The Last Word On Nothing

Fiction, part 2: Multiverse in the balance

By: Sally Adee | August 29, 2018

Eventually, Milon Tusk escaped the smart home of the unhappily deceased Dieter Peel. This process had not been straightforward. Everything inside the fortified compound was voice-controlled, including windows and doors. He had tried imitating Peel’s voice, jimmying the locks, and at one low point, throwing a chair at the wall of windows overlooking the bay, only to watch it bounce jauntily off the bullet- and blast-proof security glass. However, once he had managed to prise the smartwatch off Peel’s wrist, just beginning to stiffen against his body, Tusk’s luck improved.

Now free, he wasn’t so sure why he had been so eager to leave. He lurched through the uneven sand toward the ephemeral creatures holding the giant earth-corer in place. He no longer cared whether they saw him. “Come on, you bastards!” he screamed into the sky.

He quickly began to care again when it became evident that he had gotten his wish. From far up atop one of the jellyfish, a drone detached itself and glided into an investigatory descent. It started out as a dark speck against the brightly lit monstrosity, becoming gradually bigger as it whizzed toward him. Tusk started running when it got big enough for its features to become identifiable, because these features included eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Continue reading →

Redux: New Yorkers, I Am Watching You

By: Rose Eveleth | August 28, 2018

This post is now over two years old but the channel is still active and the conversation about surveillance hasn’t gone away (understatement of the year?). I no longer live in New York City, but I’m still watching you, New Yorkers.

I recently wrote a story for The Atlantic about a question that I have been obsessed with for a long time: How many photographs am I in, in the world? It’s something that has bugged me for years, and before you chalk this up to pure narcissism, here’s a fact: Facebook can now identify you in photos in which your face doesn’t appear with 83 percent accuracy. Your clothes, your slouch, your tilted head, they all give you away. Let loose on the entire Internet, Facebook’s algorithm could find me, and perhaps provide me with some beginnings of an answer to this question.

But without access to that powerful, if creepy, system, I couldn’t come to any real estimate in the piece. And that’s partially because there are so many more forms of image capturing going on than the form I had originally thought of. Sure, there are people with their cameras snapping pictures all the time. But there are also other lenses looking at you too, from the corners of buildings, from mall hallways, from drones or hidden in teddy bears. And you never quite know who is watching you on those things. It might be me. And for some people in New York, it is actually me.

Continue reading →

Redux: Kill the Sprickets, Kill Them All

By: People of LWON | August 27, 2018

This first ran on March 14, 2016. We may run it again another time, maybe even a few more times, maybe a hundred times. It can’t be said too often.

304068392_f7cc464f13_b HELEN: I like bugs. I started a Ph.D. in ants (and quit, but still think ants are awesome). I have blogged in this space about butterflies. I think the coming of the 17-year-cicadas is one of the most exciting things that happens in the world. My record is quite clear on this: me and bugs, we have no dispute. But I make an exception for camel crickets. They are horrible. Just horrible.

ANN: They’re horrible. They’re poop-brown, have way too many legs, and they jump exactly whatever height you are. They jump on your body, you make involuntary noises. They were in my basement, hordes of them. I used to love finding them dead in the bucket of plant fertilizer or drowned in the basement toilet. Wikipedia says they live in damp, dark places and in Japan they’re called toilet crickets. In Baltimore, we call them sprickets. Do they call them that in DC too?

HELEN: I haven’t heard them called sprickets down here in DC, but it’s possible that I just haven’t had enough conversations about them. Which is why I’m so glad we’re doing this.

CASSIE: I never saw a spricket or heard of a spricket until I moved to Baltimore. I rented this awesome apartment on St. Paul Street. The first time I went into the basement to do laundry, there they were. I hated them immediately, but it was months before I realized that they are a real thing with a name that exists places other than my basement. A real species.

It’s their stupid leaping that gets to me. Footsteps make them explode into the air like leggy popcorn kernels in a too-hot pan. But often as not, they would crash into me, not leap away from me. WTF, evolution. Go home. You’re drunk.This might not sound like such a grievous offense, but try walking into a dimly lit cement room where insects are ricocheting off every surface, including your body. It’s the stuff of goddamn nightmares.

JENNY: We’ve always called those basement beasts hunchback crickets, and I would like to drop them one by one into an active volcano. Their collective screams would bring me peace. I’m also a buggy-creature lover, but I draw the line at things that leap on me without my permission. Plus, something about that hunched shape…they look like they’re plotting something evil.

ANN: They’re like Richard III, the one who murdered the little princes in the Tower. They’re like hunched evil popcorn.
Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Cameron Walker | August 25, 2018

August 20-24, 2018

Remember last year when, for a moment, we took a break from earthly concerns and looked up at the sky? Helen returns to her eclipse post from last year, written from the backseat of a car during the I-95 traffic jam. The sun’s last rays shone bright, then winked out, and there it was, just like in the photos—a dark circle with a light ring around it, a dark gray sky. Face turned up, mouth hanging open, I made ecstatic, non-word sounds as tears streamed from the outside corners of both eyes. The other 30 or so people in the park sounded just as excited.

Rebecca explains planets in retrograde over brunch. I know astrology is a lark, as my mom might say. And yet for some reason, I want to know all this detail. . . I think it’s fine to seek meaning among the stars. Actually, I’ll just come out and say it: I think it’s totally appropriate.

On a reporting trip to Cambodia, Michelle saw an image of a woman that stuck with her. She was beautiful, with clear eyes, a proud posture and a stylish haircut. But even more striking than her beauty was the way she’d raised one eyebrow in what looked like defiance, and set her mouth in determination instead of fear. She must have known her fate — only seven people are thought to have survived Tuol Sleng — and she’d chosen to meet it with this face.

The summer heat is getting to Craig, so he reduxed a post from a deep winter night. It turned out to be one of the worst nights I have ever experienced, frigid and uncomfortable. Any colder and I’d have lost digits. I was clearly the dumb Holocene guy trying out the Ice Age.

Guest Jill Adams went to Scotland this summer. It rocked. (It’s Friday and I’ve devolved into weak geology puns. Quick, cleanse your palate with something from Jill.) Picture me, standing atop a shelf of rock. It’s easy to imagine how that structure was lifted at an angle from deeper down in the Earth. The striations on the rock sides match the angle of the lift. I’m looking westward, with my right arm bent to match the angle, low toward the sea, high towards the land. I move my left arm to take an opposing angle and my eyes scan the shoreline for a match.

Photo of a rock cairn on Arran Beach by Jill U. Adams

Guest Post: Geology 101

By: Jill U. Adams | August 24, 2018

My husband and I went to Scotland to celebrate our 25^th wedding anniversary. We walked on footpaths in the Highlands and noticed all the ways the landscape differed from our favorite hiking trails in New York. My naturalist skills extend to birds and plants. It was hard to ignore the rocks, but I did my best.

I could handle the random boulders, likely erratics left alone in a field by a retreating glacier. I can go 14 thousand years back. But geologic time? It’s overwhelming. Except that time I reported on some fossils from the Devonian period. Evidence of Earth’s oldest trees were discovered near Gilboa, New York, less than an hour’s drive from my home. I loved reporting the story and I came out with a toehold in geology. Continue reading →

Redux: Hard Times in the Younger Dryas

By: Craig Childs | August 23, 2018

Summer’s been long and hot. Usually, I’m still enjoying it by August, but this time, winter is looking sweeter than ever. This post originally ran in January 27, 2015, and is about being colder than I ever had before, and about a time North America was colder than it had been in thousands of years.

This time last year, most of North America was buried in an unusual cold period. The jet stream had hemorrhaged in early January and the Polar Vortex that usually sits atop the hemisphere like a halo came pouring down. Known as the 2014 North American Cold Wave, temperatures plummeted, particularly in the Northeast and Upper Midwest where double digits below 0 °F appeared for weeks. Lake Superior froze more solidly than it had in decades.

That’s when I went to the Superior shore of northern Wisconsin where nearby temperatures had reached -37 °F. If I wanted to get the feel of a cold spell, I figured this was my moment. At the time, I was writing about the Younger Dryas, a cold anomaly that hit the Northern Hemisphere 12,800 years ago and continued for a thousand years. The world at that point had been gradually warming, the Ice Age coming to an end. Suddenly, within the space of a decade, ocean currents reversed in the Atlantic, probably triggered by cold, meltwater flows coming off the shrinking Laurentide Ice Sheet. This reversal sent the world back into the Ice Age, and brought the end of the Clovis tradition in North America, the climate upheaval speeding up megafauna extinctions.

I don’t like writing about events without witnessing them, so I set off across frozen Lake Superior out of Ashland, Wisconsin, pulling a sled behind me with enough gear to last several days. I wanted a taste of the Younger Dryas. Continue reading →

Redux: The Flower of Dangerous Love

By: Michelle Nijhuis | August 22, 2018

Between 1975 and 1979, an estimated 2 million Cambodians — 20 percent of the country’s population at the time — died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime. Some 17,000 victims were held in the regime’s most notorious prison, a former high school known as Tuol Sleng (“Hill of the Poisonous Trees”) or S-21. Today, the building is called the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Tucked into a busy neighborhood in central Phnom Penh, it’s a carefully preserved nightmare.

Visitors walk through blandly macabre classrooms-turned-torture-chambers, and into tiny brick-and-wood cells where prisoners were held for weeks and months. But their silence is heaviest before the rows and rows of faces — the thousands of black-and-white mugshots taken by the maniacally efficient wardens of Tuol Sleng.

When I visited Tuol Sleng during a reporting trip earlier this year, I took pictures of some of the faces, trying — like everyone around me, I imagine — to see the people within the overwhelming numbers. Later, when I looked at my camera, I saw I’d taken several photos of the same young woman. She was beautiful, with clear eyes, a proud posture and a stylish haircut. But even more striking than her beauty was the way she’d raised one eyebrow in what looked like defiance, and set her mouth in determination instead of fear. She must have known her fate — only seven people are thought to have survived Tuol Sleng — and she’d chosen to meet it with this face.

Who was she? It didn’t take long to find out.

Continue reading →

Rejoice, For Mars Retrograde Is Finally Almost Over

By: Rebecca Boyle | August 21, 2018

Taurus
The other day at brunch, as two of my friends and I were commiserating about things varied and universal, we agreed about the sluggish pace of our brains. What an injustice, I ventured, that our sluggishness is so out of sync with the blistering pace of this summer and of 2018.

“Someone was telling me that it’s because Mars is in retrograde. What? When is that over?” one of my friends said.

“August 27,” I replied instantly. “Mercury is retrograde right now, too, and actually so are Saturn and Uranus. I know Mercury’s ends on the 18^th but I’m not sure about the giant planets.”

My friends blinked, and asked what this meant, for them and for the cosmos.

“Uh, nothing,” I said. “That’s astrology. Astrology is not based on any real science.” They nodded. They know this. They were still curious.

“Astronomically, it means Mars seems to move backward in the sky from night to night, as viewed from Earth.” I orbited my fists around a coffee cup to demonstrate the apparent motion of the planets. I have patient friends who humor me. “Astrologically, it means … nothing real. But people say it means things are slow, and kind of backward.”

They nodded. This sounded right. It even felt right to say out loud. It’s the dog days of summer; we can blame our sluggishness on the stars. Continue reading →