Once Upon a Phylogeny

By: | October 16, 2024

This post first appeared in 2013. My dancing shoes no longer have heels, but at least fairy tales are timeless.

One of the ornaments that lives in a box in the attic has a fairy wearing a blue gown on it; she’s sitting on a crescent moon. This picture has a quote below it: “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairytales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairytales.” It’s attributed to Albert Einstein.

I’m not sure in what context Einstein said this, if he did at all. (The one source I could track down was as advice that Einstein may have given to a mother who wanted her child to be a scientist: “First, give him fairy tales; second, give him fairy tales, and third, give him fairy tales!”) And I have tried to give my children fairy tales—last year, for Christmas, I bought them a fairy tale book nearly as big as home plate with gorgeous illustrations.

But the truth is I never read it to them. I have it on my desk so I can read it myself. There are  several other books that have migrated into my office, too: Tales from Old Ireland, Fireside Stories, Grimms’ Tales for Young and Old.

Many of these books have stories with similar characters and familiar-seeming plots. People have long been trying to trace the origins of some of these stories. And last week, one researcher reported a new way of doing this: phylogenetic analysis.

Other approaches that look at fairytales’ origins have classified them by where they’re from and when they likely appeared, looking at a few key commonalities between the stories. But fairytales disperse and evolve in a very similar way to species, according to study author Jamie Tehrani. Something so rooted in oral tradition leaves behind a spotty fossil record, and it’s not clear what traits of this mythical beast we call a story are inherited from the oldest known source.

Tehrani built a phylogenetic tree for a group of tales featuring predators masquerading as someone we know—stories like “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Wolf and the Kids“, which involves a wolf who appears at the door, in disguise, and eats up the brothers and sisters inside the house. By looking at 58 variations of these tales, and 72 plot and character variables—are there many children or just one? What kind of an animal is Grandmother? How does she disguise herself?—Tehrani found, among other things, that Red Riding Hood tales thought to originate in East Asia actually have elements of both of these story types, suggesting that these tales may have come from elsewhere and were then adapted by storytellers in places like Japan, China, and Korea.

It seems like other evolutions of fairytales are happening, too, with morals and lessons being injected into versions aimed at kids. But the ones I remember keeping me up at night and keep me reading again have little of this: instead, they hint at life’s unpredictability (you might be killed if your last sibling was born a girl), that there are things you can’t stop even if you stay far away from the woods (your stepmother might want to eat your heart), and also that there are untold wonders that await (you could dance all night until your shoes fell apart.)

Fairytales do come true: tattered dancing shoes.
Fairy tales do come true: tattered dancing shoes.

“Once we orient fairy tales toward children,” writes Harvard folklore expert Maria Tatar in a recent review, “we forget that they were engineered for entertainment, less invested in sending messages than in producing shock effects so powerful that to this day we feel compelled to talk about them, reinvent them and pass them on.”

And after reading about the books she describes, I ordered one. Maybe this time, I should just admit it: Fairy Tale Comics is just for me.

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Images from Flickr users Christos Tsoumplekas and Ahef

Snapshot – Er, SnapVideo: Post-Spawn

By: | October 14, 2024

On a salmon walk last week, a friend and I encountered this battered, spawned-out chinook in the final hours of his life: his milt spent, flesh ragged and necrotic, preparing to relax into the embrace of death. We watched him swirl aimlessly in this pool for half an hour, in awe of the vibrant spirit that brought this sacred being many miles to this pool — now leaking from him, his mission fulfilled and journey concluded, preparing to fertilize the forest with his matter.

The Evidence of the Senses

By: | October 11, 2024

Bear with me on this, please and thank you, I’m trying to think something through.

Amy Maxmen, colleague and notable public health writer, was telling me about a medical researcher who runs big studies on vaccines and who says that vaccines work, they don’t hurt you, they’re good, and Amy quoted him saying he can recite all the studies that say so. But he doesn’t recite studies when he’s talking to his patients, he told her; he just says to them, “I and everybody I know in public health vaccinates their children.” That’s the most convincing thing he can say, he said.

Well yes. I’d be convinced too. I’m a science writer and part of my job (as it is Amy’s) is to assess the reliability of studies and sources — no reliability, not science, I don’t write about them. But the researcher who says he vaccinates his own children? If I hadn’t been convinced before, I am now.

How odd. Why should I be convinced by this researcher, no matter how eminent and reliable; he’s just one person, it’s just someone’s personal testimony, an anecdote? Even though he’s looping in his colleagues, the evidence is still anecdotal. I can list you all the reasons doctors and lawyers and general scientists including this medical researcher plus the average thinking person distrust the anecdotal, and they’re all right. What’s true for you might not be true for me; statisically, it’s nonsense; you might be gullible or a congenital liar or remember wrongly or just mistaken; and so on, far into the night. So why am I and the researcher’s patients saying that if we trust this one person and he tells us he’s seen/heard/done this, then we’re convinced. Right back to the question: why?

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Look up

By: | October 9, 2024
Credit: Katharine Andrews

On May 10, I leave my house in northern Washington state just after dawn. I drive alone along a braided river, over sagebrush plateaus, and through fields of golden flowers. Then one plane across the Cascades, and another across the Rockies, to finally land in my my childhood home in Colorado. I’ve come to stand alongside my dad as we observe the passing of his sister, my aunt. My oldest sister has come from Wisconsin; another cousin, from New York. There are cousins and an uncle and aunt in Denver; my mom and my brother and sister-in-law and nephew and niece in Boulder. Still others will gather on Zoom, to watch the service from a distance, because they can’t make the trip.

The night I arrive, I curl up in bed in the guest room at my parents’ house and scroll through news on my phone. I learn that a powerful solar storm is hurling great arcs of ions towards Earth, where they will cascade through the atmosphere in a light show that may be visible as far south as Florida and Alabama. The aurora borealis. It’s late, and I’m exhausted, but I pad into the living room to stand on the back of the couch and peer north through the high windows under the ceiling eave. Clouds and city lights blur the horizon, so I return to bed.

Should I? I wonder. I stare at the phone, then begin punching in every name I can think of back in the valley where I live. By the time I’m done, I have 28. I write a quick note, telling everyone to watch the sky. Maybe, being so much farther north, they will see what I can’t. Maybe they will pass the message on to others I didn’t think of, kicking off a sort of celestial phone tree that says simply, Look up. I pause again, fretting about how overwhelming a group text can be once replies start rolling in, and likes of replies, and replies to liked replies. Then, I hit send.

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Infantile Amnesia

By: | October 7, 2024

This summer, my parents pulled out an ancient family VHS tape and we all gathered around to watch a video of me at 18 months old, in a full body cast that extends from my chest to my right foot. My femur is broken, a spiral fracture, into seventeen fragments — the result of a freak sandbox accident. 

These fragments will, I want to go back in time and tell my parents, fuse into a perfectly strong bone that can take me anywhere: I’ll run trails and climb the Tetons. But for now I am scooting around on a hideous brown and yellow carpet that they won’t rip out for at least another decade. I’m on my stomach, playing with an assortment of dolls that appear to have very complex inner lives and relationships. I am sternly admonishing one Barbie while ignoring the camera. I became more cautious after the broken leg, my mother says. “You knew you could get hurt.”

Watching this video has new meaning now that I have a 3-month-old baby. I feel more protective toward my own 18-month old body, which looks so much like Will’s. I can more fully imagine what my mom went through, turning me over in bed every couple of hours at night to prevent bedsores. I also understand better why this incident dominates my parents’ memories of my childhood. I don’t remember it, but it was a defining experience for them, the first threat to their first daughter. 

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I Did It Dad! I LOVE This!

By: | October 4, 2024
401TrailSept


I’d been pondering the consequences of modern self-chronicling when Facebook sent me its rendering of my life in 2014. If Facebook’s Year End Review is any indication, my life boils down to this: adorable dogs, skiing, trail running and mountain biking. Lots of mountain biking.

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The scenes that Facebook selected as highlights certainly were fun times, and I wake up every day feeling fortunate to live the beautiful life that I do. I’ve lived through some dark times too, so when when I’m overcome with joy, I stop to cherish the feeling. And after that, I sometimes share it on social media.

As I look over my Facebook feed, I see that this disproportionate sharing of exuberance can create a skewed sense of my life. My posts generally fall into three categories: here’s something I wrote, here’s something I love or holy crap this experience I just had was awesome! After several friends told me how wonderful my life must be, because of all those pictures of me frolicking in the mountains, I started to worry that I was coming across as a show-off or a Chris Trager type. It’s absolutely true that I’m a frequent frolicker, but the things I share in public represent only one dimension of my life. Even the highlights are just a subset, as I seek sanctuary in experiences left ephemeral and unrecorded.

Meanwhile, the internet feeds on extremes. Some people post mundane details of everyday life, but the things that really take off are infuriating, LOL cute or mind-blowingly incredible. While writing this post, I looked up a particular YouTube video, and the next thing I knew, I was deep in the rabbit hole. The clip I was looking for was amazing, but the next one was even more so. Each video upped the ante. The mountain biker dropping off a cliff was cool, but this guy pops a back flip off a crazy jump. What once seemed impossible becomes mundane on the treadmill of escalating awesomeness.

Sure, this can make for incredible cinema, but it’s only a facsimile of the experience. When we focus on the rendering, something essential is lost. There’s a reason most of us don’t film ourselves having sex. Porn is created for the audience, not for the people on screen.

I went to college with Shane McConkey, who became a renowned extreme athlete, starring in films about skiing and base jumping and sometimes combinations of the two. He died in 2009, while filming a stunt off a 2,000 foot cliff. His death was a terrible accident that wasn’t the camera’s fault. Yet I can’t help wondering if the audience’s appetite for ever-more radical and risky feats contributed in some way.

McConkey was a paid performer, but anyone sharing themselves publicly can become swayed by audience demands. The constant camera threatens to transform our lives into performances. The moment you begin composing a tweet or Instagram photo of the thing that’s unfolding is the instant you separate yourself from the here and now. You’re no longer having an experience — you’ve become an actor in your own life.

It doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve taken a ridiculous number of mountain biking photos and what I’ve noticed is that my own impulse to film arises from a desire to share, not to show off. I post all those photos from Crested Butte’s 401 trail, because it feels so good to be alive in those moments that I can’t help singing my euphoria. For a taste of what I’m talking about, take a minute and 56 seconds to watch my favorite mountain bike ride paired with the words of Henry Thoreau.

Thoreau and the 401 trail are awesome, but they’re nothing compared to my all-time favorite YouTube video, which shows a 4-year-old kid riding a mountain bike track with his dad. As he steers his bike down a steep ramp, little Malcolm engages in a some self-talk. “I’m doing it! I did it Dad! I love this!”

The clip has an authenticity that can’t be faked. The glee in Malcolm’s voice captures a magical awakening. We are watching this kid discover his own capabilities in real time. This is the point-of-view camera at its best.

I can imagine Malcom 20 years from now, sitting in an office, stumbling upon that video on whatever YouTube has become by then, and remembering the joy of that day. I hope the video will inspire him to pull his dusty mountain bike out of the garage. Because the video can rekindle his wonder, but it can’t replicate the burn in his muscles or the wind against his face. I want that kid’s older self to pedal his bike out to the woods where there are no cameras watching him. I want him to feel like Evil Knievel and not worry about whether he looks more like Napoleon Dynamite.

This post first ran in 2015.

Redrawing the map

By: | October 2, 2024
A large mossy stump

When I was in 8th grade – I think it was 8th grade – we had to do some public speaking. One of our speeches had to be an explanation of something, and I chose to explain the layout of the streets of Washington, D.C.

Today, I can’t imagine how I went on for multiple minutes about this, even figuring in the time to mess with the opaque projector. It is a neat layout – there are four quadrants, centered on the U.S. Capitol, so you can find the intersection of 7th and E Streets, say, at four different locations in the city. Numbers run north-south, letters and words run east-west, states cut diagonally across the grid.

I’ve always loved maps. I found all of this beautifully logical and fascinating enough to explain to my classmates.

I was thinking about that speech recently because I’ve been redrawing my own mental map of D.C. I’ve lived around here for most of my life. And for most of that time, I’ve gotten around the city on public transportation. So my mental map of my hometown grew as blobs around Metro stations—blobs that spread and ran into each other, sometimes in ways that surprised me. I added layers onto the maps as buildings were built and demolished, businesses opened and closed again. Jobs added details and depth to particular neighborhoods.

But now I find myself driving around the city. My mom stopped driving years ago. When my dad died in November, my mom gave me the car. I spent the next seven months driving back and forth to her house in the suburbs. At the same time that I was shifting my travels from the sidewalk to the roadway, I was shifting my life from my own apartment close to the Maryland border to my partner’s house, a few blocks away from the U.S. Capitol building.

All that driving brings new connections to my map. One evening this spring I was driving through the boring part of town, northwest of the White House. A plain grid, all the buildings the same height, shiny metal and glass. The street looked just like all the others around there. But as I waited at a red light, I realized I was a block and a half west of the job I’d had from 2007 to 2008. I’d stood at that corner countless times on the way to lunch. That Malaysian place was half a block to the left. And that strip club.

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Out of time

By: | September 30, 2024

Call no man happy until he is dead. The phrase is a bit like an optical illusion: its meaning depends on the psychological topography of the person who is looking at the words. Some people see: “Life is suffering that only ends when you are dead”. Others see: “Even if things are good now, the next calamity could always be just around the corner”.

I was thinking about this ambiguity when I was at a funeral a couple of months ago. The officiant gave a narrative of her life that was as pruned and artificial as a Bonsai tree. It was also the last word: there was no more experience ahead for her, no more data points to plot into adjusted conclusions. After he was done, we all sat in silence in the little chapel, looking back on her life.

Time is hard to think about. Beyond the immediate present and past, its sheer abstractness means the concept oozes from our grasp. I just wrote “grasp” because the physical metaphor is all I have to hold the concept of time in any focus.

That temptation seems to be universal. Most cultures don’t know how to talk about time without resorting to spatial metaphors. It’s why we think of the future as being in front of us and the past as something we have put behind us. As the anthropologist Chris Sinha once wrote in New Scientist:

Space and time seem to be closely related domains of human cognition, if the way we talk about them is a reliable guide. We speak of events occurring in relation to temporal landmarks, in the same way that we locate objects in relation to spatial landmarks. So an event can take place in the summer or on Friday.

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