I was pretty sure the sky was flat, like a cap or a lid or a ceiling. I didn’t think about the sun going up, around, and down; or the moon changing shape; or the constellations moving to different neighborhoods. I was curious about other things, not the sky.
The first time I thought about the sky as living in more than two dimensions was when I was in my teens and babysitting a smart little kid. “Did you ever think that when you’re looking up into the sky,” she said, “you’re seeing infinity?” I was struck dumb. I mean, you couldn’t see Chicago and it was only 30 miles away. And all you had to do to see infinity was look up. I knew the reason for this — I was standing on the surface of a curved planet, I couldn’t see around the curve but because I was on the surface, I could see straight up. But the kid wasn’t talking about the reason, only about the infinity itself. I don’t know what I said to the kid, I hope it was a compliment. I thought about that for years off and on, mostly off.
The next time I thought about the depth of the sky was after I became, for reasons that are still opaque to me, a science writer. I was interviewing an astronomer and he took me to the room where old glass plates of the sky were stored – in the olden days astronomers took pictures of the sky on thick silvered glass plates and universities and institutes still have collections of them. I didn’t know why the astronomer wanted me to see the plates, probably just because he liked them. He handed me a little magnifying viewer, pointed to a dark speck on one of the plates and said, “Here, look at this.” I did. The dark speck against a light background — the plate was essentially a photographic negative — was a galaxy. It was a tiny, perfect, black spiral in a pale grey universe. A whole galaxy. A spiral full of suns, hundreds of billions of suns, way the hell out there. A photograph of a galaxy. A photo? The galaxy was real? REAL? Struck dumb again.
My wife weighs in on the mysterious reflective object that appeared and a week later disappeared in the southern Utah desert. She says if this tower is technically neither an obelisk nor a monolith, why not call it a monolisk, or an obelith?
Monoöbelisk.
Two days after its discovery by a helicopter pilot hauling wildlife biologists, a friend sent coordinates and told me to zoom in close. I did and saw a peculiarly straight shadow in the back of a shallow bedrock canyon. Apparently it had been there for years and no one noticed. He’d found the site. We came up with a plan, a couple days out camping on red slickrock, exploring this metal pillar and its surrounding terrain at our leisure. The place is a labyrinth of sandstone possibilities, the same as about a hundred miles in all directions. Why there? Who cares?
The next morning it got out on YouTube. The Colbert Report already had it in the files, ready for a monologue. Helicopters were arriving. On Facebook, a friend posted a picture of his teenage daughter, an avid rock climber, sitting atop of this unpermitted, Banksy-esque installation.
We dropped our plans. Sour grapes. Crowds aren’t our thing.
I have a personal policy: never read the comments. And when my book was published last year, I quickly learned that I probably didn’t want to take note of the reader reviews at Amazon either.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love hearing from readers. Nothing makes me happier than receiving a personal note from someone who found something meaningful or even life-changing in my book. A guy recently sent me a photo of himself hugging my book and I swooned. Praise like this happens with surprising regularity, and it nourishes my writerly soul.
Of course, not all feedback is positive, yet I’m genuinely interested in critical feedback that teaches me something or offers a different perspective. But Amazon reviews, well, a lot of them are something else entirely.
Here is the summary of my customer reviews on Amazon:
These numbers seem pretty good, right? I mean, 84 percent of reviewers give it at least 4 stars! So let’s scroll down and see those reviews. Oh cool! It begins with the top review.
This guy found it depressing that I debunked bogus recovery methods (the book’s stated purpose), and 50 people found that review helpful.
Two stars, wrote “Timmy Miller” — “Chapter after chapter…only to conclude that science is hard.” The two star rating aside, this one gave me a little thrill. Yay, I thought. You got my message! If I had one ambition for the book it was for readers to come away from it understanding something about the complexities of the scientific process and why it’s so difficult to get definitive answers. Maybe Timmy didn’t like my message, but I’m satisfied that he received it nonetheless.
Moving up to 3-star reviews, we find “Dangfool,” who thought my book was “Kinda boring and too technical.” “David L” also gave me 3-stars, calling it “Not so deep.”
I have to wonder what motivates someone to leave that kind of commentary. It’s easy to understand the impulse to leave a negative review after dropping $30 on a book that’s truly terrible. But why take the time to pan a book you find merely mediocre?
The New York Times once assigned me to review a new book that sounded really exciting. Then I read it and discovered that it was thin on research and sloppy in its execution. The author was not some snobby somebody worth punching up to, and the book wasn’t terrible enough to warrant a takedown. So I told my editor that it wasn’t worthy of a Times review, and killed the assignment.
The thing about book writing is that even when it’s going well, it can be difficult, soul-crushing work. When someone has spent a substantial amount of time pouring their heart into a book, writing a bad review feels is like calling someone’s baby ugly. It might be true, but do you need to shout it aloud?
My favorite reviews are the ones that wink at what the reader took away. Like this one over at Goodreads, where “Katharine” wrote a review flicking to the human impulse to dismiss evidence we don’t like: “Although she presented peer-reviewed literature on the matter, I do not believe Christie Aschwanden when she says that stretching does nothing at all.”
Which gets me to the one thing crappy Amazon reviews seem to have one thing in common: the reviewer is mad the author didn’t write the book the reader had in mind.
Consider this 1-star review of Emily Willingham’s new book, Phallacy, which calls it “Boring with a feminist agenda.” “This book basically just gives examples of how the penis and mating process vary across the animal kingdom, and that relatively little is known about the vagina due to male scientists not caring as much.” In fact, that’s a fairly decent overview, even if “Amazon Customer” didn’t like it.
“Cynical Yorkshireman” gave Annalee Newitz’s book Autonomous 1-star. “Badly infected with gender identity nonsense…My copy (see attached picture) is on its way to be recycled.” Yes, the reviewer included a photo of the book in the recycling bin. Not just cynical, that Yorkshireman, but also mean.
Amazon reviewers love to ding authors for things their books never purported to be. Take, for instance, this complaint by a reviewer of one of LaWONian Ann Finkbeiner’s books. “The author may be a respected science historian, but she has clearly not put much effort into political history.” Ann says that in fact, she is “not an historian in any way, let alone a science historian.” At least that reviewer read the book.
Some guy gave my friend Alex Hutchinson’s book Endure one star, saying “I bought this book as a gift for my daughter…I know she received the book but have not heard further…Sorry I can’t be more helpful.” Apparently it didn’t occur to him that it would have been far more helpful to everybody if he had not given a star rating to a book he hadn’t read.
It seems not everyone understands that the review is supposed to be of the actual book. Consider the person who gave Nick Harkaway’s book, The Gone Away World, a 1-star review because it arrived damaged from Amazon.
Spare a thought for LWON’s own Richard Panek. One of his books received an Amazon review that said “It is a crap.” Which Richard found quite disappointing. “If my book is crap, I want it to be at least the crap.”
I feel him. I’ve noticed that almost all of my negative reviews make some version of the same complaint: I came to this book hoping to find the magic secret to athletic recovery, but Christie told me that most of the things marketed to me are snake oil and that wasn’t the answer I was looking for.
These critiques make me shake my head a little, but they don’t get under my skin. My book isn’t for everybody, and that’s ok with me. I’ve discovered that the people who do love my book are amazing. Until I started writing this post, I hadn’t looked at my reviews in a very long time, and as scanned the bad ones for examples, I found something truly delightful. In multiple cases, total strangers had jumped in to defend me from stupid reviews. In response to a 1-star review in which the reviewer said that “I would never buy this book,” someone replied to say “Kudos on literally admitting you didn’t read the book. Reported.”
Another 1-star review that says, “This author writes well enough to pass as a scientist but is not actually a scientist,” and then instructed people to go read another book instead. To which some other kind reader replied, “I am a scientist and found this book an excellent review of the relevant material.”
I don’t know who any of these people are, but it warms my heart to learn that there are readers who have found my book and liked it enough to defend it. Haters gonna hate, but they can’t drown out the love.
Illustrations by Sarah Gilman. Words by Christie Aschwanden.
I am alone as I write this, as I have been most days the last eight months. There are many things I know I miss: french fries fresh out of a restaurant kitchen, killing time in a bookstore. Other deficits have been more subtle, things I know aren’t available to me right now but that I haven’t consciously desired, like eating at an airport Chili’s. (Don’t get me wrong — I love a good Chili’s, but the airport ones are always disappointing.)
Also on that list: the little observations about my friends that make me feel a part of their lives, like having a bourbon at a friend’s house and noticing their new plant, or going to a wedding and noticing how much the bride’s mom resembles her aunts. Lately, the cumulative lack has finally made itself known, like how anemia can take hold after years of iron deficiency — and as a result, I’m looking for tender details everywhere.
This is a conversation the People of LWON hadlate last Marchwhen, along with the rest of civilization, we were going bug-nuts with covid stress. We had decided we couldn’t keep up a five-day-a-week posting schedule, we’d have to cut back to three days a week. We didn’t like this, but we talked through our various lives — new food supply protocols, kids at home, kids needing help with remote learning, parents who wouldn’t socially distance, working from home, finding masks, learning what’s safe, normal life now being harder, more uncertain, and taking ten times longer— and didn’t see any other way out. Emily volunteered to write the post that explained our new and unhappy covid posting scheduleand unusually, before publishing it, she asked the rest of us to read what she wrote. The responsibility of writing it, she said, felt like a Thanksgiving dinner. And that got us thinking, in March, about what life might be like in eight months, at Thanksgiving. The conversation took on a life of its own.
Emily: So, this may sound strange, but the feeling I had writing this post was similar to the feeling I think I would have if we were all getting together for Thanksgiving dinner and somehow I got entrusted with an important dish, like pie or stuffing. I had that thought and then thought how wonderful it would be to get to have a big meal all together. That thought evoked such an intense mix of gratitude and longing, I teared up. Anyway, you all matter to me a whole hell of a lot, and I think LWON matters to a lot of people, and I also think some time to rest is going to be good.
Ann: And now I’m tearing up too, Emily. Wouldn’t we be happy, everybody bringing a dish and setting the table so beautifully, and watching all the people we’ve written to but rarely or never seen and heard, and with amazement because they’re so interesting. Oh my, what a dinner we’re having!
Craig: I’ll bring the weird Jell-O dish.
Ann: You’ll put olives in it, won’t you, Craig.
Craig: Gobs of em.
Sally: Can I bring 70s fish mousse in a mold?
Ann: Parsley sprinkled over the top in an artful manner.
Cameron: Pie pie pie
Helen: Aw, yay. I’d bring duchess potatoes.
Jenny: more pie really tart cranberries
Ann: Cornbread sausage stuffing.
Christie: apricot pie here.
Becky: Green beans in butter and garlic sauce. And apple pie.
Becky: OMG, Thanksgiving this year. Will we be able to gather? Will that be covid season? I can’t bear to think of that yet.
Sally: And about that asshole that brings fish mousse to an otherwise lovely dinner party.
Emily: I love this so much. It reminds me of my favorite thing on long backpacking trips, which is to imagine all the food I’ll get to eat when I get back to civilization. I usually start craving waffle fries and ice cream at around day 6.
Jenny: My mother-in-law really goes to town with the marshmallows on the sweet potato casserole. Maybe she even uses TOO many. Then again, when has anyone ever said, this sweet potato casserole tastes too sweet? No one. Ever. She also does the (naturally) sweetest sweet corn you can imagine. She uses summer corn that she cuts off the cobs and freezes months before. I am getting happily fat just thinking about this.
Jane: My in-laws have a Thanksgiving tradition of cooking chestnuts in cream and after my father-in-law died, it was even more important to prepare them. They’re awful to shell; we’ve tried a million different methods, and we’ve mostly settled on one where we microwave them in hot water, then singe our fingers peeling them open. Inevitably, everyone curses a lot and we’re always glad to be done with it, but I miss that now.
Emily: That’s so lovely, Jane. My Nana’s tradition was to buy pureed sweet potatoes at her favorite grocery store and pretend that she’d made them herself. So now we make sure to always tell a few harmless lies at Thanksgiving, to honor her memory.
Emily: Also, since this is an imaginary feast, I don’t see why it can’t also include Easter brunch. I’ll bring eggs benedict.
Richard: Well, if we’re adding Easter dishes to our Thanksgiving feast, then I’ll bring my mother’s potato borscht, complete with kielbasa, hard-boiled eggs, and horseradish. It won’t be as good as hers, but I’ll do my best.
Richard: You realize we’re all writing a new post, right? About hope, and the power of looking to the future, and comfort food, and companionship?
Really, everyone, really, from our hearts, with comforting food and a clearer future and dear people, everyone, happy Thanksgiving. We can do this.
I’ve always been fascinated by tales of postal heroism. Not the manufactured goodwill of a reply program for letters to Santa Claus, but the everyday challenge of figuring out what a sender intended and getting the letter into the right hands. It’s become a bit of a sport for snail-mail loving citizens, and the postal workers have stepped up to the plate.
Like the Irish postman who in 2015 managed to deliver his charge to “Your man Henderson, that boy with the glasses who is doing the PhD up there in Queen’s Belfast.” Or this one, which could be mistaken for a postcard, but is really a descriptive address. I like to think the fact the recipient had a hamster was the detail that solved the case.
Others are just a vague map with a dot on it and something like “Henry”.
This post originally ran August 16, 2018. But as COVID19 cases surge, hospitals reach capacity, and the long, dark winter descends, you can bet I’m again feeling the weltschmerz.
Two years ago, a poet named Maggie Smith wrote a poem called ‘Good Bones.’ I printed it out, and I find myself reading it over and over again. “The world is at least fifty percent terrible/and that’s a conservative estimate,” Smith writes.
Really conservative. Right now, I’d put the number closer to ninety percent. Nearly everything feels awful. I have a bad case of weltschmerz, a term I just learned that smashes together the German words for ‘world’ and ‘pain.’ According to Joachim Whaley, a German historian and linguist at the University of Cambridge, weltschmerz “is the sense both that one is personally inadequate and that one’s personal inadequacy reflects the inadequacy of the world generally.” He adds, “it is pain suffered simultaneously both in the world and at the state of the world, with the sense that the two are linked.”
Yes, that’s exactly how I feel. My personal failings represent the failings of humanity. And lordy are we failing hard.
