Finding My Friend’s Unwritten Poems

By: | November 22, 2021

For as long as I’ve known her, my best friend has written a poem each day and then sent it out into the world. For more than a dozen years, she wrote a daily poem. On the day her teenage son ended his life, she stopped. 

I’d grown accustomed to opening Rosemerry’s poems in my inbox each morning, but after Finn died, I found lines from the poems that she was no longer writing everywhere.

There was a poem in the tiny wooden box that was delivered to her door on a day I was visiting, and in the tears we shed failing to understand how a boy who was more than six-feet tall and always in motion could possibly fit inside such a tiny vessel.

There’s a line of poetry somewhere in the Legos scattered across the back of my car after they spilled out of the box of Finn’s belongings I dropped off at the animal shelter thrift shop. I find another stanza in that split-second decision I make when the stranger who’s helping me sees the strewn pieces and jokes about the messiness of kids, and I just nod and smile, rather than burden her with the truth of how those toys ended up in my car or saddle myself with the task of shouldering her sympathies.

I know there’s a poem in our trip to the grocery store, when an object as ordinary as a carton of orange juice becomes a tunnel into grief. Another afternoon, I detect lines of poetry in the story Rosemerry tells me about digging up the potatoes in her the garden without her son, and I’m verklempt when they surface in the first poem she writes, seven weeks after his death.  

Rosemerry is back to writing daily poems, yet I still find unwritten ones scattered around. I notice one this evening, in the shooting star that lights up the sky at the exact moment I look up. Rosemerry calls Finn a comet, but in that moment I know that he’s really a meteor who flashed brighter and brighter as he fell to Earth.

And as I watch the meteor fade into dark, I understand that poetry is the only vessel that can contain grief.

Image by Ollie Taylor

Pamela McCorduck (1940-2021)

By: | November 19, 2021

Artificial Intelligence historian Pamela McCorduck has died. Author of Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence and other seminal works, I had a request in to interview her for a number of projects but never heard back. Now I know why.

In a pitch for a Netflix show, my creative partner Briana Brownell and I drew from her fascinating interview with Lex Fridman, which I leave for you below, along with McCorduck’s New York Times obituary, a more thorough accounting of her achievements than I can offer.

The image above is from the 1994 Computer Bowl, a fundraiser for the Computer History Museum.

An Empirical Audit

By: | November 17, 2021
“Scythe Menders,” by Charles William Bartlett, 1912

I finally finished Anna Karenina, which means I now understand how gentleman farmer Konstantin Levin felt when, after spending far too much time thinking about farming, he finally just grabs a scythe and starts mowing hay, real hay! 

That, gentle reader, is how I felt last week when I talked to Leif Nelson, senior author of the recent PNAS study “Empirical audit and review and assessment of evidentiary value in research on the psychological consequences of scarcity.”  

Some background: A few years back I wrote about a popular concept in psychology and economics called scarcity mindset. In its original form, scarcity mindset refers to the idea that poverty alters how people allocate their attention, making them worse at certain kinds of decision-making (and thus more susceptible to traps like high-interest payday loans).

Early experiments looking at the psychological impacts of scarcity focused on actual financial hardship. In one, behavioral scientist Sendhil Mullainathan and economist Eldar Shafir asked people who lived below the poverty line to think about a hypothetical car repair that cost $1,500, and found that it temporarily impaired their performance on an IQ test as much as losing a night of sleep.

The field has since expanded to include many different types of scarcity, including perceived scarcity, lack of time, social status, etc. It’s a fascinating area and the sources I interviewed for my story, including Shafir, are highly-regarded and articulate. As a freelance journalist, stressed about money and deadlines, I found their arguments that even a perceived lack of time and resources could be taking a toll on my cognitive function easy to accept. I delivered the story my editor had asked for and she liked it, barely touching the copy before posting it. Once it was published, though, I realized that I hadn’t addressed the most important question: Is “scarcity mindset” real? 

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Goodbye, Tree

By: | November 15, 2021
A man in a hard hat holds a chainsaw while standing in a tree.

The last time I wrote for this blog, I mentioned the black walnut close to my window. It wasn’t the closest tree to my apartment – that’s a catalpa that grows long beans and screens the morning light for me – but it was the second closest, and the walnuttiest. I wrote:

I just recently realized that the bonk! rolllllll sound I’ve been hearing in the fall for years now was black walnuts falling on the roof. This time next year the tree and the empty apartment building will be gone, replaced by something new.

I scheduled the blog post for 4 a.m on my appointed day.

Later that day, a Wednesday morning, I was in a video call. I’d just been asked a question and was thinking about it, slowly, when I realized I was hearing something from the yard next door. The person on the other end of the call could hear it, too. After the meeting I got up and checked: A guy in a bright orange vest was standing in the middle of a weedy curtain of vegetation next door, several feet off the ground, wielding a chainsaw.

The workers didn’t start with my black walnut. First they tackled the mass of green, some combination of weedy trees and kudzu, that ran between the two lots next door. Every time I got up from my desk to check, more was gone. They cut branches and pulled down vines. An excavator turned up to demolish the concrete block building I’d been looking at for 14 years. It was no great loss for aesthetics, but it was my view, and it was changing.

By the time they left, there was a huge gap in the vegetation wall.

Thursday morning, they were back. They took down a different tall black walnut, one heavy chunk at a time. Then another big tree.

Friday morning, the workers weren’t there. When lunchtime came and went, I thought my tree had gotten a weekend reprieve. But, a little before 3, one of the workers threw a rope up and over the lowest big branch. His colleague climbed up and pulled the chainsaw after him. As I watched over the next half hour, he shinnied along the limbs, cutting off more and more pieces. He cut off the part of the tree that reached toward my window and I heard it scrape down the side of my building.

I expected to be sadder. I’d known this was coming for a long time. I’d first heard about the new development next door three years ago, at a community meeting. During this year and a half of working from home, I’ve enjoyed the tree through the seasons—the way the hallway window framed its leaves, the way mushrooms grew on a branch after a couple of wet weeks this year. There’s clearly not enough housing, and that lot next to me is as good as any place for people to live.

In the last days of my black walnut’s life, I kept the windows open as much as I could, and it kept reminding me why trees are so nice. A downy woodpecker was on one of the big limbs, silhouetted against the sky. Later its quiet thud-thud-thud-thud-thud reached me at my desk. I heard a female cardinal chipping amicably and looked out to see her one of the branches. A pair of house sparrows hopped through the twigs, chirping.

I missed the last cut of the tree – I was learning about COVID vaccine outreach from a researcher in Michigan when they brought down the trunk and dug up the stump. When I looked out after my Zoom call, the area was just dirt. I suppose the tree will live on as wood chips somewhere.

Living in a city, any encounter with wildlife feels like a blessing. In the last few weeks several more trees came down, on another lot, for a different much-needed apartment building. My catalpa, the tree still screening my window, is like an island now, the tallest green thing around. On a recent morning a downy woodpecker stopped by to probe the trunk for food, and a starling and a white-throated sparrow. Another time I heard a squirrel fussing and looked out–I tell myself it’s the same scared youth, and I’m glad that it’s still alive a month after my little urban jungle was cleared.

Photo: Helen Fields

Powder Days

By: | November 12, 2021

This week, I was reading a story from a few years ago about what the last snow on earth might look like. Snow algae, which occur naturally in the snowpack, rise to the surface during the spring; when they emerge, they turn red. This  “watermelon snow,” these days, could be seen as a warning. The algae’s presence means the snowpack absorbs more sunlight and melts even faster, allowing even more algae to grow, melting more snow–another of the many tributaries flooding into the rushing feedback loop of climate change.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of snow, too, while reading Heather Hansman’s Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns, and the Future of Chasing Snow. The organisms she’s looking at are much bigger, multicellular creatures, yet they live for snow in their own, human way. And in the ecosystems we’ve developed around ski towns, there’s a different feedback loop of low wages, unaffordable housing, class and race issues, and mental health challenges, all against the same backdrop of the rising global temperatures.

There’s also joy. That’s why I picked up this book in the first place—I spent several years in one of these mountain towns, trying to find my way both on the snow and off of it. Even back then, the tension between bliss and tragedy there could make your throat ache. The feeling of floating down an open bowl with only granite peaks and Jeffrey pines looking on. The accidents and avalanches every winter. The connectedness of being part of an unseen river of localism that runs on friendships and favor, on two-dollar Tuesdays and leftovers from your boyfriend’s restaurant job. The constant scramble for a paycheck and a place to live, the relentless waves of tourists, the aggressive hum that takes over the lift lines on a powder day, the unsettling nature of a world that depends on how much snow will fall. And the interior tensions, too. the idea that you’re here, in this most beautiful place, doing what you love–yet somehow, you’re letting it all slip through your fingers with all of this thinking about it, while everyone around you seems to know how to live like this.

And that was then. Now, these problems have grown, and grown more entangled. Hansman, a former editor at Powder and Skiing magazines and former ski bum, set off to find out—is this life even possible anymore?

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Snapshot: Spider Man

By: | November 10, 2021

It’s something that some orb spiders do, a web embellishment whose purpose is debated. It’s called a stabilimentum, and arty spiders named Shea or Absinthe (Charlotte is just too on the nose) spin it out aciniform silk — different material than they use for the surrounding web. Typically its done in concentric circles or an “X marks the spot” dead center.

My spider had a unique vision, a man in a hat, clearly, and after I discovered and oooed and ahhhed over the thing, she must have felt obliged to make progress, so she tackled the neck (not her best work) and that second leg, trailing off to answer her phone, perhaps. (Here’s a funny thing about spiders building webs while on drugs.)

Do stabilimenta keep birds from crashing through? Make the spider look bigger and scarier to predators? Attract potential mates or prey? Create stability–a sort of rebar for webs?

Or might some spiders be designers at heart who can’t help but do a little extra zig and zag? I can imagine this spider finishing up her orb, stepping back to admire her artistry, and thinking, “what does it need? It needs something! But what? Ah! I know just the thing!”

And then she got to work.

SHE?

By: | November 8, 2021

Some things I seem to write about over and over, year after year, far into the night. One of these things is the situation of women in science, usually physics and/or astronomy. The subject bores me until I start thinking about it, and then I get sort of irate. Enraged actually. Well, flame-throwingly furious. The combination of boredom and fury can take you a long way: I’m just finishing a feature story that answers the question in this post, which first ran September 3, 2014. The answer is yes.

My first interviews for this current astronomy story were with the astronomers I’ve known for decades — whose research I’ve followed, whose talks I’ve attended, whom I’ve interviewed, as I said, for decades.  The astronomers were what they have been likely to be:  men.

Astronomer:  Werk looked at other metal lines.  She found . . .

Me (thinking): She?

Another astronomer: Rudie found extended CGM around z = 2.0.  She does. . .

Me (thinking):  She?

A third astronomer:  Martin has a similar data set.  She detects . . .

Me (thinking):  She?

A fourth astronomer:  Somerville has a good overview.  She’s worked on . . .

Me (thinking):  She?

A fifth astronomer:  When Putman looks at 21-cm lines, she . . .

Me (thinking): SHE?

A sixth astronomer:  Rubin might see a hint for some.  She. . .

Me (thinking):  SHE?   

A seventh astronomer:  Peeples finds it in the CGM.  She’d know . . .

Me (light filling brain):  Is there a pattern here?

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Waiting for a plane

By: | November 5, 2021

fog \’fog, fäg\ n : vapor condensed to fine particles of water suspended in the lower atmosphere that differs from cloud only in being near the ground ; a state of bewilderment ; something that confuses or obscures

suspend \ sə-‘spend \ vb 1 : to keep fixed or lost (as in wonder or contemplation) b : to keep waiting in suspense or indecision

“Good luck getting off the island,” they said, as we stepped from the Zodiac.

They stood at the top of the boat ramp, three teenage boys slouched deep into their sweatshirts amid the rain-greased rocks, their faces shadowy in their hoods. Behind them, the tiny Unangan town of St. George, Alaska leaned into the emerald green slope, crowned with the matching emerald green roof of a Russian Orthodox church. Nathaniel and I looked back at the ship we had just left. It was the kind of day where low clouds press you into the earth like a heavy thing balanced on your head. But the fur seals rolling amid the kelp near the shore of St. George Island were glossy and light with play.

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