Welcome to Snark Week, LWON’s answer to Shark Week. All week long we’ll share frightening tales of the world’s most dangerous non-sharks. It’s a bad week to be a puppy. For LWON readers, it’s pretty awesome. Stay tuned and enjoy! Awesomeness begins below.
August 5 – 9
Bad news this week: Tom and Erika left us.
Erik asked a question we might hear a lot of in the coming years: when is it time to give up on an endangered species?
Helen explained why singing in a choir is good for you.
Jessa saw surprising parallels in the future of journalists and concert musicians.
And Cassie revealed the recipe for implanting false memories.
See you next week!
When I was about four years old, a squirrel found its way into our house. My dad and his brother pursued it while my mom and I cowered in the bathtub with the shower curtain drawn. Eventually one of the men killed it with a hammer. I don’t remember seeing the corpse, but I have a vague memory of bloody kitchen towels.
Awful, isn’t it. But don’t be too alarmed. Chances are this massacre never happened. My parents have no memory of the incident, and killing a small animal with a blunt object seems like something that would stick. I might have made the whole thing up. Continue reading
Most summer nights at the Banff Centre for the Arts, classical music wafts out of a concert hall, attended by a small but dedicated audience of regulars. The musicians are young. The audience is old. On a July night I wander over to a recital of the Brandenburg Concertos, played in period style, with string bows overtightened until wood bends convex over horsehair.
It’s been a professionally deflating day, and I can use the relaxation of ensemble music. Globe and Mail editor John Stackhouse has visited the centre and given a rather bleak take on modern journalism. The days of being a full-time professional writer, with a pension, may have been a brief historical anomaly, he says: A blip in the post-war era. Advertising revenues have collapsed for good, freelance writing rates are plummeting, and journalism is leaning more on charitable foundations and advertorial. We budding writers will have to find our own way. But what that way might look like is rather mysterious.
The following is an essay I wrote while reporting from the Sea of Cortez last fall. To learn more, read my piece in this month’s Harper’s Magazine: “Emptying the World’s Aquarium.”
Over the past few days I have found myself thinking a lot about the tragic poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” In it, the narrator kills an albatross and brings on the wrath of the ocean – bad weather, ghost ships, and whirlpools. It’s a transfixing tale of willful destruction followed by forgiveness and redemption. One particular quote keeps popping to mind.
He prayeth well, who loveth well / Both man and bird and beast
He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small
Here in the Upper Gulf of California, fishermen, governments, and environmentalists have been struggling with a different kind of albatross – not one that soars high on the wind but rather lurks unseen in the murky water. But when the fishermen pull it into their nets, it’s an omen just as bad as that legendary bird. Continue reading
Neither one of us is good at good-byes.
Tom, who abhors leaving a party, prefers to remain until every other guest has departed, the host has passed out or gone to bed, and he’s holding forth to the household pets and/or appliances. That way, he knows he won’t miss out on any of the fun.
Erika would rather slip out quietly while a party is in full swing, the guests are laughing uproariously and everyone is in that blissed-out “What a great party!” stage. That way, she knows she won’t commit some embarrassing faux pas that will be noticed by all the partygoers, then retold for decades as an epic tale of social disaster. Continue reading
Recently I was rehearsing a glorious 16th-century motet with a group of 20 or so people. Haec dies quam fecit Dominus, the song begins. This is the day that the Lord has made; let us be glad and rejoice in it. It’s an Easter text and a lovely thought, whether or not you think the Lord actually made this day or whether the day made itself, thank you very much, from the rotation of the Earth. This is a day; let’s enjoy it.
The piece is by William Byrd, an English composer of Shakespeare’s time—yes, he’s wearing a ruff in his portrait—who wrote a lot of sacred music like this. The idea that different people could sing different things at the same time was fairly new in the Renaissance, and composers like Byrd went to town with it. Continue reading
Readers! Please welcome science writer Helen Fields, the newest person of LWON (or LaWON if you prefer). You may remember that she wrote a lovely guest post last year to help us rookies figure out how to visit a natural history museum. The exceedingly talented Helen has written about frogs and crayfish and whales and meteorites, but she really likes to write about poop.
There’s a lot to love about Helen – her Fluevogs, her knitted dragons, her penmanship, her angelic voice. I could go on and on and on. But I won’t because I want you to have your own reasons for loving her. You can read her first post on Monday.
Image courtesy of Helen Fields.
