Holding the Last of Winter

By: | March 8, 2017

You’ve noticed the cold starting to leave. The light has been strengthening, sun lifting every day, and the wind has lost some of its bitterness. Twenty-three and a half degrees of tilt to the planet, you can feel every degree.

Two mornings ago a blizzard hit where I live in Colorado. It was a fierce one with hundred-mile-an hour winds. Snow sprayed up the door frames and blasted in through cracks. As I closed the front door, stomping off the cold, I thought that one day very soon my arm would be out the window as I drove down the highway, crisp wind and warm sunlight, which happened to come yesterday, the day after the blizzard. Continue reading →

Don’t Think of a Mammophant

By: | March 7, 2017

 

Let’s talk about de-extinction. Actually, let’s not. Let’s talk about what the as-yet-unrealized technology known as “de-extinction” really is, which is the creation of hybrid organisms using genetic material from both extinct and extant species. Last month, a team of scientists announced that a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo—”more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits,” said the team leader—could become a reality “in a couple of years.”

The notion of resurrecting extinct species is fascinating—it’s one of the ultimate what-ifs—so it’s understandable that even this somewhat vague statement made international headlines. But let’s say these scientists succeed. Let’s say that in 2019 or thereabouts, they’ll be able to produce, in the laboratory, a viable elephant embryo containing some mammoth DNA. To be clear, that’s not a mammoth. It’s not even a mammoth embryo. There are no guarantees that this theoretical embryo would survive to adulthood, or be fertile, even in captivity. It’s even less likely that an organism that developed from this embryo could survive in existing habitats, or alongside existing species.

Continue reading →

Our déjà vu moment in history

By: | March 6, 2017

Very few of my friends—I, least of all—correctly predicted Donald Trump’s victory in the polls. The handful who gave him a good chance of winning did so in the wake of Brexit, with a view to the parallel factors both elections shared. The exception in my life is my friend Chris Kutarna. Here he is on stage in June 2016, having been asked whether Trump will become President. His answer: “The history of the Renaissance says, Yes.”

The lens through which Kutarna analyses our time is the period of history when Classical Greek and Roman ideas were revived and built upon during a rare peace time among the Italian states. He argues in Age of Discovery that, 500 years later, we are now living in a second Renaissance.

If your image of the Renaissance comes from the Netflix original series Medici: Masters of Florence, you may be missing the parallels with our post-truth world of Fox News and xenophobia. But with great technological, scientific and artistic innovation comes social stress that manifests itself in populist revolts, like the Bonfire of the Vanities and Brexit. The politics of fear emerge, perhaps in the form of the Inquisitions—an effort to purge Christian Europe of Muslim and Jewish influence—or in the form of bigoted executive orders from the pen of an outsider politician. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | March 4, 2017

February 27 – March 3, 2017

In uncertain times, Michelle turns to crime novels, the one certain world in which reasoning is logical, evidence is crucial, mysteries are solved, and the good guys win.

Jennifer calls her Aunt Judy (famed commenter on LWON), asks how she’s doing.  “Terrible,” she says.  So Jennifer calls her dad, asks how he’s doing.  “Terrible,” he says.  You don’t want to know.

I complain about good people — not people who are ordinarily good, but people who are good of their own necessity.  The problem is, you can’t write about them.

Sarah is not only a writer, she’s a painter.  She’s been looking for a particular shade of blue all her life: “the bruised underside of a storm when the sun is at a 4-o’clock slant.”

Cassie, doing nothing in particular, gets MRSA.  You don’t want to know about that either, just stay away from it.  The good news is, lots of times you recover.

________

watercolor by Sarah Gilman using tiny brush

My Unlovely Lady Lump

By: | March 3, 2017

Last September, a tiny, itchy welt appeared just above my left hip. I thought I had an insect bite. I was visiting New York City at the time, and I worried it might be a sign of bed bugs.

But after I flew home, the welt began to swell. Soon it was big as a blueberry. But rather than being blue, the lump turned scarlet. Because I am the type of person who can’t leave well enough alone, I tried to pop it. That just made the lump angry. It began to ache.

This is bad, I thought. This is not good at all. I worried that my bite had become infected. I thought about trying to lance the lump with a sterile needle. But what if I had necrotizing fasciitis, a disease caused by flesh-eating bacteria. I googled ‘necrotizing fasciitis.’ (Do not google necrotizing fasciitis.) I snapped a picture of my lump and sent it to a friend who also dabbles in self-diagnosis. She told me a story about a friend of a friend whose brother was bitten by a poisonous brown recluse spider in Brooklyn and developed necrotizing fasciitis. I googled ‘brown recluse spider necrotizing fasciitis’. (Do not google this either.) When the throbbing lump reached the size of a plump grape, I went to the doctor. Continue reading →

The search for thirsty blue

By: | March 2, 2017

There’s a particular shade of blue that I’ve tried to replicate with pigment for much of my life. I think it’s blue, anyway. There’s gray in there, too. Indigo. Violet. Black. Flickers of gold. This blue is luminous, despite its darkness. This blue is heavy and satisfying as a thirst, slaked.

I can’t point to any objects that are this color. It belongs to something more ephemeral: The bruised underside of a storm when the sun is at a 4-o’clock slant on the opposite horizon, burning the prairie grass white in the space between. It’s a waiting color, one that heralds a sky shattered with lightning, boom-cracking thunder that ricochets inside your ribcage, and the transformation of hardpan to ankle-grabbing mud. The things that come when the spreading anvil cloud drags the hard shield of its belly over your head—tightening the blue now to opaque gray, then obliterating it in sheets of rain.

On roadtrips with my family to the High Plains when I was a teenager, I’d turn in a circle to click photos of that storm-and-sun dance with a little 35-millimeter film camera. Later, copying the artist David Hockney, I’d tape the images together into panoramic composites, and sit down in high school art class with an oblong sheet of thick paper to try to paint that sky, that blue, with my watercolors. The results were forever disappointing. Continue reading →

The Problem with Good People

By: | March 1, 2017

Writing about people who are a normal mixture of good and bad is already hard.  Writing about good people is close to impossible.

I wrote a profile once about a doctor who was just plain good.  He wasn’t a do-gooder – “I’m not a missionary,” he’d say; he was just a man who needed to make sick people well so he needed to get to the bottom of what made them sick and what would make them well.  He listened, he watched, his manners were exquisite, he said what was on his mind, he was kind, he was absolutely relentless, he didn’t attract or like attention.

By “good,” I don’t mean faultless.  He’d have said his biggest fault was his competitiveness, but I spent a lot of time watching him deal with people and the only thing he was hell-bent on competing with and beating the daylights out of was disease.  We were collaborators – he was the doctor, I was the writer – and I’d have said his biggest fault was not getting his chapters to me within four years of the deadline.  Other people got mad at him for similar reasons but nobody stayed mad.  He’s a good man, period.  He is good and he does good.  And when I wrote the perfectly truthful and representative profile of him, the editor sent it back saying it was a valentine, I needed to make him more human.

Why is that?  This doctor I was profiling is famous not only for his work but also for his goodness; everybody says so.  Why couldn’t I report that? Continue reading →

Jewish TMI

By: | February 28, 2017

In my family, we talk an awful lot about bowel movements. If. When. Consistency. Pain level.

I call my Aunt Judy. “How are you?” I ask. “Terrible,” she says. “All I do is schlep back and forth to the bathroom. Sometimes I sit on the toilet and cry.”

I call my Dad and his lady friend, Ann. “How are things?” I ask. “Terrible,” Dad says. “Ann has a miserable stomach, terrible constipation. She’s been moaning and groaning all day.”

My mom used to tell me why she rarely called her sister. “All she wants to talk about is her diarrhea,” she said.

I’m not kidding. This is how it goes. Poop (or lack of) dominates every conversation. Continue reading →