It is still January, but the plants here don’t seem to know it. The evergreen pear trees along my street burst into flurries of cloud-colored blossoms last weekend. Along my neighbor’s garage, the hedgehog aloe shows off its orange flowers. Elsewhere, there are fingerprints of the recent storms’ destruction: beaches scoured of sand, roads crumbling like pie crust, water-logged homes and sealed-off harbors. But along this strip of road, everything the rain brought seems soft and spring-like.
This goes, too, for the giant spike of agave flower that has risen up in my backyard. I wish I was sure of the species—I plant with enthusiasm and then forget what it was that I put in the ground. My best guess in this case is Agave attenuata, also called foxtail agave. Usually, the spike droops over, sways gently like its namesake in the wind.
This one shows no sign of bending. The flowers are starting to open and spiral up the plant. Bees weave in and out in the midday sun.
How it started (November 2022)
But this false spring can be spiky, too. The flowers mean that the end is coming. A blooming agave pours its energy into reproduction, and then the plant dies.
In a poetry class I took this week the topic was impermanence. We talked about impermanence, sure, but we also talked about the things of the world that we couldn’t help being attached to: stones and family heirlooms and trees and the ones we love.
How it’s going (January 2023)
I am attached to the impermanence of a January after the rain. I am attached to the bees and the sunshine and the blossoms. I am attached to the roads that are now broken, the sand that has been washed away, the land and life as it was before the storm. I am attached also to the reservoir, which soared from 36 percent of capacity to full and spilling over the course of three days. I am attached to the agave and its tall spike of flowers, to its blue-green flames of leaves. And when the flowers begin to bend, as gracefully as a fox’s tail, I’ll become attached to that, too, even though the agave is already letting go.
I was having an email exchange with a longtime friend a few months ago, and we got to talking about our long-ago youth—specifically, the workplace where we met, when we were both in our teens. As is often the case in these late-evening conversations, the discussion turned to the subject of who else among us has survived from that ancient era: 1974 to 1978. No, that’s not quite right: The discussion turned to who hasn’t survived: a roll call we occasionally catalogue and, now and again, update. In this case, the subject in question was that guy a couple of years older than us who worked in a different department but in the back of the same office. The dude with the cool, round-shouldered affect. Heavy drinker. Heavy shrugger. You know.
We didn’t know. And then, the next day, we did, our emails arriving in each other’s inboxes nearly simultaneously. I remember now! His name was Jimmy C—.
My one salient memory of Jimmy is the evening four of us from that office attended the world premiere of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the 1975 Chicago International Film Festival. Why Jimmy was part of our entourage, I have no idea. Possibly he just perked up when I announced, from the front end of the office, that I was buying tickets to this amazing event-to-be. Also probably—almost certainly—on the night of the event we stopped for drinks along the drive from downtown Chicago to the far North Side. Also also probably—no, definitely certainly, because why wouldn’t we?; we were immortal—we timed our arrival at the Granada Theater to coincide with the opening of the outside lobby doors for general admission.
The ticket-holder line, a haphazard assemblage measuring four or six across, stretched from beneath the theater marquee to the el station a block away. The Granada, dating to the movie-theater-as-palace heyday of the 1920s, could hold 3,400. Apparently 3,396 had beaten us to the scene.
We started down the sidewalk, at least one us resigning himself to his eventual lot in the back row of the uppermost balcony, but then Jimmy did maybe the most incredible thing I’d ever seen. He stopped, said, “I think we’ve gone far enough,” and about-faced. Then he stood still, next to four or six oblivious cineastes. Just like that, he was near the front of the line.
The other three of us hesitated, our incomplete prefrontal cortexes pinwheeling between the disappointing, if morally irreproachable, position under the el platform and the satisfying, if morally risible, position adjacent to the theater marquee.
January is such a bitch. I have personal reasons to feel this and so do most of the people I talk to: bad things are happening or anniversaries of bad things have come around again. People are losing their jobs; they’re having non-trivial surgical procedures; kids are having urgent psychiatric problems; relatives are seriously sick; people’s mental abilities are slowly sliding away; people are dying before they should or even when they should. These are terrible things. They are no one’s fault and under no one’s control, and I can’t do a thing about them.
January actually has a range and includes less-bad things. These lesser things are also unwilled and uncontrollable. January does this because it can, it doesn’t care. This situation is not fair, it shall not stand, and I vowed a mighty vow to fight January, at least the lesser bads, even though my weapons are feeble.
I saw a Facebook post from a chocolatier and because the chocolatier is, or was, local and because the chocolates had a Frenchy name and are quite good, I re-posted it and then our Helen commented: was I offering to send her some Frenchy chocolate, she said. Why yes, I said, and so I did. She said thank you, chocolate helps with the January blues. You too? I said. So we discussed antidotes to January.
Aside from chocolate, Helen’s antidotes included weekly exercise classes and altogether, she said, she felt she was doing everything she could but thought she’d be happier if she took more walks. I couldn’t get myself to exercise class for any reason but I do walk every day. Well, she said, her exercise class had other real live people in it but a walk for the sake of a walk? she couldn’t get herself out the door. She needs a destination, she said. I see the charm of real live people, sweet baby Jesus, I really do; but I don’t need a destination because the way I get myself out the front door is: get dressed, walk downstairs and outside to see what’s going on the in the world, and here’s the thing, it’s a dense neighborhood and a LOT is going on. That is, a person wouldn’t need a destination when there’s all this to keep track of.
I saw a bucket of yeast at the brewery last week and I thought it looked like joy.
Not because beer is delicious (though it is), but because it could not be contained. As the beer fermented in a giant tank, the yeast dribbled from a pipe into the five-gallon bucket, bubbled and pulsed like a heart, rose to the brim, and—in frothy streams that left a growing puddle on the floor—overflowed and overflowed and overflowed.
Sometimes, in cold places, a river will overtop its ice and wend for awhile across its winter shroud before diving again. This is called overflow. Perhaps you are lucky enough to feel something like that, too—a sense of climbing out of the dark, of warmth and light that fills you to bursting, of frothing past the bounds of your skin.
I noticed it at a packed concert hall, this weekend. People pressed close in rows of seats, next to neighbors and friends and strangers they do not often see, in these pandemic times. Their chatting voices filled the room, even after the music began, like they simply could not stop, their low hum lifting the guitar and mandolin and bass and banjo, all of it spilling out into the freezing night.
I felt it alone, too, when I traded $50 for some old fish-scaled touring skis and bright yellow telemark boots. I strapped into them on a deeply snowed-over back road, strange on my thick new ankles. The glide up the slope started awkward, then smoothed, the dogs running ahead of my steady shuffle, their tongues flapping, the russet in their coats the same color as fall’s last clinging leaves. I gathered a few from a stem, folded them like pages into the pocket of my fanny pack. In those late afternoon hours, fog came in waves through the naked aspens and willows. The heavy overcast sky blended all light and shadow into twilight blue. The cold gathered in the sweaty band of my sports bra and the small of my back.
But when I turned back downhill into the rush of effortless motion—there it was, and I spread my arms wide to make room for it in the small cavern of my body. A color? A sound? A smell? A touch? Everything at once. Nothing I can describe better than that escape of river, that bucket of yeast.
Yesterday I was interviewed about the Finkbeiner Test for the Change Artist Podcast (episode will go live at a later date). While gathering up some links to share, I realized that it was exactly ten years ago — January 17, 2013 — that Ann wrote the LWON post that would become the world-renowned Finkbeiner Test.
Time flies. And yet, the Finkbeiner Test persists. Ann and I were recently interviewed about it on the podcast Lost Women of Science. Spoiler, the episode starts by saying that the show “fails that test all the time.” The hosts, Carol Sutton Lewis and Katie Hafner, felt attacked. Ann and I stood firm. We aren’t asking people to stop highlighting women whose careers had been obscured or obstructed by sexism. Instead, we’re asking to stop framing every single story about a female scientist as if her gender was the most interesting or important thing.
As I said on Lost Women, “What we’re saying is that every goddamn story about a woman scientist doesn’t need to be about how she’s a woman and isn’t it cute that she’s a woman and isn’t it hard for her because she’s a woman, and let’s make sure she’s also a good wife and a good mother because otherwise, what value does she really have?”
The original Finkbeiner Test post is reprinted below.
***
This post was originally published on March 5, 2013 at Double X Science, a now defunct website about women in science. Since then, it’s gotten quite a bit of attention, including a story in the Columbia Journalism Review, a mention in the New York Times, and even its own Wikipedia page. The Finkbeiner Test also has been the subject of a master’s thesis and it’s been used in a European art project. Although it was originally designed as a test for detecting gender bias in profiles of female scientists, it can be applied to any profile of a woman in her profession. Since we published the test, people have asked a lot of questions, and Ann answered some of them recently here. Because the Double X Science website has gone dark, I’m republishing the post here.
Men dominate most fields of science. This is not news, and countless projects have sprung up to address the disparity. There are associations, fellowships, conferences, and clubs for women in science, and with these, efforts to highlight women who are making it in these fields.
Campaigns to recognize outstanding female scientists have led to a recognizable genre of media coverage. Let’s call it “A lady who…” genre. You’ve seen these profiles, of course you have, because they’re everywhere. The hallmark of “A lady who…” profile is that it treats its subject’s sex as her most defining detail. She’s not just a great scientist, she’s a woman! And if she’s also a wife and a mother, those roles get emphasized too.
For instance, in a profile of biologist Jill Bargonetti, The New York Times quotes one of Bargonetti’s colleagues saying that, “Jill makes a fantastic role model…because she is married, has two children and has been able to keep up with her research.” It’s hard to imagine anyone saying this about a scientist named Bill. The story’s subtitle piles on, reinforcing the stereotype that women are nurturing and selfless with “A Biologist’s Choice Gives Priority to Students.”
The headline on this recent profile of neuropsychologist Brenda Milner in The Globe and Mail reads, “A scientific pioneer and a reluctant role model.” The piece explains that “Dr. Milner was determined to compete with the best scientists, male or female” and that “Her resistance to being recognized as an outstanding woman seems to stem from her desire to be a great scientist in general.” Yet the article fixates on Milner’s sex as if it’s the most remarkable thing about her. The occasion for the piece, Milter’s induction into the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame, warrants only a few sentences.
Ann Finkbeiner, my colleague at Last Word On Nothing, has had enough. As she explained here, she plans to write about an impressive astronomer and “not once mention that she’s a woman.” It’s not that Finkbeiner objects to drawing attention to successful female scientists. She’s produced many of these stories herself. The issue, she says, is that when you emphasize a woman’s sex, you inevitably end up dismissing her science.
I asked her if there was a particular story that epitomized the problem, and she pointed me to this two page profile of Vera Rubin, published in Science in 2002. (Full text is behind a paywall, sorry.) Twelve of the story’s 24 paragraphs mention Rubin’s sex or gender roles. “Four paragraphs on her science, and she was the one who found dark matter,” Finkbeiner says.
It’s time to stop this nonsense. We don’t write “Redheads in Science” articles, so why do we keep writing about scientists in the context of their gonads? Sexism exists, and we should call it out when we see it. But treating female scientists as special cases only perpetuates the idea that there’s something extraordinary about a woman doing science.
So Finkbeiner has adopted a new approach. “I’m going to cut to the chase, close my eyes, and pretend the problem is solved; we’ve made a great cultural leap forward and the whole issue is over with,” she says. “And I’m going to write the profile of an impressive astronomer and not once mention that she’s a woman.” In other words, “I’m going to pretend she’s just an astronomer.”
It’s a fine idea. In the spirit of the Bechdel test, a metric that cartoonist and author Alison Bechdel created to measure gender bias in film, I’d like to propose a Finkebeiner test for stories about women in science. The test could apply to profiles of women in other fields, too.
To pass the Finkbeiner test, the story cannot mention
The fact that she’s a woman
Her husband’s job
Her child care arrangements
How she nurtures her underlings
How she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field
How she’s such a role model for other women
How she’s the “first woman to…”
Here’s another trick. Take the things that are said about a female subject and flip them around as if they were said about a male. If they sound ridiculous, then chances are good they have no business in the story. For instance, in his Guardian profile of preeminent physicist Lisa Randall, John Crace writes, “No matter how much she bends time, there’s no escaping the fact that she’s just turned 43 and that if she wants to have kids she’s going to have to get on with it soon.” No one would possibly write such a thing about a man of her age and status.
Yes, there are seven items on the Finkbeiner test, but it’s easy to pass, if only you try. James Gorman’s profile of biologist Hopi Hoekstra in The New York Times last month exemplifies how it’s done. In the piece, Gorman conveys Hoekstra’s accomplishments, her management style, and her character without ever putting her into a gender roles box. Over at Smithsonian, Virginia Morell’s profile of climate researcher Susan Solomon passes the test, and so does Steve Kemper’s story about biologist Kay Holekamp. These stories make great reads, because they focus on outstanding research and follow a simple rule of thumb, in case you forget the seven items on the Finkbeiner test: Write about the subject as if she’s just a scientist.
My wife pieced together a kill in our driveway, sending me pictures of deer tracks posed in a casual walk followed by a sprawl, deer fur in the snow, and faint signs of melt, a couple hours old at most. The next picture was of cat tracks the size of an adult human palm, a good sized mountain lion dragging the deer. A path like that of a saucer sled was left down the drive where the mountain lion gripped the deer’s throat in its teeth and pulled it a couple hundred feet to the canyon’s edge below our house. My wife took pictures and video all the way, and where it hauled the body over the snowy rimrock, her text said she stopped following it. If she were with me she might, but alone no way.
Later, we laid together in bed in the flicker-light of a fire and she recounted finding fresh tracks and studying the kill pattern. The deer, she said, were coming through together, a line of them, no sign of scatter before the attack, so it was swift, not a chase. The kill, she said, struck her as quick, quiet, dutiful, and done.
It happened right behind the house, between the firewood and solar panels, which gives a person pause going out for wood or clearing snow from the panels. We see plenty of cat tracks around here, benches of rimrock in a high desert piñon-juniper biome, perfect place for travel and ambush. In winter they follow deer like sharks trailing a shoal. When deer tracks are around, there will be mountain lions. The rest of the time, snow is mostly blank.
Lately, we’ve been seeing lots of deer tracks and a fresher mountain lion moving through. I go out for wood not afraid so much as aware. I don’t often worry about being attacked. When deer and elk populations dwindle in mountain lion terrain, they tend go down in size, targeting porcupines and house cats. Attacks on humans are rare. Where we live, deer and elk are plenty and lion health is generally good, making a physical confrontation with humans less likely. Bad encounters tend to come from starving or curious juveniles or elders barely holding onto their teeth, not a cat that takes down a full-grown mule deer in a single pounce.
Definitely an idea. (In my mind, ideas look like the Ghostwriter.)
First: what is an idea? Its physical manifestation must be some clump of brain cells activating in some very specific pattern, but the result feels like something more. In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert describes ideas as beings that travel from person to person, bestowing their gifts upon an individual. She describes an idea she had for a novel that never got off the ground, which she discovered, years later, had worked its way to her friend, the writer Ann Patchett. Their theory was that the idea was transmitted by a kiss on the cheek.
KATE: What initially sparked this project for you?
MADELINE: Like most people who’ve been writing about climate change for a long time, I’ve dealt with a long sense of frustration about how difficult it is for people to grasp the subject, how divisive it’s been, and how even people who understood the concept didn’t seem to understand why it was urgent or what it had to do with their lives. I was always searching for ways to convey that. Then I edited an issue of YES! magazine about resilience and started doing some reporting in the Bay Area with environmental justice groups. I noticed that those groups talked in a very tangible way about how climate policy and climate change were going to affect their communities—What will this mean for us? Will our communities and our people be left out?—and this created a much more concrete way of talking about it. They also asked questions like How can we build our own resilience? How can we think about resilience in our own neighborhoods and cities, the places where we live?
