Bos Taurus

By: | October 27, 2023
Stone bull’s head rhyton used for libations, from the Little Palace of Knossos (1600-1450 BC). Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Carole Raddato.

This post first ran in December 2020. Since then, I’ve carefully monitored our community listserv for any bull-related news.

This year I was rewarded with the following:

“We have a nice heifer bull prospect almost done mowing in the front yard. Straight Back, Small Head, Big even balls – nice confirmation… Gentle fellow trained to come – working on sit and roll over…. Only experienced cow folks please.”

What was this bull’s name, you ask?

Lover Boy.

Just down the road from my house, there lived a bull. He had a massive, muscular neck and a glossy black coat that rippled as he strode around the pear orchard that served as his pasture. In fall, when the pears ripened, the bull rubbed against the old trees, shaking their trunks until the fruit fell to the ground. Other animals came to eat pears too; wild turkey, geese, and deer. But the bull was my favorite to watch, so fat and majestic. 

One day it occurred to me that the trees were so full of pears that the bull could never eat them all. For a moment I contemplated what might happen if I (ever so quickly and quietly) jumped over the fence to grab one.

As if reading my thoughts, the bull lifted his enormous head and fixed me with his inscrutable brown eyes. I froze. Would he charge? Would I get smushed? Maintaining eye contact, he rubbed his enormous flank against a pear tree, using so much of his weight I thought he might snap the tree in half. Pears fell by the dozen, thumping in the dirt around him. As the bull bent his neck to the ground, picked up a pear, and started to chew, he held my gaze, seeming to ask:

“Do you know who I am, mortal?”

Colossal Bull Sculpture from Persepolis, Satinandsilk, Wikipedia.

Humans have worshipped bulls in various forms for more than 10,000 years, when they first domesticated bos taurus. There’s the humped white bull Nandi, beloved vehicle of the Hindu god Shiva; Apis, a fertility god of Egypt; the Bull of Heaven, from the Epic of Gilgamesh. In one creation myth from ancient Iran, the bull was the first animal; in a Christ-like parallel, the sacrifice of his blood and flesh renews the world.

Statue of Nandi, a patient deity, wearing a necklace, pearls, and hanging bells. Hari Krishna/Wikimedia commons.

Humans being humans, they’ve also used bulls as symbols of control and brute force (see Zeus and the rape of Europa; Minotaur the man-eater; the Wall Street Bull; the bulldozer.) When the Pope wants something done, he writes a papal bull, sealed by the bubble of official papal wax known as a bulla.

One of my favorite bull stories, The Story of Ferdinand, is about a young Spanish bull who does not enjoy fighting, but prefers to sit under a cork tree and smell the flowers. The simple power of Ferdinand’s story, I think, is that it unravels the old conflation of male strength and violence, revealing such macho projections for what they really are: bullshit. (Disliking what he deemed its pacifist message, Hitler ordered the book to be burned.)

Hercules performing one of his labors as he forces a bull to the ground. Engraving by B. Picart, 1731, the Stapleton Collection/Wikipedia.

In 2009, a red and white Hereford named Dominette became the first cow to have its genome sequenced; since then, the cattle industry has invested millions in efforts like the 1000 Bull Genomes Project, which aim to optimize the modern bovine from rump to udder. Last year several outlets reported that nearly all US dairy cows are descended from just two bulls, dangerously narrowing their genetic diversity. Today, most bulls are owned not by small farmers but by genetics companies; the San Diego firm Illumina promises that their patented genetic screen, the BovineHD Genotyping BeadChip, will ensure cows with “exceptional tenderness” and “better marbling.”

Breed success, their brochure croons. Join the revolution.

A few weeks ago I noticed that the bull next door was gone, along with all the cows in the orchard. I’ve never met the neighbors who keep him, but even in normal times I’d have had to screw up a fair amount of courage to walk up their long driveway and ask where they took him. It would sound a bit odd under the best of circumstances — Hello, I’ve been watching your house, where is the bull? –but it feels odder than usual, wearing my mask, to knock on a stranger’s door and ask after their livestock.  

“Where do bulls go in winter?,” I typed into Google instead, fearing that after fattening himself on autumn pears, the bull had been sent to the slaughterhouse. Thankfully, I learned his owners have probably just moved him somewhere warm, to protect his valuable, vulnerable testicles from frostbite. Scrotal frostbite is a serious threat to bull fertility, not only damaging the quality of semen, but a bull’s desire to mate, I learned: In one study, Beef magazine reports, “some refused to service cows for six months following the blizzard.”

Minoan bull leaping fresco, detail. Wolfgang Sauber, Archaeological Museum of Herakleion.

Every morning now, I look at the ice crystals sparkling on the empty pear orchard, and hope the bull is cozy in a barn somewhere, wearing a thick winter coat reminiscent of his wild predecessor Bos primigenius, the auroch.

Wherever he’s gone, I hope someone is appreciating his majesty and mystery, and not just his meat or his gonads. I wish I could trace his head in graceful sweeps of red chalk, like the cave painters of Lascaux, or carve his bust out of serpentine and mother of pearl, like the Minoan sculptors of the Bull’s Head rhyton. Instead, I built this tiny version out of modeling clay, a talisman until the bull returns.

The bull next door.

The Best Bugs

By: | October 25, 2023
Two cicada wings on a sidewalk

Cicadas are the best bugs.

The 17-year cicadas emerged here in the D.C. area two years ago and I haven’t gotten over it yet. Everyone knows this, and that’s why Our Kate texted me on Monday with a link to a new paper in the journal Science about the effects of cicadas on the food web.

The researchers looked at birds, cicadas, trees, and caterpillars. In a normal year, caterpillars eat trees and birds eat caterpillars. But, in a cicada year, the researchers have put together a pretty compelling case that birds abandon caterpillars for big, juicy, easy-to-find cicadas. As a result, caterpillars have a great year – they’re released from predation, as the ecologists say – and the trees suffer.

Interestingly, other studies have suggested that the trees get the last laugh, as the corpses of countless cicadas decay and return their nutrients to the soil. That massive pulse of decaying cicadas appears to even set the timer on the masting schedule of oaks, which is the thing where oak trees have a really big acorn year every now and then, presumably to overwhelm the squirrels and other animals who eat acorns, so even if they eat every acorn they can, some will make it through to grow into new oak trees. And the cicadas play a part! The circle of life!

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Neighborhood Hauntings

By: | October 23, 2023

I wrote this post when I had young kids who were scared of Halloween decorations. This year, the frights have been different–the decorations have lost most of their power, but we’ve been haunted by a gang of preteen bullies who have been causing trouble and new evening anxieties. I feel lucky to have such good neighbors, who rallied our street when I asked them for help. Wishing all of us nights free of tricks, and filled with treats.

*

I forget this every year—in October, there are places where it is no longer safe to walk. If we want to go to our friend Peter’s house, we can’t go up the street and around the corner as we usually do. If we need to get to daycare, we have to turn and walk in the exact opposite direction first, before U-turning around the block. And Ezzy’s house? Forget it. That street is riddled with danger.

The Halloween decorations are out again, and some of them are scarier than others. Some houses have cheerful pumpkins. Others have black cats. Then there are the skeletons, the witches hanging from trees, the bloody severed body parts. On Ezzy’s street, there is a demonic baby with red eyes crawling on the rooftop. That’s why we can’t go over to Ezzy’s until November.

Every year, I forget how much terror these decorations create for my children. Sometimes we can protect ourselves by crossing the street. Sometimes they close their eyes and I hold their hands until we pass. Sometimes riding a bike really fast helps. But there are some houses, some days, where we can’t pass by at all.

I love Halloween. Sure, I feel weird about my kids getting a lot of candy, and worry about things that might be even more creepy than the demonic baby. Still, it seems like a generous thing, to make your house look sparkly and spooky, to show a brave face to tiny trick-or-treaters, to come up with creative ways to celebrate, six feet apart. One of our neighbors has dozens—many dozens—of pumpkins, skeletons that are dressed in witch costumes, a giant statue with a pumpkin head, purple and orange lights around their yard. Another creates an elaborate structure—some years a castle, others a dungeon, and hangs dummies from the trees. (I confess that this part makes me nervous—I’m worried someone will get in a car accident, thinking that there is actually a person hanging in the elms.) And there’s a family near the elementary school that every day in October—every day!—re-positions a pair of skeletons into a new scene.

My kids love those skeletons. They love seeing the creative things that the family comes up with. It’s a gift to the neighborhood, all the decorations, even the scary ones.

It’s a gift to me, too, because it reminds me that even during the rest of the year, there are houses I cross the street to avoid, places that bring back memories, whether they be skeletons or something more like a blow-up candy corn. Sometimes there’s a specific reason—the man there had once shouted at you to get out of a tree, or there is a large, unfriendly dog. Other times it’s just a feeling: do not linger here. Other times, houses give off a friendly vibe, whether or not you know who lives within.

Neighborhoods are maps of these feelings, and the longer you’re there, the more they layer over each other. There was that couple who lived in the house with the wisteria and bougainvillea since it was built in the 50s, the large family of caretakers that moved in to help them, and now, the retired officer who had to re-pour the foundation to make everything level again. There’s the other house that was blue, and then was a pale brown, and now is white clapboard with succulents in front. With each iteration, the houses draw me in, push me away, invite me to step a little closer to the fence. There is the sadness of friends’ houses that are now filled with strangers. And then there is the welcome of houses that used to look like empty haunts, homes that are now filled with friends.

*

Top image by Flickr user Vivian D Nguyen under Creative Commons license

Snapshot: A Colossal Castoroides

By: | October 20, 2023

This week I’m in Madison, serving as writer-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin, a gig that’s introduced me to many wonderful faculty, staff, and students. Among my favorite encounters, however, has been with a university resident who’s been dead for around 13,000 years. On a tour of the zoology museum, I had the opportunity to hold the skull of Castoroides ohioensis — a species of beaver, nearly as large as a black bear, that went extinct during the Pleistocene. (This individual was found in a peat bog, hence the dark stain.) You’d think that such a gargantuan beaver built Hoover-sized dams, but, unlike its modern cousin, Castoroides likely wasn’t a dammer or tree-feller at all, subsisting on aquatic vegetation instead of bark. In fact, research suggests that that’s why Castoroides died out: While the diminutive but industrious Castor canadensis was engineering ponds in which to survive a hotter, more arid late-Pleistocene climate, giant beavers were wallowing futilely in vanishing wetlands. What Castoroides possessed in mass, it lacked in architectural aptitude.

Regardless, holding this specimen was quite the thrill. Beaver bucket-list item checked!

What the Kids Are Doing

By: | October 18, 2023

This ran July 10, 2020. Over the intervening few years, the kids have tapered off and finally stopped doing this, though they’re still uncontrollably attracted to those little red winterberries that they call birdberries. But on the whole, they’ve moved on to other things and currently it’s perfecting cartwheels (the older one is finally doing perfect circles 90 degrees to the ground, the younger one flumps around on her back) and climbing the maple. I look out the window and there’s kids dangling off the tree, yelling for help because they’re scared to jump; or kids making a running jump at a low branch they’re still too short to reach; or kids up in the tree swatting lanternflies with a flyswatter and against the odds, a lanternfly sometimes plummets to the ground where another kid screams like a siren and stomps the daylights out of it.

I walk out my front door after dinner to check on the night, and before breakfast to check on the day.  And every now and then, on the porch table, or the porch floor, or the front sidewalk is an arrangement — rocks, berries, plants of some sort. They’re not put there at random, they’re definitely arranged, each rock or plant or berry chosen according to some criterion (pretty color, shiny, whatever was handy) and put down next to another rock or plant according to another criterion (circles, lines, rows, whatever looked nice).  I started taking pictures of them.

After the first few arrangements, I saw the arrangers.  They were two little kids, a big and little sister, though the big sister was the boss and sometimes had help from other little kids.  They’d hunker down, fold up like double hinges, getting closer to their work.  They’d try this, try that, flatten a leaf, put the berry in exactly the right place, the berry would roll away, they’d put it back, thumb and forefingers, pinkies sticking out.  All this would take time. Lately the heat has been plastering their hair to their foreheads in wet curls and their cheeks turn pink.  I think they are enchanting.

This is the first arrangement the little one did alone. She’s probably mimicking her older sister but she’s also seeing it for herself. Why do they do this?  I can see absolutely no reason.  No one told them to, no one rewarded them (I did say thank you but they weren’t interested), no one showed them how.  They’d never seen this done, they were doing it because it was there to be done, because rocks and plants must be there to be made something of. 

And now I’m off onto my theory of the origins of engineering and art.  The origins of engineering, I already covered.

Art has been around since at least the Paleolithic, roughly for at least 40,000 years.  The earliest art was representative, an imitation of the real thing: this is what a woman looks like, this is what a horse looks like.  And maybe, scholars think, drawing a bear  on the cave walls made you less afraid of it, or carving an ivory bison helped you hunt it.  They call this visual symbolism, one thing meaning another thing — like verbal symbolism, the way a letter means a sound, or a sound, a bear.  They say such symbolism is a mark of the first thinking.  I think this is enchanting too.

But it’s not what the kids are doing.  I think they’re going even farther back in human evolution, and nobody would know how far back because arrangements don’t likely leave fossils.  They’re temporary by nature.  The kid arrangements last maybe a day before the plants are too dead to be interesting or the mail deliverer stumbles over the rocks or I have other uses for the table. 

I think these arrangements aren’t symbolic at all, I don’t think they mean a thing.  I think that art generally doesn’t mean a thing, that it’s not standing for anything else. I think it’s the recognition that everything is just its own sweet self. 

I think that recognition has been what is so comforting in this pandemic – social media is full of kittens and crows and flowers and sunsets and elephant-head flowers — that it’s all outside us going about its own life. I think the origin of art is not only in the Paleolithic, it’s in every kid born and stays in them until death. 

The origin of art is Look!  Just look at this, will you!  Look at how shiny the grasses are.  Look at how this leaf curls.  Look how heavy and speckled the rock is.  How interesting the sticks are. Just look! Oh! I’ll arrange them like this. This. Goes. Right. There. Look!

_________

Photos by me.

Overflow

By: | October 16, 2023

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.

Overflow.

this post originally appeared in January 2023

The Weird World of Amazon Book Reviews

By: | October 13, 2023

I have a personal policy: never read the comments. And when my book was published last year, I quickly learned that I probably didn’t want to take note of the reader reviews at Amazon either. 

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love hearing from readers. Nothing makes me happier than receiving a personal note from someone who found something meaningful or even life-changing in my book. A guy recently sent me a photo of himself hugging my book and I swooned. Praise like this happens with surprising regularity, and it nourishes my writerly soul.

Of course, not all feedback is positive, yet I’m genuinely interested in critical feedback that teaches me something or offers a different perspective. But Amazon reviews, well, a lot of them are something else entirely. 

Here is the summary of my customer reviews on Amazon: 

These numbers seem pretty good, right? I mean, 84 percent of reviewers give it at least 4 stars! So let’s scroll down and see those reviews. Oh cool! It begins with the top review. 

This guy found it depressing that I debunked bogus recovery methods (the book’s stated purpose), and 50 people found that review helpful. 

Two stars, wrote “Timmy Miller” — “Chapter after chapter…only to conclude that science is hard.” The two star rating aside, this one gave me a little thrill. Yay, I thought. You got my message! If I had one ambition for the book it was for readers to come away from it understanding something about the complexities of the scientific process and why it’s so difficult to get definitive answers. Maybe Timmy didn’t like my message, but I’m satisfied that he received it nonetheless.

Moving up to 3-star reviews, we find “Dangfool,” who thought my book was “Kinda boring and too technical.” “David L” also gave me 3-stars, calling it “Not so deep.” 

I have to wonder what motivates someone to leave that kind of commentary. It’s easy to understand the impulse to leave a negative review after dropping $30 on a book that’s truly terrible. But why take the time to pan a book you find merely mediocre? 

The New York Times once assigned me to review a new book that sounded really exciting. Then I read it and discovered that it was thin on research and sloppy in its execution. The author was not some snobby somebody worth punching up to, and the book wasn’t terrible enough to warrant a takedown. So I told my editor that it wasn’t worthy of a Times review, and killed the assignment. 

The thing about book writing is that even when it’s going well, it can be difficult, soul-crushing work. When someone has spent a substantial amount of time pouring their heart into a book, writing a bad review feels is like calling someone’s baby ugly. It might be true, but do you need to shout it aloud?

My favorite reviews are the ones that wink at what the reader took away. Like this one over at Goodreads, where “Katharine” wrote a review flicking to the human impulse to dismiss evidence we don’t like: “Although she presented peer-reviewed literature on the matter, I do not believe Christie Aschwanden when she says that stretching does nothing at all.”

Which gets me to the one thing crappy Amazon reviews seem to have one thing in common: the reviewer is mad the author didn’t write the book the reader had in mind. 

Consider this 1-star review of Emily Willingham’s new book, Phallacy, which calls it “Boring with a feminist agenda.” “This book basically just gives examples of how the penis and mating process vary across the animal kingdom, and that relatively little is known about the vagina due to male scientists not caring as much.” In fact, that’s a fairly decent overview, even if “Amazon Customer” didn’t like it. 

“Cynical Yorkshireman” gave Annalee Newitz’s book Autonomous 1-star. “Badly infected with gender identity nonsense…My copy (see attached picture) is on its way to be recycled.” Yes, the reviewer included a photo of the book in the recycling bin. Not just cynical, that Yorkshireman, but also mean.

Amazon reviewers love to ding authors for things their books never purported to be. Take, for instance, this complaint by a reviewer of one of LaWONian Ann Finkbeiner’s books. “The author may be a respected science historian, but she has clearly not put much effort into political history.” Ann says that in fact, she is “not an historian in any way, let alone a science historian.” At least that reviewer read the book.

Some guy gave my friend Alex Hutchinson’s book Endure one star, saying “I bought this book as a gift for my daughter…I know she received the book but have not heard further…Sorry I can’t be more helpful.” Apparently it didn’t occur to him that it would have been far more helpful to everybody if he had not given a star rating to a book he hadn’t read. 

It seems not everyone understands that the review is supposed to be of the actual book. Consider the person who gave Nick Harkaway’s book, The Gone Away World, a 1-star review because it arrived damaged from Amazon. 

Spare a thought for LWON’s own Richard Panek. One of his books received an Amazon review that said “It is a crap.” Which Richard found quite disappointing. “If my book is crap, I want it to be at least the crap.” 

I feel him. I’ve noticed that almost all of my negative reviews make some version of the same complaint: I came to this book hoping to find the magic secret to athletic recovery, but Christie told me that most of the things marketed to me are snake oil and that wasn’t the answer I was looking for. 

These critiques make me shake my head a little, but they don’t get under my skin. My book isn’t for everybody, and that’s ok with me. I’ve discovered that the people who do love my book are amazing. Until I started writing this post, I hadn’t looked at my reviews in a very long time, and as scanned the bad ones for examples, I found something truly delightful. In multiple cases, total strangers had jumped in to defend me from stupid reviews. In response to a 1-star review in which the reviewer said that “I would never buy this book,” someone replied to say “Kudos on literally admitting you didn’t read the book. Reported.” 

Another 1-star review that says, “This author writes well enough to pass as a scientist but is not actually a scientist,” and then instructed people to go read another book instead. To which some other kind reader replied, “I am a scientist and found this book an excellent review of the relevant material.” 

I don’t know who any of these people are, but it warms my heart to learn that there are readers who have found my book and liked it enough to defend it. Haters gonna hate, but they can’t drown out the love.

Illustrations by Sarah Gilman. Words by Christie Aschwanden.

This post first ran on November 30, 2020.

It’s Raining Baby Oak Trees

By: | October 11, 2023

It’s another year of constant “ping ping ping” as the acorns leave the trees in wildly large numbers! I last noticed this happening back in 2017, and I wrote about it then. Might as well revisit that post now!

These early fall days have been especially musical here, in my house under the trees. The mornings ding and clink and the afternoons ping and donk and the nights are broken up by knocks, clangs, and cymbal crashes that startle me awake. (Part of my roof is metal.)

It’s the acorns falling, but in a relative hail storm rather than the usual drizzle. The massive dumping of seeds and occasional strike on the head might suggest I’ve totally pissed off some squirrels.

But squirrels pretty much just make grumpy noises and twitch their tails when annoyed. Instead, it’s the oaks showing off their progeny, with gravity’s help. The trees are shedding fruit as though it’s their last chance to seed the land.

That’s not too far from the truth. It turns out we are in a mast year—the boom of the boom-and-bust cycle describing oak (and beech) tree reproduction. The trees weighted down with acorns this fall (a big oak might produce as many as 10,000 of them!) will most likely support a much lighter load for the next three to five years. This is a parent tree’s best chance to spread her genes and grow the neighborhood forest before lean times commence.

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