Book Review: The Informed Parent

By: | April 19, 2016

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Being a new parent is a lot like trying to land an airplane with an engine on fire: barely controlled chaos in which all kinds of people are yelling different ideas in your ears. None of it is all that helpful but no one is volunteering to take the controls either.

How long should you breastfeed? How can I get my baby to sleep through the night? Can I drink alcohol while pregnant?

Someone should really write a book about this stuff. Oh that’s right, someone did. And not just someone, in fact everyone. I would estimate about 50 percent of everyone I have ever met has written some kind of parenting book (the other 50 have self-published social media strategy books).

How can you possibly sort it out? Do you Ferberize or do you co-sleep? Breastmilk or formula? And until when? How do you set up an easy-to-set-up playpen? What is an Apgar score? If I discipline my child can she still go to Harvard? And seriously, how the $#%*ing @%&! do you set up the &$#!ing playpen??

Sifting through the three and a half billion baby books on the market I quickly learned that most of them are less about good science and more about science that backs up whatever the author already thinks. And each one sounds completely right while you’re reading it and like complete crap when you pick up the next book.

Apparently I am not alone in this – Tara Haelle and Emily Willingham were right there next to me in their frustration and confusion over what to believe from parenting research. And so, unlike the billions of other authors out there, they wrote a book I actually wanted to read: “The Informed Parent.” Continue reading →

Learning to Talk All Over Again

By: | April 18, 2016

This is the first in a series of posts about learning a foreign language long past the age when it comes naturally.  Guest Veronique Greenwood begins at the pro level, with Chinese.

The character for "study," which appears in the words "student," "university," and many others. (Credit: Steve Webel, Flickr)
The character for “study,” which appears in the words “student,” “university,” and many others. (Credit: Steve Webel, Flickr)

I slide into a desk at the back of the dim classroom, and the Thai girl in front of me turns around. What’s your name? I ask. Zern, she chirps. My name is Zern. In the next row over, Maged from Egypt, middle-aged with a wedding ring, leans over to introduce himself, too. He asks, have you studied Chinese before?

For me it’s a bit of a trick question. Years ago I listened to six months’ worth of Mandarin learning podcasts, with my husband, a literary translator, hammering the correct pronunciations into my head. But now that we’ve moved to China, those fragments aren’t anywhere close to enough. A girl to the left of me types like mad in Chinese on her phone. I hesitate—I can’t read even a single Chinese character, just pinyin, the pronunciation guide written in roman letters. Can this really be the right class level?

If I were able to speak clearly to these people, here is how I would describe my language ability: I am like a Jewish thirteen-year-old about to have her bat mitzvah, one who doesn’t really speak Hebrew but can pronounce words on the page perfectly. Also, sometimes, thanks to those long-ago lessons, I am like a parrot. When my husband and I are quietly sitting on the couch, I turn to him and speak sounds that rise unbidden to my lips: “Siblings? What country? You’re welcome.” Then I lean in closer and ask, What did I just say?

To Zern, I mumble something about knowing a little. As other people filter in I feel a flutter of anxiety. In the placement exam I took three days ago, I stared into the middle distance while the words washed over me. At the end of a flood of sound, a voice would say quietly, What does the woman want? Another gush of words–I could pick out rice, mountain, car, hotel–and then: What does the man want? I marked nothing on the answer sheet.

The teacher walks in, and turns on the lights. Why were you sitting in the dark? she says. At least I think she says that–the tone is fairly clear, but none of those are words I currently have hanging around in my head. She walks to the front of the class, takes out her notes, and the sea of words rises, submerging me. I open my eyes wider and lean in. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | April 16, 2016

many generations

April 11-15, 2016

Guest poster Liza Gross details the struggles of traditional societies within the United States to hold onto their cultures in the face of ongoing settler aggression.

Helen used to have a messy desk. Did it mean she was badly behaved or more creative? Now she has a clean desk. Does that mean she’s the opposite?

You know those people who seem to have a hand in all the crucial historical moments of their lifetime? That was Luis Alvarez – the man behind the dinosaur-meteorite theory, discovery of antimatter in cosmic rays, the aircraft blind landing system, night vision binoculars…it goes on!

And in the mid-18th Century it was the Count of Buffon who took that role of Renaissance Man, as well as embarking on a saga that involved Thomas Jefferson and a moose.

A physics project I wrote about five years ago on this blog has since garnered the Nobel Prize.

 

Photo: From the files of Big Mountain Support Group

Redux: What Luis Alvarez Did

By: | April 14, 2016

shutterstock_148925300This post originally ran on November 11, 2013. I rerun it now partly because I liked it and mostly because it’s a conversation with Hope Jahren and Ben Lillie. Hope has a new book out, written with her usual brilliant, nail-gun verve; Ben runs an on-going travelling theatrical anthology that’s like nothing else I’ve heard of.  I thank people generous enough to show up on LWON because they get nothing for their efforts but links, which, there they are, please see.  Meanwhile, here’s the conversation about a guy who would have never wanted anybody’s links and probably wouldn’t have said thank you either.

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picture by Shutterstock

Redux: Does Your Messy Desk Make You a Bad Person?

By: | April 13, 2016

I wrote this post two years ago, when I worked full-time at home and my desk was super messy. Right now I am sitting at that same desk and there are four pieces of paper on it, three of which are the pages of one bill. Reasons for the change include: 

  • Marie Kondo changed my life. Maybe if you’re lucky I’ll write about it someday.
  • I have a job in an office now, and most of my papers live in that office. (And they’re mostly in file cabinets!)
  • I did my taxes on Sunday, but first I cleaned my desk really thoroughly, because procrastination is kind of my thing.

This photo was taken in December 2012, so don't look for the extension cord.

My desk is a disaster. Let’s see…there’s a pile of notebooks. An extension cord. A Christmas card from Switzerland and a postcard from Oklahoma. Index cards with poems by Wordsworth and Blake. A folder with the notes for a paper I wrote in 11th grade. And the only reason there’s no stack of unread and partially-read New Yorkers is that the stack has temporarily relocated to the dining room table.

I don’t understand people with clean desks. Do they drop everything to pay a bill the instant it arrives? Do they heartlessly throw away postcards, mere months after receipt? I bet they think to put tools straight into the tool box, rather than putting them on a stack of papers for a couple of weeks first. They’re probably even capable of recycling conference handouts that have a 90% chance of being useless. (My threshold is more like 99.8%.) Continue reading →

Ding Dong Moose

By: | April 12, 2016

2796923683_043d2805c1_zI recently became familiar with a scientist whose productivity makes me exhausted: Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Count of Buffon, who produced a 36-volume work on natural history in the mid-18th century. Trained as a lawyer, he became interested in mathematics and then botany on his family’s lands in France. His work propelled him into a choice position as the curator of the royal botanical gardens—which included cataloging the natural history collection of Louis XV–and to writing his best-selling Natural History: General and Particular.

The volumes covered everything from birds to minerals to the formation of the earth. European newspapers raved about it; Paris salons discussed it. It was the natural history book that could—how delightful it sounds to be in a time where you, your friends, and everyone you know is looking at pictures of the head structure of reptiles and talking about what would happen if you shot a musket-ball from a mountain top through the earth’s atmosphere.

Then he wrote about quadrupeds. To write about the four-legged creatures in the Americas, where he hadn’t been, Buffon relied on reports from travelers about the region’s inhabitants. His conclusion: the continents’ cold climates and humid swamps led to weaker, smaller animals, with only puny species in comparison to the majesty of Old World representatives like the elephant, lion, or tiger. Even animals that had been imported to the west fared poorly—dogs were mute, sheep were more skeletal (and less tasty)—the only domestic animal that seemed to do well, Buffon wrote, was the hog.

And this is where Buffon got in trouble with Thomas Jefferson. The result: a series of interactions that ended with a large dead moose on Buffon’s doorstep. Continue reading →

Guest Post: When Worlds Collide

By: | April 11, 2016

sarahs horse

Several years ago, on a brisk spring day in the wild reaches of northeastern Arizona, I was helping an elderly grandmother scrape kernels off a bushel’s worth of dried corn cobs. She spoke no English and I knew little Navajo, so we worked in silence, sitting on a blanket, side by side. The last ear scraped clean, I started to rise. The woman stared at the ground near where I’d been sitting. Then she got on her hands and knees and slowly retrieved one kernel after another, flicking dirt off each piece of corn before carefully placing the stragglers in her woven basket.

My heart sank. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | April 9, 2016

April 4 – 8, 2016

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“I must have caught this from that coughing bastard on the plane.” “Obviously, my husband’s little cold mutated into this nasty flu.”  You feel like hell, you look around for something to blame.  Christie reduxes a post about why you’re wrong.

Xenotopias are those weird places that aren’t anything else, that are borderlands between things, that are both unsettling and deeply comfortable.

Rose is so smart.  She’s been thinking about intelligent robots so she wrote a story/game about how they might work out.  If you’re smart too, you’ll be scared to pieces.

We like to think of ourselves as humane, right? we value other lives, we help out other people? especially when we accidentally run them over?  No, we don’t.

Sarah is so talented.  She not only writes with intelligence and grace, she draws that way too.  Forests move by the grace of corvids.

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That drawing up there is by Sarah Gilman.