Hell is (too many) other people

By: | October 26, 2022

“Is it okay to still have children?” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked her social media followers in 2019. She was addressing a growing reluctance among young people to consider parenting; both because of concerns about overpopulation and because of concerns about what kind of world new children would be coming into. This openness about rethinking parenthood is recent, but it’s happening in the context of a much longer global decline in births. That decline, steadily underway for the past 50 years, may be accelerating. Between 2019 and 2020, births declined 1.12 percent; the following year that number rose to 1.13 percent; the latest decline reported between 2021 and 2022 is 1.15 percent.

Why is this happening? The word “multifactorial” doesn’t begin to cover it. You hear a lot about women and education, and access to contraception. People also float the possibility of environmental toxins. You might not think of your social network as an environmental toxin, but that’s the idea Alexander Suvorov put forward last year in a paper published in the journal Endocrinology. Suvorov, a biologist at the University of Massachussetts Amherst, thinks that changes in our social environment are somehow contributing to the drop in reproduction. I was startled by this idea so I asked him to take me through it. Our interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Sally Adee

This is a really hard question to untangle.

Alexander Suvorov

As always in science, when you try to address a complicated question, the approach is to split it into much smaller questions.

By answering smaller questions, you can gradually build a mosaic, to arrive at a big picture. One example: in mice and small rodents, it is well-documented in laboratory experiments, and also in wildlife, that population density, or just social interactions, generate stress. And you can measure this stress by corticosteroid hormones in blood. So what about humans? For example, if you meet with many people over the day, will the level of corticosteroids be higher in your blood? Nobody knows. It would be a simple test, but no one has tried to measure this.

Or for example, let’s say you spend all your day sitting in front of the computer, interacting with thousands of people via Facebook. Will your body generate an increased stress response? Again, that is a very simple question that can be answered by a very simple questionnaire asking people how much time they spend on Facebook and measuring the corticosteroid levels. But nobody ever did that.

SA

How come? I mean, that seems like such a basic idea. Especially in light of all the conversations around the online safety act. People are constantly talking about the harmful effects of social media – why hasn’t anybody tried to quantify it in this way?

Continue reading →

don’t get on the bus

By: | October 24, 2022
But will the (emotional) hangover be worth it? (via Wikimedia Commons)

Perhaps this has happened to you before: you’re at a bus stop. You are — what else? — waiting for a bus. One pulls up, but it’s not the one you want, so you wave it on.

It seems so obvious that it hardly bears explanation: of course you did not get on the wrong bus.

Last week, my therapist used this to explain how feelings, too, are buses, and you can choose to get on or not. I’ve been thinking about it nonstop. It put words to a half-baked thought I’d already been ruminating on — that I have some choice in whether to get wrapped up in my emotions. Previously, I’ve thought of feelings, especially the bad ones, as unavoidable. And yes, of course, you can’t bypass every emotion. But that twinge of annoyance when opening a rude email? The pang of jealousy upon hearing someone else’s good news you had wished for yourself? The flash of anger when someone coal rolls me on my bike? All buses, and not the ones I want. I don’t have to get on and be taken along the full route of Bad Feelings.

But how tempting it can be to get on the wrong bus! The feeling of self-righteousness: definitely a party bus. The door opens; your funnest friends are there, and they’re passing around tequila shots and somehow, they’ve procured a karaoke machine. It would feel so good to get on, to blow off some steam — but no! Not today. I know the end of the route will take me all the way across town, on the opposite end from where I need to be.

Feelings of inadequacy and comparison: a gilded limo with leather seats and a sunroof. You get on thinking some of the glamour might rub off on you, but you just end up feeling even worse about yourself.

Anger: a fire engine you thought was en route to put out some inconsequential blaze, but when you pull up, it’s grown into 5-alarm affair.

Impatience: an old-school yellow school bus that stops and opens its doors at every railroad crossing. Every time you wish it’d move faster, it slows down to spite you.

Lately, when an unpleasant feeling has visited me, I imagine myself at a safe and cozy bus stop, one with a little shelter and surrounded by big elm trees. It’s a breezy spring day and I’m listening to a good album, an engrossing podcast, and I’m in no hurry to get where I need to go. I imagine a bus pulling up: as the driver opens the door, I ask myself if I want to get on. I say hello and explain I’m waiting for another bus; the driver nods, closes the door, and continues along their route. Feeling acknowledged, I get on with my day, ready for the right bus.

Writing in the Sky

By: | October 21, 2022

While visiting the Baltic seacoast of Lithuania a couple weeks ago, walking with my wife among hills of half-grassy sand dunes, I heard what I swore were sandhill cranes. I scanned an October sky pillared with distant cumulus until finding giant letters written high overhead, southward V’s and W’s a hundred yards long. 

Sandhill cranes was my quick conclusion, though I was wrong. I don’t often travel outside of the Americas, so I was already one lap behind. There are no sandhill cranes on this side of the planet. These were Grus grus, in English known as common cranes, a name that feels underwhelming considering how strongly they must figure every spring and fall. In Lithuanian, they are called gervė, one of the most mentioned birds in Baltic literature and lore. 

My sandhills, Antigone canadensis, are American species with some drifting into eastern Asia. They herald the change of seasons, standing together by the tens of thousands along lake edges and marshes on their annual migrations. To me, they are as remarkable as monarch butterflies. Last century they were edging toward extinction, but conservation efforts and changes in attitude where they were not treated as vermin invading agricultural fields has led to their brisk expansion. As they pass through Colorado or Nebraska they are known to gather in the hundreds of thousands, as loud as symphonies of wood ratchets and flutes. These cranes did the same here, coming from as far north as Siberia, flying south as far as North Africa, crowding wetlands and fields that they know like a map.

To verify what I was hearing and seeing, I turned to my wife several paces away and said do you hear that? She paused and when she heard the familiar, faraway prattle, her face changed into a bemused smile. Her mind was suddenly taken home, autumn in ditch country, Western Colorado, the last time of the year she’d be wearing a spaghetti strap outside without getting goosebumps. She’d be squatting in the garden clipping back October die-off when the calls would reach her and she’d shield her eyes from the sun with one hand, searching a prismatic blue sky until she found a great V at 10,000 feet, 3,000 feet above her. 

Continue reading →

The Iceman Cometh Not

By: | October 19, 2022

For near-term sea level rise, all eyes are on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Covering the vast majority of the island, the largest body of ice outside of Antarctica  is responsible for one-fifth of the oceans’ current elevation gain and projected to add another 10 inches globally, whether we decarbonize or not. Much of our data now comes from satellites, but the earliest ice core samples there—drilling 4550 feet into more than 100,000 years of climate history—come from an elaborate ruse that began in 1959.

“As part of man’s efforts to probe deeper and deeper into the secrets of the universe,” a small party of army engineers selected a site that year for a “city under the ice.” This according to R&D PR film number 6 produced by the US War Office in 1963. It was all about “man’s never-ceasing quest for knowledge.”

Continue reading →

Flora, Fauna, Funga

By: | October 17, 2022

This post first appeared in September of 2019 and the mushrooms never stop coming.

Paul Kroeger is a wizard. Rolling his quick little cigarettes like skinny sticks of dynamite, he halts and flows like bearded water, crossing streets of East Vancouver at angles between the cars. He slips behind houses, not the path of his fellow human beings, but grassy patches behind offices and medical facilities.

In front of a first floor apartment window, Kroeger coos, “Oh, look, look, look!” A ring of damp brown mushrooms has sprung up around a pine tree, grown from its roots. “Ectomycorrhizal,” he says. The mushroom mycelia is symbiotic with tree roots, taking to specific kinds of trees, gathering nutrients and water for the tree at the circumference of its roots, thus the circle.

Kroeger — the oe in his name more like oo — has worked at University of British Columbia studying the biochemistry of medicinal mushrooms, and is co-founder of the Vancouver Mycological Society. At the end of a day hunting in the city, he empties his collected mushrooms at home to take spore prints, gill-shaped dustings left on paper overnight. Specimens that he doesn’t dry for science, he chucks into his yard, hoping their spores will take. He has a small house in an old-tree neighborhood, his yard a crowded grove, overgrown compared to the houses around him, odd mushrooms springing up all over.

Continue reading →

Bug On My Window, Having a Tough Day

By: | October 14, 2022

A few weeks ago, a cicada landed on my screen of my open window.

Green and black cicada on a window screen

This was one of the regular cicadas that come out every year. They’re much more secretive than their 17-year cousins.

Well, most of the time they’re secretive. They don’t seem very secretive when they’re on your screen window, making their extremely loud sound right into your apartment.

Continue reading →

House Rules Rule

By: | October 12, 2022
For the last ten years, we’ve used a Monopoly game that is a family heirloom of sorts. By which I mean it’s old. The box is falling apart, and so is the board. The game pieces—the dog, the race car, the top hat, the thimble—are worn with years of fingertips. There is an orange sticky note that says it’s Indiana. No one can remember what happened to Indiana in the first place.
 
This summer, in exchange for going to swim lessons with a minimum level of enthusiasm, one of my kids asked whether we could get a new version of the game that wasn’t so battered. This did not seem unreasonable. At the end of the summer, the reluctant swimmer made his way out to a distant buoy in a mountain lake—a success! At the end of September, I picked up the most recent edition of Monopoly.
 
But was it a success? It was certainly newer. The $50 bills are purple, instead of blue. The Community Chest cards have some new descriptions: you spend time with an elderly neighbor, donate blood, go to jail for playing music too late. Some of these things take getting used to, but we’re flexible. Or, at least I was until I saw the large warning note: TO KEEP YOUR GAME SHORT AND SWEET, DON’T USE HOUSE RULES.
 
This seemed like the most unwelcome change of all. Because who goes into Monopoly thinking a game will be short? And as for sweet, house rules here and elsewhere can make for the most lovely games of all.
 
Our games use many of the techniques the top tips recommend against. No $500 bill on Free Parking? When someone’s close to bankruptcy, this beautiful golden piece of paper has bolstered many a sagging spirit. (I did also once try to bribe someone—to ask me to a high school dance? To not ask me to a high school dance?—with one of these bills. I ended up going to the dance but I can’t remember whether that was the intended outcome.)
 
And not loan money? Our most recent Monopoly game consisted of financial ups and downs that were weathered by kind gestures—paying off someone else’s mortgage, advancing them their GO money, even forgiving rent—and it was one of the most successful we’ve ever had. Others have come to a sudden, angry end.
 
We have others. In Apples to Apples, the dealer is allowed to pick whatever card they’d like to play, they’re not stuck with the one that they draw. And Uno—well, maybe I’ve never read the rules to Uno. In Solitaire, if you get stuck, you can flip through the cards in your hand two at a time, then one at a time. Why? Because that’s what my mom told me.
 
And the wonderful thing is, our house rules are not the only house rules! People come up with all sorts of terrific rules to suit their own needs. I asked some of the LWONers for theirs.
 
In Helen’s house, you can use the dictionary while playing Scrabble to check a word. “It’s considered bad form to flip through the dictionary looking for words that might exist, but making up words and looking them up is 100% fine,” she wrote. And if your word isn’t actually a word, you get a do-over. They also have a list of two- and three-letter words that people can use. Helen wrote that this “helps level the playing field a lot for kids and for people who aren’t maybe quite as good at remembering things as they used to be.”
 
Ann’s grandmother taught her grandchildren to play cards. One of her grandmother’s rules was that “if you were stuck at solitaire, you could put an extra king out, making 8 rows all together.”
 
An extra king! I never would have thought of that. Another thing that’s wonderful about house rules: their creativity. They are bespoke responses to the moment, whether that means avoiding a board-flipping tantrum or finding a way to move forward when the deck is stacked (sometimes on purpose, by a crafty sibling) against you. The game can become a puzzle to solve together, a celebration of the time that that someone put ZAXES (the plural of a tool used in roofing) on a triple word score tile.
 
There are many things to celebrate about our new Monopoly. There is a charming dinosaur token and you get money for rescuing a puppy and testing the slide at a playground you built. And there is Indiana again! We’ll keep a better hold on it—and we’ll hold onto our house rules, too.

Guest Post: Don’t kill the miller moths

By: | October 10, 2022

The moths arrived without warning. Thousands covered the walls and ceilings of the farmhouse where we lived one pandemic summer in northeastern Colorado. So many moths blanketed the spindly elm trees that they were indistinguishable from leaves until wind rattled them into flight. The trees appeared to slightly explode.

They were harmless miller moths, metamorphosed adults of the army cutworm, and native to the place. They were just passing through, really. After hatching underground on the high plains, the moths emerge and fly west each spring to drink the nectar of wildflowers in alpine meadows across the Rockies. Those that evade grizzly bears, which can eat tens of thousands of moths in a day, return to lay eggs on the plains in the fall. If only we’d been patient, the moths would have moved on of their own accord. We were impatient.

Hundreds of moths met the roaring maw of our vacuum. They came off the ceilings and the cabinets and the tables with satisfying little zips. Others we blasted with an air gun that shoots puffs of salt, which my girlfriend’s mom kept around for horseflies. Their soft brown bodies left oozing streaks on the walls. We placed pans of water and dish soap beneath reading lamps. The pans were filled with drowned moths by morning.

Continue reading →