They Paved the Maya World and Put Up a Parking Lot

By: | December 1, 2018

A few weeks ago I published a story in Hakai about the hidden story of the ancient maritime Maya. It’s not the first time I’ve written about the Maya – in fact, for a while there it was a bit of an obsession.

I’ve always found ancient Mesoamerican history fascinating. Partly, I just love history. Vikings, knights, cowboys, speakeasies, Roman gladiators, Bible stories, you name it. I don’t care if they are obsessively accurate to the time or liberally sprinkle aliens and time travel, you had me at “period piece.”

But if I’m honest, there’s also a bit of cultural voyeurism mixed in as well. I lived in Mexico for seven years and, try as I might, never really understood the culture. I mean, I had friends and learned the language a bit and went to all the culturally important stuff – Christmas parties, weddings, Day of the Dead dinners – but I was always sort of an observer. I’m a people person and it was always deeply frustrating to be on the outside, looking in.

So I got into history. It’s not exactly like cultural understanding but it smells similar. And I was shocked at just how awesome it was. Kings, warrior princesses, siege, palace intrigue, politics, assassination, arranged marriage, heroes, fools, and lots of blood. Everything my inner teenager loves. And those names! Lady Water Lily Hand. The Shaker of Cities (second of his name). Fiery Claw. The God Who Clears the Sky. I mean, seriously? The God Who Clears the frigging Sky? How badass do you have to be to get that name? Continue reading →

The End of Animal Farming? A Q&A with Jacy Reese

By: | November 30, 2018

Jacy Reese with goatJacy Reese wants to end animal farming. You can tell, because that is the title of his new book: The End of Animal Farming. Reese is a committed “effective altruist,” which means that he spends his time thinking about what actions will most efficiently help as many sentient creatures as possible and eliminate the most pain in the world. It is kind of as if Spock from Star Trek put his super-logical mind to the problem of increasing happiness in the universe. Reese’s rational mind has led him to campaign for the total end of raising animals for food, since many of them suffer in the process. Many are kept confined and indoors their whole lives in crowded conditions, are bred to such extremes that their own bodies cause them pain, and are slaughtered to fill tacos and round out a box of Hamburger Helper. Reese’s book lays out the technological and social changes that he says are already underway which could make our millennia-long practice of animal farming end by roughly 2100.

Q: In your book, you present data that suggests that many people are uncomfortable with the lives led by animals in the current food system, but they eat meat anyway. Why?

Continue reading →

Missing Pieces

By: | November 28, 2018

My aunt is standing in front of the book shelf scrutinizing two rows of photos. It’s 1 a.m., and a little while ago I was dead asleep. But now here I am, awake, because here she is, standing in her pajamas with her hands pressed into her back, looking hard at faces in the frames. Again.

I read recently that disrupted circadian rhythms, affecting glial cells in the brain called astroctyes, may cause neuroinflammation and hasten the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. I wonder if that’s true in the case of my aunt’s dementia. I decide that it is. Her sleep patterns have been off kilter for a while, but since the fire she is up at all hours many nights. I know this from tonight’s experience and also because she periodically calls or sends a blank text in the wee hours, or unknowingly shoots and sends a photo of, say, the floor, or her chin, around 2 a.m. Apparently, I’m not the only recipient; my cousins tell of similar late-night communiques.

California’s latest fires have been devastating, but for my family it was the 2017 flames that changed everything. That’s when my cousin lost her beautiful house with the mountain view. That’s when her 84-year-old mother (my aunt), who had been awakened by alarms and evacuated in her bathrobe from her retirement community, lost her mind.

Continue reading →

Redux: The Financially Damaging Myth of No Effort

By: | November 27, 2018

7408506410_fbd7bc0fcd_k

It’s the end of the year, which is a time that I generally spiral into complete crisis. Did I do enough this year? Did I produce enough? Did I spend too much time on Twitter? Did I meet my goals? What the hell did I even do for the last 11 months? What do I have to show for it? And so on and so forth. I look around at all my peers and role models, and it always feels like they’ve done so much more than I have, and yet also managed to make it look effortless and cool. In an attempt to remind myself that in fact, hard work is hard and pretending it isn’t is detrimental, I’m here to revisit this post from 2016. Hopefully it helps name something you’ve experienced too. 

__

A few weeks ago now I went to something called XOXO, a festival for independent artists. There are lots of recaps of this conference on the internet so I won’t try to add to that pile. But I did want to tie together two things I heard that I think are intrinsically related, and that I have been thinking a lot about myself: the ways in which money and work and public persona all intersect. I don’t have a fancy name for this, but let me explain. Continue reading →

Fellowship #2: Calibration

By: | November 26, 2018

Jessa Gamble is embedded in an experimental evolution lab at the University of Ottawa.

Hope Jahren writes that you can hear corn growing in the Midwest. It sounds like the collective rustle of husks adjusting to accommodate the day’s inch of growth. I am tempted to put a microphone in the incubator. Would my bacteria whine or hiss as they grow? Amplified, would there be a little crackle or snap as daughter cells break free of each other?

The incubator is the one place we want things to grow. Everywhere else those same organisms become weeds. “Contamination” is another word for growing in the wrong place, and fighting it is the whole game in this lab. Our implements of war are open flame, alcohol, and paranoia—the stuff of revolution.

Continue reading →

Redux: Weapons-Grade Private Enterprise

By: | November 23, 2018

A little while ago, I was talking casually to an old arms-controller.  “What have you been up to?” I said.  “Talking to the Russians,” he said.  The Russians he would have been talking to were probably nuclear policy experts or nuclear weapons scientists and they probably would have been talking about ways of controlling international nuclear stockpiles.  I didn’t ask for the specifics of what they talked about because 1) this was a social occasion; and 2) 30 seconds into the answer, I would have been in right over my head anyway. My point is, this particular arms-controller is 90 years old.  His colleague in arms control, William Perry, ex-Secretary of Defense, is 91 and all over Twitter,  e.g., last week: “I personally experienced 2 nuclear false alarms in a period of 4 years – if those alarms had been brought to the President, he would have had 7-10 minutes to make a decision whether to launch our own land-based missiles in retaliation.”  Smart, educated, experienced guys.  They’re old enough to know about nuclear weapons first-hand; they’re not yet old enough to stand down. You don’t have to think hard to know why.

This was first published September 23, 2014.Spent_nuclear_fuel_hanfordOver the years, I’ve met a number of physicists who had direct or indirect connections with the Manhattan Project and who then spent the rest of their lives trying to get the nuclear weapons genie back into the bottle and the bottle corked.  I think of these physicists as the old arms-controllers. They’re impressive people. They’re not so much uncheery as they are highly focused on the job of corking the genie.  Like, they’re pushing 90 years old and still stumping around full of current and complex information, giving talks and publishing things and backing politicians into corners.

I’ve just read about one (I’m pretty sure he qualifies as an old arms-controller though like others of them, he’s a little opaque to the all-seeing eye of Google) named Thomas Neff.  I’m reviewing a book about nuclear weapons. I learned that during the Cold War, the world had 65,000 nuclear warheads and around 2,000 tons of the fissile stuff – mostly weapons-grade uranium and some plutonium — that make nuclear warheads so effective.

All this stuff had to be made:  weapons-grade uranium is processed, or enriched, from lesser uranium; and plutonium is manufactured outright.  God didn’t make this stuff; we did.  It’s all over the place; it’s proliferated to all corners of the earth; most of it is in Russia, the U.S. comes second.  And once made, the stuff can’t be unmade; it can’t be destroyed.  We’re stuck with it.  You have to wonder why God doesn’t get disgusted and just shut down the whole stupid human endeavor, another Flood maybe.

Until Thomas Neff, a physicist/non-proliferation expert at MIT, figured out how the situation might be improved with a little private enterprise. Continue reading →

Redux: The Mark We Leave

By: | November 22, 2018
No automatic alt text available.

 

A friend, author Ginger Strand, recently took this picture of a handprint I spray-painted on a wall in Manhattan. When I put it up a few years ago, the wall was blank, and she wanted me to know that graffiti has bloomed around it, along with this sweet little cluster of stars somebody put there (how I love you, whomever you are). On Thanksgiving, when in school we used to trace our hands onto construction paper and turn them into turkeys, I thought this would be a fitting post. The post originally went up in the winter of 2016.

Rounding a corner in Manhattan, I saw a handprint spray-painted on a wall. It was my hand. I had put it there last summer, my first and only piece of graffiti. It was nothing special, no artistic flair other than my five fingers. I had gloved my hand in plastic wrap and waved spray paint over it, creating a simple stencil out of part of my body, one of the oldest forms of enduring human expression.

The wall of the building had originally been a sprawling gallery of graffiti until, against the wishes of those living inside, the city whitewashed the whole thing. I was staying with one of the residents when the white-washing occurred. She invited me to go to the wall and plant a new seed. She was hoping graffiti artists would soon return and start the process again. A print was needed to kick off the next wave.

The oldest known rock art of a handprint was recently dated at 39,900 years ago in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The technique was more or less the same as mine. Wet pigment had been blown across and hand pressed against the rock to leave a negative impression.

Is there anything more indelible and primally human than the image of a handprint? The oldest print in the cave on Sulawesi is part of 12 prints painted at different times around images of animals. What was on their minds is hard to say, but it is a sentiment that is seen around the world. Other Paleolithic stencils of hands have been found throughout caves in Southern France, the oldest in Chauvet Cave dating to 31,000 years ago. El Castillo Cave in Spain has handprint stencils in red ochre dating to 37,300 years ago. From Indonesia to Europe, give or take 10,000 years, people were leaving the same expression. Continue reading →