The Last Word

By: | September 28, 2013

WildMustangsinNevada_MCMorton23 – 27 September

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to attend a wild horse and burro auction? This week, Mary Caperton Morton reports.

Christie tried her hardest not to eulogize newsprint.

Helen ate whale. Verdict? Underwhelming.

“A lot of us hoped that once we had the Internet we might have more information about the world,” Ethan Zuckermann tells guest poster Amy Maxmen. But our persistent, insistent misperceptions about Africa illustrate that we only ever know what we think we know, no matter how connected we are.

And finally, did you know Queen guitarist Brian May has a doctorate in astrophysics?! This and more in Cameron’s post on music and physics.

Newsprint is dead. Long live newsprint!

By: | September 27, 2013

men walk on moon

I died a little inside when I heard about the recent Today Show interview in which Jeff Bezos said, “I think printed newspapers on actual paper may be a luxury item. It’s sort of like, you know, people still have horses, but it’s not their primary way of commuting to the office.” As founder of Amazon.com and the new owner of The Washington Post, Bezos’s opinion on this matters. (Disclosure: I write a health column for the Post.)

I’m no luddite. I read Bezos’s comment on Twitter. I own two Kindles, and more than once, I’ve pulled up an electronic book on my iPhone while standing in line at the grocery store. I understand the convenience of reading news electronically — the news arrives instantly, snow or shine, it fits in your pocket, and there are no recyclables piling up on the kitchen table.

Like most of my peers, I read news online, but I still have three newspapers delivered to my house — the local daily, the weekly paper covering my rural county, and the Sunday Denver Post, which I read daily until they stopped delivery in my part of the state a few years ago.

Reading the newspaper has been my morning ritual since I could read, and online news has yet to replicate the experience in a satisfying way. I know what all you 20-somethings are thinking — oh, another curmudgeonly rant about new technology —  tl;dr. And it’s true that I’m nostalgic for a way of delivering news that’s probably hopelessly impractical in the digital age.

A story in newsprint has a genuine quality to it — a paper’s signature columns and font make the words seem weighty and bona fide. It exists in the physical world, not just the cloud. Continue reading →

On Eating Whale

By: | September 26, 2013

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 →

Guest Post: Postcards from Mali

By: | September 25, 2013

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Malaria causes more deaths in sub-Saharan Africa than car accidents, cancer, AIDS or war, even though the disease can be easily cured with an inexpensive pill. I find that fact incredibly disturbing, so I’ve traveled to Africa multiple times to write about this problem.

But honestly, I mainly go to Africa because I like it. Africa isn’t all terrorism, famine and disease. It just seems like that because those are newsworthy topics. Outside of those stories, there’s art, kindness and beauty like I’ve never witnessed before. It’s a huge continent with all-night clubs, traditional ceremonies and everything in between. Continue reading →

Way! Or, Queen meets quantum physics

By: | September 24, 2013

air guitar bigThe first time I heard Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” there were a lot of things I was on the verge of understanding. My first contact with the song was in the movie Wayne’s World, which also highlighted some of this dawning awareness. I knew it was funny when the main characters, Wayne and Garth, said “Schwing!” but I didn’t know why. And there was a nebulous cloud of comprehension around why Wayne thought the rocker played by Tia Carrere was so foxy.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” underscored these vague mysteries. The song held a murder of some kind, and foreign-yet-familiar sounding words like Scaramouche and fandango. That Galileo guy, I’d heard of him before. (I later learned that lead guitarist Brian May had been studying astrophysics before joining Queen, and finished his doctorate in 2007.)

OK, so I didn’t understand the lyrics, but I was used to that. I’d been listening to bands like Faster Pussycat and Def Leppard and Aerosmith and Queensrÿche–which, along with lyrics I didn’t understand, had names that had this wonderful, inscrutable appeal. (What’s that umlaut for? Didn’t they know how to spell leopard? Why, despite all this, are they so cool?) Continue reading →

Guest Post: Accounting for All the Pretty Horses

By: | September 23, 2013

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERATwo summers ago I did something reckless: I went to a wild horse and burro auction in Bernalillo, New Mexico. I managed not to place any bids, but I fell in love many times over. Nothing is more beautiful than a wild mustang and these were going for a song.

The 50 yearlings, mares and geldings were separated into five pens: two pens of yearlings, one of mares, one of geldings and one of donkeys. The yearlings were the calmest. Most had been rounded up with their mothers the winter before and weaned over the summer. Having spent so little time on the range, they were the most used to corraled life.

The mares and geldings had a different, dangerous energy. The majority of the adult horses were between two and four years of age and the auctioneer warned most were on “the wilder side of wild”. Both pens were given to panicking; one horse would spook, setting off the others in a swirling, dusty mass of flared nostrils, white eyes and pounding hooves.

The BLM officials gave the crowd about an hour to check out the horses in the corrals before starting the bidding. At each pen, interested buyers would call out the number of the animal they wanted – numbered tags were secured on a rope around each horse’s neck – and the bidding would start at $125. There were few battles; most animals went for the base price or five to ten dollars more, a small price to pay for a living, breathing piece of the ever shrinking Wild West. Continue reading →

Sleeping Giant

By: | September 20, 2013

1024px-Giant_Mine_3Canada’s oil sands region has been gaining international recognition as a monstrous environmental liability, its vast tailings ponds made beautifully ghastly by Ed Burtynsky’s aerial photography. By some measures, though, Canada’s most polluted site is located less than three miles from where I put my son to bed, with a cup of tap water, every night.

I live in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, a gold mining town until a decade ago, when the gold was phased out in favour of diamonds. The danger in this town is enough to kill everyone in the world more than once, so out of a regional population of 17,000 there’s plenty to go around: 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide in water-soluble dust, just biding its time in the underground chambers of Giant Mine, walking distance from where I sit. Seven hundred tonnes of it still lurk in the abandoned gold-roasting complex above ground. Belatedly, “Caution” signs have appeared, to dissuade people from walking their dogs on the grounds. Continue reading →

Q&A: Big Bang Theory

By: | September 19, 2013

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For most of the interviews we do, sources will be disappointed by what comes out. And we journalist are mostly okay with this because those are the rules of the game. But every so often a person gets a little robbed. And I, the journalist, feel like a crook. The following is a Q&A I did for Scientific American with Eric Kaplan, writer and producer of Big Bang Theory on CBS. It wasn’t SciAm’s fault they only had space for a snippet of this conversation – they told me as much beforehand. How was I to know he was so surprisingly thoughtful and not-surprisingly funny? So here it is, unabridged, for the dedicated LWON readers.

Continue reading →