The Last Word

By: | December 3, 2016

Before the week’s Last Word, a continuing apology: Our software for commenting is still screwed up — you can leave a comment but its publication might take a bit — and we’re still working on it and we’re still sorry.

img_1129November 28 – December 2, 2016

Helen’s nerves are still shot — whose aren’t? — and she finds drawing out her worries to be soothing.  Goats are soothing too.

The beautiful big old eucalyptus trees in California aren’t native and are pitting eco against eco: welcome visitors? loathed invasives?

What websites should do about commenters is pitting writer against writer: civil conversationalists? smelly trolls?  (LWON’s commenters are 99.99% the former and we love ’em.)

PTSD comes in all flavors and from all reasons.  Nobody has a certain cure for all of it, but getting outside and looking up couldn’t hurt. Goats are soothing too.

No one, I promise you, has ever seen the universal desire to leave one’s mark in quite this way: from the Voyager’s golden disks to a coyote’s poops.

What’s the Poop?

By: | December 2, 2016

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I have been paying attention to poop and where I find it.

This isn’t a passing interest, I’ve been noting for years where animals choose to squat. In the out of doors, you can’t help noticing because they squatted to get your attention, like a billboard that reads GOTCHA!

With a little chub of scat would come all sorts of information: sex, fertility, health, virility, strength, what was eaten, and where. The way the poop is positioned, which end is tapered off, tells you which direction the animal was heading. A coyote had to feel pretty damn good about things to lay one right in the middle of a clean white sidewalk, knowing there would be no hiding it. This is pure animal pride.

When I come to a confluence of canyons and there on a boulder in the middle is a shit of coyote or fox, I can’t look away. The animal knew this was the spot.

The last couple months I’ve been snapping photos of well-placed predator scat. Whenever I see one, my mind flies to wherever that animal has gone, effectively leaving a proxy of itself, as if being cloned, leaving a dark one like a sentinel. It is a graffiti scrawl, I was here, which may be pertinent information, letting competitors know that the fight isn’t worth it, letting potential mates know who’d come by, the tinder of the wilderness. Continue reading →

Looking Up

By: | December 1, 2016

img_7915About seven years ago, a good friend of mine experienced an unthinkable tragedy. Her 38-year-old cousin—to whom she was extremely close—and the woman’s two young daughters were walking hand in hand to school when a driver, having passed out due to an illness, swerved into them. They were dragged to their deaths.

Ever since, my friend has been unable to drive over bridges.

Her sudden inability is a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, which can manifest as an irrational fear of something directly related (or sometimes not) to the incident that triggered it. In her case, the accident turned manageable discomfort with highway driving into extreme nervousness on busy roads and full-on panic attacks on bridges. Why bridges in particular set her off isn’t clear, but it’s atop these suspended roads, she says, that she worries she’ll pass out like the driver who killed her family. (She’s been blogging about her own road, to healing, here.) Continue reading →

What Should We Do About Comments?

By: | November 30, 2016

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I have a policy: never read the comments. This rule applies to most of the publications where my work appears online, such as FiveThirtyEight, Slate and The Washington Post. (LWON is the exception. Comments left here require approval before they’re posted, and I read them all.)

It might seem unfriendly to ignore people who are interested enough in my stories to share their thoughts, but by the time a story is published, it’s usually been occupying my headspace for a while and I need to move my attention to the next piece. Discussions in the comments rarely seem directed at me. Instead, they’re more like a book club discussion where not everyone finished the novel, which is just a conversation starter anyway.

I do read every email I receive from readers (and do my best to reply) but I don’t have the time or energy to keep up with the back and forth in the comments. Whatever I have to say is already contained in the article I wrote, so reiterating it seems pointless. And when the comments veer toward personal critiques or attacks, it feels unwise to dignify them with a response.

While working on a recent story about what motivates people to comment, I wondered how other journalists handle comments, so I created a survey. It’s not a scientific sample, (I solicited responses via social media and I imagine that people who’d had memorable experiences with comments were probably most likely to respond) but it provides a bit of insight nonetheless. Continue reading →

The Great Eucalyptus Debate

By: | November 29, 2016
A grove of eucalyptus trees, viewed at trunk level, with whitish bark
Eucalyptus globulus at Reyes National Seashore, Marin County, California. Reproduced under a CC license. Charles (Chuck) Peterson

The Tasmanian blue gum, Eucalyptus globulus, is a magnificent tree. That is perhaps the only thing that everyone agrees on. It is, as Jake Sigg puts it, “a big, grand, old tree.” Tall, gnarled, stripey-barked, with white flowers like sea anemones, blue gum eucalyptus are characteristic of the San Francisco Bay area, despite being native to an Australian island half a world away. They just happen to thrive in the Bay climate, and many were planted either for timber of for scenery from the 1850s onwards.

There is, to put it mildly, widespread disagreement about what to do with these trees. The argument is as complex and tangled as the bark streamers that hang from the blue gum’s trunks. In the most general terms, there is a faction of environmentalists that want to see many of these eucalyptus trees removed, because they are a fire hazard close to homes, or because they are non-native and make poor habitat for native species, or both. In this group, place native plant enthusiast Sigg (who nevertheless loves the species and would like to see more of them planted in landscaped, irrigated parks). This faction also includes the local chapter of the Sierra Club.

There is another faction of environmentalists that dispute that the trees are more of a fire hazard than what might replace them, see them as decent or even very valuable habitat, and want to retain them to sequester carbon, provide shade, beauty, and recreation, and to avoid the use of the herbicides that are generally necessary to thoroughly kill them off. This faction includes a longtime correspondent of mine, Mary McAllister, and allies in different groups, including the Hills Conservation Network and the small-but-fierce Forest Action Brigade.

Those are the basic contours, but getting a fuller understanding requires a walk deeper into the woods.

Continue reading →

Drawing For My Nerves

By: | November 28, 2016

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I have a tendency to worry. When I’m stressed, I can worry pretty much any time of day, but my brain’s favorite time to worry is in the middle of the night. At 3 a.m., there is no problem that can’t be mulled over, chewed on, and puffed up until it seems like the biggest problem in the world.

Anxiety has been a problem for a lot of people I know lately. First there was the election, which hung over us all, with daily news stories (fake and real) and opinion pieces (anxious and more anxious) and stupid memes (mean and meaner). And now there’s the uncertainty about what this next administration will do.

But at the end of October, I was worrying about something pretty great: a three-week trip to Nepal. And, yeah, I was worrying about it. That’s just a thing my brain does, ok? In the middle of the night before I left, I did one of the things that helps me keep my mind off of things: Drawing. And I went for one of the more challenging subjects, my hand. And then I thought maybe I’d just decorate it with some of my travel-related worries. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | November 26, 2016

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November 21-25, 2016

This week, Erik brings his expertise to bear on the placebo and nocebo effects of presidential election results. What are the public health implications of deep disappointment? Of all the factors, low voter turnout may make those effects more powerful.

NIH no longer uses chimps for biomedical research. But the transfer to chimp retirement communities meant wrenching them away from the people who love them most, says Cassie.

What has three eyes, breathes through its legs and eats its own kind? Cameron’s new Triassic-era pet.

Thankfulness is not the first emotion that comes to mind this month, but the People of LWON did our best and found some Thanksgiving cheer in the small things (like breathing).

Fat is neither intrinsically good nor bad, but rather a dynamic organ of the endocrine system. I look at some of the complexities of our most reviled body part.

Image: Craig’s indescribably wonderful children.

Fat: What is it good for?

By: | November 25, 2016

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Infant mortality in the Arctic has always been a bit of a mystery. Yes, the usual suspects are present — high smoking rates, overcrowding — but the same is true of many communities in the south where far fewer babies die. Nunavut’s infant mortality rate, for example, is four times that of the rest of Canada.

In recent years, a missing factor has emerged in Inuit genetics across the circumpolar world from Siberia and Alaska to Greenland. If a baby is born with two copies of the CPT1A Arctic Variant, his body cannot turn fat into energy when his blood sugar is low. The Arctic variant enzyme carnitine palmitoyltransferase (CPT) — the protein that does the fat-transforming work — only functions about 10% as well. Continue reading →