Guest Post: Lost in Congo

By: | October 9, 2013
The rapids just downstream from Kinshasa and Brazzaville.
The Congo River just downstream from Kinshasa and Brazzaville.

Ever get the feeling that the whole world’s privy to a joke you just don’t get? That sort of approximates my life in the sprawl of Kinshasa. For the next year or so, my wife Anne-Claire and I will call this notorious behemoth of a failed state home. I couldn’t be happier – to live in Africa again and sate a childhood fascination with the continent; to find stories to tell that no one else can; and to learn French. My current lack of fluency, in addition to many other aspects of life here, has me in a near-constant state of bewilderment.

I accompany my fluent-in-French wife to work every day and desperately try to follow what’s going on. As she deftly navigates a barrage of bilingual situations, I peck at adding something more useful than “OK, d’accord” or “Oui, ça c’est bon” to conversations. Meanwhile, my wife has charmed the local staff by learning a few phrases in Lingala. Heartened by her results, every once in a while, I get up the courage to start a conversation in French with one of the local staff, often going something like this:

Continue reading →

FAQs about breast cancer screening

By: | October 8, 2013

shutterstock_150086024Regular readers of LWON know that I’m fed up with science denialism among breast cancer advocacy groups like Susan G. Komen for the Cure®. 

As I write in the Washington Post today,  I’m also exasperated with my doctor (one I won’t be going back to).

I’ve been reporting on breast cancer and mammography for more than 12 years now. I’ve read just about every paper that’s been published on mammography during that time, and after reviewing all the evidence, I’ve decided to opt out of mammography.

Whenever I write about this subject, I get letters and comments, and so today I’m going to address some of these objections here at LWON.

You say that the benefits of mammography have been overstated, but I’m a breast cancer survivor and a mammogram saved my life. If I’d skipped that mammogram, I’d be dead. Continue reading →

Freeman Dyson Turns 90

By: | October 7, 2013

576px-Freeman_dysonI do seem to keep referring to Freeman Dyson, even writing whole posts about him.  The reason, I think, is that I want to write a profile of him, even though 1) profiles of him have been done and done and done, the most recent being a full-blown biography; and 2) he’s way above my pay grade.  The closest I can come to describing him is to say that he’s not like anyone I’ve met before.  He just turned 90 and his long-time home, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, gave him the kind of party scientists give each other:  a day of talks on the subject on which the scientist has spent his/her life – like, say, low-mass stars.  For Dyson, the Institute needed two days and four different subjects and even then I don’t know how they narrowed it down. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | October 5, 2013

DSC_0344September 30 – October 4

This week — on the off chance that you haven’t heard — Christie won the National Association of Science Writers’ Science in Society Award for last year’s dynamit post about pink ribbon cancer denialism.

Cassie sets out to do a story on how Bolivia can have a navy without a coastline — and finds herself needing to execute some defense maneuvers of her own.

Runner’s high, we’ve heard of. But runner’s itch? Roberta explains.

Guest poster Bryn Nelson ruminates on shared memory, stored knowledge and tractorpalooza.

Ann and Abstruse Goose realise that an internet without back doors and side channels is probably not an internet.

And Jessa learns to fence.

En Garde..Touche

By: | October 4, 2013

shutterstock_144500554

“So, this goes…under the bra?” I stare dubiously at the hard plastic bowls.

“Yup,” says the 27-year-old Black Irish firefighter who somehow strikes me as unlikely to know, even though it is he who handed them to me in a sealed package upon which he has printed my name.

The trouble is I already have my heavy white canvas straightjacket zipped up to a high neck line in the back and the strap between my legs buckled to the rings at the middle of my back. I retreat to the ladies’ room with the only other lady present and we insert the domes. They feel decidedly unergonomic. Like if I were to take a hard hit to them they might spare the nipple but completely crush my lymph nodes.

I am in my first fencing class for a few reasons. First of all, my deep interest in combat sport has long been grappling with a deep lack of interest in injuring myself. Secondly, the Municipal Recreation Guide offered only a few other alternatives, such as scrapbooking and home-buying, for adults seeking new skills.

I have visions of springing about with my non-sword arm cocked, scorpion style behind and over my head – a throwback, it turns out, to a time when duels were fought with the visual aid of lanterns. Dueling died out after the First World War, and aristocrats stopped inoculating their children with fencing techniques, but the sport has lived on. In fact, it’s one of only four sports that has featured in every modern Olympics.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: A new love for the very old

By: | October 3, 2013

Row of tractorsWhen I was young, my brother and sister and I caught salamanders in my grandparents’ garage and chased cats through the barn. The family farm was a big private playground, where we could poke at tadpoles in Nelson Lake (more like a large pond) and occasionally ride around on a giant lawnmower.

More often than not, though, we would spend our time on the other side of rural Highway 32, at a far more public and imposing place called Steamer Hill. Since 1954, this tract of rolling farmland donated by Grandpa and his siblings has been home to an annual festival called the Western Minnesota Steam Threshers Reunion, or WMSTR. Every Labor Day weekend, the unincorporated community of Rollag, with a population hovering around 30, swells to the size of a small city as tens of thousands of visitors and volunteers descend upon the Hill to experience what we now jokingly call “Tractorpalooza.”

Continue reading →

Love City

By: | October 2, 2013

DSC_0336

For every story that makes it to print, there are scads that die in the reporting trenches. This is one of those stories.

In 2001, I moved to Bolivia to become a Peace Corps volunteer and fell deeply in love with the country. In 2010, I returned. I wanted to visit friends and family, but, like any intrepid freelancer, I also hoped to do some reporting. Although Bolivia has been landlocked since it lost its coastline to Chile more than 130 years ago, the country still maintains a navy. This is their motto: “The sea belongs to us by right, recovering it is a duty.” I find this sentiment simultaneously ridiculous and sort of commendable. So why not do a story on Bolivia’s navy, I thought. (Well, lots of reasons. But I didn’t let details deter me.) Continue reading →

Why I don’t run

By: | October 1, 2013

shutterstock_146500019I haven’t gone for a run in more than a year. The main reason I dislike running is that I’m lazy. But I have a second, slightly better excuse: Every time I run, my legs get unbearably itchy.

It starts as a tingling in my thighs and calves. After several minutes, right around the time when I’m supposed to be settling into a nice rhythm, it erupts into full-blown, supremely annoying itchiness. My runs usually end with me clawing at my legs on the side of the road, while passersby give me weird looks.

Continue reading →