Our Moon

By: | December 9, 2024

Last week, Ann wrote about her moon epiphany and Our Becky’s book (Ann: “Our Moon, you know the one, lead review in the NYTimes Book Review, longlisted for the National Book Award”) about our most glorious satellite. I got to ask Becky about Our Moon in January, and I’m thinking of this conversation again at the end of the year, after all of those moonrises and moonsets and all the things that have happened in the meantime, down here beneath our Moon.

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Cameron: Could you tell the story about how this book came to be?

Becky: When I started working on this proposal, I imagined it as a sort of appreciation—here’s how cool the Moon is, here’s why you should care about it even though many astronomers find it dull, here’s what it has done for us. I wanted people to think about it in a way that transcends the modern rocket-measuring-contest obsession with going back there and mining or something. My editor, who is amazing, saw early on that this book was more like a history of human thought. 

So when I started writing it, I wanted to connect its existence to our own, and our process of thought through time. And I set out to find some interesting lunar connections. As I found these different connections—ranging from the earliest methods of timekeeping, to the roots of religion and philosophy—I grew convinced that this wasn’t going to be an appreciation, but instead an argument. Like: The Moon is responsible for every giant leap we have made as a species. We would not be here without it, and here are all of the reasons why.

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Thanks for Basking

By: | December 6, 2024

Last week I found myself on the Hawaiian island of O‘ahu, part of — I swear! — a very arduous and intellectually demanding book-reporting trip. (More on that…someday.) After my grueling days of reportage, Elise and I headed up to the island’s North Shore, where, to our astonishment, we found the beaches positively littered with relaxing green sea turtles. Although I’d seen turtles come ashore to deposit their eggs — in fact I once spent a blissful season on a North Carolina barrier island, monitoring laying loggerheads and protecting their nests — I’d never seen one hauled out for the sole purpose of lying in the sun, and didn’t even know they engaged in that behavior. (NOAA claims it’s unique to Hawaii, and it is most common there, but scientists have also observed the phenomenon in Australia, Mexico, and the Galapagos Islands. Only green turtles do it.) They were spectacular in the way of all turtles, of course, sculpted and gleaming and placid, practically geologic in their ancient solidity.

I assumed that the basking had an obvious thermoregulatory function — warming up speeds reptilian digestion, among other functions. But it may not be entirely that simple, as a herpetologist named Hunter Howell pointed out to me in the graveyard once called Twitter. Green turtles often bask well into the evening (and indeed, I saw them lounging long after sunset), by which time the air is actually colder than the ocean, and we beach-lazing humans have long since gone back to our cabanas to take a hot shower and throw on a sweatshirt. So if the point isn’t solely to get warm, what else might motivate a turtle to drag its carapace ashore? Researchers have postulated that turtles leave the water to escape sharks, recuse themselves from competition over seagrass beds, or, in the case of females, avoid the unwanted advances of amorous males. Perhaps the simplest explanation is also the right one: You just save a lot more energy lying around than you do swimming. Or it’s all of the above. Whatever the purpose, Hawaii’s turtles do it a lot; one monitored turtle basked for a whopping 945 minutes in a single session, nearly sixteen hours. Hopefully she’d applied plenty of sunscreen.

(Oh, and a word about good turtle protocol — give the sunbathing reptiles their space, and report sightings through Honu Count, a volunteer-science portal.)

Moon Not Shining of Its Own Light

By: | December 4, 2024

I was reading Becky’s beautiful book (Our Moon, you know the one, lead review in the NYTimes Book Review, longlisted for the National Book Award) and she was talking about how ancient people figured out amazing things about the moon. And by the way, ancient people figured out amazing things in general, like the circumference of the earth and the existence of atoms, getting it wrong half the time and the other half, stunningly right. I mean, left to me, humanity would never know the stars were there during the day, would still think the sun moved across the sky. Anyway. Becky said that one thing the amazing ancient people figured out was that the moon shone, not of its own light but from light reflected from the sun.

She explained how they figured it out, and how you can figure it out for yourself — it has to do with sunrise or sunset. She said that once you see it, “it’s obvious.” So I tried. I looked at the moon, looked at where the sun had set, and it wasn’t obvious. I texted my neighbors who are curious and science-minded people, and after a number of texts over a number of days and little or no response, I decided they also didn’t think it was obvious, or maybe they just didn’t care. How could you not care that you, your own self, using nothing but the evidence of your senses, can figure out that the moon shines because it’s reflecting the sun?

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Dancing in the streets

By: | December 2, 2024

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This is the game my older son and I played one weekend a few years ago. He would bolt into a four-lane thoroughfare, and I would shout and jump around: “Get out of the street! It’s not safe! GetoutgetoutGETOUT!” Then I would dash into the street after him and we would laugh and laugh. And then he would pretend he was the grownup, and I was the kid, and he would yell at me. And we then laughed some more.

This probably isn’t the finest example of responsible parenting. But at least the street didn’t pose any dangers. That year, town had its first-ever Open Streets day, where a 2.5-mile stretch of a main boulevard was closed to auto traffic. From 10 to 3, bikes and skateboards, strollers and running shoes, and even a few unicycles and a seven-seater “conference bike” ruled the roads.

People say the Open Streets movement started more than three decades ago in Bogotá, Colombia, when regular Ciclovía events would block off several main streets; the city still holds the event on Sundays and holidays, with close to 70 miles of open roads for the more than 2 million people who attend. North American cities have taken note, with Open Streets events running in big cities like New York, Los Angeles and Vancouver to smaller places including Carrboro, North Carolina and Paducah, Kentucky.

A survey of 600 people who strolled and rolled in San Francisco’s Sunday Streets found that 25 percent of those who attended more than one of the events said they’d increased their physical activity since their first Sunday. The researcher who led the study also reported that the attendees reflected San Francisco’s overall diversity—suggesting that these events might increase activity among communities that can suffer from greater risk of cardiovascular disease.

No surveys have been published yet on about the 10,000 people who showed up to our local event this weekend. But everyone seemed to be smiling, whether on bike or on foot, playing air hockey or salsa dancing in the street. And there did seem to be just as many women as men—which is pretty critical for those who want to make cycling more engrained in their community. Women are often considered the “indicator species” for a city’s bike-friendliness; studies have found that women are less likely to use bike lanes on the street, instead heading for protected, off-street bike paths and quiet residential streets. (This is me: I stick to places easily accessible from the bike path or spots where I can safely practice my left turn.)

And maybe it made an impression on other people, too. On the ride home, my younger son was drifting off to sleep when he said, “Are we going to dance in the street tomorrow?”

“No, buddy,” I said. “Not tomorrow.” And then, to head off a tantrum, I told him about a birthday party we were going to the next day.

He wouldn’t be distracted. “NO! I want to dance in the street TOMORROW!”

“Not tomorrow,” I said again. But someday soon, I hoped.

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Images from Flickr users work the angles (CicLAvia in Los Angeles) and killerturnip (ciclovia in Jakarta)

Rosa and the Lighthouse

By: | November 29, 2024
Portland Head Light in a pastel pink and purple sunset

In December of 2019 I visited Maine to see if it might be a good place for me to live. From the airport I drove straight to the sea. The sky was violet, the ground was covered in snow, and the only other person there was a young woman leaning against the railing, looking out over the water. She smiled at me and asked if I was local. When I said I was visiting, without providing any additional information about my reason for coming, she responded, simply, “You should move here.”

The rest of my visit would prove her right. By the time I got back to D.C., I already missed Maine. I went online and found a livestream from the top of Portland Head Light. At any hour, in any weather, you can be there, watching the waves pound the shore, or the rain lashing the lighthouse itself. In the middle of the night the stream is all black, save for the graceful, silent sweep of the lighthouse’s beam.

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Needs washed

By: | November 27, 2024

I took this photo in the veterinary lab at the Duke Lemur Center in October, on a tour at the National Association of Science Writers meeting. The bin sat next to a sterile operating room where, according to the scientist who was showing us around, they mostly do emergency caesareans for lemur mothers in distress. (None of the center’s research involves harming lemurs, I was relieved to learn.)

What caught my eye about the bin was not the stuff inside it, but the label on its outer edge. “Needs reprocessed” is a grammatical construction that will be familiar to anyone from Indiana, Ohio or Pennsylvania, but I’d never heard it until I met my husband, who grew up in central PA and says things like “the dishes need washed,” “my brakes need fixed” and “the dog needs fed.”

If you were raised to be a stickler about traditional English usage, like I was, this may make you grind your teeth. Most people in the northeastern US, the upper Midwest, and much of the West reject the construction, but there are pockets of people in Arizona, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana who think it’s ok, according to this fascinating study from the Yale University Grammatical Diversity Project, which recently surveyed its use.

In regions where “needs washed” is most accepted, more than dozen other verbs can also get wedged in: “he deserves fired,” or “the paperwork requires completed” (gah!). It’s also commonly used for gestures of affection, like “the baby wants cuddled.” (I’m hearing a lot of that this week, since we brought our 5-month old baby to spend Thanksgiving with Pete’s family.)

“Needs washed” and phrases like it probably traveled to the United States with settlers from Scotland and Northern Ireland, according to the Yale researchers. When I saw the “Needs reprocessed” label at Duke, I was immediately intrigued — and also tickled by the odd juxtaposition of informal grammar against such a prestigious research setting.

It made me wonder who printed it out, and if it was meant to be funny or not. If not, I wondered further, was this research center a place where a person could just talk the way that came naturally to them? Where anyone could feel at home in science, no matter their backgound?

It was a nice thought — almost as pleasant as contemplating this pair of ring-tailed lemurs from Madagascar improbably perched in the woods of North Carolina. May we all feel this at ease, somewhere.

Season of the Snood

By: | November 25, 2024

Today, I give thanks for the snood. My amusement begins with the word itself, which rhymes with rude. Try enunciating it several times in a row, slowly, and you’ll see what I mean.

But the snood is more than just a delightful word and common crossword puzzle answer. It’s also a comedic example of sexual selection and the silliness of haute fashion.

In male turkeys, the snood is a long, fleshy appendage that droops down from the forehead. Richard Buchholz at the University of Mississippi has studied wild turkeys and found that snoods are highly prized status symbols among these fowl. In experiments that used both real wild turkeys and a series of decoys he’d created (which were identical, except for their snood lengths), Buchholz found that hens prefer long snooded toms and short snooded toms defer to toms whose snoods hang lower than theirs.

It’s a classic example of sexual selection, not so different from the peacock’s showy tail feathers. Snoods provide an easy way to assess a tom’s fitness. The length of the snood is linked to testosterone levels, and Buchholz’s work suggests that snood length may track with susceptibility to parasitic infection.

When a tom is just kicking back, relaxing, his snood tends to bunch up toward his forehead and undergo some shrinkage. But when a tom gets agitated or wants to pull rank, his snood elongates and he flaps it around for everyone to see. I’ve witnessed this behavior in the heritage turkeys that I’ve raised at my farm as well as the wild turkeys that stop by.

Having seen the turkey snood in action, you are now ready to ponder the fashion snood, which is back  — in a big way. So declared the New York Times in 1989. The snood was also back in 2009 when the Wall Street Journal declared that “retailers are betting big on the snood” and Bloomingdales declared it a “lavish new accessory.”  And now, “snoods are back!” in 2012 too.

It would be easy to dismiss the fashion snood as nothing more than an example of the repetitive nature of fashion cycles and the human susceptibility to advertising. But perhaps it has something in common with the tom’s snood after all. Those with the power to declare such things have deemed the snood “very Chanel – and very chic.”  Which means it’s a status symbol, not so unlike the flappy appendage.

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This post first ran on November 21, 2012.

Photos: turkeys and video by Christie Aschwanden, human snood by VeryPurplePerson

Snapshot: Farewell, Stump Mountain

By: | November 22, 2024

Last month I wrote about maps and dog walks and grief and stuff, and I illustrated it with a photo of a majestic stump in my partner’s neighborhood.

I guess life needed to give me a lesson about impermanence, because that stump is now half gone. I imagine the city plans to plant a new tree there or something, which will be nice, but gosh that stump spoke to my imagination. And it hosted so many lovely mushrooms and hopeful tree sprouts.

So please enjoy this picture of Eliot the dog atop what’s left of the stump and contemplate its bygone majesty.

photo: Helen Fields, obviously