Meeting With ‘Oumuamua

By: | November 30, 2017

interstellar-asteroid

Observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and other observatories around the world show that this unique object was traveling through space for millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system. It appears to be a dark, reddish, highly-elongated rocky or high-metal-content object.
– European Southern Observatory, Nov. 20, 2017 

Science fiction, at its best, interrogates not just the possible future but also the present. While playing with things like time travel or aliens or teleportation, the genre makes us consider our experience of time and mortality, reckon with our identities and our treatment of others, and contemplate the lasting impacts of our actions. The carefully constructed worlds of science fiction and fantasy can be used as magnifying glasses, or as looking glasses. They amplify and distort our world; in pretending, we can see reality differently, challenging our presumptions or maybe catching something unseen or misunderstood.

Sometimes the refracted reality is obvious. For instance, scholars have long recognized a correlation between waves of alien-invasion fiction and waves of immigration. Sometimes it is less obvious, at least in the moment. You might think you are reading a simple piece of fiction, and chuckle at its outmoded references and anachronisms, until you realize its prescience, and understand you are actually reading something preparatory. Just as children’s imaginative play serves as a form of social practice, science fiction can serve as a test bed for possible realities. Really, what would we do with humans who possess unexplained mutations or abilities? What would we do if aliens showed up? Continue reading →

Powerless: A Puerto Rico Update

By: | November 29, 2017

A couple of months ago, I wrote about a woman in Puerto Rico who posted a picture of her chicken soup in a Facebook group for lovers of a kitchen gadget called the Instant Pot. We’ve heard a lot of news about the devastation and sluggish pace of recovery in Puerto Rico, but I wanted news of one particular Puerto Rican. So yesterday I called her to get an update.

Monica Diaz and her two children sleep in one room, the only room in the house with a crack-free ceiling. When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico on September 20th, it split Diaz’s roof. “The roof literally broke in four pieces,” she says. So whenever it rains, the house floods.

Diaz’s home has been without power for nearly three months. The lights went out during Hurricane Irma. That storm brushed past the island rather than broadsiding it, but the winds were still strong enough to knock out power to more than a million residents. At night, Diaz runs a generator, which powers an air conditioner. Sleeping without it would be impossible. The heat is oppressive, and the AC helps muffle the drone of her neighbors’ generators. Diaz’s generator also keeps the chest freezer cold. She lined the bottom with water bottles. At night, they freeze. During the day, when she turns the generator off, the frozen bottles keep her other groceries cool. Continue reading →

A Plant’s Nightmare

By: | November 28, 2017

There is a semi-annual ceremony in the Vance house. At some point – perhaps after a sudden trip to the nursery or an impulse stop at a roadside garden – I bring in a bunch of new plants to the house. Then I remove the carcasses of the ones who have not survived the twisted Hunger Games that is our back patio.

And as I walk in with these organisms whose only job is to “add a little green to the house,” I can swear that I feel a shudder go through them when they cross the threshold. As if they can sense it. They are entering a place of death.

I’m bad with plants. I mean, I’m really bad with plants. I even killed an aloe once, which was billed as an unkillable plant when I bought it. If “brown thumb” was a thing (as oppose to something that sounds like a fraternity dare) I would have one.

To make matters worse, I have a cat that actively tries to destroy every plant that dares invade his space. He once spent three months carefully chewing down the spines on one side of a cactus plant just for the thrill of knocking it over.

Continue reading →

Redux: Good Night, Patriarchy

By: | November 27, 2017

Since I wrote this post a few months ago, the beloved books mentioned here have been joined on our shelves by Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 2 (the brand-new and very worthy sequel to Rebel Girls, described below) and Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World. Now, after this year of extraordinary collective activism by women throughout the U.S. and beyond, I’m hoping to find a book that not only celebrates individual rebel girls, but also emphasizes what they can accomplish together.

PS. Both Girl Bilbo and I heartily recommend the titles in this post as holiday gifts for the girls and boys in your life. Happy Cyber Monday.

I am a feminist, and I’ve raised my daughter to be a feminist. But lately, I’ve been administering feminism like it’s a damn inoculation. (The shot is metaphorical. The disease is not.)

One of my favorite prophylactics against the patriarchy—suitable for girls and boys alike—is the feminist bedtime story, and happily, the selection is expanding quickly. My eight-year-old and I have read and reread several collections of women-centered folk and fairy tales from around the world—including Tatterhood, The Serpent Slayer, and Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters—and we’ve put women in the lead of many classic stories by genderswapping their central characters. Recently, we’ve added three excellent books to our nightstand stack: Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, Bad Girls Throughout History, and Rad American Women A-Z all use short, accessible biographies and cool art to introduce kids (and the rest of us) to powerful, creative, famous, and not-so-famous women from the past and present. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | November 25, 2017

The Last Word

November 20-24, 2017

Sarah changed her landscape, and finds herself changed. I never meant to be one of those people who would trade redrock bones of desert and mountain crags and the velvet nakedness of tundra for the claustrophobic press of forest. For a place so green and eager to grow that if you sit still too long you’ll be mossed and brambled over, just another soft shapeless lump at the toes of giants.

Craig looks for pockets of acoustic delight wherever he travels. I move through the city the same way I move through the desert, looking for shaded alcoves that might hold rock art, hissing or clucking my tongue to hear the sound bounce back. 

Emma eats an Impossible Burger with Charles Mann. For lunch, Mann and I dined at Farmers & Distillers on Massachusetts Ave, one of the early adopters of the Impossible Burger, a wheat-based veggie burger that includes heme produced by genetically engineered yeast. It tastes not exactly like beef but light-years more like beef than any veggie burger I have ever tried.

Thursday was Thanksgiving in the US, and the People of LWON talk about gratitude. It’s not payment for goods delivered in hope of getting more, but a sentiment, a weightless emotion, a thank you. Whatever it is, it goes out and not in.

On Friday, we rehash our Thanksgiving memories. Some people associate scents like baking pie crusts and buttery sweet potatoes with the fall holidays. That would be nice. My scent memory is no less powerful, though not quite as pleasing. Giblets.

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Image by Sarah Gilman

 

The People of LWON Have Memories

By: | November 24, 2017

 

Rebecca

I have the worst memory. I say this a lot, and I worry about it a lot. I forget meaningful details, or snippets of conversations I know are important. I forget to whom I’ve told something, and then I tell them again, and sometimes they look at me funny and I realize I’m repeating myself. I may think I remember something, and then I look at a photo associated with that memory, and realize I remember the composition of the photo, not necessarily the composition of the day. I have forgotten so much more than I know.

But, faulty though it may be, I have my memory. Today, someone very important to me no longer has hers. My great-aunt, who has been sort of an extra grandmother, is in a “nursing home.” Or a “long-term care facility,” a “memory-care center,” or whatever euphemism you might choose to describe a place where we silo our oldest loved ones, those who can no longer live independently. Continue reading →

The People of LWON Are Grateful

By: | November 23, 2017

Craig

I like to think that being thankful carries weight, that it occupies an influential space in the world. In a series of 2003 studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, subjects kept journals reporting their levels of gratitude. Each of three studies found that people who experienced more gratitude “exhibited heightened well-being across several, though not all, of the outcome measures across the 3 studies.” That leaves me wondering, are we grateful in order to better ourselves, or is that the byproduct, and the whole point of gratitude is to send goodness outward, back to the source? It’s not payment for goods delivered in hope of getting more, but a sentiment, a weightless emotion, a thank you. Whatever it is, it goes out and not in.

Continue reading →

Visiting Norman Borlaug and Eating an Impossible Burger with Charles Mann

By: | November 22, 2017

Charles Mann smiles in front of a statue of Norman BorlaugIf you are planning a huge, calorie-dense feast for dinner later this week, you might want to take a moment to thank a man you’ve likely never heard of—a man whose scientific breakthroughs in agriculture made food cheaper and more plentiful around the world. Norman Borlaug may have saved up to a billion lives by breeding up new short, high-yielding varieties of wheat, often running field trials personally, plowing, planting, and harvesting by hand. Combined with irrigation and synthetic fertilizer, Borlaug’s plants ushered in the “green revolution,” in which crop yields skyrocketed from India to Iowa, his home state. In the biography written to introduce him as the winner of the 1970 Peace Prize, he was described as both “an eclectic, pragmatic, goal-oriented scientist,” and “a vigorous man who can perform prodigies of manual labor in the fields.” The Nobel prize committee often calls at five in the morning to make sure they find their winners at home. When they called for Borlaug, his wife told them that he had been already out in the field, working, for a solid hour.

Not everyone is a Borlaug fan, though. Since his agricultural improvements relied on more expensive seed, irrigation, and fertilizers, some say they caused mass impoverishment for farmers who could not afford these technologies and led to poisoned rivers and genetic homogenization of crops. More broadly, his reliance on technology doesn’t sit well with those who blame blind faith in technology and capitalism for many of our environmental problems. And the disagreement over his legacy mirrors a decades old disagreement about how to save the planet: should we respect “planetary boundaries” and “limits to growth” and live lightly on the planet or should we simply innovate our way out of trouble? 

Continue reading →