Guest Post: Deep and Unspoken Hopes

By: | November 1, 2016

img_7176With fewer than a dozen days left until Election Day, I’m having a hard time looking at the news. The blurzy noise of the past few months has become unbearable: polls, rigged elections, pantsuits, emails, orange, yelling, balloons. I’m still processing some of the answers I gave my ten-year old when she blurted out at dinner last week, “What’s sexual assault? And what’s rape?”

I’m sure my household isn’t unique: In just six months we’ve gone from discussing what it will mean for her generation to come of age knowing that it’s not only white men who run for President to talking about the differences between sexual assault and rape.

Since this summer, she’s been obsessed with the election. Always a news hound – a few years ago, she was asking questions about “Mitt Rommanee” – she consistently pops on NPR as we’re driving to school and asks me about the latest poll results.

(Lately, I’m the one flipping the radio to pop music. I don’t want to start my day with news. I just want to listen to “What Does the Fox Say?” on repeat.) Continue reading →

The Othering of Tom Hayden

By: | October 31, 2016

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I need you to know this: I had my name before he was famous. And though my family moved from Detroit to Saskatoon during the Vietnam War years that made him so, I need you to understand that my father was never a draft dodger. I have no quarrel with the decisions, to flee conscription or, more improbably, to name a child after the author of the Port Huron Statement. But those are complicated life histories and they belong to others. Those are not my circumstances; that’s someone else’s Tom Hayden.

A name, presumably, feels personal to anyone. Writers’ names, though, are tied especially tightly to the work we do, printed as they are above the words we write, search-engine optimized to the good we hope we’ve done in the world. But for the 20 years that I’ve been a journalist, my name, my byline, and the assumptions about who I am that go with it, have never been exclusively mine. So even though he was older than me by decades, more famous by far, and died just last week, can we call him the Other Tom Hayden, just for today?

OTH’s fame, first earned as an American civil rights and peace activist of the 1960s and ’70s, was at once substantial and very specific to place and generation.  Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | October 29, 2016

mt-emily-pupsOctober 24 – 28, 2016

For signs of fall, you got your turning leaves, your pumpkin spice, your Halloween.  But Helen’s got crocuses, flu shots, and delight.

LWON is so happy that Emma Marris finally agreed to join it.  She’s been watching wolves for a while now, and wonders what will happen now that someone’s shot OR 28.

Cassie felt such empathy for that slow, hard-working kinesin molecule, she reconsidered scientists’ disdain of anthropomorphic descriptions of science.

Killing rats for science, says Jessa, is necessary and beneficial.  She seems to have been awfully good at it.  She just couldn’t do it any more.

Craig was innocently transcribing an interview done for a story on a haunted theatre when he hears a low rumbly boom on tape that wasn’t there in the theatre.  OR WAS IT?

 

The Sound of a Ghost

By: | October 28, 2016

gothic-1662756_1280The title of this post is not metaphorical nor is it a misleading hook. I’ve got a sound on tape. It could be a ghost. What is a ghost? Science says no such thing exists. But in these thinning days of autumn, even diehards might glance up startled. What was that?

If you want to skip this post and go straight to a spooky audio recording I picked up while covering a ghost hunting story, here it is:

However, I recommend you read this early Halloween entry first.

It starts with flashlights panning across Gothic effigies, lighting up figures in the walls above us. I wondered why the lights in the theater weren’t turned on, and now I knew. The shadows were stranger this way. You’d see things out of the corner of your eye, a face, a human body in a headdress with golden wings behind it, its face dark, eyes gleaming. Continue reading →

Killing in the Name of Science

By: | October 27, 2016

I open the lab door, flick on the light switch, and watch a herd of cockroaches scuttle for cover.  It’s seven in the evening, when most of the university’s workers have left for the night.  Even so, after I lift each rat from its cage, I place it in an unmarked black box, its temporary home for the journey from the sub-basement to the surgery room upstairs.  Should anyone see me wheeling the box down the hall, they won’t be able to guess what’s inside.  In fact, most people don’t know that my lab exists.

All is quiet in the surgery room except for the rustle of the nine rats.  My fingers are sweating.  Suddenly, I’m tired.  I just want to go home.  Swearing to myself, I move aside a jar of sterilized scalpels and reach for a Metallica CD. Gradually, the music hardens my mind as I mix chemicals behind a plastic shield.  I can’t allow myself to think.

The first black box has an ID tag that reads JSmPFC1.  Two months ago I injected a neurotoxin into this rat’s medial prefrontal cortex.  I’ve finished testing the animal for learning problems, and now I have to check that I damaged exactly the right part of its brain.  This requires a very specific procedure.  I mark an X beside the ID number and open the box. His whiskers twitch inquisitively.  He’s accustomed to my smell, and not so likely to bite as he was when he first arrived here as a 200 gram youngin’ from the breeding colonies.

Continue reading →

The Eternal Toil of the Motor Protein

By: | October 26, 2016

A few days ago, I stumbled across this particularly arresting GIF while scrolling through my Facebook feed. The animation shows a stringy figure with huge feet lugging a rippling green sphere along a ribbed beam. “Look at that little guy plodding along,” I thought. “That looks like hard work.”

Here’s the thing: That “little guy” is a motor protein called kinesin. His feet are actually heads. And he isn’t simply plodding. Kinesin is propelled down structures inside the cell called microtubules (that beam in the GIF) as its heads bind and release. Humans plod. Kinesin is driven by chemistry. Continue reading →

A Wolf Dies

By: | October 25, 2016
A black wolf, photographed midstride, with a prominent GPS collar
OR 28. Photo courtesy of ODFW.

“The Silver Lake Wolves” sounds like the title of a young adult novel, or possibly an indie rock band with lots of close harmony and beards. Actually, it was the name given by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to a small family of wolves living near Silver Lake, Oregon, about 75 miles northeast of where I live in Klamath Falls. The family consisted of a male, known as OR 3, a female, known as OR 28, and a single pup. Earlier this month, someone killed OR 28. Because she lived in the western two-thirds of Oregon, she was protected by the Endangered Species Act. Killing her was a federal crime.

I’ve been covering wolves as a journalist for a few years now, and I’m endlessly fascinated by the complex ways we humans see them, relate to them, and interact with them. One clear tension is between seeing each wolf as an individual animal and looking at large numbers of wolves as a population. And the death of  a single wolf in a small population tugs hard on that tension. Continue reading →

New Person of LWON: Emma Marris

By: | October 24, 2016

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We’re so pleased that Emma Marris — author, journalist, interesting thinker, and LWON guest poster — has agreed to join us as a regular contributor. Emma is the author of Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, and she’s written for National Geographic, Nature, Slate, and other publications. She recently gave an excellent TED talk that you really should watch, and won an NASW Science-in-Society Award for her Orion essay “Handle With Care.” She can also tell you exactly how to dress for the Peruvian rainforest.

Emma and her family live in southern Oregon, close to some of North America’s most rambunctious gardens. I’ve been lucky enough to camp out in a few of them with her, so I know she’s superfine company in the woods: smart, witty, thoughtful, and always fun to argue with. Please welcome Emma to our virtual campfire, and look for her first post tomorrow.