The Last Word On Nothing | "Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing" - Victor Hugo

Some say love, it is (an atmospheric) river

By: Emily Underwood | October 29, 2021

Driving home from an outdoor wedding in Napa Valley wine country. Puddles!

In 1861, a 45-day-long rainstorm hit California, causing the largest flood in our state’s recorded history. It created an inland lake 300 miles long in the Central Valley, and drowned roughly 200,000 cows. Governor Leland Stanford had to attend his inauguration by rowboat, and the state went bankrupt. In an effort to escape future flood waters Sacramento raised some of its streets by as many as fourteen feet.

That storm was an atmospheric river, like the category 5 storm that barrelled across Northern California last weekend. Atmospheric rivers roar over the Pacific Ocean from Hawaii and can transport more than seven times the volume of the Mississippi in a single storm. One average, California receives most of its yearly precipitation from these massive storms, over a period of 5-15 days. This storm arrived after a record 212 consecutive days without rain, on my dear friend’s wedding day.

The wedding was to be held in Napa Valley at the groom’s mother’s home. The dress code was garden party attire and the color palette was light blue and butter yellow. We arrived a few hours early to help hoist tarps over the outdoor ceremony area and stage the bar in the garage. By noon, a light pattering of rain intensified the sharp scent of the bay laurel that lined the path to the meadow where Pete and I planned to camp that night. As the 2pm ceremony approached, the tarps flapped ominously in the wind, and the sky got darker.

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the Beanie Baby bubble

By: Jane C. Hu | October 27, 2021

Peace. Clearly his tag is no longer in mint condition.

When I turned 11, I wanted to have a blow-out party. My sweet, patient parents arranged for ten of my friends to show up at Mr. Gatti’s, a combination all-you-can-eat pizza buffet and arcade. (Southerners: IYKYK.) After bumper cars and skeeball, we all piled into a designated “party room” and sat at a long table drinking soda as I opened my presents: Bath and Body Works lotions, Claire’s jewelry, Sanrio knick knacks. As I pulled a gift out of one bag, I swear I remember friends actually gasping as I pulled it out of the bag: a tie-dyed bear.

Not just any tie-dyed bear, though. This was Peace, one of the vaunted rare Beanie Babies. Around my 11th brithday, the Beanie Babies craze was at its peak, a year or so before the bubble burst. Whereas Ty, Beanie Babies’ parent company, churned out a steady stream of adorable animal toys at $5 a pop, Peace was several hundred dollars at the time; it was the first kind Ty rolled out with an embroidered symbol (naturally, a peace sign), and the tie-dye pattern meant no two bears were exactly the same. I was shocked any of my friends sprung for such a nice gift, and later learned that the generous gifter was A, and that he blew his entire savings on it.

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Telegrams to my publisher

By: Penny Wednesday | October 25, 2021

There is a much-fêted relationship between a writer and his editor. Less often is it mentioned that a writer often keeps up a second backchannel with folks from the business side of a publication, dealing with invoices and working out logistics. With smaller pubs you may actually be talking to the publisher, as is the case here. It’s an awkwardly mercenary part of the job, but occasionally, one can find a way to elevate it.

The correspondence below spanned 2015-2021.

Quick question about invoicing: [Contract #1] was assigned and filed at 800 words, then edited down to something like 680 words. Do I invoice for the original $X or see what the word count comes to and invoice for the per word rate? Also, is this a question for my editor?

We pay the assigned rate 🙂

Hooray! Here is the invoice — I’m told the piece is expected to run tomorrow. Thanks.

📎 invoice

Thanks, Penny. I’ve passed this on for payment. Fascinating story!

Have a great day.

It seems I’m always hitting you up for money, like some sort of dead-beat sister. This one’s for the piece about the invention of pottery, coming out now-ish.

📎 invoice

Brothers always spoil their sisters, right, dead-beat or otherwise? So how about I increase your payment to $Y? Your published story was 658 words, well in excess of the 500 contracted for so we’ll pay the overage. Your invoice is a Word document, so I can just change it myself, no need to send a revised invoice. Have a great day.

Yes, I WILL have a great day now. That’s a much appreciated bonus. Thank you.

DEAREST BROTHER -(STOP)- HAVE EXHAUSTED ALL PREVIOUS FUNDS AT THE CRAPS TABLES -(STOP)- PLEASE WIRE MORE -(STOP)-HAVE A HOT TIP ON A RACE HORSE -(STOP)- YOUR DEAD-BEAT SISTER

📎 invoice

DEAREST SISTER -(STOP)- ANSWER TO YOUR GAMBLING PROBLEMS FOUND -(STOP)- ALL IS EXPLAINED IN MESSAGE SCRATCHED IN STONE AT BASE OF N MOST TREE ON ISLA DE MARGARITA -(STOP)- PAYMENT BURIED UNDER ROCK -(STOP)- PRAYING FOR YOUR SALVATION -(STOP)- YOUR DEAREST BROTHER

I’m so sorry — I thought they had been referred by you and were simply CC’ing you to indicate this. I went and approved it, but of course that’s not binding unless you sign off! I’ll let you take it from here.

I am probably fine with it, but I didn’t see any further details. Did they provide you terms?

No, she didn’t give any details on that. I unthinkingly quoted her my usual syndication fee of $X, then she came back at $Y and I said fine. But it’s so soon after publication — you probably own it for a year or so? Maybe I can sell them the Brooklyn Bridge instead. Anyway, now you know their price range!

$Y is about right, though it can depend on exactly what they were planning. We do technically have exclusivity for the first 6 months, with a revenue sharing for reprints. But we don’t have any real expectations of generating big revenue from syndication, so you go ahead and keep the money. We’ve only had one other paying syndication, so far, and we let that author keep the money too. So, dinner on me, deadbeat sister 😉 Happy Easter!

That’s awfully generous of you, and I’ll try not to sell any more of your stuff. This comes just in time — remember that hot tip I got at the racetrack? Nobody told the horse. Happy Easter back at you.

DEAREST BROTHER -(STOP)- ATTEMPTED TO BUILD LAND BRIDGE OUT OF CLAMSHELL MIDDENS -(STOP)- NOW MIRED THREE FEET AWAY FROM CALVERT ISLAND -(STOP)- PLEASE SEND FUNDS FOR A TOW TRUCK -(STOP)- YOUR DEAREST SISTER

📎 invoice

DEAREST SISTER -(STOP)- TOW TRUCK IS BUSY TRYING TO EXTRICATE REPUTATION OF RYAN LOCHTE AND OTHER US SWIMMERS -(STOP)- I HAVE A LINE ON SOME KIND HUMPBACKS WHO MAY BE WILLING TO RESCUE YOU -(STOP)- SIT TIGHT -(STOP)- YOUR DEAREST BROTHER

PS HOLD YOUR BREATH IF THE TIDE COMES IN -(STOP)-

DEAREST SISTER -(STOP)- IT HAS BEEN SO LONG, THE FAMILY HAS BEEN WORRIED. -(STOP)- WE’VE MISSED YOU SO -(STOP)- MONEY IS ON OFFER TO BRING YOU BACK INTO THE FOLD BUT WE AREN’T SURE WHERE TO SEND IT -(STOP)- DO YOU STILL LIVE AT [ADDRESS] -(STOP)- CANT WAIT TO HEAR OF YOUR ADVENTURES. -(STOP)- YOUR DEAREST BROTHER

ARE YOU OUT THERE DEAREST SISTER -(STOP)- NO ANSWER TO MY LAST EMAIL. ADVISE.

DEAREST BROTHER -(STOP)- APOLOGIES FOR THE SLOW TRANSMISSION -(STOP)- RECENTLY SPRUNG FROM EMIRATI CAPTIVITY BY A CRACK TEAM OF SCUBA DIVERS -(STOP)- PREVIOUS ADDRESS CONFIRMED AS CURRENT -(STOP)- YOUR DEAREST SISTER

DEAREST BROTHER –<STOP>– MOB GOT WISE TO MY MONOPOLY MONEY RACKET –<STOP>– TOOK REFUGE IN A FOREST GARDEN –<STOP>– SUBSISTING ON CRABAPPLE AND HAZELNUTS –<STOP>– BEAR HAS TAKEN UP RESIDENCE ALSO –<STOP>– PLS SEND FUNDS FOR BEAR SPRAY –<STOP>–YOUR DEADBEAT SISTER

📎 invoice

DEAREST SISTER –<STOP>– MONEY FORTHCOMING –<STOP>– HAVE YOUR BANK DETAILS CHANGED –<STOP>– LAST BANK WE HAVE FOR YOU WAS IN THE GREAT WHITE NORTH –<STOP>– NEW BANK FORM ATTACHED –<STOP>– FEED THE BEAR THE CRABAPPLES AND STAY ENJOY THE HAZELNUTS –<STOP>– YOUR DEAREST BROTHER

DEAREST BROTHER–<STOP>–BANKING DETAILS REMAIN THE SAME –<STOP>–OPENED ACCOUNT IN GREAT WHITE NORTH DURING FAILED GOLD RUSH BID AND NEVER CLOSED IT –<STOP>–THX FOR CHECKING–<STOP>–D.B. SISTER

Your deadbeat sister is on her feet and has acquired an email address. I see that it was actually on this day in 2015 that you started helping me out of various scrapes. To be real for a second, I’m off to seek my fortunes on Wall Street, having taken an analyst position for a New York investment fund. If I turn out to be employable and manage to hold down the job, I’m unlikely to be writing freelance again.

It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.

Warmly, Penny

p.s. invoice attached.

📎 invoice

Oh my gosh, sister! Good thing you said “to be real” because that almost doesn’t sound real 😁. Congrats on the job and good luck with it!

I’ve passed your invoice on for payment.

Science Poem: The Death of the Lobster

By: Kate Horowitz | October 22, 2021

A version of this poem appeared in Doubleback Review.

Bubbles at the sea's surface. A trail suggests something has just fallen, or is rising.

The Death of the Lobster

I. 
The death of the lobster will commence quietly.

One night, she will awake and find her shell slightly too snug:
The lobster’s shell has stopped growing. The lobster has not.

Tomorrow, her shell will be tighter;
the next day, tighter still.

Her shell is everything that holds her, outside and in. 
It is the little legs that click her across her cave, 
the gears in her stomach for grinding fish into food.

The constriction will continue.
The lobster will lose her appetite.

Now she will waste away, a diminishing prisoner
inside a self-shaped cell. 


II. 
One morning, it will be time. She will pump her shell with sea water, 
more, more, more, until it cracks.

She will wrench the lining from her guts
and pull it from her mouth, a conjurer's string of scarves.

She will withdraw withered arms from rigid sleeves.
She is too weary to be doing this. Still, it needs to be done.

She will thrash her soft body through the rupture in her armor.
The world will go black.

It will feel like dying, and it is.
But it is not the end.


III.
Beneath her old split shell
she has grown another, flimsy and mica-thin.

When she wakes, she will flood this young covering
with water, filling the new shape until it inflates, 
solidifying by the moment.

Before long, she will have claws that will hold. Legs to stand on.
Teeth to feed her.

She will rise on new feet. She will raise the broken shell 
to her mouth and start eating.

The old house will never be home again. Yet from the rubble 
she will pick good bricks and rebuild.

Image by Mostafa Ashraf Mostafa via Unsplash. Inspiration by Trevor Corson.

Nature stuff I saw from the car on Sunday: A list

By: Helen Fields | October 20, 2021

I’ve spent a lot more time in a car than I used to, since the pandemic started. Because of not wanting to be in spaces where other people are exhaling. On Sunday, I spent a few half-hour stretches in a car. And I noticed a number of things, and I’m here to tell you about them now.

I took the picture above on Sunday, but I was standing on my two feet, nowhere near a car, and isn’t it pretty?

Black vulture

As the car went up a wide suburban road, two vultures were flying low. So low that I could tell, for once, that they were not both the same kind of vulture. I know that there are both turkey vultures and black vultures around here, in the air and on the ground, eating dead things. But most of the vultures are turkey vultures, so mostly I assume that’s what I’m seeing.

Most of the time, they’re too high up to see the color of their heads – they’re just a black V shape in the sky. This time I could see that the undersides of their wings had different light-and-dark patterns, and then one turned in a way that I could see its black head.

The delight of seeing something I sort of knew, for real, in the field! And by field” I mean in the sky, over the six-lane road.

Black walnuts

A few hours later I was driving along the Beltway that encircles Washington, D.C., and spotted a cluster of green balls on the shoulder.

Just outside the window of my apartment is a catalpa tree, and several feet to the left of that is a black walnut. It’s a wonderful, tall, sturdy tree, with pretty leaves that catch the light. My tree book tells me “all parts [of the tree] have distinctive odor” but I’ve never gone out there to sniff the tree. I’d be trespassing in the backyard of the abandoned apartment building next door.

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. When I saw those walnuts by the side of the interstate, I remembered that there are other walnut trees out there, living their little lives and throwing their round, green fruits down on the ground, even if nobody appreciates them.

Dead mammal

As I left one interstate for another, on another ramp, I saw a furry ball by the side of the road, up against the concrete barrier, huddled, soft.

Roadkill is one of the many ways that cars are the worst. That animal was just going about its business, maybe trying to get to some fresh walnuts. Then someone who was afraid to take Metro drove by, and the animal dragged itself to the side of the road, met a concrete barrier, curled up, and died. I’ve driven by roadkill countless times before – cars: the worst – but this one actually made me feel sad. It looked like a raccoon to me, although all I saw was its beautiful fur and its curled-up back.

Maybe since then a vulture has stopped by, and ensured that it did not die in vain.

That was my Sunday: In a car, noticing the bits of the natural world that hang on, surrounding us, overhead and at the margins of our concrete, growing and dying while we drive by.

Photo: Helen Fields

Bird on the Street

By: Cameron Walker | October 18, 2021

Last week I asked a friend, new to town, to meet me on the corner by Mockingbird Lane. I have been noticing mockingbirds more since the start of the pandemic—the bright flash of white tail feathers, the snippets of stolen songs. And I’d been to this corner many times—it’s the start of one of my favorite places to walk—but until I had to give someone directions, I’d never really noticed that particular name, on that particular sign.

Streets, particularly ones I know well, have a way of doing that to me. The words don’t mean the same thing as they do out in the real world, they’re connected instead with a particular stretch of tarmac, or the series of turns needed to get to a destination. As I started writing this, I started thinking about the streets I’ve lived on or near. Until about five minutes ago, I’d never associated a road called Grizzly Peak, a main thoroughfare in my childhood, with any living, breathing bear.

I ran through other familiar streets in my mind. Crow Canyon, Quail Hollow. Some of them I write on envelopes every December: Sun Eagle, Wren. The words seem beautiful, interesting, but they have never been birds to me. Some say the names of things show us what we’ve lost, others say they could be a way of marking what species are important to us. At their best, making an effort to name streets after local fauna (and flora) could generate pride–and perhaps, even spark an interest in protection, according to a 2018 study in PLOS.

I starting thinking about the birds we find on our street signs while reading Jennifer Moxley’s new book, For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds. In one of her essays, she describes growing up in San Diego among birds as cross-streets, from Albatross to Lark. Moxley, too, had an early disconnect between the street and what it described: “[T]o my young self, ‘Curlew’ conjured not the image of a sleek shorebird with a curved beak, but a perilously steep, snake-like road . . It was a hazardous gauntlet down, and an arduous, almost impossible climb back.”

She describes navigating girlhood by bird streets. And in her other essays, these birds come to life off reflective signs, and form another way to navigate the world. It may be arduous, but that’s where I’d like to climb to, too, to a place where roads direct me back to the world around me. Maybe we can meet there, on Mockingbird Lane, and these birds and their patchworks of song can start showing us the way.

Mockingbird photo by Flickr user Anne Davis 773 under Creative Commons license

Somebody Needs to Write a Book About the Political Economy of the Colorado Potato Beetle

By: Ben Goldfarb | October 15, 2021

The other day, my friend Max — a brilliant aquatic scientist whose work lies at the center of the herpetology/gender studies Venn diagram — tweeted a comment he’d received from an anonymous peer reviewer. Evidently this reviewer had doubted Max’s claim that frogs have political economic histories. Max’s reply: “lolz yes. All critters on Earth have socio-cultural & political economic histories.” (If the reviewer found this tweet convincing, Max didn’t say so.)

I agree with Max’s assertion — heck, even a creature as obscure and humble as the achoque salamander is deeply embedded in socio-cultural webs of religion, science, and regulatory bureaucracy. That said, I’m skeptical that every species has an equally compelling socio-political history. While one could theoretically write an exhaustive work of political economy about, I don’t know, the red-backed vole, I’m not sure I’d want to read it. (Apologies to all the mammalogists I just mortally offended.)

I’m biased, but I’d argue that the political economy with the most explanatory power in the non-human animal kingdom is that of Castor canadensis, the mighty beaver. How many other species were the subject of a transcontinental trade that spanned centuries and fundamentally restructured European and Indigenous North American cultures? How many species spurred the colonization of a continent, started wars, inspired a real estate transaction as grandiose as the Louisiana Purchase? How many species were so economically important that regional currencies were pegged to the value of its fur? I could go on. Somebody should really write a book about this.

Anyway, Max’s tweet got me wondering: Which other species are crying out for a popular political economic history? Most of the obvious ones, I think, have been written. Mark Kurlansky covered cod (and, in so doing, made the single-species biography a genre). David Montgomery did salmon. Whales have been comprehensively documented, most recently by Rebecca Giggs and Bathsheba Demuth. There’s no shortage of books about influential disease vectors (mosquitos, rats, ticks) and species at the center of management controversies (wolves, bears, spotted owls) and commercially valuable sea creatures (save some fish for the rest of us, Paul Greenberg).

In short, it’s a crowded market. (Although I do think the world badly needs a prairie dog opus.)

(As a brief aside, I’m aware that I’m defining political economy vis-a-vis species’ interactions with humans, a narrow frame that reveals my anthropocentrism and limited imagination. No doubt many animal societies have endlessly rich political economies of their own, entirely unrelated to their relationship to humans. Imagine the palace intrigue within, say, a naked mole rat colony.)

All of the above notwithstanding, there’s one deserving critter whose political economy has never, to my knowledge, been thoroughly explicated: the Colorado potato beetle.

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Just Have Lunch

By: Ann Finkbeiner | October 13, 2021

I’ve been interviewing women scientists again, younger ones this time. I ask them if they have some kind of semi-official, almost casual way of staying connected with other women scientists. Because, you know, staying connected helps you survive the bullshit. Every time I ask them this question — and the answer is almost always “YES!” — I think of Senator Barbara Mikulski’s lunches which were surely a bullshit-survival mechanism. But they were something more: they were also watched. What happens when a network of women is watched? This first ran January 9, 2017.

I wish I could remember – but I can’t – the woman who told me a story about how she and other women in her profession had regular lunches, casually, unofficially, no agenda. Was she a lawyer? A writer? An astronomer? Just don’t remember. The thing I’m sure about is that the point was not that the women met for lunch, it was that the men they worked with noticed that they met. The men didn’t get snippy, didn’t make comments, just noticed: something like, “saw that you were at one of your lunches.”

Now there’s a thought. I’ve spent a certain amount of my career writing about women in science and the gender-related issues they deal with, including how to get attention paid to their research, how to get taken seriously, and how to get enough power. Why even be in a profession unless your voice gets heard and you can do things that you’re good at, things worth doing, the things worth your time on earth? Even the paleolithics wanted to have the things they made (I stole this idea from Jacob Bronowski, around minute 14:45), show the shapes of their hands.

And of course women have always and still have trouble being noticed. One work-around was hilarious: a woman in a meeting says something (“Let’s check the immigrant statistics”), another woman in the meeting repeats it and cites the first woman (“I think we should do what Sarah suggested, check the immigrant statistics”). They called it “amplification,” as in, boosting the signal, making it louder, spreading it farther, just like a cell phone tower. Parts of these last two paragraphs are digressions.

The solution of the woman-I-can’t-remember was different from amplification, less in-your-face: it was just, have lunch. When I was in academia, I was part of something like this. A friend in another department, agreeing with everybody that the university’s percentage of women faculty (upper-body strength not a requisite) was pathetic, began reserving a lunch table at the faculty club every few weeks. She thought that since we were so few, we might like to know each other. There we sat, at an obviously-reserved table, in the middle of the faculty club dining room, talking not about university politics or the plight of women or the subversion of the patriarchy, just talking to the person across the table about what her research was finding these days or had she travelled somewhere interesting over the summer or how were her classes going. I loved these lunches; they made me feel more a part of the university’s intellectual candy store. But that was the view from the inside. I never thought about the old boys at the next table over, what they might be seeing. Though I do remember the same comment, something like, “saw you at one of your lunches.”

Turns out Senator Barbara Mikulski had the same idea. After she announced her retirement, the news media talked all about how she was head of the enormously powerful Appropriations Committee, and how she was 4’ 11” and stood on a stool so she could be seen over a podium, and how she’d been in the Senate for 30 years and was the longest-serving woman senator and when she first got there, she was only the second senator to be a woman and the Senate didn’t have women’s bathrooms and she was supposed to wear skirts.

And in almost all of those news reports was this same piece of information: that every month or so for two decades, Mikulski had held – often at her house – famously private dinners to which only women senators were invited, no men. Because women senators come in all political persuasions, the discussions were not business meetings, they were just people getting to know each other, listening, talking – you know, the basis on which the human, social world of politics begins its arguments, negotiations, and compromises.

Some news reports said that the dinners were the reason that women senators got an unrepresentative amount of stuff done.

But again, that’s the view from the inside. Here’s my point: the dinners were private –the rule was no staff, no memos, no leaks — and even then, they were a standard part of the public news reports. The dinners existed and so the guys watched, they noticed. Maybe humans can’t help ourselves, when some people sit around in a special group, we pay attention, we wonder what they’re up to. And even if they seem to be up to nothing special, just sitting around eating, we notice. We keep an eye on them, see if they do it again. They do. They do it for the next twenty years. They’re a presence now.

All the gender-related inequities still have to be talked about, written about, legislated, enacted, enforced. But meanwhile, damn, sisters: to be seen, start with lunch.

__________

Roundhouse Wipers, 1943 – United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division, via Wikimedia Commons

Senator Barbara Mikulski (guess which one she is) and NASA (part of her professional purview) staff, via Flickr

Mikulski and fellow senators at the 2008 Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the National Women’s Law Center, and the National Partnership for Women and Families: Clarissa Peterson, LCCR, via Flickr