Day Tripper

By: | December 31, 2023

This post first ran on Dec. 31, 2010, though with a different main image, and it has run just about every New Year’s Eve since then. Back in the day, the lead image was a close-up of the crown of the 2009 pole. That image still appears as part of this essay, only farther down. Instead, the new image at the top of this post is a photo of me at the Pole resting my hand on the crown of the pole. I made the substitution after this photo resurfaced on a long-forgotten roll of film. Yes: “roll of film.” Hence, above, the funky contrast, the inconsistent tint, the overall granularity, etc. (Also, as has become customary, I’ve changed the dates in this year’s post to keep it current.)

By the time you’re reading this post, 2024 will have already arrived at the South Pole. Even if you’re reading it the instant it pops up on the Internet, at 7 a.m. EST December 31, 2023, the New Year will already be an hour old. Unless, of course, you happen to be obsessively refreshing your LWON bookmark from the Line Islands (pop. ~ 8,000), the easternmost atolls in the Republic of Kiribati, or from the Chatham Islands (pop. 730), a New Zealand archipelago not only way off the southeastern coast of the mainland but in a time zone all its own (and how cool is that?).

You don’t have to go to the South Pole to appreciate how arbitrary our conceptions of space and time are, but it helps. And fifteen years ago today (tomorrow? yesterday?) I found myself, thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation to support research for a book, at the Pole.

By “at the Pole,” I don’t mean just at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, the modern and rather posh living quarters for the approximately 200 scientists and support personnel who work there during the October-to-February austral summer, as well as the 50 or so who keep the place running for the rest of the year.

Nor do I mean the various outposts within walking distance where scientists conduct research in astronomy, geology, particle physics, climatology, and other areas.

And I don’t mean the ceremonial South Pole, the striped-barbershop photo-op version, semi-encircled by the flags of the twelve nations that signed the 1961 treaty setting aside the continent for scientific pursuits.

I mean at the Pole.

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Not Everything Is Terrible

By: | December 29, 2023
A glass jar filled with lit sparklers at sunset, the glittering sparks illuminating the dusk.

Ed. note: It’s easy to believe that literally every single thing on this earth is broken, awful, and/or doomed. But it’s not true. Some things (not most, but some!) are good. Here are a few unexpected moments—and geese—that have comforted us, given us hope, or brightened a difficult day.

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The People of LWON Tell You What to Watch

By: | December 27, 2023

Welcome to the second of three LWON end-of-2023 lists. This time, we look back at the film, video, and television that has moved us this year.

For further view-spiration (viewspo?) here are the lists from four previous years:

2017, 2016, 2015, 2014

Ann:  Britbox’s Desperate Romantics: it’s a series that knits into a single feature about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who are, if the series is to be believed, every one of them a goof or a nitwit or a prig or a cheery predator or John Ruskin, all flintily ambitious, all obsessed by art and sex, plus their sad or bouncy objects of worship. They’re very funny and are pretty much what you’d think of them if you look hard at their art.  

Sally: Are you feeling so anxious that prestige TV can’t keep your attention from drifting to your problems? May I suggest Made In Heaven and Jee Karda, two shows that will wrestle your focus to the ground with sheer sensory overstimulation. Made in Heaven is about two friends who launch an Indian wedding planning company – a tough-as-nails lady-who-lunches and a gay man coming to terms with being out in a complicated family. Come for the absolutely dazzling fabric and beauty porn, stay for the investigations into class divisions that show Americans are not the only people with problems. This show has everything: lavish, luscious Indian weddings, attractive people with big problems, and didactic Afterschool Special-style episodic storylines whose over-the-top absurdities weave into far more serious, heartrending and genuinely nail-biting series arcs. These are complicated characters who you will love and root for even when they are at their most objectionable. Jee Karda is about a group of childhood friends who are given a narrow premonition of their futures – and the 30th birthday party at which they are finally allowed to understand the full picture. Like Made in Heaven, it’s an affecting drama in a shiny, frilly soap opera costume. Neither show will leave any bandwidth in your brain for critical analysis, or for your own problems. Just sit back and let the sequins, music and drama blast your brains out of your skull. 

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The People of LWON Tell You What to Read

By: | December 25, 2023

Welcome to a longstanding LWON tradition: our end-of-year recommendation lists. The idea is to provide our beloved readers with curated experiences to fill the rare moment of silence that is the last week of December. Below is a list of top-notch reading material we’ve discovered this year, and if you’re looking for further inspiration, do peruse these seven previous ‘what to read’ lists:

2021, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014

Jessa: I heartily recommend The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt. But don’t take my word for it, just ask the 2012 non-fiction Pulitzer Prize jury. It centers on the moment Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things was unearthed in a monastery during the Renaissance, and it paints a vivid picture of everything surrounding that event, which it nominates as the moment modernity began.

Ann:  A friend who’s also a writer has been telling me to read mid-century British novels written by women and so I took a whack at one of them and found her lacking, and then my friend told me again and the upshot is that I’ve now read all of Jane Gardam, Rumer Godden, Penelope Fitzgerald, and sometimes I read Barbara Pym.  I won’t even mention Margery Sharp and Muriel Spark because I read them long ago. They’re not all the exact same age but they do overlap.  They’re all uneven; not one of them stopped writing until she keeled over.  I’ve read these books repeatedly because my goodness sakes alive, these writers are smart as they want to be and they can WRITE.  What was going on in the mid-twentieth century Great Britain? Besides universal post-war deprivation, added to a cultural position which induced boredom, plus excellent educations?  Maybe that’s enough.  So, my own favorites, not necessarily the best, just the ones I most like rereading: Gardam: the Filth trilogy.  Godden: In This House of Brede. Fitzgerald: At Freddie’s. Pym: Excellent Women.  Sharp: The Innocents.  Spark: A Far Cry from Kensington.

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Redux: A Grayling Visit

By: | December 22, 2023

Earlier this week, I found myself scrolling through photos on my computer, reminiscing semi-fondly on the year that was, when I stopped short at a series of pictures from a reporting trip I took this summer to Nome, Alaska (story still TK, alas). Like many of my reporting trips, this one also doubled as an angling excursion, especially since the Arctic daylight persisted until well after midnight, meaning that even long days of journalisming could end with me standing waist-deep in the Nome River. The river turned to be full of spectacular and obliging Arctic grayling — scales with the glittery sheen of oil on water, dorsal fins proud as flags — and I felt profoundly fortunate to stand in the presence of such gorgeous creatures in their native habitat. The experience also reminded me of catching grayling in the high lakes of Idaho, which I wrote about for LWON back in 2020. Those starving alpine fish were guppies compared to the robust torpedos that cruised along the Nome River, but I still recall them fondly — the sheer surprise of finding them up there, the delicacy of their sleek little bodies, their avidity. Below, two more pictures from my Arctic adventure this summer, followed by a reprise of that 2020 essay.

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Guest post: A plunge into the artificial sweat industry

By: | December 20, 2023
A reporter and her artificial sweat.

Some time ago I purchased a tiny bottle of synthetic sweat from a reputable chemical company for $141. The bottle of “Artificial Eccrine Perspiration – Stabilized” contained a teaspoon (5ml) of a fluid that mimics something many of us produce in vast quantities to cool down, or at least I do. During a recent 45-minute spin class, I collected nine teaspoons of my own sweat by catching it in a mason jar as it poured down my skin.

In fact, if you put all humans on Earth in an enormous sauna so that we began to sweat collectively, we would all produce a flood of perspiration on par with Niagara Falls on a hot summer’s day – a bemused employee at the Niagara Parks Commission helped me figure this out based on average human sweat rates from our 2-5 million sweat pores.

This raises an important question: why would anyone need to buy artificial sweat? Moreover, should I start a side business selling my own sweat, given that I could make $1,260 every spin class?
The synthetic sweat company, Pickering Labs, where I bought my teaspoon sample of sweat, sells more than 50 different kinds of synthetic sweat products. When I asked Pickering Labs about the size of its synthetic sweat sales, back when I was writing the book The Joy Of Sweat, the company’s director of operations, Rebecca Smith, demurred. However, she did note that “it is safe to say we sell hundreds of gallons of artificial perspiration each year.” In fact, compared to synthetic mimics of other bodily fluids, such as saliva, urine, or earwax, Smith said “artificial perspiration is our largest selling product category.”

Despite humanity’s homemade supply, bottles of artificial sweat circulate the globe to satisfy the demands of an artificial perspiration market. Multiple industries — forensic, handheld electronics, textile, jewelry, music — rely on a steady supply of pseudo-sweat to comply with government regulations or to ensure their products’ quality does not plummet from the sweat dripping off overheated humans.

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Science-ish Poem: Right Then

By: | December 15, 2023
A blue jay perched on a wooden fence, looking back at the camera.

My blue jay friends are back, tap-dancing on my balcony to get my attention, peering accusingly through the living room windows until I get up to fetch the peanut dish. There are many, many more blue jay poems in my future. Here’s one from the past. (This post first appeared in March of 2022).

Many of my poems are not autobiographical, but this one is. I can still remember that moment: the early-morning air, the flash of blue. The pang I felt.

In the intervening years I’ve gotten to know blue jays much better as a species and as individuals. I’ve spent endless hours reading about them, watching them, talking to them, and listening. I’ve studied an audio glossary of jay calls and songs in the vain hopes of learning to understand at least a little of their language. Still, the birds of this poem have their own private, gleaming little niche in my memory, vivid and tender as a bruise.

Right Then

Ransacking the grass
at the edge of the parking lot,
the loveliest jay
I’ve ever seen.

His features,
so fine. His blues,
so bright.

He cocks his crest
at my idling car
:

I sigh behind the wheel.

He screams.
Another bird flutters down.

She is smaller than her mate,
her neck feathers
mute and iridescent
as shade-grown violets.

Two hops and he is gone
into the brambles. She follows
:

Right then.
That’s when I miss you.

*

Image via Unsplash. A version of this poem originally appeared in Passionfruit.