Uncle Bundy and the Technically Sweet

By: | May 25, 2026

I like to run this post on Memorial Day (the first version ran May 28, 2012) because when I think about soldiers and wars and Memorial Day, I think about Uncle Bundy. He was awfully opinionated and excessively direct but I admired him greatly and listened when he talked. Not he ever talked about the war, he didn’t. But in this case, what he was talking about is an ancient link between war, technology, and humans — a link began when someone first improved a stone into both the first hammer and the first spear. I’ve heard it about this link from many technologically-inclined people; I heard it again just the other day. Uncle Bundy has since died — at a nice old age with his family around him — and I miss him.

It’s Memorial Day in the U.S. but this is not a war story.  It does have a little war in it, but the real reason I’m writing it is because of this ball bearing  my uncle had.  My uncle’s name was Leverne, some of his buddies called him Vernie, all his relatives called him Bundy – no reason for that – and he’d always been a mechanic.  One summer day a long time ago, he was out in his garage working on a car and I was watching him.  “Look at this,” he said, “it’s a ball bearing.”  It was a grooved ring, and running in the groove were little metal balls.  “I just greased it,” he said, “and look how pretty it goes.”  He ran his finger over the little balls and, one after another, they turned smoothly and easily in their groove.  “Isn’t it pretty?” he asked.  No, it isn’t, I thought, but I didn’t answer.  I was in high school and an English major.  It’s greasy and dirty, I thought.  Poetry was pretty, not ball bearings.

Bundy was a farm boy who went to high school, then in November, 1942, joined the army.  He was sent first to the University of Utah, then went back to regular duty.  Then he requested to be sent to the Fort Sill Motor School, then went back to regular duty.  Then he requested to be sent to the 668th Field Artillery School, then went back to regular duty. Then he requested to be sent to the Schofield Barracks Motor School in Hawaii, and he learned to be a mechanic. He never got a college degree.

In 1944, he got on a Liberty troop ship, a little hollow tub short enough and the Pacific waves big enough that the ship went up one side of a wave and down the other while the seasick troops lined up along the deck and threw up over the side.  The ship was headed for the Philippines, to the battle of Leyte in which 3,000 Allied troups and 10,500 Japanese troops were being killed.  By this time Bundy wasn’t really mad at anyone any more and didn’t want to fight; and anyway Leyte turned out to need materiel, not troops; and besides the war was ending, so Bundy was just as glad when the Liberty ship turned around and went to Oahu, where he spent the rest of the war.

He came home to Illinois in November, 1945.  He and Mitzi, his new wife, lived in an unheated upstairs room in his sister’s house.  He got a job fixing cars and tried to figure out a place to live.  He found a little octagonal house that had been built for either hired hands or pigs, and bought it for $2,300 which he borrowed from his mother.  The house was too far from work so he bought a lot nearer by, and then he measured up the house and measured up the lot. Next he dug two rows of post holes and in the holes he stuck stove pipes which he filled with concrete, and this would be a foundation.  Then he asked his two brothers and his brother-in-law if they’d be willing to help move the house; and next he asked a customer at work if he could rent the customer’s flatbed truck for a Saturday at the going rate of $3 an hour.  His plan was to raise the house enough to back the flatbed under it.

He remembered seeing some 30-foot timbers somebody had left out along Route 66, and he and his brothers went out and picked them up.  They brought the timbers back to the house and with two hydraulic jacks, jacked up first one corner of the house and wedged a timber under it; then jacked up another corner of the house and wedged a timber under it, then went back to the first corner and jacked up the timber and wedged another timber under that one; and pretty soon the house was perched on the timbers up higher than the truck.  Then they backed the truck under the house, timbers and all, and headed out — Bundy stood on the roof to lift up any telephone or electric wires. When they got to the lot, they backed up to the foundation, unloaded the house, trimmed it up, and reversed the jacking-up process, removed the timbers, and rested the house on its foundations.  It worked exactly as planned.  Bundy paid the customer $9 for three hours rental, plus $1 tip.

Bundy and Mitzi lived in the house for five years, then sold it to his mother and moved to a house that could fit the six kids they eventually had, and where they lived the rest of their lives.  Bundy kept being an auto mechanic and by the time he retired, he owned his own garage.  Once my brother had questions about his college physics problems, and Bundy figured out the vectors and derivatives intuitively and got the answers. Bundy told me in the 1970’s to hold on to the Dodge slant-six but for my next car, give up and buy Japanese because otherwise Detroit wasn’t ever going to learn.  At age 91, he was fairly creaky but as bossy, opinionated, righteous, and as impressively, precisely competent, smart, and ingenious as he ever was.

Continue reading →

Leaving / Imprints

By: | May 22, 2026

Mom spreads maps over the dining room table. They’re oldish, not ancient, but the home I see in them is not the home I know. They are all of Colorado—mostly cities at the nexus of Rocky Mountains and High Plains, 40, 50, 60 years ago. The outpost of Ward, a funky old mining town up a sinuous dry canyon, guarded by two guys with broadswords. The hopping university town of Fort Collins, then just a smallish scatter of purple squares along a tidy grid of streets. And there’s Boulder in 1957, my hometown, where I’m visiting my family.

We press the map folds flat with our fingers and lean closer. The city then was a tiny yolk at the core of its current footprint, pressed hard against the mountains. The mesa where my parents live formed its eastward boundary, a new neighborhood then, not yet swallowed and sprawled miles beyond with malls and business parks and subdivisions and natural gas wells, the fingers of the city and its neighbors creeping outward over the plains, grasping each other to form an amoeba of light and noise that pulses with traffic along a vasculature of roads. A place forever swallowing itself. Becoming new and new again, without becoming better.

Every time I come back, I grumble about how much things have changed since I was a kid. For all my sharp words, though, there’s something unchanging here. It rises in me when I see the rolling, ponderosa-covered waves of the foothills breaking on the treeless slopes of the high Rockies to the west, when I see the plains reaching boundlessly east, haloed pink at the days’ two turns, from and towards darkness.

Continue reading →

Haircare in the Viking Age

By: | May 20, 2026
A Norse comb from the Middle Ages unearthed in southern Greenland.

The comb was found in a trash pile, what the archeologists call a midden, not far above the sea and just outside the remains of a longhouse. From the sit of the house and the site of the midden we know it was an easy toss: you could practically step outside and hurl food scraps, bits of wood, leather or whatever onto the pile. And so the ancient homesteaders did: Ashes from the hearth, bones from meals of seal, a tiny wooden horse with braids carved into its mane. And this curved comb, held together with rivets that still shine in the right light. 

The people who lived beside the midden more than 500 years ago, along the edge of fjord in southern Greenland, are generally called Norse, though they are often called Vikings, too. What we know is that they arrived in Greenland around the first millennium and survived up into the 15th century. Then they vanished, somewhat abruptly, and more or less without a trace. This is to say we don’t know how or why they disappeared. We don’t know where they went, or if they went, or how they died. Theirs is among the mutest of all endings I can think of, for no one in the Middle Ages seems to have noticed, or recorded, or even wondered what happened to them. By the time Europeans returned to Greenland, in the early 1700s, this comb had lain buried for at least 300 years. 

One afternoon last September I sat in the attic of the Greenland National Museum and Archives considering the comb. Arranged on a table before me were a dozen or so other artifacts—bits of wood decorated with interwoven, almost Celtic designs; sticks carved with enigmatic Old Norse runes, a pair of rust-caked shears still sharp enough to be dangerous. But the comb held my attention.

It was in good shape, seemed ready for use. I gently lifted it from a tissue-lined tray and tried to imagine who had last pulled it through their beard or hair, or tugged it across the head of a reluctant child. Nearby on the table was a lock of braided hair that had somehow survived from Viking times. The two relics were not related—they came from different sites—and yet here in the attic they formed an unsettling pair. While I handled the comb (with a curator’s permission), something kept me from touching the hair. It seemed too intimate, even though its owner was many centuries gone. I’d discovered, to my surprise, a line I would not cross.

Norse shears.

What I’m learning now about the comb is that it tell us more about the Vikings than I’d ever imagined. Similar examples have been found across an astonishing sweep of territory: western Greenland, Iceland, the British Isles, the Scandinavian homelands, and deep into eastern Europe. More than almost any other object, the combs reveal how far Norse travelers moved. Map the places where they turn up and a vast network emerges—routes of trade, migration, raiding, and settlement stretching across much of the medieval world.

The combs reveal something else, as well. In them we glimpse what mattered to the people who carried them. Grooming. Craftsmanship. Daily ritual. These are not the kinds of details that tend to survive in the popular imagination of the Viking Age. We think swords, spears, armor. We think boats, burial mounds, hoards of silver. We think of their terrible raids into Britain, or the way they once or twice attacked Constantinople. Or we remember stories of sacrifices made to old gods who loved a good battle.

The comb told about none of that. When I mentioned this to a curator he laughed and said personal grooming kit didn’t make for good TV. But perhaps it’s the nature of the comb itself: simple, practical, intimate. What is a comb but an undramatic tool for a small personal act that after a moment on a wind-swept shore leaves no trace. And yet this object may yet undermine generations of violent storytelling. How do you gauge the real reach of Viking culture? Look for their combs.

I thought of the comb I’d carried in my suitcase—black plastic, cheap and forgettable—and I handed the Norse one to the curator. He held it up to catch afternoon sunlight glancing through the attic window. The relic was warm in that light and surprisingly heavy in the hand. It felt good to hold. Later I would pick it up again, and pull it through the air, mimicking the way its last owner might have moved. I would think of my middle child, the one whose long hair I have learned, after much screaming, to untangle from the ends first, not the roots. After a moment the curator turned to me and said, You know, no one’s ever found a sword or a shield or a spear in Greenland. But we have plenty of combs. 

Written in the Stars

By: | May 18, 2026

My kid is on his way to university this year, and it’s hard not to get swept into doomscrolling opinion pieces. AI is going to take over everything and there will be no entry level jobs left. Did I do the wrong thing by encouraging my child’s interest in knowledge work? Should I have nudged him into a trade? There are, as usual, no maps for this territory, and the territory itself seems to come from another planet.

But then I heard Mexican philosopher Carissa Véliz speak and the picture came into clearer focus. Author of Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI, the Oxford prof reminded me of one key fact: the future doesn’t exist yet, and there are no facts about what does not exist. If someone is telling you that their vision of the future is inevitable, they are trying to shut down conversation. They are trying to control you, and they’re most likely making money off it.

Predictions are often power moves, according to Véliz. If you actually knew the future, it would give you vast power, which is why the kings of old invariably had an astrologer or diviner on hand to advise them of how to conduct their battles or tell them who was plotting against the crown. It’s no different now.

What do I do when I believe someone’s prediction that anyone without AI will be left in the dirt, scrounging for universal basic income handouts if we’re lucky? I go out and buy AI subscriptions and courses. I cancel my plans to write a book, since can’t the readers just get more tailored AI answers on the topic now? I resist buying software because I know I’m supposed to be vibe coding it instead, even though I will likely never get into vibe coding, I just don’t want to be the only sucker paying for software.

In other words, I act in exactly the same way as I would if I were simply obeying orders from the prophets of Silicon Valley. All because I believe their spiel uncritically.

But look how the Iran War is going. How many scenarios had I read beforehand about how just such a war would play out? None of them looked remotely like this. The future, especially the complex future of the global economy and geopolitics, is almost totally unknowable.

I’m in the business of prediction, too. That’s what investors do—they make high confidence bets on the future path of businesses. And guess how much time we investors spend with egg on our faces because things went exactly opposite to our predictions? All of it. All of the time that exists, we are looking at you through a three-cheese omelet dripping off our foreheads.

So no, nobody knows what’s going to happen here. There’s a good chance they don’t even directionally know the flavour of it. The important thing is that you and I just write our own futures in a way that’s true to ourselves, refusing to be captive to the forecasters. The future is, and always has been, something for all of us to figure out.

Image: Woodcut from On the Art of Prophecy (1555)

What’s Truly Beautiful

By: | May 15, 2026
I’m telling you, you’re beautiful. Don’t change a thing. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jean Fenouil.

Have you noticed Mar-a-Lago face popping up in pop culture? It’s freaky. Certain conservative women and billionaires’ second wives—people who started out looking perfectly fine—now have puffy lips, exaggerated cheeks, and eyes that look perpetually surprised. I finally figured out what they remind me of: marionettes. They look like marionettes. With control-me, make-me-dance strings definitely implied. 

Certain conservative men are promoting a hypermasculine version of this display, called “looksmaxxing.” They’re also doping themselves with testosterone and getting injections to enlarge their penis. 

Politics isn’t incidental here; the MAGA movement is all about enforcing and glorifying a strict gender binary. We’re being pelted with propaganda about warriors and tradwives, all of it infused with ultra-gendered, white-supremacist beauty standards. (Perversely, the same people who prize gender-caricaturing procedures for cis people are denying gender-affirming care to trans people.) These distortions of true beauty have unfortunately escaped containment from the propaganda channel (Fox News) and the social media Nazi bar (X). 

Misuse of GLP-1 agonists is making it easier for people to lose dangerous amounts of weight. Pop culture has celebrated extreme thinness for decades (even though every generation thinks they invented eating disorders (and sex)), but most people couldn’t look like Twiggy. Now Hollywood and fashion shows are bringing back heroin chic. 

Plastic surgery procedures doubled from 1999 to 2018. The cosmetics industry attempts to make people so insecure about their appearance that they’ll buy expensive age-defying products that do not, in fact, defy age. The sociopathic, eugenicist head of the Health and Human Services is trying to deny kids vaccines but let them use tanning beds.

We can resist all this nonsense. We do not have to participate, and can instead pity or mock those who do. We can define and appreciate beauty according to our own values, beauty that’s real, beauty that isn’t complicit with oppression. And by beauty I mean any flavor of beauty: masculine, feminine, nonbinary, gender-conforming, gender-nonconforming beauty. Trans people, you are beautiful, and I’m so proud of you. 

I want to say to anybody who is worried about their appearance: Honey, you look great. Nobody’s judging you, and if they are, they’re no good for you. You’re glorious! Your eyes sparkle when you smile.

When I was in my 20s, I had one friend with super straight hair and another friend with super curly hair. They got into a conversation about hair, and the first told the second she’d always wanted curly hair and the second told the first she’d always wished her hair were straight. They both, of course, had beautiful hair. And so do you! And if you don’t have much hair, that’s beautiful, too.

You know what else is beautiful? Kindness. Attentiveness. Competence. Enthusiasm. Courage. Making people feel welcome. Your sunglasses look sharp! Did someone make that bracelet for you? It’s beautiful. So are those shoes that let you walk with confidence, not like a wobbly marionette in high heels. 

You don’t have to be skinny to be beautiful, or to be healthy. In fact, people who are overweight according to their body mass index have a lower risk of death than people who have a “normal” BMI. Eat plenty of vegetables and find an exercise that’s fun for you; you’ll be fine.

You don’t have to be young to be beautiful. For anybody who is worried about looking old: You are as young as you will ever be. In 20 or 40 years, your future self will wish your current self had appreciated the body you have now. Enjoy what works and don’t worry about wrinkles or whatnot. It’s fine if you have age spots—I hope you had fun in the sun. (If they’re from tanning beds, well, now we know better.) Your hair is still beautiful, or if it’s gone, that’s beautiful. Not caring if you look old is beautiful. Did you know older people have bigger vocabularies than younger people? Think of all the books you’ve read, people you’ve met, lessons you’ve learned. Wisdom is beautiful. You’re alive and that’s beautiful, you gorgeous old thing. 

Why Do People Hate Spiders?

By: | May 13, 2026
A Phidippus johnsoni jumping spider. Betsy Mason

Over the last decade as my obsession with jumping spiders has grown, I’ve often wondered why some most people hate spiders. What is it about spiders that makes them particularly aversive? At first I was mostly just curious, but my conversations with arachnologists convinced me this question is actually important. Many researchers struggle to find funding to study spiders, which some of them attribute, at least in part, to the fact that people don’t like spiders. People are the ones deciding which studies get funded, as well as which animals are worth conserving and protecting. This is bad news for spiders.

So figuring out why people feel this way is a worthy goal. A couple years ago I wrote an essay for Knowable Magazine arguing that part of the problem is our lack of knowledge about spiders, which is partly the fault of this anti-spider bias in research funding, which is partly the fault of our lack of knowledge. I suggested we need something like the Backyard Bird Count for spiders which would serve the dual purposes of generating data about spider populations while helping people get to know these animals better — and hopefully fear them less. In researching that essay, I found only a few relevant studies looking into why people dislike spiders, along with a lot of speculation on the topic.

Continue reading →

Loving Explosions

By: | May 11, 2026

This was first posted on November 17, 2017. The latest explanation of gamma ray bursts are that they’re massive stars going supernovae and collapsing immediately to black holes and in the process, aiming high-intensity jets at our skies. They’re still the brightest things in the universe, the brightness of a trillion suns, and they last for anywhere from about 10 eyeblinks to a short nap. They’re still not understood very well, but how well is a human ever going to understand something as inhumanly bright as a trillion suns that operates on human time scales? However. Military guys and astronomers both loving explosions, that I can understand.

Years ago, talking about the persistent rumor that the Hubble Space Telescope was an off-the-shelf spy satellite retrofitted for astronomy*, I told a NASA employee that I was pretty sure academic astronomers were culturally anti-military and they wouldn’t be crossing lines and dealing with spies or the defense department.  The NASA employee looked at me and said, “Don’t be naïve.”  And ever since, I’ve been interested in the cases of interplay between astronomers and the military.  The case I learned about most recently:  a hyper-violent explosion called a gamma ray burst, that astronomers are still trying to figure out, was first discovered by satellites flown by the defense department’s Advanced Researth Projects Agency, ARPA, now called DARPA.

Gamma rays are light that carries even more energy than x-rays.  You want to stay as far away as possible — miles, light-years — from anything that makes gamma rays.  One of these things is a hydrogen bomb.

By the late 1950’s, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union had been testing bombs of just about every size and had begun thinking that making the earth and sky radioactive might be a bad idea and maybe they should sign a treaty to stop doing that.  But first they’d have to figure out how to detect all the ways the other side might cheat.

In 1959, after months of negotiations, the Soviet Union wouldn’t agree to satellites that would monitor the sky for rogue nuclear explosions. A young physicist named Stirling Colgate (of the toothpaste Colgates, “I had had enough of privilege growing up,” he said), who was consulting for the US side, told the Soviets he thought the gamma ray signature of a nuclear explosion could look like the gamma ray signature of a supernova.  What if a supernova went off and everybody thought it was a bomb?  Two weeks later, everybody agreed to send up satellites that could keep an eye on the situation.

The US’s were called Vela satellites; they carried neutron, and x- and gamma-ray detectors.  The gamma detectors were important because if the Soviets exploded a nuclear bomb behind the moon, the only way to see it would be with the gammas blown out of the radioactive cloud.

On July 2, 1967, Vela 4 recorded a burst of gamma rays, but the signature wasn’t exactly that of a nuclear explosion so the people monitoring the Vela’s shelved it.  Over the four years, this happened 16 more times, gamma ray bursts that weren’t bombs. The bursts occurred randomly over the sky and seemed to be coming from outside the solar system.

The Vela monitors, government scientists at Los Alamos, published these bursting oddities, oddities that clearly were not in the realm of national security but of astronomy and therefore could be made public.  One of the scientists gave a talk at an astronomy conference.  The only media that covered the talk was the National Enquirer; the reporter wondered whether the bursts might coming from a nuclear war between space aliens.

The gamma ray bursts continue.  Generations of astronomy – i.e., not spy – satellites have recorded them with increasing detail.  Astronomers agree they’re coming from as far as 9 billion light years away, they last only seconds, they’re extraordinarily bright, they’re among the biggest explosions in the universe.  Astronomer think they’re either from stars blowing up as various kinds of supernovae, or they’re from the merger of two neutron stars — the neutron star merger whose gravitational waves we detected had a burst of gamma rays.  But the bottom line is, nobody knows for sure what they are.

An astronomer told me once that astronomers sometimes work with the military because their technology is often the same, but (and I paraphrase), “they’re using it to look down and we’re using it to look up.”  In this case of collaboration, the outcome was the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty.  And young Stirling Colgate later becoming famous studying supernovae:  “I had always loved explosions,” he said.

*I have no idea. Probably true though.

Much of this story came from a nice online archive at the University of Chicago, in this case, a history of gamma ray astronomy written by Stirling Colgate.  Other parts of the story came from a short history written by J.T. Bonnell.

_______

Photo of core collapse supernova, one of the kind that probably emits gamma ray bursts: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Drew Univ/S.Hendrick et al, Infrared: 2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSFech

Too Little, Too Late, But Better Late Than Never?

By: | May 8, 2026
Snowy spruce

More snow finally came on Tuesday night, two months later than it was supposed to finally come, and it is too late, but it is better than nothing. That’s what everyone is saying. “I’m so grateful for the moisture.” “I hope the flowers I covered will make it.” “I’m happy it snowed, but I do wish it had snowed back in February and March when we really needed it.” “It will be a drought-denter, but not a drought-buster.”

A May snowstorm is not actually all that rare, and most people who live in Colorado are happy about it. The ones who complain or act surprised are usually the Texans who moved here and still talk all the time about Texas. The snow is good — any snow in the mountains is good — and we need it all year, but especially right now, in our absurdly severe megadrought.

Still, even a typical May snowstorm comes at bad timing this year, because the trees and the forest were not ready.

The leaves are on deciduous trees, which happened earlier this year than usual, because it was in the 80s in March during a historic heat wave. I wrote about it in The Atlantic. We lost most of our snow back then, and when more snows came in April, we lost some leafed trees to the weight and the frost. Some farms lost their entire peach crops, the trees having been tricked into thinking it was spring from then on. Others were much more lucky, but famous Colorado peaches are heading for a mixed summer.

In the woods where my house is, the scrub oaks came in a month early and then their buds froze. Now they are in a perpetually liminal state, not-blooming but almost-blooming. Frozen in time and in actual frost.

The blue spruces near me were recently sporting tumescent male pollen cones, and I remarked to my husband that I will have to remember to close my office window, so that my desk won’t be covered in yellow pine dust. What will happen to those cones now? Are they ok?

I looked it up, because I am always worrying about trees, and I learned that blue spruce pollen is shed from April to June, depending on altitude. It was not shedding yet for me, but at 6,700 feet in elevation, I suspect it will be very soon, or would have been. I hope to be sneezing again soon as a sign of the trees’ health.

I also worry about the delicate, but also incredibly hardy mountain plants. In the high mountains, the grasses and the tundra plants were exposed early, and were drying out because the snow was gone two months earlier than usual, at least in some spots. The snow this week is welcome, but it will also bury them, and if they were already out of dormancy, I imagine this is tough for them.

I looked this up, too, and read that cushion plants and sedges can produce buds under the snow, and then awaken for just eight weeks of summer. I hope they were not waking up yet.

Snow at the wrong time can hurt, in a year when everything has been happening out of sync. This snow is too late. But it is better than nothing.

I mean, at least now, the blue spruces and the ponderosas and the tundra grasses will be slightly less likely to burn. Small victories!

—

Photo: Wikimedia Commons because I didn’t want to put a photo of my house on the interweb