Three Weird Tricks For Not Writing Ableist Garbage

By: | October 15, 2015
Wellcome Images
Wellcome Images

I’ve fallen, relatively unexpectedly, into a beat. This is something I hear that some journalists plan, but for me it was simply a snowball effect. I did a story about prosthetics. Then I did another. Then amputees and prosthetists started calling me, and I just kept covering the field.

I love covering prosthetics. I talk to really warm, smart and interesting people all day. But I’ve felt some anxiety about being an able bodied person covering disability. Every time I express my unease at owning the prosthetics beat to other science reporters they look at me like I’m from another planet*. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to worry, and for the last seven months I started spending a few minutes at the end of interviews asking all the disabled people I interview they love and hate about journalism that covers their community. Along with help from Carrie Wade, who has called out some of the ableist ways science and technology refers to disability before, here’s are three key things I’ve learned so far. Continue reading →

Redux: Brave New Worlds

By: | October 13, 2015

This post originally ran on June 26, 2012. Since then, the researchers have published some of the results of their work with imaginary worlds. I’ve included this (along with making a few other edits) below. My own experience of imaginary friends has also expanded, now that we have two new boys named Pumpernickel and Garbanzo living in our house, alongside all the real ones.

*

I remember the day the horses arrived. It had been raining, and for two kids cooped up inside, the afternoon seemed to stretch into years .

And then there were horses. Some were dark as thunderclouds, some roan, some palomino. There were wild mustangs and Icelandic horses with manes like clouds. My best friend and I picked each name—there was Stormlight, that one’s Mackintosh—as they came down the hall.

There was also one with a rainbow coat. Another had an eggplant-colored mane. A few could even fly.

As you might have guessed, these horses weren’t something anyone else could see. Only the two of us watched them canter along the nubby hallway carpet. We’d been kept inside, away from the empty lot behind my friend’s back fence, where we had a world called Orak. There, dwarves crouched in tree stumps and elves reached into their quivers for silver arrows. Now our world had come to us. Continue reading →

Gesundheit

By: | October 12, 2015

shutterstock_194185637

When we were kids, my brother was the sneezer of all sneezers. There was never just one, or even two or three. It was always 17. No lie. Each sneeze began with this strange little sucking in of air, a pause, and then from his bent body and contorted face flew ah-YESH-ah!

Seventeen times. He was very consistent. (He says he’s now down to seven.)

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | October 10, 2015

shutterstock_125680649October 5 – 9, 2015

We look for water on Mars not just for scientific evidence of life, Craig says, but because our species is predisposed to look for water everywhere.

Helen revisits her experience eating whale meat and exploring culinary taboos.

Ann loves everything about her local restaurants but the cacophony that fills them. Commenter Peter Apps has a grand solution.

Cameron introduces the difference between a rainfall year and a water year, then admits she rigs it to feel wetter.

How will we know when it’s Autumn? Helen has a list of clues.

Image: Shutterstock

The Other Signs of Fall

By: | October 9, 2015
The "most normal looking picture we managed" says my college friend Cameron, on Robert's first day of second grade and Max's first day of kindergarten. (The chicken has completed her formal education.)
“The most normal looking picture we managed” from college friend Cameron on Robert’s first day of second grade and Max’s first day of kindergarten. (Gladys the chicken has completed her formal education.)

The equinox is past. At last, fall has come to the northern hemisphere.

Some of the ways the new season shows up are obvious. The sunset creeps earlier and earlier as we race toward the winter solstice. The air cools. Pumpkin spice is in every product imaginable.

Others are subtler. There’s the spooky Halloween decoration store that opened near my office, and the equally scary specter of potential government shutdown.

Here are some of the nicest ways that the world has let me know we’re tilting away from the sun.

Continue reading →

Water Year

By: | October 8, 2015

5466003319_e4e8e12581_zIt’s October, the start of a new water year. A water year is one of several ways to measure rainfall. This way, water year 2016 starts now–when we hope the rain will begin–and will end in September. A rainfall year runs from July to June, a buffer of dry season on either side of when the rain might come. Other places just use a calendar year, from a cross-your-fingers-that-its-rainy January, to summer dryness, then rain again, we hope. We hope. Continue reading →

Countering Iniquity

By: | October 7, 2015

15085955416_f1be981444_zThe world is full of iniquity.  Guys shoot up college classes; they also shoot up churches, malls, and elementary schools.  Little kids get shot playing on their front porches.  A hospital gets bombed and its doctors die.  Drug companies raise prices of drugs for sick people by obscene amounts. Gun advocates keep the country locked and loaded. And that’s just in the past week and the good Lord knows what’s going to happen between the time I write this and the time it’s published. It’s so depressingly unsolvable out there, no redemption possible. So the counter-balances to iniquity are precious. Which is why I’m all irate about the small-scale, silly, stupid problem of noisy restaurants. Continue reading →

Redux: On Eating Whale

By: | October 6, 2015

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about eating meat–as in, whether it’s a thing I still want to do–and thought now was a good time to revisit this post from two years ago about whale.

lofoten islandsWhales are impressive, enormous, beloved animals. Whaling has been banned since the 1980s, but it still goes on in a few pockets of the world. I spent three years of my life in two of those pockets, Norway and Japan, but somehow had never eaten any whale meat. Until this spring.

Over the 17th of May, Norway’s national holiday, I visited my friend Veronica and her family in the Lofoten Islands, an archipelago that extends into the Norwegian Sea north of the Arctic Circle like a cyclist signaling a left turn. It’s a rugged place, an unbelievably beautiful land of green fields and craggy peaks, exposed to the ocean’s storms. It’s a center for fishing and whaling. Continue reading →