discovering radioactivity and Marie Curie was trying to isolate radium, nobody knew what the effect of radioactivity on the human body might be.  Radium was a new element, just a pretty blue glowing thing.

Curie also wrote:  “One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night; we then perceived on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles or capsules containing our products. It was really a lovely sight and one always new to us. The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights.”  She died in 1934 of aplastic anemia, killed by the fairy lights.

http://abstrusegoose.com/430

The Last Word

By: | March 10, 2012

March 5 – March 9

Today I’m calling on the power of the crowd to resolve an internal debate: What do you hear yourself think when you see the letters LWON? Are we LaWon or Elwon? The reason I ask is that this week, we got a new person of LWON! Do I welcome Cameron Walker as a LaWonian or an Elwonian? Or is there some alternative construction we’ve failed to consider? Your thoughts in the comments, please.

As advertised, Cameron immediately wowed us with a snappy and sweet post about the nature of writerly communion. Also, barnacle penis.

Tom wondered if the human excretory system could be re-engineered to be more like the copepod’s, which produces small, neatly-wrapped poop burritos.

Ginny followed parasitic filarial nematodes on a cross-species adventure as they hopped between humans and mosquitoes, leaving me all itchy and worried about a global elephantiasis pandemic.

Jessa correctly observed that “a wilderness death by charismatic megafauna has a certain dramatic appeal.”

And my friend Richard Fisher wrapped up the week with a beautiful meditation on how we’re all just small links in a chain of humanity that stretches into time’s vanishing point.

Guest Post: Continuity and Deep Time

By: | March 9, 2012

About a decade before my father died, he asked me to start collecting rocks for him. I didn’t fully understand why, but since I was studying geology at the time, I began to pick them up wherever I visited. Limestone from the Alps; granite from New Zealand. He kept the rocks I collected on a window-shelf at his office.

My dad trained as an accountant, and worked for a company that made lamp-posts and poles for traffic lights. On family holidays and days out, he would point from the car’s driving seat at grey, galvanised lamp-posts at the side of the road. “Look! That’s one of ours,” he said. We all made fun of him for that. One day, he came home with a garden climbing frame made from steel poles, which he’d had made for us in the factory. It was awesome. We did not make fun.

Two particular moments stay with me about the day of his death.

Continue reading →

Fruit Fly Walks into a Bar . . .

By: | March 7, 2012

When I lived in Madrid in college, I read several guidebook descriptions of Café Gijón and knew I had to go. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be a writer, but I sure liked the idea of being a writer, and a “famous literary café” with artists and writers still meeting up to drink and philosophize sounded like somewhere I needed to be.

I showed up one winter afternoon, ordered a coffee in my shy Spanish, and waited. When nothing happened but the arrival of my coffee, I didn’t know what to do, so I pulled out a notebook and began to write.

What happened next might be a little blurred by years and vino tinto, but suddenly there was a balding man sitting across from me holding out a tiny glass of sherry. I found myself trying to tell him about the one philosophically-oriented book I’d read recently, The Quantum Society, but I got mixed up somewhere between the particles and the waves.

Whatever I said must have sounded as bad as that does, because he said, “You’re not very articulate. But you’re still very young. Why don’t you come sit with my friends?” Continue reading →

New Person of LWON: Cameron Walker

By: | March 6, 2012

We’re delighted that science and travel journalist Cameron Walker has joined our ranks as a regular contributor, bringing the People of LWON to an even dozen. You’ve already read Cameron’s graceful, quiet, funny prose in her popular guest posts. Elsewhere, she’s written about the physics of stone skipping, a marathon swimmer who fuels his river swims with Slovenian wine, the pleasures of weatherspotting, and, well, many other curious and charming subjects that she’ll share with us soon. Cameron lives with her husband and two young sons on the central California coast, and two truths and a lie about her are: As a teenager, she founded an all-girl surfing club that was featured in People; in college, she was accidentally assigned to a boys’ dorm; and one of her LWON guest posts has inspired a real-life romance.

Welcome, Cameron.