A Shape in the Woods

By: | November 15, 2022

This concerns the burned out hulk of a ponderosa pine that bears have taken an interest in, sculpted, really. I recently saw this smoldered-black tree on a backpack with two friends in Western Colorado. The walk took four days with no human trails to speak of, so when we arrived, we were well away from human presence in a purely animal landscape.

One of the friends had found it weeks earlier, saying he considers this one of the most important finds of his life. It is a mysterious meeting place for bears. When I saw it from a hundred feet away, I thought the object was a big bear in the woods. A large tree will burn down in a wildfire and leave a hooded black stump that can be mistaken for a large animal. Through lines of standing, live ponderosas, catching it out of the side of my eye, it seemed to be standing on its hind legs, peering through the trees.

This had been a large ponderosa pine, at the peak of its life thirty or forty years ago. For whatever reason, it had grown at a slight angle, and a fire burned it down to about ten feet of trunk, the base smoldering into a stiletto. It looks like a half-ton charred ballerina standing on a single leg. At the top, on what appears to be a head, stands a pair of uncanny protuberances, not unlike the raised ears of a black bear, making it not a ballerina, but ursine, bulky in the chest, heads taller than any living bear. 

You can tell something has been happening around this charred shell. A halo of pine needle duff has been pummeled flat by the weight of many bears over time. This has long been a focus of ursine attention. It stands like their shrine, like nothing the three of us had ever seen in the wild.

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When society imitates fiction

By: | November 14, 2022

A snake oil salesman and some hedge funds partner up to pimp the latest ‘synthetic biology’ scam—as phantom revenue, a hocus-pocus business model, rampant related-party games, and a decade of colossal failure get shoveled into yet another garbage SPAC. Ginkgo Bioworks is a colossal scam, a Frankenstein mash-up of the worst frauds of the last 20 years.

So begins a 2021 short-seller’s report, representative in style of the literary form.

This year I’ve been reading a fair number of ‘short reports’, a type of inflammatory, investigative presentation aimed at convincing other investors to dump a stock. Short sellers play an important ecological role in the public markets, clearing away excess valuations that otherwise build into bubbles. If one couldn’t sell short, investors could only speculate in one direction—upward. But like all scavengers, activist short sellers are roundly loathed.

The short reports I’ve been reading have done nothing to dispel this grimy reputation. There is a kind of disdain for their victim, a schadenfreude in the suggestion that they will not only bring down a company but gain from its downfall, too. But there is something else in the literary style. Each time, I sense I should be wearing a fedora. The language is so reminiscent of noir detective fiction that my surroundings transmogriphy into a dimly-lit bar, a lone saxophone playing at the edges while, as I read, my inner voice takes on a transatlantic accent.

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In the Pocket

By: | November 11, 2022
Beethoven’s sketches for String Quartet in C sharp minor, op. 131.

My grandmother used to take me to master classes at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, where young musicians from all over the world came to train. After buying our $10 tickets, we’d stand in the line of mostly senior citizens waiting for the doors to open. I’d hold her hand and rest my head on her shoulder, inhaling her Obsession perfume.

Nana wasn’t allowed to listen to music growing up, so as an adult she learned to play cello and taught her children and grandchildren to love classical music and jazz. We usually sat in the first or second row, close enough to hear the students breathing and their shoes squeaking. Barely-out-of-college opera singers wiped their sweaty hands on their pants and pianists dropped their sheet music. Then the teacher would arrive, the students would pull themselves together, and they’d get to work. 

The students were very, very good. But as we listened, their instructors made small adjustments that transformed their performances from good to something shiver-worthy, perfect. 

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100 Days, 1 Dress

By: | November 9, 2022
woman dancing in pink dress

This weekend I could not motivate to write a blog post from thin air, so I asked Our Cameron to interview me instead. Here we are.

So I saw a photo on Instagram of you wearing a pink(?!) dress. And then you said that you had worn that dress for 100 days. Wow! And what’s the deal?

I did! 100 days in a row! 

The deal is that there’s this company called Wool& that has a very clever marketing thing: If you wear one of their dresses for 100 days, they’ll give you a $100 gift certificate. Their dresses cost over $100 each so the economics of this aren’t really the point – I’ll leave the math to you. But a friend of mine was doing the company’s 30-day challenge (same deal, for a $30 gift certificate) and I thought…well, that sounds fun. So I went for it, and dove right in to the 100 days.

Their clothes are made out of wool blends, and the point of the challenge is that wool doesn’t really get stinky. At the beginning I washed it every night in the sink but by the end of the 100 days I’d go for a week or two without even thinking about washing it. It just didn’t smell bad.

Ok, so I confess, I also looked at this (had I known you were doing this, I might have been able to do it in solidarity!). But I couldn’t figure out what dress I would actually wear for 30 days. I was thinking small. How did you pick? 

It wasn’t a very sophisticated thought process. It was May in Washington, D.C., which meant I was going to be wearing it all summer, so I wanted short-sleeved or sleeveless. I obviously wanted pockets. And then one of the sleeveless dresses came in pink. I did consider getting it in a subtler color, like navy, but then I remembered that I love pink and I would probably enjoy wearing it every day. I was right!

And so wearing the same dress over and over is not too stinky–but otherwise, what’s it like to wear the same dress for 100 days? 

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Time Will Tell

By: | November 7, 2022

Yesterday was the end of Daylight Saving time here, also called “The Day That Just Won’t End” by assorted family members and friends. So I’ve been thinking about time and watching this frightening movie trailer again. Other times, it’s good when time feels more expansive than it usually does. Even though this post first appeared in 2018, I still have the experience of time becoming more liquid when I’m in the water. This weekend, I forgot my watch again while surfing–and two hours later, my son and I paddled back in to the beach, not knowing when we were, but knowing we felt better than when we started.

*

Sometimes I lose track of time when I’m in the water. There are days when it seems like I’ve been paddling through whitewater for hours, the wind makes my ears feel like icicles, and my arms are burning. When I get back to the car, only fifteen minutes have passed since I started surfing. Then there are days when the sky is blue, the waves are just right and there’s a friend to chat with between sets. On those days it seems like I’ve hardly been in the water at all. And on those days I have sometimes been late to pick up my kids.

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Snapshot: Persimmon tree

By: | November 4, 2022

In spring of 2022, I wrote about an edible plant walk. Plants! With food! They’re all around us! In early October I went on another plant walk with the same guy, featuring oak trees. Did you know you can eat acorns? You can. But first you have to process them, extensively, to get rid of the compounds that make them bitter. I am probably not going to go to all that trouble, but it was fun to learn about oak trees and eat the acorn pancakes he’d made.

While we were at it, in this urban park with youngsters playing soccer, a tattoo parlor across the street, and a community college behind us, we also found edible mushrooms and a persimmon tree. I ate one of the persimmon, and it was new and custardy and sweet.

This photo is not of that persimmon tree. This photo is from the next day, when I was walking in my neighborhood, along the edge of a different urban park with different youngsters playing soccer. This is a walk I have done dozens of times in the last few years, including during persimmon season, but this time, there was a persimmon tree.

The birds certainly knew about it. I bet the deer did, too. It is not a new tree. It is very tall. All those years it had been living its life between the soccer fields and the tennis courts, minding its business and producing gobs and gobs of little orange fruits. But it only became visible on October 9, 2022.

Photo: Helen Fields

Conversation with Science Writers about Whatever Is Going On & Whether It Matters

By: | November 2, 2022

Ann:  Nine, or who’s counting, ten years ago the consummate professional and pot-stirrer, Dan Vergano, and I posted a conversation about the science writer’s sad place in the media.  Dan called this place the science ghetto, though I’m pretty sure we can come up with a better term — a bubble? A walled garden?  The post’s commenters, who included what seemed like half the science writing community, argued about whether science journalism is or is not, and should or should not be, in its own small, walled hilltop town.

But in the last nine years, we’ve been through a lot, yes we have.  And maybe the big problem isn’t that science writers are not proportionately represented on front pages.  That is, something is very different now.  

So we’re talking about it again.  Dan and I are joined by two other consummate professionals and (with modest pride) ex-People of LWON:  Virginia Hughes and Thomas Hayden. 

The original conversation ten years ago centered on Tom’s idea that when science writers write about “mummies, exploding stars and the sex life of ducks” –  in Dan’s translation – instead of about the science of “whether Iran really will have the bomb, whether quantitative easing will spark inflation” they make themselves irrelevant.  And as a correlate, at the high desks of the influential media no science writers sit.   

The commenters defended mummies and duck sex with the same reasoning that scientists defend science driven by curiosity: The world is lovely and odd and large, aren’t you interested? And anyway, the sciences of climate and ecology and medicine and genetics do directly affect people.  

So, Dan, given that a LOT has happened since this argument, do you think science writers are still making themselves irrelevant, are they still in their private garden? Has that changed?

Dan: Oh yeah. I think people have been driven out of the garden. The twin shocks of Trump’s election and the pandemic forced a lot of folks to give relevancy a stab. Not to take a victory lap — because it was driven by a terrible human calamity — but some of the very commenters on the original post who knocked the science bubble idea ended up way out in front on pandemic reporting. (One of them won a Pulitzer for it, not to again pick on duck sex and poor Ed Yong, who is really the kindest guy in the world.) 

Ann:  I want to interrupt to say that Ed — whose series on Covid is a shining example of what humanly relevant science writing can be — explained that he’d been happily learning how rattlesnakes and mantis shrimp saw life when Covid hit, and he didn’t even know what science writing was any more.

Dan: And there are a lot more science writers, as a proportion of the field, now tackling not just climate change and public health, but also scientific misconduct and the ways science agencies spend their money.

Beyond that, I would argue that even the folks who just want to write about exoplanets or fireflies can’t escape relevancy in our era. The question of regulating, say, water-polluters or carbon-emitters has politicized our world to the extent that choosing to write (accurately) about science means choosing sides. 

The real question for me is, did it matter? A critique I didn’t hear was that everyone tunneling out of the science bubble and getting their hands dirty writing about the science of how the world was run wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. But that might have been a fair point. A million dead Americans later and the anti-vaccine movement snug in the bosom of a major political party, I have to ask myself if my bland assurance that it would matter was silly and naive. 

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Apocalypse, in costume

By: | October 31, 2022

I have what might best be classified as ‘manic costume joy.’ You’ve even heard about it here on this blog. I try to be the scariest thing I can think of for Halloween. One year, that was “Your Biological Clock.” Another year, the year humans hit 7 billion in number on October 31st, I tried to be overpopulation by burying myself in tiny homemade dolls with articulating, poseable limbs. Instead, I gave up after making just 30 and decided that “I am Being Attacked by Tiny People.”

Last week, my journalist friend Cally asked me when I was going to be the “Sixth Mass Extinction.”

Great idea, right? Really scary! But how does one dress up as a geologic-era scale event? You can’t just walk around in a onesie covered with CO2 molecules telling people that you’re the “Apotheosis of the Anthropocene,” can you?

Fortunately (but actually, quite unfortunately), the news is often full of inspiring headlines, so before the big day, I worked up some options:

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