Drawing What I See

By: | May 2, 2014

artLast year I started drawing again after about a 16-year break. I say “again” like I ever really drew in the first place—really, I took a few classes, produced a few things that bore some resemblance to the thing they’d been based on, and quit.

Then, one day toward the tail of last winter, I was walking down a street in northern Sweden. I was spending three months in a tiny town and going slowly crazy.

I spotted a store that sold art supplies. It occurred to me that maybe drawing was what my brain needed to keep it from constantly refreshing the social networking sites. And I’d been so careful with money for so long that having a legitimate reason to shop for something that wasn’t food seemed exciting. I picked out a set of pencils (with sharpener and eraser) and a sketchpad. Continue reading →

Beauty & Truth in Writing about Science

By: | April 30, 2014

512px-Charles_Robert_Darwin_by_John_CollierA  while ago I was on a panel for the local science writing association, and each panel member was assigned to talk  about writing about science in a way that’s both literary and beautiful. I gave my talk and a few days later, it was posted on the association’s website.  Much social media ensued, all of it kind and generous.  But I’ve been uneasy about that talk: it digressed, its logic slid around. So I’d like to rewrite it here; that is, I’d like to write the talk I should have given.  Also I couldn’t think of what else to post today. And besides, I’ve kept the nice bits.

So, the assignment:  science writing that’s literary and beautiful.  “Beautiful writing” is a phrase I use a lot – “what a beautiful writer,” I say.  I dislike the phrase, “literary beauty,” because it’s pompous and probably undefinable but I’ll use it anyway. Continue reading →

The Pocket Guide to Bullshit Prevention

By: | April 29, 2014

 

Shameless merch update: Want the Bullshit Prevention Protocol on a T-shirt, sticker, poster, mug, or onesie? Sure you do. Shop here for the original, and here for a SFW version.

I am often wrong. I misunderstand; I misremember; I believe things I shouldn’t. I’m overly optimistic about the future quality of Downton Abbey, and inexact in my recall of rock-star shenanigans. But I am not often—knock wood—wrong in print, and that’s because, as a journalist, I’ve had advanced training in Bullshit Prevention Protocol (BPP).

Lately, as I’ve watched smarter and better-dressed friends believe all manner of Internet nonsense, I’ve come to appreciate my familiarity with BPP. Especially because we’re all publishers now. (Sharing a piece of news with 900 Facebook friends is not talking. It’s publishing.) And publishing bullshit is extremely destructive: It makes it harder for the rest of us to distinguish between bogus news and something real, awful, and urgent.

While BPP is not failsafe, generations of crotchety, underpaid, truth-loving journalists have found that it dramatically reduces one’s chances of publishing bullshit.

So I believe that everyone should practice BPP before publishing. No prior experience is required: Though it’s possible to spend a lifetime debating the finer points of BPP (and the sorely-needed news literacy movement wants high-school and college students to spend at least a semester doing so) its general principles, listed in a handy, portable, and free—free!—form above, are simple.

Here’s how they work in practice.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Tears of the Warrior

By: | April 28, 2014

shutterstock_143903716

Recently, in a yoga class, I started crying. The tears welled up as I took a bind while in side-angle pose (look it up) and finally dribbled down as we settled into our final position—lying flat on the mat. Then they just kept coming. Soon I was hup-supping (as my husband’s grandmother used to say) like a little girl. I had to leave the class to compose myself; no one can enjoy shavasana to the sound of a fellow yogi weeping. It blocks the chi, or something.

This time, the music was clearly a trigger. Each yoga teacher has her (or his) own class soundtrack—a mix that may go from wine-spritzer Dave Matthews to songs from Grease (yup, really) to wolf howls and Gregorian chants. On this day the selection included the sweet ukulele version of “Over the Rainbow” by that big Hawaiian guy who died so young. It was a song my mother loved, one we’d listened to over and over while she was dying and that we’d played at her memorial service as we ran through her life in Slideshow. That song kills me.

So, I’m not surprised at how emotional I got when it came on. The big guy was dead (such a gentle soul and nice voice!), my mom was dead (such a loving, funny woman, also with a nice voice!); it was all just too much to take. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | April 26, 2014

Notice from the People of LWON:  We’ve run into problems with the outfit that handles our email subscriptions, i.e., we have too many subscribers to qualify for free emails.  So in line with our policy of spending as little $$$$$ as humanly possible, we’re taking the liberty of having those emails sent, not daily, but now weekly.  You’ve probably been notified of this already.  And just think of the joy — it’ll be like Christmas morning.

Jen after a day of shootingApril 21 – 25, 2014

Sally Adee’s redux post on stuff that looks like spider webs covering highly radioactive waste: if not woven by highly radioactive spiders, then by what? what manner of life form has such superior resistance? and should we be afraid?

You know what happens when you lose your smart phone? when you have to look not at the phone but at the other people in the grocery line? when you can’t take a picture of the dogs playing, you have to watch them instead? Lose your smart phone, says Christie, and good things happen.

Guest Julie Rehmeyer could hardly walk — look at the video if you don’t believe that — and the docs who told her she had ME/CFS couldn’t tell her exactly what it was or what to do about it: Part I.

Guest Julie Reymeyer knows people who still can’t get up off the floor, while her docs and their national and international health institutions are still arguing about the definition of ME/CFS and still considering basing the definition on actual biomarkers — you know, tests for things in the body going  haywire? — assuming they get funding for finding biomarkers:  Part II.

It must be spring — Penis Fridays are back, this time featuring Richard’s tour guide in Pompeii, pointing out the ancient international symbols:  “Look, a wine store!”  “Look, beware of the dog!”  “Look, –” no, don’t.

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The photo is a still from a movie about ME/CFS, called Canary in a Coal Mine, by Jennifer Brea, Deborah Hoffmann, Blake Ashman, and Kiran Chitanvis. The still is captioned, Jen After a Full Day of Shooting.

TGIPF: Look! International Symbol!

By: | April 25, 2014

vino pompeii

“Look!” our guide said, and he pointed to a frieze at the top of a nearby building. We looked. The figures were inscrutable at first, but then the guide explained: The building had been a shop belonging to a wine merchant. We ahhh’d, not so much at the fact that the shop had belonged to a wine merchant as at the utility of the sign. To anyone who was familiar with the sight of two men hoisting a wine bladder—as visitors from throughout the Mediterranean were, back when this establishment was a going concern—the identity of the shop would have been at-a-glance unmistakable.

“International symbol!” our guide said. “Two thousand years ago!”

We were standing at the corner of Via del Foro and Via degli Augustali, in Region VII of the ruins of Pompeii. That morning at breakfast, an American at our hotel had pulled me aside to say he’d heard that my wife and I as well as another couple would be spending the day in Pompeii. Speaking as a veteran of many visits to the Amalfi Coast, he said, he strongly urged us to hire a guide. The ruins are too vast, he said. You won’t be able to make sense of them on your own; you’ll miss the important details.

In the car on the drive from Positano to Pompeii, the four of us had debated whether to follow our American friend’s advice. Now, as we left behind the previously inscrutable men and their wine bladder to follow the guide to our next destination, the other husband whispered to me that we’d made the right choice, and I whispered back that I agreed.

Continue reading →

Guest Post, pt. 2: Why Are Doctors Skeptical & Unhelpful about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?

By: | April 24, 2014

This is Part Two of a post on myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome — or just ME/CFS — which is a disease that 1) knocks people right out of the game and 2) doctors can help with (though not as well as one would like). But most doctors haven’t a clue, often even viewing the illness as psychosomatic and untreatable.  Part One was yesterday, and it left off puzzling about why doctors are so unknowledgeable.

dr klimas explainingReading about the history of the illness made the situation seem far less inscrutable. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first investigated it in the mid-1980s, when a few hundred people near Lake Tahoe suddenly got symptoms much like mine. A couple of doctors documented abnormalities, also much like mine, and noted that the malady fit the profile of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), an illness that had cropped up sporadically for decades.

Purported epidemics usually turn out to be nothing more than coincidences, though, and CDC investigators found the abnormalities peculiar and the symptoms suspiciously diverse. They performed a quick investigation and wrote up a report downplaying the illness. But concern continued to grow, and a manuscript outlining the abnormalities was being prepared for the Annals of Internal Medicine. So investigators created a definition for the illness, but they kept it broad, disregarding the specific findings and requiring six months of fatigue along with several picks from a grab-bag of other subjective symptoms, like sore throat, swollen lymph nodes, and brain fog. They named it “chronic fatigue syndrome,” and they tacitly subsumed myalgic encephalomyelitis within this new illness (which the federal agencies now often call ME/CFS).

With such a broad definition, CFS suddenly applied to widely varying patients with few shared abnormalities. As a result, many doctors came to view the CFS grab-bag as a psychosomatic illness. The triviality of the name “chronic fatigue syndrome” reinforced the skepticism. After all, aren’t we all tired? The name makes the illness that made it nearly impossible for me to stand up or talk or do my job sound very much like the everyday tiredness most folks push through.

Enough good science would dispel this notion, but the illness hasn’t easily yielded its secrets. Continue reading →