Content note: One character gets a glimpse of another character’s fantasy that’s a touch TMI.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Perhaps we’d better discuss this outside,” Halloween said.

“Outside?” asked Daria. “In the snow?”

“Doesn’t look like snow,” Saavik said, crossing the lobby to the revolving door and pushing her way through.

Daria followed. The wind that met her as she emerged was as gentle as she expected it to be cutting. She reached out her gloved hands and gathered a few of the… “Cherry blossoms?” They caught in Saavik’s wig and melted to water, like snowflakes, on her face.

Halloween came through the door, skirt swirling, raincoat hooked by one finger at her left shoulder.

“I didn’t think you were the springtime sort,” Daria said.

Halloween’s lips quirked. “Oh, this is bigger than just me. It concerns us all.”

“All…” Daria cleared her throat and tried again. “All of Holiday Island?”

“The Holiday Island which you remember,” Halloween began, “is a skerry of the Dreaming. The present matter concerns not just that little outpost, but all the Dreaming, not to mention realms beyond. Shall we walk and talk?” She stepped out into the deserted traffic loop and headed for the street.

Daria muttered, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us,” and followed.

“Sometimes they do,” Halloween said, spinning her coat from her shoulder and slipping her arms through its sleeves. Without turning around, she added, “But most often not.”

The street was empty. Saavik caught up with them as they turned left, heading, Daria figured vaguely, across the channel and back towards South Station and downtown. Except that this didn’t seem to be the road they had taken to the hotel, two afternoons before. It did not seem, in fact, like the middle of Boston at all. To their right, across the street, where there should have been a concrete plaza and an entrance to the subterranean bus line, there was instead a marina, fronted by a row of clapboard shops, like a small Atlantic beach resort. The skyline of the city in front of them was… too tall, with too many layers and too many lights moving midair between the highest skyscrapers.

Daria took Saavik’s hand. It seemed a sensible thing to do. Their fingers, gloved and bare, interlaced. “You’re taking this well,” Daria said.

Cherry blossoms fell around and between them. “You remember,” Saavik said, “I told you I was in War of the Worlds?” She tilted her head upwards and began to recite: “`Starting now, we couldn’t soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the next best thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the Somerville Theatre. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember please for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian’—” She took a deep breath and pointed to the woman walking beside them. “It’s her.”

Halloween inclined her head. “I suppose I have to own that, too.”

Saavik asked, “Are we going… far?”

“Very far,” Halloween replied. “It’ll be a few minutes’ walk.”

—On this street, that makes sense.

“So…” Daria asked, “Do you still play in a band?”

“I hold a couple drumsticks now and then,” Halloween said. “But I’ve come into a new career since last we met.”

“And that would be?”

Without interrupting her stride, Halloween looked Daria up and down. “When I first spotted you and your friends checking in, you wore a parka and matching après-ski boots. The Doc Martens you’re wearing with your costume are unscuffed, and you’ve relaced them since yesterday afternoon. Now, unlike then, the bottom three holes are unthreaded. Inference: your boots are not just new, but so new they have not yet broken in, and you have been adjusting them to try and find a tolerable fit. Balance of probability: you did not plan on coming to the convention and made the decision only within the past few days.”

Saavik said, “You’re a detective.”

Halloween turned up the collar on her coat.

Daria deadpanned, “How’d that happen?”

“Garden-variety syncretism, I should think,” said Halloween. “All that belief had to go somewhere. Perhaps it was only fitting that it arrive with the one who already presided over stories coming back from the grave.” Her lips quirked again. “Or perhaps all those years of mischief gave me a taste for trouble and a healthy disrespect for the official police.”

Daria figured it would be a good idea to process this, if that were possible. “Let me guess. You’re here on a case.”

Halloween nodded—a sharp, abrupt movement. “A series of thefts in the far realms. All of them, to the best knowledge of the regional authorities concerned, impossible. A skull from a royal crypt in Aurelia Minor. The mummy of a child taken to the Faerie Wilds to make a place for a changeling. Two hollow agates of ceremonial poison, the first causing death and the second a trance. The other egg of the Phoenix, from—” She broke off.

Saavik asked, “What is it?”

Halloween was patting the pockets of her coat. “I had a list,” she said. She stopped in her tracks and began pulling scraps of crumpled paper from one pocket, briefly scanning them and stuffing them in another. “My boyfriend is always telling me I should keep notes on my phone, but I can’t seem to break my old habits.” She paused and held up a folded note. “Huh, a wedding invitation.” She crammed it into another pocket, a new one on the inside of her coat. “Oh,” she said, producing a curled-over brown paper bag. “Chestnuts?”

* * *

They came to the foot of a bridge. A last whorl of cherry blossoms spun before them and settled against the oak beams which made up the path.

Saavik grasped Daria’s hand more tightly. “Is this where we have to hold our breath so they can’t tell we’re human?”

Halloween clucked her tongue. “Aw, no, not here. Most of those that come this way are human, after all.”

Daria looked from the holiday spirit to the bridge and back again. “Most?”

But Halloween was already moving forward again.

Daria decided to think about something else. “So… How did you come to be looking for me again, after all these years? Sorry I didn’t keep in touch, you know, what with my thinking you were all just the cast of my most legal drug trip.”

Saavik asked, sotto voce, “Hey, does that mean—”

Halloween now stooped and shambled as she walked. “That was more of a vision than a trip, if you get my meaning. No? Well, put it like this: my friends and I left home, ended up in Lawndale. You were the one who was in the right state to perceive us. Instead of leaving your plane altogether, you dreamed in Lawndale. I’ll bet your memories of what happened got a bit garbled.”

“Kinda lost over here,” Saavik said.

“Oh? Well, the details don’t matter that much. The upshot is, people who have a special interaction with the Dreaming, an experience out of the ordinary, tend to pick up a certain tinge. And then your friend Jane—”

“Jane?” Daria chirped.

“Her company. The movie-prop workshop. You know they got an endowment from Farrell Multinational? Well, Mr. Farrell is an associate of the Dreaming. From the days of the last Dream in charge. He is what you might call an old god, with a new job. Nice guy, too, if you ever get the chance to meet him. Wears pink suits, sounds like Billie Dee Williams.”

“Sorry,” Daria said. “I’m still working on the part about `an old god.'”

“Babylon,” Halloween replied, “and I think the Akkadian Empire of Sargon before that. His worshipers were fading away, kids those days, you know? And on the old Dream King’s advice, he found other ways to keep going.”

They had reached the midpoint of the bridge. The city lights before them were farther away than they had been.

“The gods need belief,” Saavik said.

“Yes, yes they do. I guess I should say `we,’ but I’m not nearly in the league of some of those guys, and I don’t come from quite the same place, not exactly.” She was rummaging in her raincoat pockets again. “Where was I? Oh, right, Mr. Farrell. He likes to support the arts, you know. Part of being rich.”

The bridge now seemed to end, not in the city, but in an island which had arisen in the channel.

Halloween produced a bar of plain chocolate and began nibbling on a corner of it. “Part of being rich, part of being an old god. One must strive to fill a need in the human heart, to inhabit a role which the people crave to believe is occupied.” Her stoop was more pronounced now, and she held the chocolate bar between the thumb and index finger of her left hand. Though the air was still, her hair apppeared to tousle and sway in a breeze. “I expect that people want the rich to be doing something with all their wealth and power, something less tacky than the excesses reported in the gossip blogs. Machinations with weight and consequence. So, Farrell patronizes the arts, and Jane and her collaborators receive a financial infusion.”

The path was sloping down, now, towards a sandy beach.

“And that had nothing to do with me?”

“Not a thing. But there are certain mechanisms in place to detect when separate individuals of significance to the Dreaming come into contact. That can be a harbinger of… events having notable import.”

Saavik said, “So when you moved back in with Jane…”

“Think of it,” Halloween elaborated, “as though you crossed a tripwire, which only a person having a past like yours with the Dreaming could activate. You came to my attention, and the Lord Shaper decided that an arrangement might be mutually beneficial—for all three of us.”

Daria’s boots sank a few centimeters into dry sand.

Halloween inquired, “Look familiar? You visited here, a couple times, accompanied by projections of your mind, in the shape of your friends.”

“Holiday Island,” said Daria.

* * *

They came to a set of stairs, shallow concrete steps leading up to a weathered, institutional building.

“It’s dream school!”

Daria regarded Saavik with mild puzzlement. “Come again?”

“Where you go when it’s final exam day, only you forgot you were in the class and haven’t been going for months, and you start to think, hey, didn’t I graduate at some point? Are they going to take away my college diploma if I don’t pass? Why is the barista from the place across from my job in my biology class? And why are we dissecting Oompa-Loompas?”

“To understand how they avoid diabetes?”

Halloween seized the handles of the big double doors and swung them open. “Right this way, you guys.”

“Smells just like Laaaawndale High,” Daria said.

“Not far now,” Halloween called back, breaking into a jog and rounding a corner.

Saavik and Daria sped up to follow, and then stopped.

The hallway was empty.

Lockers on both sides. A broken desk chair left beside a classroom door. A water fountain recessed into the wall, next to a bathroom marked MEN.

“Um,” Saavik said.

“Maybe she had to tend to a cauldron?” Daria offered.

They looked about. A banner ran over the row of lockers on their right. FELLOW HOLIDAYS, it read. YOUR ICHOR IS NEEDED. DON’T DELAY, GIVE TODAY!

A semitransparent humanoid brushed past them, minding its own business.

“Daria… who was that?”

Others began to pour out of the classrooms, forming little knots of silent conversation, closing in around the two visitors.

“Daria. That one is carrying his own head.”

“Um, at a guess, Saint Denis. He’s the patron saint of France. First bishop of Paris. Martyred in the… third century?”

The specter tucked its head under one arm as it spun the dial on its locker. The head nodded to another figure that passed by, a young man in chain mail, who raised an arm and saluted with a quick wave of two fingers.

The arm was lacerated through the armor, but it did not bleed.

“These wounds he had on Crispin’s Day,” Daria said, under her breath.

Saavik tugged at her. “Maybe she went in one of the rooms.”

The first door led into a geography classroom. Daria had time to notice that the map pulled down in front of the blackboard was of GHULHEIM AND ENVIRONS before Saavik was pulling her onwards.

The next door was narrower, and closed. “Supply closet?” Daria figured aloud.

“Might as well try.” With her free hand, Saavik twisted the knob.

Inside, they found Jane Lane, seated on a low shelf, her back to the wall.

And, wrapped fairly around her, one hand exploring the space between Jane’s over-the-knee socks and her skirt, was Daria.

—That bodysuit follows every curve I have and some I’m pretty sure I don’t.

“Uh,” said Daria.

“Mmm,” said Daria, brushing back her feathery blue hair as she lavished kisses on Jane’s willing neck.

—That’s…

—Rei. Dareia. Dareia Ayanami.

Saavik was staring slack-jawed.

“This is not my dream,” Daria said, standing on the threshold, feeling Saavik’s hand start to slip away.

In the room, Dareia was saying nothing.

“Someone else’s fantasies,” Daria stated.

Jane took her lover by the shoulders. “Get down and lick, Morgendorffer,” she instructed.

Dareia gracefully knelt.

Daria looked away. She let her hands fall to her side, and she turned, and she leaned against the cold metal of a locker.

“Kraaawrk!”

“Huh?” Daria straightened her posture.

The new arrival was a bird. A raven, which flapped between the meandering holidays and settled at her feet. “You’re Daria? Daria Morgendorffer, from Boston?”

“Uh, yes. I am.”

“Name’s Matthew. I’m the boss’s raven. I’m supposed to bring you to meet him.”

“He’s waiting?”

“Yup. We better get moving.” Matthew looked at Saavik, then into the supply closet. “Or, we could hang here and chill for a few.”

“I’d like some answers, please,” Daria told him.

The corvid grumbled and rose into the air again. “Is she coming with—”

Saavik was, by all appearances, lost to them both, enraptured.

“Eh,” said Matthew. “Looks like she’s out of it now. She’ll be all right, just dreaming regular. Come on, we’ll go someplace better than a high school.”

Daria followed the raven. The spectral crowd was thinning. Looking back, she saw her friend standing, amazed, swaying a little on her feet, and then they rounded another corner and she was lost from view.

“Was that her dream we saw?” Daria asked.

“Huh? Could have been. Probably was.”

“You know,” Daria mused, “this whole trip has a certain fairy-tale quality to it. One guide at a time, for each part of the journey.”

“Yeah,” said Matthew. “This place gets to be like that. There it is, up ahead.”

Another set of double doors, this time a pair which Daria recognized well.

“The Lawndale High library?”

“You spent a lot of time there?”

“It and the roof were the two places in school I didn’t hate.” Daria reflected a moment. “One day, they met and became one.”

“Say wha?”

They entered the library.

The shelves were taller than Daria twice over, and made of richly-stained wood. The books, thousands upon tens of thousands of them, were bound in leather and titled in charcoal ink, or in gold and silver leaf. Beams of afternoon sunlight descended from high windows in opposite walls, converging in the air, making a path which she followed while staring about herself in all directions, walking now forwards, now backwards, her coat trailing with every turn.

—”I have always imagined Paradise to be a kind of library.”

Matthew settled down on a trolley, one which bore the placard, Reshelve at your Own Risk.

Daria loked at the books which had been left on the cart.

“The Pixel and the Quantum, by John Archibald Wheeler. Be Seeing You: The Shooting Script, by Philip K. Dick. And… A Practical Course in Power Electronics, by Amy Barksdale?”

“You know them?”

—Books of dreams unwritten, thought Daria. —No, wait, that’s not quite right—

“This is not the Lawndale High library,” Daria said. “It’s much too… everything.”

“Correct. It is mine, and I welcome you.”

She turned to face the speaker, who rose from his divan and motioned her to sit in the matching chair which faced it across a low table.

He had the features of a young man, but the gravity of one much older, as though a calcite statue of a teenage pharaoh had been granted life after a few dozen centuries to contemplate its model’s misdeeds. He wore a plain white robe, bound at the waist by a pale gray sash. His only ornament was an emerald hanging against his chest on a gold chain which looped around his neck. Matthew flew to alight on his shoulder.

It seemed a foolish thing to ask, but Daria could think of nothing else. “Am I dead?”

“Not in the slightest,” the man—no, not a man, something else, something more—said. “That would seriously inconvenience both of us.” He paused. “I am Dream of the Endless, and I oversee this realm. You might think of me as a king, or as an anthropomorphic personification of an aspect of life. Prior generations of humanity have found the `king’ metaphor more congenial. In any event, when I was mortal, my name was Daniel.”

Daria’s throat was going all scratchy again. “And my friend?”

“She is safe. As Matthew perhaps tried to explain, she underwent a loss of lucidity: Though you both entered the Dreaming fully conscious, she now experiences it in the manner of an ordinary dream. The path you walked was intended for you, Daria Morgendorffer, but it will bring her no harm.”

Daria plodded to the chair which he had offered and sat down.

Dream of the Endless sat as well. “Tea? Or wine?”

“Yes… Yes please.”

Dream—Daniel?—smiled gently and poured tea into a cup which Daria had not noticed, from a teapot which she was pretty confident had not existed a moment before. He handed her the china cup and saucer. The liquid looked like tea, and smelled delightful.

She sipped. “Barley?”

“It is to your liking?”

“Oh, very much so.”

—It is, I’d say, uncannily like the tea at the sushi restaurant where I had my first real date with the most promising (but still doomed in retrospect) boyfriend prospect at university, the former roommate of my former roommate’s fella, the one who I’d been told loved sushi, which I had never liked amazingly much, so I said nothing and we went out and the unagi was delicious…

Daniel poured a cup for himself and sat back. “I am glad. As Halloween informed you, I have a deal to offer you. I believe it will benefit her, the Dreaming as a whole, and you as well. You are free to turn it down. If you do so, the events of this night will slip from your memory like ordinary dreams do, and you will be able to go on living your life as you were before.”

“You want me to become the Watson to Halloween’s Sherlock?”

Matthew piped up. “Got it in one!”

Daniel’s reaction to the bird was, she decided, best classified as indulgent. Then he grew serious again. “I believe you have already begun to appreciate the function of archetypes in my domain. Fragments of tales, recurring motifs, the genetic materials of the fantasies which have flourished in human minds.”

“Up to and including gods,” Daria said.

“Yes. So many have been born in this realm. Most of those who have walked the waking world have returned here again, as human wills have drifted away from them. Those who survive sometimes do so by developing new aspects, performing new functions.”

“Like playing the drums in a hiphop-punk-electronica band,” Daria suggested.

“Among other possibilities. For some years, Halloween has served as an agent of mine, and quite capably. She has become not just an investigator, but the focus of that archetype.”

“And the archetypal detective always has an assistant.”

“A confidant, a counterpart. In some tales, the Watson is the villain, brought into the detective’s plans, made to listen and grow unnerved as the sleuth unravels what had seemed to be the perfect murder.”

“But you don’t have a prime suspect, so you need a counterpart who can follow Halloween around, be amazed, ask her the right questions. And record it all for posterity.”

“Yes.”

“And what do I get out of this deal?”

Daniel poured her a fresh cup of barley tea. She was barely aware that she had finished her first. “My predecessor in the role of Dream made a certain bargain with a human, a little over four centuries ago. The human, a poet and playwright by aspiration, created two plays. One was a merry celebration of dreams and a comic perspective on classical mythology. The other, written a lifetime later, was a romance, but also an exploration of the responsibilities of magic. In exchange for these two plays, my predecessor granted the author the wellsprings of the Dreaming, the ability to reach within himself and find images for all occasions which had captivated and prospered in minds long past. With them to draw upon, his own talent was able to strengthen itself, and move souls to this day.”

Daria set her teacup down very carefully. “Shakespeare. The Dream King before you made a deal with William Shakespeare. And that’s why he was Shakespeare.”

“To put it briefly, yes. And I am quite willing to do the same for you. I would, after all, like my agent Halloween to have the best writer possible for her assistant.”

Matthew flapped his wings. “Pretty sweet deal, huh? And I gotta admit, I think you’re starting in a better place than he was. I mean, Melody Glass is bitchin.”

“As I see it,” Daniel said, “the local authorities investigating various crimes of interest will dream, as they normally do, and they will come here, to my library, or to some other convenient location. As they dream, they will explain their problems to a consulting detective, whom they need never suspect exists beyond their own sleeping imaginations. When they wake, they will remember what you two deem it important that they retain and forget the rest. For your part, you need only sleep, as you typically do, and Halloween will call upon you when your assistance is desired.”

“I just go about my day, and sometimes when I take a nap, I pop up here and take notes while a demigod sleuth solves crimes. And in exchange I get inspiration on tap so I can grow into a literary genius.” Daria shook herself. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have the context to even begin processing that.”

Matthew squawked. “You think you got it bad? Try driving drunk and killing yourself and being asked if you want to stay on as the raven for the Dream King.”

Daria deadpanned, “I concede that the bird has a point.”

“My predecessor,” Daniel told her, “was an entity much taken with continuity, tradition—a personage of great dignity. When he made his deal with a young William Shakespeare, he expected that man to give voice to the Great Stories of ages past. And, indeed, so the author did. Later generations reworked his plays, replacing tragic endings with happy ones, for example. My predecessor saw this as a natural but temporary diversion. `The Great Stories will always return to their original forms,’ he put it. I do not take quite the same view of the matter.”

“No?”

—King Lear, she thought. —Romeo and Juliet. Any other Shakespeare plays which had upbeat endings tacked on? Frailty, thy name is memory.

“If the experiences of my predecessor taught me anything, it is that a fixed point is not an idol to be sought for its own sake.”

Daniel—Dream of the Endless—did not seem eager to elaborate. Matthew shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.

“My kind are not what you would call `proactive,’ by our nature,” Daniel said.

“Overtly meddling in mortal affairs isn’t among your core competencies,” Daria quipped.

“In so many words. We—myself, and the others of my… family—tend to react, more than we act. We could, indeed, forsake our domains, and life would continue, albeit with nothing taking responsibility for those aspects of life which had fallen under our rubrics. What you might call the purpose behind events would no longer be subtle, but nonexistent.”

“I… see.”

“You are troubled?”

“It’s just that you’re verging into that `God works in mysterious ways’ territory—so `mysterious’ that it’s indistinguishable from `no way at all’ as far as trying to live a good life here on Earth is concerned.”

“We are not charged with making your lives pleasant,” Daniel said. “Or fair, or just.”

“Good. Because if you were, I’d have to tell you that you’ve been doing a shitcock job so far.”

Matthew squawked and crowed. “Hey boss! I like this one.”

“We do, on occasion, step out of our habitual roles,” Daniel said. “Such interventions are in certain circumstances necessary, usually to avert undesirable consequences whose magnitudes and natures are essentially unprecedented in recorded human history.”

—Is he pissed? No, not quite. He’s… working up to something big.

“Are you… Does this have to do with why you brought me here? Is this deal you’re offering one of these `interventions’?”

Daniel nodded.

—Oh ho-o-o-ly shiiiiiiiii—

“Suffice for the moment to say that significant changes are afoot,” Daniel told her. “Changes due to the development of your civilization, of your species and the role it plays on the planet you inhabit.”

“The planet we’re poisoning?”

“That is one corner of the problem, yes. New challenges have arisen. The matter which Halloween is investigating will be, I am certain, only the first. Meeting them successfully and surviving through the aftermath will require a great many novel conceptions. Quite likely, a new ethics. Conceivably, a new interplay between science and myth.”

“And I am supposed to…”

“Interventions, as I’m sure you have observed, have unpredictable consequences.”

—For me, hell yes. For you, too?

Daniel went on. “Were what you would call a `supernatural’ agency truly to affect humanity directly, humans would build a mythology around the event. Stories would be told and retold largely according to their ability to transform emotions. Soon, given enough emotional power, new gods of the kind born of the human heart would walk your world, their forms partly inspired by the original intervention and partly a human work.”

—Somehow, I don’t think that’s only a metaphor. Or, in this place, metaphors are not “only.”

“So,” Daria said aloud, “you need a human agent? Whatever you’re doing to help us along has to look like it comes from us ourselves?”

“It will come from you, Daria Morgendorffer. What you write—should you choose to accept my offer—will be products of your creativity which I myself would be unable to produce.”

Something about that made sense. He was Dream, she was a storyteller—and dream logic did not work like story logic. She thought back over all the times that she had awoken with an idea that she had to write down. Images, fragments of dialogue, settings, occupations, moods, conflicts, yes, but never plots entire which functioned as the eye took in the printed page.

“I think I’m starting to see,” Daria said. “You want to give me the chance to grow into a new Shakespeare?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll never lack for inspiration.”

“Yes. You will be able to resolve problems you face as you construct stories, though the problems you encounter will depend on the choices you make, following your own inclinations which I cannot mimic.”

“And the price I pay for this is to help a holiday spirit fight crime.”

“Concisely put. I must warn you: the gift I can provide you is far more easily given than it could be returned.”

“I can’t give it back without, what, tearing my soul to pieces?”

“That is, perhaps, a dramatic statement, but essentially true. You would live, and not descend into madness—”

Matthew interjected, “That’s his sister’s job.”

“My younger sister,” affirmed the Lord Shaper, “known as Delirium. As I was saying, you would live, but returning to exactly the state of creativity in which you exist now would be all but impossible.”

—But why would I give up a gift like that?

Daria stared at her toes.

“Look at it one way,” she said, “and I’m already a lost cause. I try to think everything through by writing. In all the worst times, when I was having to take care of Jane, when Tom’s father died the year after that and right in the middle of all that mess at Bromwell, when… when my heart got broken… there’s always a part of me that comes along, saying in my head, `There’s good meat in this.’ What I think you’re asking of me, is that I become like I am, but more so.”

“To an extent which you may find deleterious. This deal took a toll on Shakespeare, essentially dominating his life; but that is a sample of only one person, perhaps too small a pool to draw conclusions from.”

“And will you want specific works from me? Like, I gather, your predecessor commissioned Midsummer and The Tempest.”

Daniel smiled softly. “My motivations for offering this deal are somewhat different from my predecessor’s. I am not so concerned with specific works at the moment. The first priority is that you help Halloween develop her aspect. Later, perhaps, I might come to you with a request for a special occasion.”

“I… I’d like to think about this for a few minutes,” Daria said.

Daniel nodded and rose to his feet.

“Come, let us walk,” he said.

“Mm, OK.” Daria stood, her knees a little stiff.

Matthew fluttered from his perch and flew into one of the vaulted alcoves. Daniel turned to follow, inviting Daria with a palm-up wave of his right hand. She dusted off her coat and joined him.

They walked into the alcove. On the hewn-stone wall was a painting of a room, rendered in amber and burnt-sienna tones. Matthew circled over their heads and then flapped his way into the painting. Daniel and Daria followed.

This room was a heptagonal chamber. Judging by the low bookshelves, their contents locked behind glass, Daria guessed that this was a specialized annex of some sort. The wall behind them featured a fresco of the main library. In front of the other six walls were five amber statues and an empty plinth. The statue closest to her was of a young woman, her head half-shaved, her fingers tugging the locks that tumbled down over her shoulder. Trapped inside the carving were a half-dozen moths, which might have been moving.

Matthew flew upward, and a helical staircase grew downward. Growth was the only word Daria could find for the process: the cold wrought iron flowed and twisted, like tendrils of a vine filmed in time-lapse.

“I thought you would enjoy a view from the castle roof,” Daniel said.

“Oh. Yes. Definitely.” She placed her right boot on the first step and began to climb the helix beside Daniel.

“So, ah,” she began. “I guess I’d kick myself with my new Docs if I didn’t ask this, so… If you literally are Dream, do you know what my dreams mean? Is that part of your job?”

“For example?”

“Well, like… That repeating dream I had, where my family died after eating those poison berries on that camping trip. Or the one where Boston and Lawndale and Chicago were all mixed together as part of one big city where everyone’s job was performing funeral rites? Or, for something really scary, the one where Stacy Rowe was an Evangelion pilot.”

“Or,” Daniel suggested, “the time you woke up trembling because Jane Lane was infected with alien DNA, and you abandoned her to faceless operatives of a vast conspiracy.”

“Yeah, sure. Like that. What does it mean?”

“Would you find it plausible,” Daniel asked, “if I told you that Stacy Rowe was on your mind because you had met her unexpectedly at a significant time in your life, and you were struck by how she, of all your sister’s friends, was one whom Quinn had kept in contact with all these years? Would it be beyond belief that you feared you could not support Jane, and that your fear manifested itself in a mileau drawn from the stories you two grew up watching together?”

“That sounds plausible.” Daria stopped. Daniel paused, standing two steps above her, and looked back. “I’d have said so myself, yesterday. But not today.” She took a deep breath. “If dreams were just random recombinations of what we already have in our heads, and `interpreting’ them was just like ad-libbing your way through an inkblot test, then there—there wouldn’t be any need for you.”

“Krawwwr!” Matthew landed on her shoulder. “She’s got you there, boss.”

Daniel’s mouth quirked briefly. He turned and began to climb the stairs again.

“`Caesar crossed the Rubicon,'” Daniel said, “`and was a menace to Rome’s freedom. He is also an American schoolroom pest, made into one by the reaction of our schoolboys on his writings. The added predicate is as true of him as the earlier ones.'”

“I’ll take… William James for eight hundred?”

“Yes. An interpretation of a dream is a story about that dream which endures in the Darwinian contest of the waking world. The process of dreaming itself is the genesis in shreds and patches of new experiences, inserting themselves into the greater weave, changing their environs and being changed themselves.”

“Uh, boss,” Matthew put in. “I’ve been around here a while, and you’ve still lost me.”

The ceiling irised open and swiveled away above them.

“Behold, Daria Morgendorffer: the heart of the Dreaming.”

Those few pages of PowerBASIC on MS-DOS never amounted to much by themselves, but simulating ecosystems remained an interest of mine. I returned to the general idea now and then as I learned more.

And then, hey, what’s this? It looks like a PhD thesis.

“I bet every great mathematician started by
rediscovering a bunch of ‘well known’ results.”
—Donald Knuth, Surreal Numbers

Content note: A character recalls experiences with Pick-Up “Artistry” and blithe cissexism.

CHAPTER FOUR

The party thrummed and pulsed and mingled with itself. It wound around furniture and up steps. It carried drinks outward from the bar, where Tom watched over the grand central room of the suite, shaking cocktail mixers and spinning bottles with his white-gloved hands. His jacket-over-tunic ensemble gave the appearance of a military uniform, worn by a man with open contempt for his nominal superiors. He took a moment now and then to slide his shades back up the bridge of his nose, so that their oval lenses caught and toyed with the light.

Daria caught sight of Morgan the fire-spinner, currently in heavy makeup as a Borg drone. Ze gave Daria a nod and saluted rather solemnly with an umbrella drink. This prompted the woman with whom Morgan was speaking—a lanky figure dressed as a brown teddy bear—to turn about with an inquiring glance. Jane waved happily and beckoned Daria to join them.

This, Daria was only too happy to do, but it required working her way through a substantial amount of the crowd. A grandiose gesture from a young man she passed nearly connected with the side of her head. He looked over and then made apologetic noises, adding, “Wicked outfit!”

“Thanks,” Daria said. “Excuse me, I have to go meet its maker.”

Every third or fourth person at the party was, Daria estimated, in cosplay to some extent. This was representative of Aletheia on the whole, judging by what she had seen over the past two days.

At last, she stood beside Jane, who hooked an arm around hers and leaned in close. “Told you it would be a hit!” A lock of Jane’s hair flopped forward. A crosscross band just above eyebrow level kept the lock constrained in a bundle.

“You win the bet,” Daria said. “Do you want quatloos or woolongs?”

* * *

Tom poured lemon-lime soda up to the halfway point of her cup, then added a stiff measure of cranberry juice and topped it off with orange and a splash of pineapple. “You look like you’re trying to find the signal in the noise.”

Daria took the cup from his hands. “Thanks. Trying to read body language, and all I get are signs that people slept with each other.”

—Is it a good thing or a bad thing that I don’t get attracted to people until emotions get involved?

“In this crowd? Yeah, the social network is pretty much a hairball.”

“One great big fun drama vortex,” Daria said.

“Is that a happy face or a sad face?”

“It’s just, you know…”

Jane appeared beside her and leaned against the bar. “Like high school all over again? Hey,” directing this to Tom, “you have fixings for a Shirley Temple?”

Tom began assembling her drink.

“Worse,” Daria said. “In high school, I could tell myself I was above it all. Now, it’s like there’s something I need at the bottom of the vortex, and I want to throw myself in.”

—Not that anyone would care to pick me up.

“If you’re serious,” Jane said, “I can point out people.”

“Uh.”

“Too soon?” Tom asked.

Jane waved her hands placatingly, then took her drink and slurped a mouthful of it. “Too soon,” she said. Then, brightening, “So a man walks into a talent agent’s office—”

—And I couldn’t reciprocate anyone’s interest unless and until I gave them a piece of my heart, dammit.

Daria interposed: “Where’s Saavik?”

“Oh,” Tom said, “she texted me a few minutes ago. Said she’d met some people she knew down in the dance hall and she’d try to get them all up here.”

“More people,” Daria said. “Same number of escape routes.”

Tom propped himself up against the bar. “You doing OK?”

“As long as I keep telling myself I’m here to do research, yes.”

Tom’s jacket pocket began to play “Karma Police.” He read the caller ID and held the phone to his ear. “Dial-A-Sloane.” Holding it in place with his shoulder, carrying on with the construction of a Gibson. “Uh-huh. That’s from Morris himself? Yeah, well, Valley boys, what can you do? `We’re innovators who are all about disruption! You can tell by how we all look alike!’ No, but—all right. No, I think the stats we’ve got will cover it.” He looked down to scan the dial of his watch. “Hmm. I’m with you on that. Tell you what: you and Tink put what you’ve got up in the cloud, and I’ll see what I can do with it.” He handed off the cocktail glass and continued, “Jess, if we don’t sort it out now, I’ll just have it in my head to stress over, and the night will be ruined anyway. Gimme half an hour and we’ll see what I can come up with. OK. Talk to you soon.”

He gestured to Jane. “Can you keep an eye on things for half an hour? Work calls.” This last while waving his phone a little apologetically.

“Sure. Just don’t expect those cocktail olives to be waiting for you when you return.”

“Super,” Tom replied, and with a generally harried air he squeezed his way between the party-goers until he vanished around the corner that led to the master bedroom.

And then Jane was busy attempting to mix a Manhattan with orange bitters following instructions on her phone. Daria felt herself recede into the background.

—I should strike up a conversation.

She finished the last of the concoction that Tom had made for her.

—I should join the genial chatter in which Jane is partaking right now. It will be easy and enjoyable.

Daria swung her feet a few times. Then she slid off the barstool and made her way, unhurriedly, to the door.

* * *

“Melody knew she had to file an after-action report. She knew she had to force her unease into the open, to codify and catalogue it. Otherwise, her discomfort would linger and fester. And that was bad for Company business.”

Daria was mumbling to herself, gnawing on the blunt end of a pen as she sat, alone, at a round table for six. The snack buffet, in the basement room beside the hawkers’ hall, was quiet at this hour. She turned the pages of her notebook until she found the place where her rough-draft statement of academic interests had trailed off. Then she drew a horizontal line, inscribed the date and sought within herself for the right character’s voice to recount the convention so far.

* * *

The convention began in an encouraging enough way. There I was, patiently queueing for the registration desk, looking out from the mezzanine over the hotel lobby. Taking everything in, telling myself it’s all fine, I’m here to gather material. Then, at the desk, sliding my photo ID across the Formica:

“Daria Morgendorffer, multipass.”

Equipped with my badge, I rejoined Tom and Saavik. The latter was sashaying a little, singing in a melty tenor, “`Who’s been casting devious stares in my direction?'”

Tom’s reply, plaintive: “It’s not my fault I got drunk and downloaded all those songs from high school!”

We saw Jane waving from across the lobby. The room fairly seethed with activity, most of it aimless. As we navigated through it, I tracked the coffee cups in the hands of people coming from one direction, the shopping bags carried by those going in another. I counted two Klingon warriors, the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors, a genderflipped Captain America, a trio of Imperial Stormtroopers, a Faye Valentine (how was she not freezing?), Finn and Fiona and a tall woman in a dark wool overcoat and a deerstalker hat with captions attached to it by wires.

Saavik looked about. “Hey, where’d Jane get to?”

My phone buzzed. I pulled it out and read the incoming text: “Look behind you.”

This time, her flying hug-tackle lifted me from my feet.

I looked her up and down. “I get it. Serial Experiments Lane.”

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get the three of you looking fa-aaabulous!”

On the elevator ride upwards, she explained the merchandise they were hoping to unload. Downstairs, in their booth in the hawkers’ hall, they had unpacked a crate of paintings that had been MacGuffins in a miniseries about a gentleman thief and forger. Imitations of forgeries, which made the whole show more artful than it deserved to be.

When I stepped into the entertaining suite, I quailed. I knew then how accustomed I had become, after serving my time as a grad student and an adjunct professor, to modest and respectable spending.

Tom asked, “What do you think?”

“Surprisingly tasteful,” I said.

Jane, flouncing onto a chaise: “Yeah, I had expected much more of a `walking into a SkyMall catalogue’ vibe.”

Tom and Saavik vanished into one of the bedrooms to change. I had worn much of my Fullmetal Alchemist outfit as my street clothes, just swapping my boots and pulling my parka on over the sweater. I was flexing the fingers of my prosthetic, testing my ability to unwrap a chocolate bar, when they emerged from the bedroom.

“Commander Ikari,” I greeted Tom.

“Bet you were wondering why the beard,” Jane said.

Saavik stepped out from behind Tom. She wore a snappy khaki jacket with a matching skirt that came to her knees. A short, feathery indigo wig framed her face, and a matte-gray collar curved around her neck, open at the front, with cable jacks and plugs at the two terminii flanking her throat. A leather Sam Browne belt cinched in the jacket at her waist and ran over her right shoulder. She slid a glove over her right hand, a spiffy little item that left her fingertips bare, but added some intimidating metal over her knuckles.

“Hey,” she said to me, “I think we’re technically the same rank!”

I glanced at the three rows of modest insignia just over her breast pocket. “You’re more decorated than I.”

It was roughly at this point that Morgan entered, pulling a luggage trolley laden with booze, the magnetic pull of which had ensnared several other people whom I vaguely recognized from the preparation party.

“Hey, there’s a karaoke machine in here!” Jane held up a microphone on a long cable.

Still adjusting the USB collar for a comfortable fit, Saavik darted to the cabinet and jabbed the power button. She pushed keys on the machine’s control panel to speed-scroll through its list of artists. In a moment, her face lit up.

Jane looked from the younger woman to the display panel and back again. Saavik beckoned her in to hear a whisper, and whatever she heard made her smile and surrender the microphone.

I glanced away momentarily to watch Morgan don the Borg eyepiece that ze had made the weekend before. I looked back as Saavik said, her voice now amplified through the room’s sound system, “This one goes out to a young woman who just moved here from Chicago. It’s a song about cultural appropriation. Daria, others present, I think it’s time we blow this scene. Get everybody and their stuff together. Three, two, one… Rawhide!“

She had a fine singing voice, one that gave the impression of great power under tight control. Soon, she had the room joining in on the “head ’em up”s and “ride ’em out”s. I noticed that she left the gender unchanged in the “wishin’ my gal was by my side.”

Not long after, Jane returned to the hawkers’ hall, and the rest of us went exploring.

We found the discothéque, which was trapped in Remix the Eighties mode. Next door were the subdivided function rooms, the sort rented for topical sessions of real-estate broker cabals. Tonight, the room we entered was set aside for a LARPing event of some sort. The people I was with knew people already there, and some sort of conversation appeared unavoidable.

There were signals of undercurrents: the way Morgan’s fingers adjusted zir Borg-drone monocle, the low wattage of the smiles with which both ze and Saavik greeted certain shifts in the general chatter. More than a few interactions in the room read as the cool politeness granted an ex from a relationship concluded but not yet completely resolved. However, who the pairings might have been was hard to tell. The signal, if it was there, had been obscured by the scheduled conviviality, the sense of this-time-comes-but-once-a-year. But beneath that, one felt the substratum of friends on the opposite sides of a breakup, perhaps repeated with different alignments two or three times.

Thankfully, dinnertime interrupted.

Jane/Lain reunited with us as we left the hotel. We rode the subterranean electric bus to South Station and walked to Chinatown. A dozen people squeezed into a renowned hole-in-the-wall, next to a bakery, a juice bar, a curio shop and a pornogerie. A dozen people, of whom I knew two well and another two vaguely.

And here I had one of those moments, one of those little interludes where you think, “This is totally a prototype or an archetype or a microcosm for something or other.” When life surprises you with a concrete realization of a theme you had mostly contemplated indistinctly in the abstract.

It began with the ordering of the pan-fried Peking ravioli. First, the judgment had to be made as to how many our table could collectively consume. Hands, or rather index fingers, went up all around. Some fingers were straight, the others bent. It transpired that a bent finger meant the diner wished only half a regular order. Abashed, I dropped the hand I had raised and made some kind of “never mind” gesture before turning my attention to emptying my teacup.

In the eyes of everyone I did not already know, I was an outsider, and a gauche one at that. While the food was chosen and awaited and eaten, Tom and Saavik tried a few times to bring me into the conversation. “Daria, didn’t you once write something for #SickSadWorld about that?” I made an honest attempt to rise to their leads, but the chill never quite lifted.

How odd it felt to be me, of all people, a writer for #SickSadWorld even, and to feel myself out of place at a science-fiction convention. I, who in my day had been a Love Goddess from beyond the stars.

During the midst of these thoughts, I found that Jane/Lain had snuck three pan-fried Peking ravioli onto my plate.

We returned to the convention hotel to see a play, a spoof of several decades worth of science-fiction tropes, put on by a group with which the Major sometimes performs, though circumstances I didn’t know the details of had kept her from participating in this show. It was a fine show, too, one which demanded the scenery be well-chewed by story’s end. I laughed, frequently, and the merriment was general.

“It was good,” Saavik said, “but it’s just not the same without the captain’s faithful sidekick Lumpy.” Agreement was widespread on this point.

The next day, Jane was scheduled to staff the Moonbase booth all through business hours. I tried taking in some panels. There was a session of filking, spoiled by poor organization which left too many people in the room not knowing the tunes of the songs for which the comedic new lyrics had been written, thereby trampling the chances of a real sing-along. Together, Saavik and I sat in on a session about an abortive attempt to make a Doctor Who animated movie after the show was canceled in the 1980s. Roger Ebert had just given his thumbs up to Akira, and both the possibilities and the affordability of animation were intoxicating. René Laloux, fresh from his fantasy epic Gandahar, was ready to direct. A script was drafted, apparently with at least some input from Douglas Adams. Animation tests were made, voices recorded over concept art… and the whole thing went up the spout.

The session was surprisingly poorly attended. Me, I’d have thought that Sylvester McCoy regenerating into Diana Rigg would have drawn a bigger audience, but perhaps the description in the programme gave away too little. Word is, the people running the panel will be Kickstarting a documentary about the lost Doctor, so stay tuned.

Strangely enough, the only Doctors I saw around the hotel were all New Who—except for the gentleman dressed in a blazer, jeans and a long scarf, limping on a cane adorned with flame decals. His pocket of pill bottles must have been bigger on the inside.

“Would you like a jelly baby? By which I mean Vicodin.”

We lunched with the Moonbase Illyria team in the hawkers’ hall. Over my empty chili bowl, I looked over the programme once more.

“`Why does a science-fiction convention have such a strong fetish contingent?'”

Tom asked, “Well, why shouldn’t it?”

“No, that’s the name of a session, in room 2A.”

* * *

“Daria?” A young woman’s voice brought Daria out of her notebook.

“Saavik? What are you doing down here?”

“Oh, you know, just—” Whatever she had planned to say faded out. She shifted her weight and ran her fingers up underneath the blue-purple bangs of her wig. “Can I sit with you a minute?”

“Sure.”

Saavik pulled out a chair opposite the round table from Daria and crumpled into it.

Daria asked, “Rough night?”

Saavik snorted. “Not my best.”

“You didn’t come all the way down here from the party?”

“Never made it that far. Hell, you want to hear the story?”

“Um, sure.”

“I was down here, over in the dance hall. I meant to go up to Tom’s party, but it was a pretty good set, and I lost track of time, and then I kind of got swept along with some people I sort of knew who were going to another room party. And the guys I knew from college had to talk with the people they knew before they could leave, the way that happens.”

Saavik drew in a ragged breath and went on. “I got cornered by this guy. He was pleasant enough at first. That’s how they always are, right, you know? Pleasant enough at first. I was just waiting around, killing time, doing the smalltalk thing, and he starts going on about something involving medicine.”

“Portraying himself as an eligible young doctor?”

“He said he had majored in alternative medicine in college. I was trying to be polite, because, you know, party, and I thought it might make a scene if I said anything. Like, for example, the reason they call it `alternative’ is because if it worked, it would just be `medicine.’ Then he said something about Western doctors being all closed-minded and `out of tune with our bodies’ natural healing energy,’ I think was how he put it. Which just, I don’t know, sat wrong with me, can’t fucking imagine why.”

“So then you left?”

“Well, I kind of looked around and took a second to think, and I realized he had been doing that trick where you lead a girl to different parts of a room so she feels like she’s been talking with you for longer. It’s, like, some Pick-Up manual thing? Only it didn’t work, because I’d been counting the seconds until I could get out of there and up to Tom’s party. I should have left right then, dammit, but before I could decide how polite my exit should be, my college friends came over, and I thought we’d be on our way. But they got to talking with Mr. Healing Vibes, and one of them said something about me transitioning. And then it was all `I Didn’t Know You Were A Trans: Conversation Number Three.'”

Saavik slumped over the table and rested her head on her right arm, while her left hand wandered out to toy listlessly with a candy wrapper someone had discarded on the table.

“It’s just, so, I don’t know, insidious. You spend year after year feeling like your body is wrong in a fundamental way. And you kind of internalize that. Like it’s a basic rule of who you are. So when you finally present in a new way, when you’re read more and more as the gender which feels right, there’s this little voice in your head. `You should be grateful,’ it says. `You should thank the man for calling you a pretty girl. That’s the validation you wanted. You can’t pass it up, can you?'”

Daria couldn’t think of anything to say. She waited in silence until Saavik pushed herself up and leaned back to stare at the ceiling. “Like I said, not my best night. Even before we got to the `So, how does sex work with you?’ part.”

“What did you do?”

“I reached into my pocket like my cell phone had just vibrated, and I pretended that my boyfriend had just texted me. Because I am just that fucking subtle. Then I threw my drink in the trash and walked out.” She paused, as a thought occurred to her. “On my way out, I heard Harry—one of my acquaintances from college—inviting everybody to his Super Bowl party. And everyone was being, I dunno, pumped about it? I got this quick taste of something that didn’t compute. Daria, why are people so proud of watching the Super Bowl? Like, contrarian proud?”

“Same reason they come out as bold supporters of Valentine’s Day. A milder form of asking why there’s no Straight Pride parade or White History Month. They like the self-righteous thrill of being an oppressed minority, without the actual risk.”

“Huh.” Saavik blinked a few times.

Daria felt a pulse of what might have been grim satisfaction, although the satisfaction part was a little lacking. Her default response to distraught people was to try drawing them out and diverting their attention, sending their thoughts down a different path. For a wonder, here was a person and a situation where that actually appeared to work, to an extent at least.

Daria asked, “You want to head up to Tom’s suite? I’m sure the party is still going on.”

“No. I don’t think so. I mean, I feel—kind of a mess.”

“If you’d rather sit in the dark and not have to talk or think, I bet there’s a movie or an anime marathon somewhere in this place.”

“You want to join me?”

“Sure.” Daria pulled out her phone and checked the Aletheia schedule. “Looks like they’re showing The Andromeda Strain in about fifteen minutes.”

“What’s that about? Is that the one with the germ from outer space?”

“From back before we discovered the greatest threat to space exploration was American indifference.”

“I’m in. God, am I in.”

* * *

They emerged into the empty hallway which linked the conference rooms with the elevator alcove beside the lobby. Faint noises came out of the anime-screening room just across from them.

“I liked it,” Saavik said, sounding surprised at herself.

“Goes to show,” Daria said, “they can’t play the genuinely bad movies at this hour, because con people want to see them.”

“It’s like, there’s a…” Saavik slipped the knuckleduster glove back onto her hand. “An appeal, you know, to seeing people at the top of their profession doing what they do best? Competence on display?”

“Yeah,” Daria said. “It’s the opposite of gawking at a disaster and saying `You had one job! One job!'”

“Right! They have one job, and they’re trained by the best to do it, and they do the right thing—”

“Even in the face of blood-clotting bugs from space, and even more horrifying, an original story by Michael Crichton. Something wrong?”

Saavik was looking down at her toes, walking with swinging kick-steps that advanced her slowly for the amount of motion involved. “Thanks for staying with me,” she said.

“I’m not much of a support system,” Daria said. “In fact, that I have anything to give after all I’ve taken seems rather implausible.”

“Psssh.” Saavik looked around the corner, past the elevators, toward the hotel lobby. “Hey, look! It’s a perfect bit of Beige Land!”

“Hrmmm?”

“You know, the interchangeable places. The anodyne territories. Made to look and work the same no matter how far from home you are. They function on their own logic. Catch them after closing time, and they’re empty of the people which are their reason for existing. They aren’t even haunted. The shoeshine stand in Terminal C. The beige places.”

—Been dwelling on this, turning it over in her head more than once.

“A vending machine,” Daria suggested, “beside the bathroom in a Student Union, the night after Christmas, advertising Ultra Cola to a bulletin board open to notices from clubs which haven’t met in nine months and never had more than five members when they did.”

“Damn, girlfriend, where have you been lurking?” Saavik looked over to the stairwell which led down to the basement, with the hawkers’ hall and the room set aside for the disco. “Oh hey, we’re not alone.”

Even at this hour, a couple con people were idling on the stairs. The woman tapped her high-heel black boot against the top step as she spoke. She wore a black skirt with a considerable tendency to swirl, and a corset the color of a slightly dusty pumpkin. Over one arm, she carried a grayish raincoat. The man, sprawling like a spiky-haired Diogenes in a leather jacket, took up the other side of the stairs.

“Not the mask,” he said. “The masks are for tossers.”

Daria could not hear what the woman said in reply, but the man’s voice cut across the lobby, the voice of a public-school dropout trying to sound as tough as possible as he deferred adulthood in the orbit of London.

“The man was a bloody theocrat,” he said. “And these pimply colonial wankers have turned him into some potted spunk fantasy. `Like, dude, anarchy in the UK, bro!’ I need that like I need a zit on my foreskin. You know what their anarchy means? Each mask, ten quid in the till for Wanker Brothers, that’s what. The pause that refreshes in the corridors of power!”

The woman’s reply was a little louder than before. “Do me a favor?”

“Yeh?”

“Next, say, `I’m off to Tesco. Fancy a fry-up?'”

“Sod off.”

All through this exchange, disquiet had been welling up inside Daria. It began with the feeling that those two reminded her of something from a long time ago. Then came the memory of what in her past that was, then the sensation that the match was too exact to be funny any longer.

Daria took a step closer to them. Saavik looked at her with a concern which Daria barely registered. Then Saavik looked back to the other two, and Daria took another half-step, and the woman turned to face them.

The regulated air of the hotel lobby was now the outdoor air of a clear autumn afternoon, smelling of fresh apples and dried leaves and the unwrapping of chocolates.

“Hello, Daria. It’s been a long time.”

There was no hint in her tone of an accidental encounter, no suggestion this meeting was due to serendipity.

Daria’s voice was not quite as raspy as she expected for herself. “Hal… Halloween?”

The man rose from his sprawl, and the two of them strode the few paces to where Daria stood.

“The very same,” she said to Daria.

The last time Daria had seen this woman, the woman named Halloween, she had looked eighteen, old for eighteen, seasoned by a life a few degrees less secure than Daria’s own. She had worn much the same clothes. She had played drums in a band with Trent Lane.

And she had most decidedly not been real.

“And you remember our lead singer, of course.”

“Bonfire Night,” he introduced himself to Saavik. He offered a hand.

“Saavik Yan,” she said, grasping it briefly.

Halloween lightly touched Bonfire Night’s elbow and whispered, “I think Daria’s friend is a little on edge. How about some girl time?”

Bonfire Night nodded. “Right,” he said. “I think I’ll go see about that fry-up.” He turned with a wave, took a step back toward the stairs, and disappeared.

Halloween clucked her tongue. “Honestly, that man.”

She clasped her hands, wrung them just a little, interwove her fingers. “Well, Daria, and Saavik…”

Both of whom were standing without moving.

“Daria?” Saavik asked. “What’s happening?”

“I met them… once…”

“Fifteen years, has it been?” Halloween smiled, a little this-isn’t-easy-for-me-either smile. Perhaps she was eighteen, perhaps twenty.

“That was a dream,” Daria said. “A long, rambling dream that came in pieces when I was doped up after they pulled out my wisdom teeth.”

“Yes,” Halloween said. “You were full of Demerol and trying to explain to your father how Christmas, Halloween and some English punk had fled Holiday Island to start a band, and you had to get them back where they belonged. Which we do appreciate, by the way. Both us and the personage in charge of the boundaries.”

“The… boundaries?” Daria echoed back in a whisper.

“Of the waking world,” Halloween replied. “There was a certain confusion in those days, a kind of fallout from things gone majorly whack a few years before. We were walking the Earth, me and my friends, thanks to some `advice’ that Christmas got from… well, never mind who exactly. Point is, you got us back home, which spoiled the plans of a particularly nasty, well, not person exactly…” She clasped her hands again. “Long story short, I’m here to introduce you to someone who’d like to make a deal with you.”

Daria sought in herself for words. Saavik spoke first. “The same someone who’s in charge of… of the boundaries?”

Halloween nodded. “The Lord Shaper. The Oneiromancer. The Emerald over Terminus. Youngest and third-eldest of the seven Endless. He who rose to the aspect of King of All Night’s Dreaming.” Halloween paused for a deep breath. “Daria Morgendorffer, the Sandman would like a moment of your time.”

[on to chapter 5]

Travis

Here are review’s key findings:

Treadmill desks led to the greatest improvement in physiological outcomes including postprandial glucose, HDL cholesterol, and anthropometrics, while standing desk use was associated with few physiological changes. Standing and treadmill desks both showed mixed results for improving psychological well-being with little impact on work performance.

If you’re interested in the latest findings on active workstations, I strongly suggest you check out the review itself.  If you’d like a quick summary, pop over to Fast Company Design, where they highlight all the key findings.  For those keen to know more about active workstations, Brittany followed up the review with a very interesting intervention study which I hope to summarize here in the near future.

Travis

CHAPTER THREE

Daria’s Journal, Inaugurating a Brand New, Posh Hardback Notebook. Tuesday, 15 January 2013.

I braved the slush yesterday and made my way to a stationery store up near Raft. Treated myself to a fistful of disposable fountain pens. I hadn’t known that such things were a thing. Between these, my history of failed relationships and my coffee intake, I must be a Real Writer.

The convention—that is, the fifteenth annual Aletheia—is to kick off this Friday. Jane has Plans for my attendance. I refuse to let this frighten me.

Tom explained the logistics to me. “I never really learned how to spend money for fun,” he admitted. “So, I set aside all that I didn’t spend on indulging myself last year, and now we’re having a party. More specifically, three parties: Friday night is the chill session with movies and board games and a little karaoke for close-ish friends. Saturday night is the big bash for everybody and their plus-ones and plus-twos and the new folks that the plus-twos met at the convention.”

“Sounds jolly,” said this reporter.

“No obligation,” Tom said. “And we recover the next night with the most laid-back event of them all. We four have the run of the place. No pressures, nothing to do but kick back and let someone else do the cooking.”

Saavik was slurping the filling out of a cupcake. At this, she paused. “Dude, that has a downside.”

Weird stuff to think about, after all these years. The Sloanes were old money—Colonial New England, in fact, so their money was about as old as money could get in Anglophone America. That caused plenty of friction when Tom and I were an item. But it wasn’t until much later that I realized it had an upside, too. College brought the opportunity to mix with the nouveau riche, and that provided a—what’s the polite phrase?—”study in contrasts.” The Sloanes had a gobsmacking amount of liquid assets to spend, but their choices of what to spend it on were not wholly determined by the price tags of the purchaseable items. They were stuffy and irritatingly hidebound by traditions, but those traditions did at least include getting a first-class education and even something of a commitment to public service. While their philanthropic efforts did skew towards museums and symphonies—generally, to causes that meant opportunities to be seen in black tie—they did at least make the goddamn effort. And, after meeting the sort of teenagers who would these days be the Rich Kids of Instagram, well, I have to admit, Tom’s upbringing wasn’t all bad.

Grace, Sloane and Page had been one of the most staid financial firms on the East Coast. The culture at the top was too fundamentally stodgy to be interested in radical new ways of slicing, dicing and repackaging debt. Deregulation left them almost unmoved. So, when the crash came, as Tom remarked, they were too dull to fail.

That, at least, was the story generally shared. Embarking on my PhD studies at Bromwell, Little Daria heard much more. Tom’s father Angier had wanted to modernize, to move into the new territories opened up when regulations were stripped away. Tom opposed the idea. What started as a statistics question, a technical critique of the SEC’s conclusion that repealing the uptick rule was a fine and safe move, became a family quarrel when Tom took his concerns to Messers Grace and Page. Angier Sloane felt that his son was slinking behind his back. Tom acccused his father of betraying the ideals he had espoused, in the name of short-term profit.

The bad blood was still unresolved when the doctors found the cancer in Angier’s thymus.

Damn, fountain pens are good for this sort of thing.

I suppose I ought to make a habit of recording the memories when they bubble up on me—to get them out of my head, to take away a little of their power over me, etc. Sometimes they have the odd texture of disuse. Disconnected fragments, separated out by virtue of having occurred in a place that I never revisited.

Jane, back in Lawndale after her first semester at BFAC. Living at her family home again. Working for someone whose daughter had told him about the Jackson Pollock murals that Jane had done across the gymnasium walls for a Lawndale High dance. A defunct appliance store in a strip mall, converted to an indoor playground.

Little Daria, having such a mature soul for her years, had found a job in Cambridge and so spent only a little time in Lawndale that summer. Trent told me that Jane was decorating the back rooms of the playground place, the rooms intended to be rented for birthday parties. They were unfriendly, windowless chambers, unsuited for the purpose. I brought Jane a family-sized box of chicken tenders and cheese fries. Jane wolfed into them, getting barbecue and honey-mustard sauces all over her fingers.

The mural was replete with rocketships and dragons and princesses packing laser guns.

I gave Jane a lift home. We talked of nothing in particular. Then, without warning, at the front door of Casa Lane, she pulled Little Daria close and wrapped me up in a hug that had more than a little desperation about it.

“Back rooms without windows,” Jane said. “A box for screaming children of indifferent parents on a run-down street in a dead town. Tell me that’s not it. Tell me that’s not where we end up.”

In our years together, Jane had been at times angry and resentful and confused, but this was a sinister emotion, a sadness that infected what it touched and made the expressive, passionate Jane Lane into a blank shadow. It would pass that night, and it would return later.

But, eventually, she won. She fought it every day for months, and now, the dark interval that seemed to last forever is itself years in the past, and she’s running a goddamn company.

Tom won out, too. He’s even in love.

And Little Daria? Whatever happened to her?

Hey, fuck you. I’ve got fountain pens.

* * *

“This arrived for you,” Jane told her, carrying a cardboard box. “And not a day too soon!”

“I don’t think I ordered that much Thai green curry.”

Jane deposited the box on the kitchen counter, unfolded a wicked-looking multitool and began to attack the packaging. As the tape came undone, Daria read the address label. “From Aunt Amy?”

“I’ll admit, she consulted me on this, so we get to share in the glory.”

“Or the blame.”

Jane reached into the box and extracted an envelope, which she handed to Daria.

“`To my favorite niece,'” she read aloud. “`I remembered you got a lot of mileage out of the pair you inherited from me, and that they gave their lives in the line of duty at that Longfellow Tech incident. Wouldn’t you know, the shop where I bought them is still open?'”

Jane held aloft a black boot in each hand.

“`If you don’t go off and join an all-girl punk band like I did, I hope you’ll still find a use for footwear made for stompin’. Love, Aunt Amy. PS: Now that you have a Bromwell diploma, are these Post-Docs?'”

“I feel like I’m in the presence of history here,” Jane said. “And hey, you never told me that your trademark boots had been your aunt’s!”

“I am a woman of many secrets, Fraulein Lane.”

“Me too,” replied Jane. “Bravo Romeo Bravo.” Raising an index finger in a just-a-moment gesture, she left the kitchen and headed for the bedrooms.

She returned with a stack of folded clothes. “Phase one,” she instructed Daria, “get changed. Boots too. I suggest putting them on after the pants.”

“Again with the matching,” Daria monotoned.

In her bedroom, she commenced changing into the new clothes. The black jeans were crisp and sturdy. They fit her waist and had the right length, but were a little tight on her thighs. A broad belt of brown leather fell out of the charcoal-gray sweater when she unfolded it. The right sleeve had been cut and hemmed, so that it came just over her elbow. With the belt and sweater in place, she examined the jacket. “Black, with white trim? Is she trying to make me into Number Six?” There was a steel clasp on the high collar. “No, not quite.”

A knock on the door. “You decent?”

“Come in.” Daria sat in her chair and began to pull on her glossy fresh Docs.

“Phase one is a success,” Jane declared. She was carrying another box. “Now, stand up, and hold your right arm out.”

“Umm…”

“I know, usually women have to buy me dinner before I say that. Chop chop.”

“Implications of amputation do not generally inspire confi…dence?”

A glove? No, a gauntlet? The shell of a replacement forearm? It looked to be made of metal, but the way Jane carried it made it seem too light for that.

“This was going to be my Aletheia costume,” Jane told her, “but I think it’ll work even better on you. Oh, better lace those Martens first.”

Daria complied. “People will talk. They’ll think I’m actually getting into the spirit of this thing.”

“Just hang with us. We’ll have spirit to spare.”

“Does that mean you’ll be going as a bartender or a Ghostbuster?”

A minute later, her boots were laced, and she stood. Jane came to her right side and slid the prosthetic over her arm. It came up to her elbow, and Jane adjusted the sleeve to conceal the skin left uncovered.

“Good fit?” Jane inquired.

“Uh, yeah. It’s… light.” Daria flexed her fingers. The loss of dexterity was no worse than with a regular winter glove, she figured. Perhaps actually better.

Jane watched critically. She inserted a screwdriver into the wrist portion. “Let’s try tightening it here, just a bit. OK?” Daria nodded, and Jane applied a couple turns to each of two small screws. “How’s that?”

Daria moved her appendage about. “Nice. Actually.”

“Good. Next, pocketwatch.” From her box of goodies, she withdrew a large silver timepiece on a steel chain. The watch cover was imprinted with an insignia, a heraldic emblem—a rampant manticore. Jane clipped the loose end of the chain to a belt loop at Daria’s right hip.

Daria flipped open the watch. The works inside were real, and ticking. On the inner surface of the cover was incised, in rough letters, 18 Nov 01, and on a line below that, Never Forget.

—The wind down Huntington is cold, too cold for the thin fabric on my legs, and Jane is flipping a bus schedule over in her hands—

“Beautiful,” Jane proclaimed, a satisfied smile warming her angular features. Daria was trying to think of something to say when her friend continued, “Now, your coat!”

It had been the long red overcoat which Saavik had donated to the cause. The back surface now bore a serifed cross along the vertebral line, with a snake looping about its arms.

Jane helped Daria into the black jacket. Daria fastened the clasp at her neck—it was easy enough to work even with her new arm. She took the red overcoat from Jane and pulled it on. Then she spun on her boot-heel. It seemed the right thing to do. Her coattails turned after her.

Jane bubbled with delight. “Oh, God, this will be just too perfect. Too!” Gently, she took Daria’s bare hand and slipped a white glove over it.

Daria stepped back and clapped her hands together, forcefully, in an insolent subversion of a prayer. Then a Mona Lisa expression stole over her face. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure.”

She followed Jane out of the bedroom.

A medly of beeps and whoops came from the pinball machine in the lounge. Tom and Saavik were trying to play it in tandem, one flipper-control each. They looked over as Daria strode up, and the ball rattled, unseen, off the board.

“It works,” Tom said. “It certainly does.”

Saavik just goggled.

* * *

Daria tossed her tablet aside with a sigh. The device landed on the sofa cushion. Its screen dimmed and then, untroubled by a user’s touch, went dark. She walked from the lounge to the kitchen and decided to stare at the beverage equipment counter for a while.

Several hours before, she had tapped into a lode of fanfiction, an obscure collection only available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Most of it was zine material written during the first couple seasons of Star Trek TNG, circulating on Usenet and BBSes for a while, eventually being cached on a GIF-happy website in the mid-Nineties. In a lot of it, Tasha Yar was alive. There was a high density of Dirty Pair and Space Battleship Yamato references, which at first she put down to the enthusiasm of the fanfic writers, but which turned out to derive from in-jokes apparently buried in TNG itself. Wesley Crusher was variously scarred by delta rays, glorped by brain slugs and revealed as Captain Picard’s son. Perhaps because the fans had only bothered to save the fraction of the stories that they had cared about, the average quality level was surprisingly high. Daria had looked up at the conclusion of a novella in which Wesley turned out not to be Picard’s son after all—subverting a genre convention she had no inkling about until that night—and discovered that the time now verged upon five in the morning.

“Onward to the saga where the Iconian gateways change everything,” Daria asked herself, “or take drugs so I can sleep?”

Alethia was to start that afternoon. She had her costume now—Edward Elric, the Fullmetal Alchemist—and with it, the concomitant sense of obligation. Backing out, after Jane had gone to all this trouble? Unthinkable, dammit.

She splashed milk into a glass and returned to the lounge. As she sat down again, she jostled the computer’s wireless mouse, which had somehow migrated into the couch cushions, and the projector glowed into activity. She moved to shut it off again—this was not the hour to watch TV and start a racket—and saw that, on account of their having watched an English technology documentary, the computer was now suggesting that she view James Burke’s Connections.

The layers of memory unspooled quickly. In one, she was ten, and her mother was away somewhere on business, and she was stumbling sleepless out of bed around midnight to find her father up and the TV on. “Oh, hi kiddo. This used to come on back when your Mom and I had that apartment before you were born!”

In another layer, Daria was seventeen, remembering that night as she and Jane walked out of Anthony DeMartino’s history class. Only it wasn’t Mr. DeMartino’s that day or for a while after, because Mr. DeMartino was enjoying a soft room and free toast at a secluded retreat far from Lawndale High’s star QB, Kevin Thompson. The substitute had plugged a tape in the VCR and gone to take a nap. “And I stay awake,” Jane complained. “It’s against the natural order, I tell you.”

“Short visits to one topic after another,” Daria mused, “interspersed with dad jokes. I wonder why that seems so familiar.”

Later that day, Quinn and the Fashion Club had passed them in the hall.

“And that suit! I just can’t get over it!”

“Just when we thought brains couldn’t commit any worse crimes against fashion.”

“It, like, offends our refined sensibilities or what-ever.”

“Maaaybe Quinn’s cousin has a suit like thaaaat…”

[on to chapter 4]

In a complex system, the individual components are neither so tightly coupled or correlated that they can all be treated as a single unit, nor so uncorrelated that they can be approximated as independent entities. Instead, patterns of interdependency lead to structure at multiple scales of organization. Evolution excels at producing such complex structures. In turn, the existence of these complex interrelationships within a biological system affects the evolutionary dynamics of that system. I present a mathematical formalism for multiscale structure, grounded in information theory, which makes these intuitions quantitative, and I show how dynamics defined in terms of population genetics or evolutionary game theory can lead to multiscale organization. For complex systems, “more is different,” and I address this from several perspectives. Spatial host–consumer models demonstrate the importance of the structures which can arise due to dynamical pattern formation. Evolutionary game theory reveals the novel effects which can result from multiplayer games, nonlinear payoffs and ecological stochasticity. Replicator dynamics in an environment with mesoscale structure relates to generalized conditionalization rules in probability theory.

The idea of natural selection “acting at multiple levels” has been mathematized in a variety of ways, not all of which are equivalent. We will face down the confusion, using the experience developed over the course of this thesis to clarify the situation.

(PDF, arXiv:1509.02958)

“Words in leather and wood”. Bookshelves in the “Long Room” at the old Trinity College Library in Dublin.
Image: Nic McPhee from Morris, MN, USA. 2007. (Creative Commons.)

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.

Compiled by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, the Birdbooker Report is a weekly report that has been published online for years, listing the wide variety of nature, natural history, ecology, animal behaviour, science and history books that have been newly released or republished in North America and in the UK. The books listed here were received by Ian during the previous week, courtesy of various publishing houses.

New and Recent Titles:

.

1. Gallardo, Robert. Guide to the Birds of Honduras. 2015. Self-published. Flexicover: 555 pages. Price: $39.95 U.S. [Buteo Books; Amazon UK paperback; Amazon US paperback].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: The first dedicated field guide to Honduras, featuring 1,000 illustrations on 73 color plates. The book also illustrates the majority of the migratory species. Along with the standard species accounts the book has a lengthy chapter 'Where to Find Birds in Honduras'. There are numerous Tables toward the end of the book, one of which has an extensive list of botanical names for nectar sources that hummingbirds utilize and each species of hummingbird observed for each flower. A unique feature is a large pull-out map approx. 16 x 25 in. One side illustrates a basic layout of ecosystems. The other side is labeled 'Important Bird Sites in Honduras which features over 200 points of interest throughout the country. These GPS-coded marker numbers are embedded in the text throughout most of the book and are all laid out in a separate Table. This layout means that all the numbers can be easily cross-referenced.
   This book covers over 98% of the birds of the surrounding countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize and Nicaragua; all countries where no book exists.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: A must have for anyone with an interest in the birds of Honduras, BUT I do wonder how the binding and light-weight paper will hold up to field use?

.

2. Walker, Barry. Field Guide to the Birds of Machu Picchu and the Cusco Region. 2015. Paperback: 243 pages. Price: $35.00 U.S. [Buteo Books; Lynx Edicions; Amazon UK paperback; Amazon US paperback].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: A comprehensive field guide that illustrates all the bird species recorded in Machu Picchu, including Cusco and Abra Malaga. Also includes a bird finding guide to the region. Color plates, a color map of the Sanctuary and a comprehensive introduction that deals with the biogeography and conservation, and a checklist.
   The extraordinary ruins of Machu Picchu, at an elevation above 2400 m, were among the most amazing creations of the Inca Empire at its height: its giant walls, terraces and ramps seem to have been cut out of continuous rock escarpments. This remote site lies on the eastern slope of the Andes on the upper reaches of the Amazon basin in a region exhibiting a rich diversity of flora and fauna. With the publication of this Field Guide to the Birds of Machu Picchu and the Cusco Region, visitors from all over the world can now appreciate and identify the birds of the mountains, valleys, and forests of this World Heritage Site.
   The Field Guide to the Birds of Machu Picchu and the Cusco Region is the result of a unique, three-continent collaboration between Barry Walker in Peru, Buteo Books in Virginia (USA), and Lynx Edicions in Barcelona. The text from previous versions of Barry Walker’s field guide has been completely rewritten and updated. Covering the nearly 500 species known to occur in the region, the individual species accounts provide details on habitat, behavior, localizations, and occurrence. The 165 color plates on pages facing the text are drawn from illustrations painted for the monumental Handbook of the Birds of the World. Additional illustrations by Martin Elliot of birds in flight and subspecies present in the Cusco Region were prepared specifically for this book. This is a field guide with all the essentials to identify the bird in the field, yet compact and light enough to fit in a pocket or carry on the Inca Trail. A section of the book contains a detailed guide to the best birding sites in the region and an annotated checklist, both of which will be of great value to the visiting birdwatcher.
   A native of England, Barry Walker has lived in Cusco, Peru for the past 30 years and with his wife Roario is the owner of Manu Expeditions Birding and Wildlife Tours. His knowledge of Peruvian birds is virtually unmatched; he has seen more than 1700 species in Peru alone. An invaluable aid to field identification, Barry's text provides key details on habitat, behavior, and vocalizations. A section describing the principal birding sites will prove essential to the visiting birder.
   Ultimately, A Field Guide to the Birds of Machu Picchu and the Cusco Region combines the talents of an experience field ornithologist with illustrations by a number of the best bird artists in the world. Visitors from all over the world who travel to see the extraordinary ruins of Machu Picchu will now have a field guide to the magnificent birds inhabiting the region.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: A must have for anyone with an interest in the birds of the region.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

This is a guest piece written by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen. Ian is an avid book collector who is especially well-known to the publishing world. He collects newly-published books about nature, animals and birds, science, and history, and he also collects children's books on these topics. Ian writes brief synopses about these books on his website, The Birdbooker Report.

It is a commonly held assertion that the average freshman will gain approximately 15lbs during the 2 semesters of 1st year university or college.

However, my experience and the results of numerous studies suggest that the phenomenon is purely myth, and a student who gains 15 lbs during their 1st year is clearly an exception rather than the rule.

The average university school year is approximately 30 weeks. Thus, to gain 15lbs over the 30 weeks of 2 semesters would require an additional 1750kcals per week – which is almost an extra days worth of calories added every week. That is impressive chronic overeating.

During my first year of university, I definitely did not experience a substantial increase in body weight. If anything, the initial stress of being away from home, the foreign environment, the increased academic workload, being forced to eat cafeteria food instead of my mother’s delicious cooking actually caused me to drop a few pounds. By second semester I was well adjusted, had figured out the ‘healthier’ eating options on campus, and had re-acquainted myself with regular exercise. When I went home for the summer, I had actually arrived in better shape (and approximately 5 pounds lighter) than when I first departed.

But that’s just my isolated experience.

What does the research suggest?

Back in 2006 Morrow and colleagues published a study in the journal Obesity investigating the notion of a freshman 15. This study has one of the largest samples to look at the phenomenon of freshman weight gain, and is the only one (to my knowledge) to assess body composition. In that study, 137 female freshmen at the University of Oklahoma were assessed for body weight and composition at the start of the school year and again at the end of the spring semester.

While the study did find a statistically significant increase in body weight from the start to the end of 1st year, the average weight gain was approximately 2lbs – a far cry from the commonly touted gain of 15 lbs. And of those 2 lbs, about 25% was due to an increase in muscle.

What’s also obvious when examining the results of this study is that about a quarter of the students actually lost weight during the 1st year, and many maintained their baseline weight.

So while I may be in the minority of those who lose weight in 1st year, it appears to be an experience shared by a quarter of first year students.

More importantly, the freshman 15 is more accurately the freshman 2 – but that doesn’t sound nearly as exciting or catchy.

Regardless of the magnitude of weight change, the transition from home to living on your own is a critical period for developing your own dietary and activity patterns, and thus educating 1st year students on proper nutrition and regular exercise is of utmost importance.

Given the appropriate education, first year students can not only resist weight-gain, they can actually improve on the lifestyle habits they had adopted from their parents over the past 17-18 years.

That is, if your parents didn’t have the best lifestyle habits, moving away from home may be an excellent chance to fix the dietary and physical activity patterns that were handed down to you from your folks.

Of course, I knew students who adopted a regular diet of beer, pizza, burgers and video games during university – these individuals fared less well with their weight and health . But this is far from the norm as often popularized by the freshmen 15 myth.

Debunking the myth that all freshmen gain weight may help remove the excuse to eat unhealthy and become sedentary – we often allow suggestion to affect our behaviour more than we’d like to think. If it is expected that most students will gain an average of 15lbs, the incoming students may feel that how their body will look in 8 months it is out of their control.

So to all incoming first-year students: Don’t buy into the hype and fear-mongering. You are more likely to be a freshman 0 than a freshman 15.

Peter

A new study, published in the September issue of the journal Obesity suggests water can be an effective tool to combat excess weight, albeit modestly.

In the study, Parretti and colleagues randomized 84 adults with obesity to one of two basic conditions: 1) drinking 500 ml of water 30 min before their main meals or 2) a control group where participants were supposed to visualize being full before having their meals.

At the start of the study, all participants were given a 30 minute face-to-face weight management consultation and a 10 minute follow-up telephone consultation at 2 weeks.

41 participants were randomized to the intervention group and 43 to the control group, and their weight was tracked until the 12 week conclusion of the study.

And what effect could something as subtle as drinking water before meals have on one’s body weight?

At 12-weeks, participants who “preloaded” with water reduced their body weight by 1.3 kg more than participants in the control group.

Just to be sure, the authors performed another analysis where they adjusted for potential differences in the two study groups, such as ethnicity , age, and gender; this analysis confirmed significantly greater weight loss at 12 weeks among those who drank water before their meals..

Is this surprising?

Well, you may recall a somewhat similar prior study we discussed on this blog back in 2009 that randomized overweight/obese older men and women to either a hypocaloric diet alone or a hypocaloric diet plus increased water consumption for a duration of 12 weeks.

The hypocaloric diet consisted of 1200 calories for the women and 1500 calories for the men. Those in the diet + increased water group were required to consume 500 ml of water (2 cups) 30 minutes prior to each of the 3 large daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner).

While participants in both groups lost a significant amount of weight (5-8kg) in response to the diet, those who also consumed more water before their meals lost an additional 2 kg in comparison to the diet only group.

The greater weight loss in the group consuming pre-meal water could be the result of smaller caloric intake during each meal (~40 calories less per meal), as shown during the baseline laboratory test meals.

The findings of these randomized controlled studies are in agreement with prior epidemiological studies showing that caloric intake in water drinkers is on average 200 calories less than among non water drinkers.

The results provide compelling evidence to encourage all those attempting to lose weight to increase their daily intake of water to help in their efforts. Specifically, one should consume approximately 2 cups of water, about half an hour prior to most meals.

Peter

Reference: Parretti et al. 2015. Efficacy of water preloading before main meals as a strategy for weight loss in primary care patients with obesity: RCT. 2015; 23(9): 1785-1791.

“Words in leather and wood”. Bookshelves in the “Long Room” at the old Trinity College Library in Dublin.
Image: Nic McPhee from Morris, MN, USA. 2007. (Creative Commons.)

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.

Compiled by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, the Birdbooker Report is a weekly report that has been published online for years, listing the wide variety of nature, natural history, ecology, animal behaviour, science and history books that have been newly released or republished in North America and in the UK. The books listed here were received by Ian during the previous week, courtesy of various publishing houses.

New and Recent Titles:

.

1. Dunne, Pete. Pete Dunne on Bird Watching: Second Edition: A Beginner's Guide to Finding, Identifying and Enjoying Birds. 2015. Stackpole Books. Paperback: 308 pages. Price: $19.95 U.S. [Amazon UK paperback; Amazon US paperback].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: Birding is one of the most popular and fastest-growing outdoor activities, but it can seem intimidating for beginners who don't know where, when, or how to search for birds. Fortunately, Pete Dunne, one of the most popular and respected writers in the field, has written a guide that will help even the most casual observers identify the skills and tools they need to develop their interest in birding. This popular how-to guide has been revised, updated, and now has color photos.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: If you liked the first edition, you'll like this edition!

.

2. Taylor, Marianne. RSPB Spotlight: Robins. 2015. Bloomsbury. Paperback: 128 pages. Price: $17.95 U.S. [Amazon UK paperback/Kindle UK; Amazon US paperback/Kindle].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: Their melodious voices, bright-red breasts, and cheeky attitudes have always endeared robins to the public, but how much do we really know about these familiar garden visitors? The characteristic image of a robin on a spade handle is actually a consequence of their keen territorial instincts -- males are often seen seeking a favorable lookout post. Despite their cute appearance, robins are aggressively territorial, and because they hold their territories year-round, robins are one of the only UK birds that can still be heard singing in gardens on Christmas Day, which has perhaps contributed to their longstanding association with the Christmas season.
   In this delightful new book, Marianne Taylor provides a revealing account of their life cycle, behavior, breeding, what they eat, and how they hold their territories, and looks into the many cultural representations of these much-loved little birds.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: A well illustrated introduction to the species.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

This is a guest piece written by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen. Ian is an avid book collector who is especially well-known to the publishing world. He collects newly-published books about nature, animals and birds, science, and history, and he also collects children's books on these topics. Ian writes brief synopses about these books on his website, The Birdbooker Report.

“Words in leather and wood”. Bookshelves in the “Long Room” at the old Trinity College Library in Dublin.
Image: Nic McPhee from Morris, MN, USA. 2007. (Creative Commons.)

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.

Compiled by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, the Birdbooker Report is a weekly report that has been published online for years, listing the wide variety of nature, natural history, ecology, animal behaviour, science and history books that have been newly released or republished in North America and in the UK. The books listed here were received by Ian during the previous week, courtesy of various publishing houses.

New and Recent Titles:

.

1. Bernhard,Tim and Timothy Loe. Collecting the New Naturalists. 2015. William Collins. Hardbound: 352 pages. Price: £60.00 (about $94.00 U.S.). [Amazon UK hardcover/Kindle UK; Amazon US hardcover/Kindle].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: The Collins New Naturalist series is the longest-running and arguably the most influential natural history series in the world with over 120 volumes published in nearly 70 years.
   Being a numbered series, with a very low print run for some volumes, New Naturalist publications have been and continue to be highly collectable. Second-hand copies of the rarer volumes, in very good condition, can command high prices. As such, there is considerable interest in a detailed bibliography and history of the series.
   Collecting the New Naturalists offers a detailed insight into the fascinating phenomenon that has gripped Britain since just after World War II and which reflects the country’s continued enthusiasm for wildlife and nature publishing generally.
   With previously unpublished in-depth insight into the workings of the series and its collectors, the book will comprehensively cover every aspect of the New Naturalists, from rare editions produced for Bloomsbury and the Reader’s Union to foreign editions, interviews with the iconic cover artists and well-known naturalists such as Nick Baker and Alan Titchmarsh telling the story of their own fascination with the series.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: A MUST have for anyone with an interest in the New Naturalist series!

.

2. Avery, Mark and Keith Betton. Behind the Binoculars: Interviews with acclaimed birdwatchers. 2015. Pelagic Publishing. Hardbound: 252 pages. Price: $26.99 U.S. [Amazon UK hardcover/Kindle UK; Amazon US hardcover/Kindle].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: How and why did our most acclaimed birdwatchers take up birding? What were their early experiences of nature? How have their professional birding careers developed? What motivates them and drives their passion for wildlife? How many birds have they seen?
   Mark Avery and Keith Betton, passionate birdwatchers and conservationists, interview members of the birdwatching community to answer these and many other questions about the lives of famous birdwatchers. They take you behind the scenes, and behind the binoculars, of a diverse range of birding and wildlife personalities.
   Behind the Binoculars includes interviews with: Chris Packham, Phil Hollom, Stuart Winter, Lee Evans, Steve Gantlett, Mark Cocker, Ian Wallace, Andy Clements, Mike Clarke, Debbie Pain, Keith Betton, Roger Riddington, Ian Newton, Steph Tyler, Mark Avery, Stephen Moss, Alan Davies and Ruth Miller, Rebecca Nason and Robert Gillmor.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: An interesting collection of interviews with British birders.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

This is a guest piece written by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen. Ian is an avid book collector who is especially well-known to the publishing world. He collects newly-published books about nature, animals and birds, science, and history, and he also collects children's books on these topics. Ian writes brief synopses about these books on his website, The Birdbooker Report.

As an obesity researcher I have publicly grappled with the ethics of working with the food industry here on Obesity Panacea for several years.  Originally I had always leaned more towards the view of engaging with industry.  While I felt that people like Michele Simon and Yoni Freedhoff made good arguments against engaging with Big Food, I felt it was possible that the positive aspects of engagement (primarily in the form of money for research or other programs that might not be possible otherwise) outweighed their potential to do harm.

However, over the past few years I’ve gradually been pulled toward the views held by Yoni and Michele for 2 reasons:

1. Big Food seems willing to say or do just about anything to promote their own interests.
2. Funding public health projects (including research) probably helps Big Food avoid meaningful regulation.

Big Food seems willing to say or do just about anything to promote their own interests.

Take this interview with Coca Cola President for North America Katie Bayne, which has been critiqued by Marion Nestle and Yoni Freedhoff previously.

In the interview, Ms Bayne claims that there is no such thing as an empty calorie:

A calorie is a calorie. What our drinks offer is hydration. That’s essential to the human body. We offer great taste and benefits whether it’s an uplift or carbohydrates or energy. We don’t believe in empty calories. We believe in hydration.

She weighs in on the evidence linking sugar sweetened beverages and obesity (emphasis mine):

There is no scientific evidence that connects sugary beverages to obesity. If you look at the data, you can see that during the same period obesity was rising, sugar intake from beverages was decreasing. Between 1999 and 2010, sugars from soda consumption decreased by 39%, but the percentage of obese children increased by 7%, and 13% for adults.

Note that she didn’t say that the research isn’t air-tight, or that some questions remain, which would be true.  She said there is “no scientific evidence”, which can be easily disproved by heading back to my previous post which surveyed the rather large body of evidence on this exact topic.

She goes on:

Q: Shouldn’t teens drink less cola and more milk and water?

A: Teens should get a healthy diet through food and beverage choices throughout the day.

Q: How much Coke should a kid drink a day?

A: We don’t make recommendations on what kids should drink. But a 12-ounce can of Coke has 140 calories, the same as a lunch-box-size bag of pretzels.

Finally, here is her son’s post-workout hydration regimen:

 If my son has lacrosse practice for three hours, we go straight to McDonald’s and buy a 32-ounce Powerade.

Now if Big Food executives were able to respond to these sorts of questions as a reasonable, rational person, then I would continue to agree that partnerships with industry are the way to go.  But it’s tough to maintain that view after seeing the above interview and others like it, that suggest to me that the food industry has no goal other than profit.  I don’t think that any reasonable person could honestly say that there is no such thing as an empty calorie (especially in the context of obesity), or duck a simple question asking whether it’s healthier for kids to drink more water and less soda. 

Funding public health projects (including research) probably helps Big Food avoid meaningful regulation

My other big problem is with an issue related to corporate social responsibility campaigns. In short, a primary goal of these campaigns is to prevent regulation.  That really worries me.  There are certain areas (e.g. a restrictions on advertising to children, a tax on sugar sweetened beverages, etc) where I feel that regulation is absolutely warranted. So while individual Big Food-funded projects may be fantastic, I worry that it will allow the industry to avoid regulation that could have more far-reaching benefits.  Sort of a win the battle, lose the war situation.

If all public health advocates were to stop partnering with Big Food, this would create a pretty large vacuum in terms of funding (unfortunately, those corporate social responsibility campaigns fund a lot of worthwhile projects… which, as I’ve written previously, is the whole point).  This has always been a big concern for me, and I still don’t know how that vaccuum could be filled (this is far from inconsequential – if we had another way to fill that vacuum, there would be far less need to partner with Big Food in the first place).  This is not an abstract concern – I have not personally received funding from the food industry, although I have worked with several individuals and organizations that have, and have therefore indirectly benefited from these partnerships myself.  However, if the goal is to improve public health, then I’m starting to think that the ends may not justify the means.

Travis

Earlier this year I was asked to give a talk on the childhood obesity epidemic for faculty and staff of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT). The folks at UOIT were good enough to record the lecture, so I’ve embedded it below (email subscribers can view the video on the blog).

I should note that the video has been edited slightly to remove several “Think-Pair-Share” discussions with the folks attending the lecture. So if I appear to make some random segues from time to time, that’s why.

For a risk factor to be considered a “cause” of the childhood obesity epidemic, two conditions need to be met:

1. The factor must be shown to promote excess weight gain in childhood

2. The factor must have increased before/during the childhood obesity epidemic

Based on those criteria, there are 4 factors that we can say (or at least I say) have contributed to the childhood obesity epidemic with relative certainty. These are:

1. Sugar sweetened beverages (e.g. pop)
2. Sedentary behaviour (especially screentime)
3. Lack of sleep
4. Adult obesity

People might be surprised that diet and physical activity aren’t on that list. But really, it comes down to measurement issues. It is certainly plausible that diet and physical activity contribute to increased childhood obesity rates. The problem is that the historical data for both of these variables is really weak, and often contradictory. The data for sugar sweetened beverages and screen time isn’t of much better quality, but the findings for both of those outcomes is much more consistent than for physical activity or diet more generally.

In the lecture and paper I also look at a variety of other risk factors (changes in gut bacteria, reduced breast-feeding, etc), and while there are some interesting findings there, it just isn’t to the point where you can make a strong conclusion with respect to obesity rates at the population level.

Check out the video, look at our previous series on the childhood obesity epidemic, or download the review paper that started all of this (it’s an open access paper, and can be downloaded or viewed online for free). Also, my sincere thanks to Drs Ellen Vogel and Meghann Lloyd for inviting me to speak at UOIT – I had a great time, and enjoyed the opportunity to see their new campus.

Travis

“Words in leather and wood”. Bookshelves in the “Long Room” at the old Trinity College Library in Dublin.
Image: Nic McPhee from Morris, MN, USA. 2007. (Creative Commons.)

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.

Compiled by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, the Birdbooker Report is a weekly report that has been published online for years, listing the wide variety of nature, natural history, ecology, animal behaviour, science and history books that have been newly released or republished in North America and in the UK. The books listed here were received by Ian during the previous week, courtesy of various publishing houses.

New and Recent Titles:

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1. Hadley, Jane (editor). A Birder's Guide to Washington, Second Edition. 2015. American Birding Association, Incorporated. Paperback: 613 pages. Price: $29.95 U.S. [Amazon UK paperback; Amazon US paperback].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: Few states show more dramatic contrasts in their environment than Washington. Elevations range from sea level to over 14,000 feet. Precipitation varies from over 200 inches annually on the Olympic Peninsula, nurturing a temperate rain forest and mountaintop glaciers, to a mere six inches in parts of the Columbia Basin, where near-desert conditions prevail. Between these extremes, an array of aquatic and terrestrial communities supports a remarkable diversity of bird species. This revised version of A Birder's Guide to Washington brings current the 2003 first edition, and, in the process, adds a number of new destinations, while eliminating a few that are no longer worthwhile. The guide details hundreds of birding routes and sites in the state, together with year-round access instructions and birding advice. Over 220 maps pinpoint the most productive destinations in the field and offer regional overviews to help with trip planning. An annotated checklist of 510 species recorded in the state through 2014 gives information about status and habitat associations, while the seasonal abundance and regional occurrence bar graphs will assist birders in locating regularly occurring species.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: A MUST have for anyone birding Washington State!

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2. Baker, Nick. The Complete Naturalist. 2015. Bloomsbury. Paperback: 352 pages. Price: $34.00 U.S. [Amazon UK paperback; Amazon US paperback].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: Nick Baker's fascination with the natural world began at an early age, inspired by Gerald and Lee Durrell's classic book The Amateur Naturalist. His The Complete Naturalist is an up-to-date, practical introduction to observing, understanding, and investigating the natural world around us. Whether you want to understand what makes an insect an insect, rear a family of frogs for your garden pond, or record birdsongs and calls, Nick can give you all the advice and information you need.
   Fact-packed and brimming with practical tips, techniques, and activities, The Complete Naturalist offers a rich source of new ideas for more experienced naturalists, as well as sparking the natural curiosity of a whole new generation. Covering everything from communicating with wild animals to setting up an aquarium, this is the naturalist's guide no family bookshelf should be without. Nick is an experienced and well-traveled naturalist, and his book includes his international experiences.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: A well illustrated introduction to natural history study.

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3. Dial, Kenneth P., Neil Shubin, and Elizabeth L. Brainerd (editors). Great Transformations in Vertebrate Evolution. 2015. University of Chicago Press. Paperback: 424 pages. Price: $45.00 U.S. [Amazon UK hardcover/paperback; Amazon US hardcover/paperback/Kindle].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: How did flying birds evolve from running dinosaurs, terrestrial trotting tetrapods evolve from swimming fish, and whales return to swim in the sea? These are some of the great transformations in the 500-million-year history of vertebrate life. And with the aid of new techniques and approaches across a range of fields -- work spanning multiple levels of biological organization from DNA sequences to organs and the physiology and ecology of whole organisms -- we are now beginning to unravel the confounding evolutionary mysteries contained in the structure, genes, and fossil record of every living species.
   This book gathers a diverse team of renowned scientists to capture the excitement of these new discoveries in a collection that is both accessible to students and an important contribution to the future of its field. Marshaling a range of disciplines -- from paleobiology to phylogenetics, developmental biology, ecology, and evolutionary biology -- the contributors attack particular transformations in the head and neck, trunk, appendages such as fins and limbs, and the whole body, as well as offer synthetic perspectives. Illustrated throughout, Great Transformations in Vertebrate Evolution not only reveals the true origins of whales with legs, fish with elbows, wrists, and necks, and feathered dinosaurs, but also the relevance to our lives today of these extraordinary narratives of change.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: For those with a serious/technical interest in evolution.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

This is a guest piece written by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen. Ian is an avid book collector who is especially well-known to the publishing world. He collects newly-published books about nature, animals and birds, science, and history, and he also collects children's books on these topics. Ian writes brief synopses about these books on his website, The Birdbooker Report.

“Words in leather and wood”. Bookshelves in the “Long Room” at the old Trinity College Library in Dublin.
Image: Nic McPhee from Morris, MN, USA. 2007. (Creative Commons.)

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.

Compiled by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, the Birdbooker Report is a weekly report that has been published online for years, listing the wide variety of nature, natural history, ecology, animal behaviour, science and history books that have been newly released or republished in North America and in the UK. The books listed here were received by Ian during the previous week, courtesy of various publishing houses.

New and Recent Titles:

.

1. Couzens, Dominic and David Nurney. Birds: ID Insights:
   Identifying the More Difficult Birds of Britain. 2014. Bloomsbury. Hardbound: 272 pages. Price: $30.00 U.S. [Amazon UK hardcover; Amazon US hardcover].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: Birds: ID Insights is ideal for birders of all levels. Its unique layout, which compares the plumages of similar pairs and groups of species, makes it perfect for identifying the more difficult birds found in Britain and other parts of northwestern Europe. It has more images showing how to age birds than any comparable guide, and its handy compact size makes it practical for taking out into the field.
   The book is based on a long-running series of identification features in BirdWatching magazine. Author Dominic Couzens and artist David Nurney have spent years compiling the field notes and artworks for this series, and here their efforts are drawn together and made complete in a single volume that is easy to carry into the field and practical for birders to use.
   In addition, they have expanded the species list from the magazine series and added many new birds, including the likes of Subalpine Warbler, Short-toed Lark, and Red-rumped Swallow. In total, the book covers more than 230 species, with easy-to-identify species such as Magpie and Kingfisher given minimal coverage so that the more difficult ID issues can be covered as fully as possible.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: I actually prefer The Helm Guide to Bird Identification, also published by Bloomsbury.

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2. Woods, Sarah. On a Wing and a Prayer: One Woman's Adventure into the Heart of the Rainforest. 2015. Bloomsbury. Hardbound: 272 pages. Price: $27.00 U.S. [Amazon UK hardcover; Amazon US hardcover/Kindle].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: When writer and intrepid traveler Sarah Woods set about discovering the jungles of Central and South America, her quest took her into some of the most remote tangles of vine-knotted jungles on the planet. In Panama's rain-soaked Chiriquí highlands, she navigated seemingly impassable trails with a machete to reach quetzals with resplendent jewel-tone plumage.
   Sarah sought the native wisdom of the indigenous Embera, deep in the Darien Jungle, in order to encounter the world's largest and most powerful birds of prey--the elusive harpy eagle. Using razor-sharp talons to hunt and kill sloths and monkeys with deadly precision, these mammoth, winged dinosaurs hide a lesser-known, softer side: devoting great care to raising their young for the first two years of their lives. Seldom seen in the wild, Sarah struggled to demystify the fear-riddled legends and superstitions that earned the harpy eagle its name from early explorers.
   Her voyage taught her much about the rich glories and mesmerizing spectacle of the natural world and also its challenges and dangers. She met the albino 'moon children' of Kuna Yala, swam in the Panama Canal, encountered left-wing guerrillas at the heart of Colombia's five-decade conflict, and witnessed Amazonian beliefs and customs surrounding shape-shifting and the jungle afterlife. Sarah survived landslides, crash landings, mammoth floods, and culture clashes in mysterious untrodden lands, learning much about aspects of herself from the incredible wildlife and tribal peoples she encountered--arguably her biggest journey.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: If you enjoy travel writing you should enjoy this book.

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3. Leseberg, Nick & Iain Campbell. Birds and Animals of Australia's Top End: Darwin, Kakadu, Katherine, and Kununurra. 2015. Princeton University Press. Paperback: 272 pages. [Amazon UK paperback; Amazon US paperback/Kindle].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: One of the most amazing and accessible wildlife-watching destinations on earth, the “Top End” of Australia’s Northern Territory is home to incredible birds and animals—from gaudy Red-collared Lorikeets to sinister Estuarine Crocodiles and raucous Black Flying-foxes. With this lavishly illustrated photographic field guide, you will be able to identify the most common creatures and learn about their fascinating biology—from how Agile Wallaby mothers can pause their pregnancies to why Giant Frogs spend half the year buried underground in waterproof cocoons.
   The Top End stretches from the tropical city of Darwin in the north, to the savannas of Mataranka in the south, and southwest across the vast Victoria River escarpments to the Western Australian border. The region includes some of Australia’s most popular and impressive tourist destinations, such as Kakadu, Litchfield, Nitmiluk, and Gregory national parks, and is visited by more than two hundred thousand tourists every year.
   An essential field guide for anyone visiting the Top End, this book will vastly enhance your appreciation of the region’s remarkable wildlife.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: A good introduction to the wildlife of the region.

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4. Pérez-Lorente, Félix. Dinosaur Footprints and Trackways of La Rioja. 2015. Indiana University Press. Hardbound: 363 pages. Price: $85.00 U.S. [Amazon UK hardcover; Amazon US hardcover/Kindle].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: During the Early Cretaceous, lakes, meandering streams, and flood plains covered the region where the current foothills of Rioja now exist. Today the area is known for its wine and for the dozens of sites where footprints and trackways of dinosaurs, amphibians, and even pterosaurs can be seen. The dinosaurs that lived here 120 million years ago left their footsteps imprinted in the mud and moist soil. Now fossilized in rock, they have turned Rioja into one of the most valuable dinosaur footprint sites in all of Europe. Félix Pérez-Lorente and his colleagues have published extensively on the region, mostly in Spanish-language journals. In this volume, Pérez-Lorente provides an up-to-date synthesis of that research in English. He offers detailed descriptions of the sites, footprints, and trackways, and explains what these prints and tracks can tell us about the animals who made them.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: For those with a serious interest in Spanish paleontology.

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5. Oddie, Bill. Bill Oddie Unplucked: Columns, Blogs and Musings. 2015. Bloomsbury. Hardbound: 224 pages. Price: $30.00 U.S. [Amazon UK hardcover; Amazon US hardcover/Kindle].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: Bill Oddie has been the voice and face of birding broadcasting for more than three decades. In this new book, Bill has compiled and expanded a collection of his recent published musings about birds and bird-watching. Writing in his witty and inimitable style, Bill is sure to entertain and enthrall his many fans with this new book of thoughts and opinions on the world of natural history in Britain.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: Fans of Bill Oddie's writings might enjoy this book.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

This is a guest piece written by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen. Ian is an avid book collector who is especially well-known to the publishing world. He collects newly-published books about nature, animals and birds, science, and history, and he also collects children's books on these topics. Ian writes brief synopses about these books on his website, The Birdbooker Report.

The critics panning Pixels lead me to reflect: Galaxy Quest would have failed if the main characters were the kids instead of the actors.

The heroes of Galaxy Quest know less about their own canon than their obsessive fans do. They find it easy to see everything bad about their work, and much harder to remember why it connected with people. The comedy comes from their not easily stepping into the fiction. They’re fish out of water. In Armada, apparently, the gamers find their favorite snack food waiting for them at their battle stations. In Galaxy Quest, on the other hand…

“Are you enjoying your kep’la blood ticks, Dr. Lazarus?”

“Just like Mother used to make.”

[blood tick, still alive, jumps from spoon back into bowl]

In Galaxy Quest, what saves the day? Not just the technical know-how (which was provided, again, by the secondary characters). How do the good guys win? Hope, courage, quick thinking, camaraderie. They live up to the virtues that their show, at its best, embodied.

(Note that the treknobabble that the fans provide is effectively dialled down to a minimum: basically, “reach this spot and push this button.”)

I think it also helps that the makers of the Galaxy Quest film took the trouble to invent their own show-within-a-show. It’s not just that inventing stand-ins for Trek imagery requires a bare minimum level of creativity that the Sandlers of this world never bother aspiring to. This move ensures that developments in the film’s plot can’t turn on minutiae of the Trek series they’re parodying. The jokes play on the recurring motifs, not on incidents isolated to individual episodes. This helps the movie strike a healthy balance: it’s not a shallow parody, but it doesn’t require encyclopaedic knowledge of the source to appreciate, either. It also helps create a little emotional distance, making it easier to appreciate the best and worst of Trek by holding it at a brief remove. Moreover, this way means that differences of opinion about particular Trek stories don’t lead to arguments that detract from enjoying the film.

Plus, it’s fun to see what ST:TOS would look like if upgraded from ’60s cheese to ’80s cheese. Shatner, with an Action Mullet? Yes please.

Credit: Tim Felce (Airwolfhound) Adult common starling, Sturnus vulgaris.

A study recently published in the peer-reviewed journal, Current Biology, revealed that some psychiatric pharmaceuticals commonly used to treat depression and Parkinson’s disease significantly alter human behaviour (doi:10.1016/j.cub.2015.05.021). In that report, the authors found that just one dose of a serotonin-enhancing drug increased the likelihood that healthy volunteers were more protective of themselves and others, whereas a dopamine-enhancing drug made healthy people more selfish.

Clarifiers are widely used for wastewater treatment.

Poo or pee: is that the end of the pharmaceutical story?

This, then, raises the question: how do psychiatric pharmaceuticals and their metabolites affect wildlife after they are excreted into the environment? This is an important line of inquiry because pharmaceuticals, which are specifically designed to alter human physiology and behaviour at low concentrations, can also affect other vertebrates. For example, it has recently been found that nestling wild starlings, Sturnus vulgaris, grow more slowly and show poorer immune response than controls when fed endocrine-disrupting chemicals, including 17α-ethinylestradiol, a common ingredient of the contraceptive pill (doi:10.1111/j.1365-2664.2010.01931.x). But so far, studies of the effects upon wildlife of environmentally relevant concentrations of pharmaceuticals are rare, particularly for terrestrial species and exposure routes.

This inspired Kate Arnold, a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the environment department at the University of York, to investigate the effects of the commonly prescribed psychiatric pharmaceutical, fluoxetine (Prozac), upon wild starlings. In the environment, this antidepressant and its metabolites originate from human waste and are present in surface water at concentrations as high as the µg l-1 level. (For reference, the therapeutic dose of fluoxetine is 20 to 60 mg orally per day for an adult.)

Together with her colleagues, Dr Arnold captured 24 wild starlings, fitted them with transponder tags, separated them into two treatment groups and housed them in outdoor aviaries. Five days each week, birds in the experimental group were fed wax worms that had been injected with fluoxetine at concentrations that simulated what the birds would be exposed to by feeding on invertebrates at a wastewater treatment plant (0.92 µg d^-1). Control birds were fed wax worms without fluoxetine.

The birds’ feeding behaviours were then monitored using electronic tag readers as they visited food trays throughout the day. These electronic tag readers allowed the researchers to identify changes in the birds’ foraging behaviours throughout the day (figure 1):

Credit: Illustration: Tom G. Bean et al. Figure 1. Mean (+/- 1 s.e.) feeder visits per hour per bird for the first and last 4 h of data against time for control (blue diamonds) and fluoxetine-treated birds (red squares). Time is expressed relative to sunrise ( a) and sunset ( b) and so the 4 h period for which observations were taken depended upon the time when birds first fed in the morning and last fed at night.

Birds in the treatment group showed conspicuous changes in foraging behaviour from controls.

“The normal way that birds forage during winter is when they’re hungry, they have a big breakfast and then during the day they forage to meet their energetic requirements”, said Dr Arnold in a video interview.

“Then before bedtime, it has a hearty supper and then it can survive a cold dark winter’s night. And that’s what our control birds did, as we expected.”

“But birds that had been exposed to environmentally-relevant concentrations of fluoxetine, they didn’t do that. They essentially snacked throughout the day and didn’t have a hearty breakfast, so their foraging routine was completely changed”, said Dr Arnold.

This seemingly minor change in behaviour can affect these birds’ survival in the wild. For example, birds can dramatically change their body mass in a short period of time to ensure that they have enough fat reserves to provide sufficient insulation and energy to survive periods without food. Dr Arnold went on to explain that birds that eat too much during the day are too heavy to escape predators.

Why care about wild starlings on Prozac?

Fluoxetine is not the only pharmaceutical, nor is it the only antidepressant, that is present in the environment at detectable levels. Further, this gallimaufry of environmental pharmaceuticals and their active metabolites interact with each other in unknown ways, potentially creating a dangerous brew that is more potent than any individual contaminant due to additive or synergistic interactions. These interactions could lead to powerful or detrimental effects in wildlife -- and indeed, in humans, too.

For these reasons, it is important that additional research be done to determine the identity and extent to which pharmaceuticals accumulate in the tissues of animals, how those animals fit into the food chain and how this bioaccumulation can impact behaviour and overall health in wildlife and people.

Sources:

Tom G. Bean, Alistair B. A. Boxall, Julie Lane, Katherine A. Herborn, Stéphane Pietravalle and Kathryn E. Arnold (2014). Behavioural and physiological responses of birds to environmentally relevant concentrations of an antidepressant, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369 (1656) 20130575-20130575. doi:10.1098/rstb.2013.0575 [₤]

Also cited:

Molly J. Crockett, Jenifer Z. Siegel, Zeb Kurth-Nelson, Olga T. Ousdal, Giles Story, Carolyn Frieband, Johanna M. Grosse-Rueskamp, Peter Dayan, Raymond J. Dolan (2015). Dissociable Effects of Serotonin and Dopamine on the Valuation of Harm in Moral Decision Making, Current Biology, published online ahead of print on 2 July 2015. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2015.05.021 (OA)

Shai Markman, Carsten T. Müller, David Pascoe, Alistair Dawson, Katherine L. Buchanan (2011). Pollutants affect development in nestling starlings, Sturnus vulgaris, Journal of Applied Ecology, 48 (2), 391–397. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2664.2010.01931.x (OA)

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This piece has been edited and reformatted from the original.

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Grrlscientist can be found on on her eponymous Guardian blog, and she's quite active on twitter: @GrrlScientist.

“Words in leather and wood”. Bookshelves in the “Long Room” at the old Trinity College Library in Dublin.
Image: Nic McPhee from Morris, MN, USA. 2007. (Creative Commons.)

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.

Compiled by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, the Birdbooker Report is a weekly report that has been published online for years, listing the wide variety of nature, natural history, ecology, animal behaviour, science and history books that have been newly released or republished in North America and in the UK. The books listed here were received by Ian during the previous week, courtesy of various publishing houses.

New and Recent Titles:

.

1. Abbott, John C. Dragonflies of Texas: A Field Guide. 2015. University of Texas Press. Paperback: 448 pages. Price: $27.95 U.S. [Amazon UK paperback; Amazon US paperback].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: Dragonflies and damselflies (together known as Odonata) are among the most remarkably distinctive insects in their appearance and biology, and they have become some of the most popular creatures sought by avocational naturalists. Texas hosts 160 species of dragonflies, nearly half of the 327 species known in North America, making the state a particularly good place to observe dragonflies in their natural habitats.
   Dragonflies of Texas is the definitive field guide to these insects. It covers all 160 species with in situ photographs and detailed anatomical images as needed. Each species is given a two-page spread that includes photographs of both sexes and known variations when possible, key features, a distribution map, identification, discussion of similar species, status in Texas, habitat, seasonality, and general comments. Many of the groups also have comparative plates that show anatomically distinctive characteristics. In addition to the species accounts, John Abbott discusses dragonfly anatomy, life history, conservation, names, and photography. He also provides information on species that may eventually be discovered in Texas, state and global conservation rankings, seasonality of all species in chronological order, and additional resources and publications on the identification of dragonflies.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: A MUST have for anyone with an interest in the dragonflies of Texas!

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2. Hibbitts, Troy and Toby. Texas Lizards: A Field Guide. 2015. University of Texas Press. Paperback: 333 pages. Price: $24.95 U.S. [Amazon UK paperback; Amazon US paperback/Kindle].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: “Texas offers the opportunity to observe lizard diversity like no other part of the country,” writes Laurie J. Vitt in the foreword to Texas Lizards. From the moist eastern Piney Woods to the western deserts, lizards can be found in every part of Texas. The state has forty-five native and six naturalized species of lizards, almost half of the 115 species that live in the continental United States. Yet Texas lizards have not received full coverage in regional field guides, and no other guide dedicated solely to the state’s lizards has ever been published.
   Texas Lizards is a complete identification guide to all fifty-one native and established exotic lizard species. It offers detailed species accounts, range maps, and excellent color photographs (including regional, gender, and age variations for many species) to aid field identification. The authors, two of the state’s most knowledgeable herpetologists, open the book with a broad overview of lizard natural history, conservation biology, observation, and captive maintenance before providing a key to Texas lizards and accounts of the various lizard families and species. Appendices list species of questionable occurrence in Texas and nonestablished exotic species. Informational resources on Texas lizards, a map of Texas counties, a glossary, a bibliography, and indexes of common and scientific names round out the volume.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: A MUST have for anyone with an interest in the lizards of Texas!

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3. Lister-Kaye, John. Gods of the Morning: A Bird's-Eye View of a Changing World. 2015. Pegasus Books. Hardbound: 294 pages. Price: $26.95 U.S. [Amazon UK hardcover; Amazon US hardcover].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: A celebration of birds that reflects a year in the wild, revealing how these amazing creatures embody our changing world, by one of Britain's foremost naturalists.
   Gods of the Morning follows the year through the turning of the seasons at Aigas, the Highlands estate John Lister-Kaye has transformed into a world-renowned wildlife center. John's affection, wisdom and lyricism sings off every page, bringing the natural world around him to life: from the rookery filled with twenty-nine nests and distinct bird calls to descriptions of the winter morning light, from the wood mice and the squirrels preparing for winter to tracking a fox's path through the snow. In particular it brings John's lifelong love of birds—his gods of the morning—to the fore.
   In the Highland glens, bird numbers plummet as their food supplies—natural fruits and every kind of creeping, crawling, slithering or flying bug—begin to disappear. Not just the swallows and house martins have vanished from round the houses. Gone are the insect snatching wheatears, whinchats and stonechats from the hills, and redstarts and flycatchers have fled the woods. Pied wagtails no longer flicker across the lawns and sandpipers and grey wagtails have deserted the river banks. Farmland and hedgerow species have vanished in the night: the linnets, yellowhammers, and all the warblers have decamped from the thickets.
   By the first frosts the hills will have emptied down to a few hardy stalwarts such as the golden eagles, the raven and the irrepressible hooded crows. Silence settles across the land. The few species that are left frequent a changed world. Soon only the buzzards and wood pigeons will hang on in the woods and the coniferous forests will be host to flocks of chaffinches, tits, siskins, and crossbills passing through.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: If you enjoyed the author's other books you should enjoy this one.

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This is a guest piece written by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen. Ian is an avid book collector who is especially well-known to the publishing world. He collects newly-published books about nature, animals and birds, science, and history, and he also collects children's books on these topics. Ian writes brief synopses about these books on his website, The Birdbooker Report.

Say you’re one of those gamer prodigies who’s whisked off to fight a glorious war in which your mad skills are the key to Saving the World. What happens when the war is over? What happens when you get shipped home with a headful of PTSD? Everything you enjoyed in your old life now reminds you of ordering good men to their deaths.

When you were a child on Earth, you fled all your troubles by escaping into games of war. Then the war found you.

What do you do when you can’t escape any longer?

(Title based on Wilfred Owen.)

Our protagonist is Alix, a young trans woman trying to make it in the field of video-game journalism. Tired of regurgitating press releases for ultimately forgettable AAA titles, she decides to delve into the mystery of Starfighter, a science-fiction action-adventure game that appeared on the net seemingly from nowhere. Nobody knows who wrote the code or even the IRL identities of the people who first noticed it, but once it caught a little attention, its popularity snowballed. Alix, a fiend at Starfighter herself, gets a lead on where it might have come from. The movie opens with her on her way to a big SF/gaming convention in some large city. At the convention, she meets a fellow we’ll call Greg, because he asked for it. Greg knows Starfighter amazingly well, not just its game mechanics and the design of its fictional world, but the details of its code, too. They joke around about Phillips-head sonic screwdrivers, reversing the polarity on the main deflector dish and so on.

Alix and Greg are walking back to the convention after dinner with some champion Starfighter players, when some ominous guys who have been skulking about the shadows burst out and instigate a fight scene. Greg snaps into action and fights them off, using martial-arts moves that escalate until they really should be impossible without wire work. Just when the ominous guys have been roundly trounced, their reinforcements arrive, and they run over Alix with a Humvee. Fade to white.

Alix awakens, floating in microgravity, wearing a jumpsuit uniform over skin that feels a bit too much like plastic.

Greg and others now exposit the backstory, though for reasons that are soon apparent, Alix and we have learned a lot of it already. Thousands of centuries ago, a species of interstellar travelers—let’s call them the Krell—colonized our solar system. They took specimens from Earth and performed genetic experiments to “uplift” them, creating sentient forms of various Earth animals. (Hence, we have an excuse for humanoid aliens.) The Krell civilization reached amazing heights of sophistication and technological power, but then they all died. Nobody knows exactly how it happened, but what they do know does not make for pleasant dreams.

The factions descended from the Uplifted species are now at war. They depend upon Krell technology, which operates by thought-wave control. Only a few individuals can operate Krell machines without going mad, and if that failure mode sneaks up on you, it has the unfortunate tendency to unleash monsters from the Id. Greg is one of the Grandmasters, the “lucky” specialists who can coax the Krell technology to perform amazing feats: relativistic space travel, transferring minds between bodies and so forth.

(This is where I began, actually, with the question of why the Star League couldn’t just make Beta Units to serve as Starfighters. Of course, the original movie’s answer is because comic relief, but why not invent a deeper explanation? In Starfighter 2015, the limiting factor is the fact that each time a Grandmaster pulls off something as elaborate as initializing an AI, they risk a Monsters from the Id incident. And the last time a Grandmaster tried copying themselves, a Kuiper-belt object the size of New Jersey was pulverized.)

Alix is rather flummoxed by the discovery that, on top of everything else—a new body, based on her mental self-image—the backstory to Starfighter is all real. An ancient taboo prevents the different factions from interfering with Earth overtly, but that’s going to change. Greg’s faction, the Star League, want an alliance with Earth, and they created the game to test how Earthpeople would react to the scenario of interplanetary war. On the other hand, the renegade Xurian cult wants to invade Earth and annihilate most of it. The ominous guys who tried to kill them were Xurian agents investigating the Star League presence and gathering intelligence for the upcoming invasion. Greg saved Alix’s life by transferring her mind-patterns into an artificial body.

One of the other Grandmasters sells out the Star League, betraying their secret HQ to the Xurian cult. A surprise attack breaches the Star League defenses, and the Xurian admiral intercepts Greg and Alix as they try to flee to Greg’s spaceship. “So, this is what you risked your sanity for, Grandmaster? This is your opus—giving another day of life to a reject from Terran society? Oh, yes, my agents were watching you two make idle chatter long before the Grandmaster here noticed their presence.”

The only thing which saves Alix and a handful of others is that the traitor gets drunk on the thrill of the act… and ravenous energy-beings are not very nice pets.

Alix and a Starfighter escape in an experimental spacecraft, but Greg is incapacitated and captured. With the Star League out of the equation, the Xurians launch their invasion of Earth.

The remaining forces that the Xurians have not yet stomped out gather to try and stop them. Starfighters from the final League squadron meet the Xurian armada in Earth orbit. The battle does not go well, and the Xurians are basically mopping up when Alix arrives. The experimental ship is limping on half power because they lack a Grandmaster to get its systems fully operational. They fight gamely, but the Xurian ships are just too numerous.

The pilot and Alix are both wounded. She has lost the use of one hand, and internal working fluids are spilling out of severed hydraulic lines. The pilot is unconscious—she doesn’t know much about his species, but she’s pretty sure he’s dying. The Xurian admiral taunts her over the comm link:

“Trying to make a noble last stand? Why are you fighting to save a world which rejected you?”

Alix undoes her flight harness and floats about the ship, trying to find something, anything that still works.

“The Star League saw you as a gear in a machine. Humans see you as a freak—at best, an object of pity.”

One control panel is still glowing. It operates the Death Blossom, the new experimental weapon based on Krell technology.

“We’re the winners today, but we don’t even have to write you out of history. Your own kind have already done that.”

Pressing her bleeding wound closed with her damaged arm, Alix begins to follow the steps of the procedure she saw Greg use to connect to a Krell machine.

“Your ship is in a decaying orbit. Either our fighters will blow you out of space, or you’ll burn up in the atmosphere of the planet you couldn’t save.”

Telltale indicators on the control panel begin to switch on.

“You’re a copy of a memory of a reject. In your last minute of life, can you even say … who you are?”

On the bridge of the Xurian command ship, Greg is trapped in a forcefield web. He looks like he’s not long for this life, but his eyes focus with renewed alertness when, at last, a reply crackles over the comm link:

“I… am… the last Starfighter.”

Interlocking circles of light encompass the drifting Star League ship. For a moment, everything is calm.

And then, bursts of plasma separate from the glowing rings, as if thrown off by centrifugal force. They cross the distance to the Xurian command ship before anyone can react.

The first hit overloads the Xurian deflector shields. The second, a heartbeat later, breaches the hull. The Xurian dreadnoughts try to re-aim their weapons from the planet below to the tiny, deadly ship in their midst, but long before they can do so, they are powerless, venting oxygen and nitrogen and crewmembers into space.

Power goes out on the Xurian command bridge. The admiral stumbles amid the sparks and the flames towards his personal escape pod—and then spills into midair as the artificial gravity fails. As he fumbles for a handhold, he sees Greg sailing past him. Greg reaches the escape pod first. The hatch, which should not open for anyone but the admiral, opens for the Grandmaster. The admiral gains hold of a railing and hurls himself through the air at Greg, only to slam into the ceiling as the gravity turns back on, upside-down.

“Reverse the polarity,” Greg says to himself.

We cut to an outside shot. The escape pod launches away from the command ship just as a bolt from the Death Blossom cuts through it bow-to-stern, and the entire massive structure disintegrates.

The Xurian fleet is annihilated, and the Death Blossom switches off, the rings of energy vanishing as quickly as they came.

Inside her ship, Alix is floating, her eyes open but unseeing. Cables link interface ports on the back of her neck to the Death Blossom control panel. Greg’s voice comes over the comm link: “Alix? Alix? Can you hear me?” Fade to white.

We return for the epilogue. Alix, Greg and the Starfighter pilot are sharing coffee at a bistro beside a park. Various indications make it plain that several years have passed. While the three heroes talk, the camera pulls back, showing children at play in the park. Our viewpoint continues to pull back and up, revealing that the people enjoying the park hail from multiple species, both Terran and Uplifted. The camera tracks back in between the girders of a geodesic dome, revealing that the park occupies the center of a colony on an alien world.

Roll credits!

“Words in leather and wood”. Bookshelves in the “Long Room” at the old Trinity College Library in Dublin.
Image: Nic McPhee from Morris, MN, USA. 2007. (Creative Commons.)

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.

Compiled by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, the Birdbooker Report is a weekly report that has been published online for years, listing the wide variety of nature, natural history, ecology, animal behaviour, science and history books that have been newly released or republished in North America and in the UK. The books listed here were received by Ian during the previous week, courtesy of various publishing houses.

New and Recent Titles:

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1. Carson, Robert (editor). Many Waters: Natural History of the Walla Walla Valley and Vicinity. 2015. Keokee Books. Paperback: 192 pages. Price: $35.00 U.S.
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: Many Waters is a testament to the beauty of an extraordinary place. From the Blue Mountains to the Columbia River, southeastern Washington and northeastern Oregon, in particular the Walla Walla Valley, is a remarkable region, one that American Indians called Wallah Wallah, or Many Waters. And for good reason. It's always been a bountiful place with its rich soils and streams teeming with fish.
   Included are more than 40 paintings by noted Northwest landscape artist Leslie Cain to illustrate the Walla Walla River, Mill Creek and the Touchet River as they make their way from the Blue Mountains through fertile valleys to the mighty Columbia River. Katrina Roberts and Janice King contributed six poems about the hills, farms, forests, flowers, water and rocks of the area. Among the short essays are one on fishing by Scott Elliott and another by Kevin Pogue on wine terroir. Geography and geologic history are followed by chapters on past and present animals of southeastern Washington and adjacent Oregon. Images by Duane Scroggins and 15 more photographers illustrate the magnificent landscapes, beautiful flowers, and interesting birds and mammals of the Walla Walla Valley and vicinity.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: A must have for anyone with an interest in the natural history of the region.

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2. Pratchett, Terry and Stephen Baxter. The Long Utopia: A Novel. 2015. Harper. Hardbound: 355 pages. Price: $26.99 U.S. [Amazon UK hardcover/paperback/audio download/mp3 CD; Amazon US hardcover/paperback/Kindle/audio download/mp3 CD].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: It is the middle of the twenty-first century.
   After the cataclysmic upheavals of Step Day and the Yellowstone eruption, humanity is spreading farther into the Long Earth. Society, on a battered Datum Earth and beyond, continues to evolve.
   And new challenges emerge.
   Now an elderly and cantankerous AI, Lobsang is living with Agnes in an exotic, far-distant world. He's determined to lead a normal life in New Springfield -- they even adopt a child. But there are rumors, strange sightings in the sky. On this world, something isn't right. . . .
   Millions of steps away -- learning about a hidden family history and the father he never knew -- Joshua receives an urgent summons from New Springfield.
   Lobsang has come to understand that what has blighted his Earth is also a threat to all the worlds of the Long Earth. Countering this threat will require the combined efforts of humankind, machine, and the super-intelligent Next. And some must make the ultimate sacrifice. . . .
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: Fans of the Long Earth series should enjoy this book.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

This is a guest piece written by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen. Ian is an avid book collector who is especially well-known to the publishing world. He collects newly-published books about nature, animals and birds, science, and history, and he also collects children's books on these topics. Ian writes brief synopses about these books on his website, The Birdbooker Report.

A certain mindset skims a bit of cyberpunk fiction and thinks the future will be amazing, because Ruby-coding skills will clearly translate to proficiency with katanas. You know, katanas.

A certain mindset learns a little about the Victorian era and is instantly off in a fantasy of brass-goggled Gentlemen Aviators, at once dapper and wind-swept, tending the Tesla apparatus on their rigid airship. All art in the genre carries the tacit disclaimer in its caption, “(Not pictured: cholera.)” In the designation steampunk, the -punk has nothing to do with anarchy (in the UK or elsewhere), the suffix having been conventionalized into a mere signifier of anachronism. A steampunk condo development promises units for the reasonable price of 2 to 7.5 million dollars apiece.

[To be fair, Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990), which is in some part responsible for the whole wibbly-wobbly steamery-punkery, did spend some of its time with the run-down and the passed-over. It also, I’m guessing unintentionally, underscored the incoherence of the premise, when in its final pages, Ada Lovelace describes a fanciful notion of the late Charles Babbage, whose fictional version dreamed of doing computation with electricity. The fictional Babbage’s never-implemented plan relied on such hypothetical devices as resistors and capacitors. The book’s plot begins in 1855; the Leyden jar was invented 110 years earlier. Carl Friedrich Gauss built a working telegraph years before the historical Babbage even designed his Analytical Engine. But our aesthetic can’t allow that, of course.]

It is against this background that we should read “Silicon Valley is a Science Fictional Utopia,” a recent piece in Model View Culture. I have enjoyed and appreciated MVC quite a bit in the past few months, which is why I was rather flummoxed to find a statement in that essay that just refused to parse. The overall thesis sounds roughly right to me, but not all the examples seem to fit as written. Here’s the part that jumped out at me:

Awesome things, and great ideas. This is what SF is all about.

This is also the drive behind Silicon Valley culture. It’s about a better future through human industry, like the Cyberpunks.

It’s a better future through ingenuity, risk-taking, and a rock-solid belief that technology is humanity’s best chance at a better future.

Cyberpunk—cyberpunk!—is “about a better future through human industry”?

Cyberpunk, the genre in which multinationals own everything and humans have to fight over what’s left; cyberpunk, which saw the Campbellian heroes of the Golden Age, staring at the stars with wonder and ambition, and said, “Fuck you, you get rain.” A cyberpunk future is a prosthetic heel grinding into a human face, if not forever, at least until the owner of the heel gets bored. The idea that success flows to the privileged was wired into the genre from the beginning. Technology can be incorporated into our bodies, but never trusted. “Progress” in the Sprawl means moving a little hot RAM. The Los Angeles of the Tyrell Corporation is no Utopia, and it never pretended to be.

But after a couple decades of the genre being reduced to ZOMG trenchcoats and mirrorshades, perhaps it’s not so surprising that looking back at the stories themselves can be a bit of a shock. It’s so easy to geek out over the superficial trappings, and so much harder to see ourselves complicit in the systems that the stories railed against.

In Blade Runner, Captain Bryant tells Deckard, “If you’re not cop, you’re little people.” Escaping into a story about being the cop has a much more obvious appeal than escaping into one about being the little people. As a friend of mine once noted, nobody reads Atlas Shrugged and says, “Why, I must be one of the unproductive slobs who are everything that is wrong with humanity.”

To say that cyberpunk fiction was “about a better future through human industry” is absurd; to say that of the aesthetic, of “cyberpunk” recoined by back-formation from “steampunk,” is rather less so.

Among the other SF stories mentioned in the MVC piece is one that I’ve thought a fair bit about: Asimov’s The Naked Sun (1957). This novel is, in spirit, an Agatha Christie yarn in space. A man is bludgeoned to death at his isolated country estate. His wife discovers the body. The murder weapon is missing. A detective comes from the big city to investigate, and everyone the detective meets had a motive to kill the victim. At the climax, the detective gathers all the principals to listen as he solves the crime.

Asimov greatly admired Christie and the “cozy mystery” genre, and I don’t doubt that this structure was intentional. The unintended consequence has to do with another novel published in 1957: in building the setting for his perfect murder, Asimov created Galt’s Gulch—with the crucial difference that Asimov’s version has the robot labor force necessary to keep everyone from dying in a couple weeks.

The planet Solaria was settled by wealthy people who wished to avoid the regulations of their home planet. Personal autonomy is sacrosanct. On Solaria, everyone is either the best or the only practitioner of a trade.

And, incidentally, their society is stagnant and moribund. Once something goes wrong, they have to call a cop from New York to fix it. At the end, the detective spells out what he has learned:

Baley said, “The Solarians have given up something mankind has had for a million years; something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything; because it’s something that made everything else possible.”

“I don’t want to guess, Baley. What is it?”

“The tribe, sir. Cooperation between individuals. Solaria has given it up entirely. It is a world of isolated individuals and the planet’s only sociologist is delighted that this is so. That sociologist, by the way, never heard of sociomathematics, because he is inventing his own science. There is no one to teach him, no one to help him, no one to think of something that he himself might miss. The only science that really flourishes on Solaria is robotics and there are only a handful of men involved in that, and when it came to an analysis of the interaction of robots and men, they had to call in an Earthman to help. […] Without the interplay of human against human, the chief interest in life is gone; most of the intellectual values are gone; most of the reason for living is gone. […]”

The final message is that Earth and Solaria are both stagnating, in mirror-image ways. But more to the point is that vintage male-as-default language: “a handful of men,” “robots and men,” “call in an Earthman.” Aren’t we glad that casual sexism is a thing of the past? There’s more that one could dissect in that scene, including some talk of the evils of “ectogenesis,” a suggestion that gestating fetuses anywhere other than women’s bodies is dehumanizing. One really ought to unpack that at greater length, but for now, let’s step back and consider the novel more broadly. The “accusing parlor” scene, in which Baley presents the solution to the mystery, contains two women and five men, along with one robot, who is coded male in both the social and technological senses of the word. Three other male characters appear at various points, not counting the murder victim and assorted robots, all of whom are treated as male. Two women out of eleven characters—for this writer and that era, that’s practically Madoka Magica!

Earlier, we touched on how self-congratulation can enter the act of reading science fiction. There’s another angle to that: When one grows up reading books full of robots, it’s easy to say, “I’m willing to bestow my empathy upon artificial intelligences. I can think of these robot characters as human, in the ways that matter. Surely, then, from my enlightened perspective, the petty differences among flesh-and-blood humans must shrink to insignificance!” With this kind of thinking, it is simple to convince oneself of one’s own freedom from bias. Even though the books which inculcated this enlightened philosophy are replete with biases themselves!

Likewise: The Federation in Star Trek is largely a meritocracy. For the most part, promotions in Starfleet seem to happen on the basis of professional competence. I like that. Civilization triumphing, day by day, over its own worse elements—that’s a good story. But there’s a flipside. “I grew up watching Star Trek, where progress is based on merit,” I say to myself, “and so I learned to judge people fairly. Therefore, when I evaluate a person’s potential as a scientist or as a programmer, I will do so on their merit alone. Any suggestion that I might not is an insult against my character, made by someone who doesn’t understand people like me.” Psychology is probably seldom as straight a line as that, but at the very least, it’s a mental trap we should look out for. The more admirable our fiction makes our ideals sound, and the more we identify ourselves as devotees of that fiction, the harder it is to admit when we fail to live up to those standards.

“Words in leather and wood”. Bookshelves in the “Long Room” at the old Trinity College Library in Dublin.
Image: Nic McPhee from Morris, MN, USA. 2007. (Creative Commons.)

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.

Compiled by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, the Birdbooker Report is a weekly report that has been published online for years, listing the wide variety of nature, natural history, ecology, animal behaviour, science and history books that have been newly released or republished in North America and in the UK. The books listed here were received by Ian during the previous week, courtesy of various publishing houses.

New and Recent Titles:

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1. Howell, Steve N. G. & Brian L. Sullivan. Offshore Sea Life ID Guide: West Coast. 2015. Princeton University Press. Paperback: 56 pages. Price: $14.95 U.S. [Amazon UK paperback/Kindle UK; Amazon US paperback/Kindle].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: Two-thirds of our planet lies out of sight of land, just offshore beyond the horizon. What wildlife might you find out there? And how might you identify what you see? This Offshore Sea Life ID Guide, designed for quick use on day trips off the West Coast, helps you put a name to what you see, from whales and dolphins to albatrosses, turtles, and even flyingfish. Carefully crafted color plates show species as they typically appear at sea, and expert text highlights identification features. This user-friendly field guide is essential for anyone going out on a whale-watching or birding trip, and provides a handy gateway to the wonders of the ocean.
   • First state-of-the-art pocket guide to offshore sea life
   • Over 300 photos used to create composite plates
   • Includes whales, dolphins, sea lions, birds, sharks, turtles, flyingfish, and more
   • Accessible and informative text reveals what to look for
   • Great for beginners and experts alike

   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: A well illustrated introduction to the marine life found off the West Coast.

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2. Stephenson, Neal. Seveneves: A Novel. 2015. William Morrow. Hardbound: 867 pages. Price: $35.00 U.S. [Amazon UK hardcover/paperback/Kindle UK/audio download/mp3 CD; Amazon US hardcover/paperback/Kindle/audio download/mp3 CD].
   PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon comes an exciting and thought-provoking science fiction epic -- a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years.
   What would happen if the world were ending?
   A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space.
   But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain ...
   Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown . . . to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth.
   A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.
   IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: Fans of the author's other works should enjoy this book.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

This is a guest piece written by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen. Ian is an avid book collector who is especially well-known to the publishing world. He collects newly-published books about nature, animals and birds, science, and history, and he also collects children's books on these topics. Ian writes brief synopses about these books on his website, The Birdbooker Report.

Then they came for the titled gentry, and I did not speak out, because I ride the bus.

Then they came for the millionaires, and I did not speak out, because I don’t have dental coverage.

Then they came for the bestselling authors, and I did not speak out, because I write fanfiction on my blog.

Then they came for the people with over a million Twitter followers, and I did not speak out, because I have 973.

Then they started to wonder what good it did to “come for” these people, since everyone they came for was still rich and powerful.

Then I spoke out, because, honestly… Phrasing!

Except it’s not really that simple. There’s a reason it takes at least seven years to churn out a primary care doctor. There’s a reason your eyes glaze over when you ask me how a pill works and I launch into pathophysiology and pharmacology. I mean, I love this shit. I think about medicine all day and all night, and I’ve been thinking about it for about twenty years. When I see an interesting blurb in the news I hunt down the source to see if there is a new paper, a poster presentation, or maybe just a press release from a drug company. While you are stopping your life-saving medicine because your friend’s friend posted something on your facebook feed, I’m stopping by the hospital, reading up on new developments that will help my patients, and checking on lab results.

Google doesn’t care about your health. Some guy on facebook doesn’t care about what’s important to you. Dr. Oz doesn’t care if your depression is the reason you haven’t been taking your insulin.  If you are worried about something you read about a disease or a medicine, why do you automatically believe “some guy”? I’ve been doing this for a long, long time (and I’ll be paying off those loans for a long, long time). Come see me sometime.

Credit: Alan Vernon, CC BY 2.0 An adult Mexican jay, Aphelocoma wollweberi.

A previous study suggested that birds prefer seeds or nuts that are heavier or denser (Heinrich et al, 1997), but there has been very little research in the ensuing twenty years into which sensory cues are used by birds to make these important decisions.

To investigate, an international team of scientists from South Korea and Poland conducted field studies with Mexican jays, Aphelocoma wollweberi, to better understand how these food-caching birds identify nutritious seeds without first opening the shells to inspect the contents.

Mexican jays are largish songbirds that have a long blue tail, blue wings and head, a blue-grey mantle, a pale grey breast and underparts. Mexican jays are cooperative breeders where several subadults help tend the nestlings produced by the dominant pair in the group. Most of these helpers are offspring of the dominant pair from earlier years, but unrelated individuals will also join a group and help raise the young. Although Mexican jays are omnivorous, they do cache acorns and nuts throughout the late summer and autumn that serve as their primary food during the winter.

The research team studied nine such groups of Mexican jays living on the arid eastern slopes of the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona. These birds are individually colour-banded and have been trained to approach their own particular feeding arena in response to the sound of a police whistle. Sunflower seeds, acorns and peanuts are provided at each feeding arena that the birds can carry away and cache nearby.

Credit: Maciej Fuszara A Mexican jay, Aphelocoma wollweberi, appears to evaluate the content of a peanut by weighing it in its beak and by listening to the sound created when clicking its beak on the pod. (doi:10.1007/s10336-015-1193-6)

Three experiments tested how the birds evaluated peanuts

The team designed three tests that were repeated hundreds times (using tens of thousands of peanuts) in 2008, 2009 and 2012 in the nine jay groups, to evaluate the sorts of information that the birds might be learning by handling peanuts.

First, the team tested whether the birds could identify if similarly-sized peanuts contained nutmeats simply by looking at them. To do this, they gave the jays 20 similarly-sized peanuts, ten of which had been emptied of nutmeats and the pods superglued closed, whilst the other ten had been opened, the nutmeats glued to the pod interior to prevent rattling, and their pods superglued closed. In this experiment, the “normal” peanuts were 4 times heavier than the empty peanuts.

Second, the team tested whether the jays could distinguish between similarly-sized peanuts with a normal mass or with a slightly heavier mass than normal. To do this, they provided the birds with 20 similarly-sized peanuts that had been weighed. Ten of these peanuts were of “normal” mass and had been opened, the nutmeats glued to the pod interior and superglued closed, and ten peanuts were 1.6 times (1 gram) heavier than “normal”. The heavy peanuts were prepared by putting non-toxic clay inside each pod before they were superglued closed.

Third, the team tested whether the jays chose peanuts visually based solely on size. They provided the jays with 20 peanuts, ten of which were small, containing only a single nutmeat, and ten of which were large, containing three nutmeats. As before, the team opened each peanut, glued the nutmeat to the pod interior and superglued the pods closed. But before resealing the pods of the “triple” peanuts, they removed two of the three nutmeats so all peanuts, regardless of size, had similar masses.

Slow motion videos revealed how the birds handled peanuts

The team filmed the jays with a portable high-speed camera (250 frames per second, and occasionally 500 or 1000 fps) to capture minuscule details of how the birds handled peanuts. The team later analysed the films to identify whether (and by how much) the birds opened and closed their beaks when handling a peanut, and estimated the velocity of the beak when it closed on the peanut pod.

The videos revealed that the jays evaluated each peanut whilst handling it by using very fast beak and head movements. In the first and second experiments, the birds consistently chose heavier peanuts. When provided peanuts that were obviously different in size, as in the third experiment, the jays handled the larger peanuts before rejecting them and choosing the smaller peanuts.

“The jays figured out that the larger pods did not weigh as much as they should and the birds preferred the smaller pods, which weighed as expected for their size”, said the study’s co-author Elzbieta Fuszara, a biologist at the University of Warsaw, in a press release. She noted that, basically, the birds behaved as if they knew that “something is wrong” with the larger nuts.

Birds listen to sounds created by clicking their beaks on a peanut

Preliminary analyses of the data suggest an alternative explanation for how the jays decided which peanut to cache.

“Although the peanuts in our experiments had similar mass and look, they produce different sounds during handling”, write the authors in their paper. Further, despite gluing the nutmeats inside the pods to prevent them rattling, the birds created sounds by rapidly clicking their beaks on the peanuts.

“If heavy/full peanuts have consistently different auditory features than light/empty ones, then the Jays would also reject the artificially lighter triple peanuts, if they follow only the auditory cues without any cognitive processes about the match between weight and visual size.”

In short, birds choose the best seeds and nuts to store away for a snowy day by using the same sensory cues used by melon-thumping humans in a supermarket.

Source:

Piotr G. Jablonski, Sang-im Lee, Elzbieta Fuszara, Maciej Fuszara, Choongwon Jeong, Won Young Lee. (2015). Proximate mechanisms of detecting nut properties in a wild population of Mexican Jays (Aphelocoma ultramarina), Journal of Ornithology, published online in advance of print; doi:10.1007/s10336-015-1193-6 [₤]

Also cited:

Bernd Heinrich, Chris C Joerg, Sean S Madden, Emory W Sanders (1997). Black-capped Chickadees and Red-breasted Nuthatches “Weigh” Sunflower Seeds, The Auk, 114(2):298-299. doi:10.2307/4089173 [Open Access PDF]

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This piece has been edited and reformatted from the original.

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Grrlscientist can be found on on her eponymous Guardian blog, and she's quite active on twitter: @GrrlScientist.

CHAPTER TWO

The rest of the week passed in a wintry mix with few distinguishing features.

On Tuesday, Daria pulled on the boots which Quinn had chosen for her and stomped through the standing snow to the Sullivan Square bus terminal. She rode the 86 bus to Union Square, which as best she could recall, she had seen only twice during her undergraduate years. It was an enduring, salt-of-the-Earth intersection, just beginning to be licked by gentrification, still too far from the subway lines to lie within a college student’s mental horizons. Their junior year, Daria and Jane had joined a convoy to try a Mexican restaurant here, and now, standing under the leafless trees in the dented-triangle plaza, Daria could not remember which of the restaurants on this block it had been. She had passed through once again the year after that, riding in a friend’s car back home after a party which had not gone all that well, and both she and the driver had gotten completely disoriented on Somerville streets, which turned one-way at the least convenient times and were never parallel or perpendicular when you expected them to be.

On Wednesday, Daria carried lunch down for Jane. “Figured you could use sandwiches,” Daria said. Jane was at a drafting table, examining a 3D-printed part under a magnifying lamp. The part was ash gray and resembled an index finger from a gauntlet. “Grilled cheese. These ones are plain. Those have tomato, those have peppers and those have avocado.”

“Aisha! Giulio!” Jane called.

And so Daria met the other two organizers of Moonbase Illyria, who descended upon the sandwich tray in short order and speedily divided the portions which Jane had not claimed. Aisha had come up with Jane from Providence, and Giulio had more or less married into the business. At the moment, they both smelled of sawdust.

“You and Jane want to chill with us some time later?” asked Giulio, starting in on his second sandwich.

“We have the co-op expansion for Zelda Starring Zelda,” added Aisha, swallowing a chunk of her third. “It lets the second player play as Xena!”

Wednesday evening, Jane got Daria out of the house again, for a jaunt in the Moonbase pickup truck: a short trip up the highway to the nearest Tools ‘n Things. Here, too, Daria realized she had been lost before. This must surely have been the big-box store where Digamma House ventured for construction and repair supplies. Not being mechanically minded, Daria had let others deal with buying the things needed to keep the various parts of the house from falling apart. But once, a need for PVC pipe arose in midsummer, on a day when Daria had sampled the latest from their local ‘pothecary, and one “sure, I’ll tag along” later, she was wandering wide-eyed up the Lighting Fixtures aisle, her vision swimming and pulsing, her body tense to the point of trembling.

—Damn, I was reckless then.

“You say something?” Jane rooting through plastic trays of pipe fittings.

“Oh, just… wondering if this is where they keep the Copper Female Adapters.” It had been a long while since she had indulged in a live back-and-forth of “But I just met ‘er” jokes, as little as they took.

Jane volleyed back: “While we’re here, we should check the automotive department for a Rubber Inner Tube.”

Cheap and easy wordplay. Familiar territory. “I think we can fix the one you have at home if we find a can of Tire Sealer and Inflator.”

Jane chortled and Daria smiled gently, and the week slipped past. And soon enough, it was Saturday.

* * *

Daria padded out of her bedroom, scratching her ass through the thick gray fabric blend of her Forever Lazy. She crossed the den and aimed herself at the kitchen fridge, catching the clock on the stove as she passed.

—Twelve-forty in the afternoon? Shit. And how long was I actually out for? Five hours, maybe?

She rummaged through the cabinet of miscellaneous drink containers, pushed past a couple shotglasses stamped with college crests, retrieved a mug and poured herself an iced coffee from the pitcher she had left to brew in the fridge in the small hours of the previous morning. With the drink clenched between her hands, she shambled back through the den and into the gallery.

Out the gallery windows, a featureless slate of sky, and the last flakes of a snowfall drifting down to mingle with the bits of secondary snow blown off the roof by an intermittent wind.

Jane had moved a new sculpture up from the workshop, a flowering metal thing, all petals and chrome. Daria drained her coffee and walked around the sculpture. One of the bits was a crisply clear magnifying mirror, and there, enshrined in the middle of a jubilant blossom:

“A hair. Growing on my nose.”

Daria recalled, vaguely, that she had a Swiss Army knife in one of the pockets of her backpack, and that she might not have lost the tweezers from it. She plodded back into her room, dug through pens and a spare eyeglass case and a tube of store-brand bacitracin, and found that the tweezers were missing after all.

—Where did I see… Kitchen. One of the utensil drawers. Still in blister pack—Jane must have bought in a sweep of household stuff.

Tweezers in hand, she shuffled back to the sculpture.

Twisting her nose to the side with her left hand, she took the tweezers in her right and sought out the hair amid the pores. It came loose with a quick, painless pull. Staring at the quabby white dot on the formerly buried end:

“Well, Jane always was the pretty one.”

She looked from the original hair to its magnified image.

“I guess I should be glad it isn’t gray.”

She looked over the sculpture to the window beyond and stared without focusing.

“Thirty-mumble years old,” she said, “jobless except for a gig complaining on the Internet four times a month. Single. A few failures and fizzles in college and after. A void for years. Then a fella I thought would be the one who made all the hurt not matter, and he goes behind my back to play Stern CEO and Bashful Secretary. Leaving me with… The relationship I thought actually worked… doesn’t even feel like it counts any longer. And I have nothing to look back on except a history of… I’m short and plain and look like a spinster librarian from Central Casting, and I can hardly remember the last time before him that I attracted anyone, and the worst part is that I care. For the first time in my life, I wish I could just have a… a… a goddamn one-night stand, just to convince myself it’s not all over. But all I am is a withdrawn, depleted bookworm, gone past frumpy into pure frump, and even worse, I care. I can’t appeal to anyone, I couldn’t please anyone, which means I don’t deserve anyone and I want to… And I hate myself for it.”

“Damn, Dariatron,” Jane said, and Daria nearly dropped the tweezers.

Jane was standing in the stairwell door. —How deep had my funk been that I hadn’t even heard her come in, dammit?

“Sorry,” Daria said. “Just, you know, thinking. Very loudly.”

“Leave something for the rest of us to tear down, won’t you?” There was a twitch of an attempted smile at one corner of Jane’s mouth, but much more worry in her eyes. She crossed the gallery and peremptorily wrapped her arms around Daria.

“That bad, huh?” Jane whispered.

“I feel… weak,” Daria said.

“Here, let’s get you over to the sofa and you can sit down.”

“Not weak like that, I mean…” Come to think of it, though, she did not feel all that steady on her feet. She let Jane lead her back into the den.

“Weak like you should be above all this?”

She sat Daria in the center of the sofa and took the cushion beside her.

“I thought… I mean…” Daria ran her tongue over her dry lips and tried to speak again. “I spent years at Bromwell, just working, lonely sometimes, not thinking of myself as… as all that great a catch, but not feeling like I was a horrible person on account of it. I was just being good at what I was good at. And now. And now, there’s this whole side of my life, this whole side of the human experience, where I’m a… A complete fuck-up.”

Jane said, softly, “You had a boyfriend go bad on you. It’s not your fault.”

Daria shut her eyes. “And before that? I’d feel a little more optimistic about being able to move on if I had anything other than a history of failure to look back on.”

“Is that really how you see that side of your life?”

“Why shouldn’t I? Big failures, little failures. Boys who stopped being into me once they got to know me. Days when it hurt, days when I didn’t care. God, what I’d give now for a stretch of days when I don’t care.”

“I can see how that’d work,” Jane said. “So… You going to try keeping yourself busy again?”

Daria snorted. “Want to see how my job search is going?” She leaned forward, snagged her Encom tablet from the coffee table and handed it to Jane.

“Well,” said Jane, “you’ve been searching the Raft alumni site for job postings. That looks like a good beginning. And, oh look, five open tabs of fanfiction. I’d say you’re making progress.”

“Fantastic progress. Couldn’t be better.”

“What’s this, Harry Potter and the Masque of the Red Death? One of yours?”

“I wish.”

“And… Is this really A Study in Emerald redone with the characters from Sherlock?”

“It’s got a certain swing.”

Jane had bought, Daria recalled, the Absolute edition of A Study in Emerald when it came out: a great, thick volume, bound like a Bible, sturdy enough to brain an obnoxious ex-boyfriend. Just about the only product of the late-’80s turn to Grim, Dark and Serious comic books which held up in the present century, and one of the few stories called “steampunk” which seemed to care about the “punk.” No gentlemen adventurers having their dashing escapades in Her Majesty’s Royal Airship Navy—in its twisted, layering story of Holmes and Watson gone antihero to fight the Lovecraftian horrors which had subjugated humankind, the viewpoint and the sympathy were always with the preterite, with the face under the heel. Young women had been getting tattoos of Holmes and Irène Norton and Elsie Patrick for twenty years.

Jane scrolled text for a moment. “Heh. You might get a kick out of—oh, shit, is that today? Shit. Daria, I totally spaced on telling you—”

“Wha?”

“Some people are coming over this evening. We’re all getting ready for a science-fiction convention in town next weekend. You know, prepping our cosplay stuff. I’ve got a merchant booth, and we’re gonna try offloading some old movie props, and—shit. I should have given you more advance warning.”

“To do what, hide in my room while there are, shudder, other people?” Daria shrugged her right shoulder. “Eh. Had to happen some time. I’ll keep myself entertained in my room. What with forty more chapters of Harry Potter and the Masque of the Red Death to read, and all.”

“Daria, I’m so, so sorry.”

—Jeez. I haven’t had a crowd-induced panic episode in weeks and weeks.

“It’s OK.”

—And even that was understandable. I mean, I was within a fifty-meter radius of a retail establishment in the month of December. What could I have been thinking?

“Well…” Jane took both of Daria’s hands in her own. “Maybe… tomorrow we could go and do something together?”

Daria sighed and let her eyes fall shut. She waited for the tide of memory to ebb. Still years away, she asked, “What’s around here for me to do?”

A new voice: “Well, you could take a tour of a chocolate factory.”

Daria lurched back into the present to face a visitor from the past.

“Tom? Tom Sloane!”

—And so it was, true to life: coated and bescarfed against the January afternoon, pale under the wind-bite blush, an honest twinkle in one of those sea-green eyes—and sporting an Abe Lincoln beard?

Daria swung her feet off the couch and wobbled to a standing position. Tom set down the canvas shopping bags he held in both hands and shrugged a duffel carry-all from his back to the floor. They met midway, beside the coffee table, and lightly hugged.

“Fancy seeing you here,” Daria said.

“Likewise.”

“Hiiiiii!” A new voice, over the zrrr of a zipper and the squeak of a wet boot being unfooted, toe of one foot against the heel of the other. “Jane, I hope it’s OK that we’re early. Snookums here decided to drive up last night instead of this morning, and we—” The patter of socks against the gallery hardwood. “Oh, hello.”

She came around the corner through the accordion door, nodding and waving to Jane, smiling in general greeting, depositing the bags she carried beside those which Tom had brought.

“Daria, this is Saavik,” Tom said. “Saavik, Daria.”

“Like in the better Star Trek movies?” Daria asked.

—Dammit. You must get that a lot. Probably with comparable frequency as, exempla gratia, half-Japanese girls, do it to me every time.

“Daria… Morgendorffer?” she asked, quickly looking from Daria to Tom and back again. “I love your blog!” She made widening gestures with her hands at eye level, laying out an invisible headline. “`How many years before your romance dies? Love Actuarily, next on #SickSadWorld!'” She dropped her hands to her sides, then quickly reached one up again to shake Daria’s. “It’s. Wow. Melody Glass is wicked. Oh, and your book—Tom bought me your book for my last birthday!”

“That explains the jubilant letter I got from my publisher,” Daria said. She squeezed Saavik’s hand and then released it.

Saavik wore a pinstripe vest over her blouse, a carnation in one lapel and a deeply violet silk tie knotted Full Windsor. The effect was, Daria judged, as if she had raided a museum hall devoted to a bygone era’s notions of upstanding masculinity and made it all her own.

“We came over to get ready for Aletheia,” she said. “Are you visiting?”

Daria felt very underdressed and very unshowered.

“She lives here now,” Jane said. She waved towards Daria’s room. “Can I offer you two anything?”

“Oh, right,” Tom said. “Aisha and Giulio bought a house.” He was peeling out of his coat and undoing his scarf.

“Let me take those for you,” Daria offered.

“Oh, thanks. Um, coffee?”

“Daria made a pot of cold-brew,” Jane said, beelining to the kitchen. “And a cake. And another cake. And muffins.”

“Oooh,” went Saavik.

Daria listened to Jane on her way to the coat-hooks. “This cake is chocolate with a hint of orange. That one is pear. And the muffins are—Daria! Are these cranberry or cran-apple?”

“Those? Pomegranate,” Daria called back.

She returned to the kitchen to find Jane distributing slices of cake. “Coffee for you both?” Jane asked.

“Mind if I fix myself a hot chocolate?” Saavik shook, lightly, a prescription pill bottle. “I need to, you know, wash down.”

“Sure.” Jane nodded towards the row of syrup spigots. “You’re the one who got us the membership, after all.”

“Thanks!” Saavik chirped. While Jane poured coffees for herself and Tom, Saavik wiggled her fingers indecisively over the syrup taps. “Hmmm,” she said.

“I like the chili spice one myself,” Daria said. “But the plain chocolate would be the cup of a carpenter.”

Saavik looked at her and smiled, skewedly.

“Daria! Coffee?” Jane asked.

“Already dosed,” Daria replied. She saw that she had left her coffee mug on the counter during her tweezer-hunting expedition. She brushed past Saavik to retrieve it and heard her click the pill bottle against the countertop, muttering, “I guess mint goes with mint?”

Daria found a space for her mug in the dishwasher, decided it was crowded enough to justify activation, loaded in the detergent. “Warp factor three. Engage.”

Saavik was working the milk steamer. She shot another tilted grin towards Daria.

“Gonna go stand under hot water myself for a while,” Daria said, and scooped up a pomegranate muffin on her way to her room.

* * *

Her shower turned into a long one, but she felt slightly more human afterwards, and with one muffin inside her, she decided she had enough of an appetite for another. She dressed in the bathroom and rolled her Forever Lazy into a tight bundle.

When she emerged, Jane was kneeling beside the bags which the other two had brought in, rummaging through them. “Oh, this is perfect!” She started pulling out what looked to be a long coat, cochineal red. To Saavik: “This is perfect! Are you sure you’re willing to give it up?”

“To see what you can work with it? Definitely,” Saavik told her.

“Hey, could you find a reference to check against? The box set should be over with the DVDs.”

“Sure.” Saavik stepped over Tom, who was busy sorting clothes and fabrics into piles.

“Are other people coming over too?” Daria inquired.

“A few,” Tom said. “We’re early—I think we’d said four-thirty?”

“They’ll probably be fashionably late,” Jane said.

Saavik called over from the DVD shelves. “Hey, did you know you have seasons six and seven of Columbo mixed in with the fantasy section?”

Daria said, “He’s a methodical cop who busts rich white people. How much more fantasy do you need?”

All three of them laughed. Saavik said, “Oh, Lord, I’ve got another one on my hands.”

“Another?” asked Daria.

“Bitter snarky bastard, she means,” Tom said.

“It’s true,” said Saavik. “I can’t even keep up with one of you.”

Jane held the coat up by its shoulders and swirled it this way and that to examine it front and back. “Surely Daria’s fame preceded her in that regard.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Saavik replied. “Maybe just a little.”

“She thinks,” Tom told Daria, “my recollections are tinted by jade-colored glasses.”

“Oh, speaking of glasses,” Saavik said, dropping to a crouch in order to root through one of the canvas bags. “You’ll need… these!” She handed Tom a spectacle case.

“Whereas Daria here,” Jane pointed out, “probably hasn’t heard
any Saavik stories.”

“Really?” Saavik’s left eyebrow shot up.

“You’ve found a good fellow,” Daria told her, “but he doesn’t write e-mails very often. All I’ve heard since Christmas before last has been about the green-tech auditing company.”

“Which is important stuff,” Tom put in. “That and managing the GSP scholarship fund and donating to the Warren campaign are how I hope to avoid swinging from a lamp-post some day.”

Class lines had been a weird thing, one of the weird things, in the days when Daria and Jane had first known Tom. In high school, he had been Jane’s boyfriend for a while, and then Daria’s. The transition had not been among the finest moments for any of them, but they had survived it. The pairing of Tom and Daria had lasted until graduation, when it couldn’t last any longer. Both of them ached and stung after that, but then came Raft for her and Bromwell for him, friendly (at first, guardedly so) notes between their .edu addresses, and it turned out that nothing in high school could have prepared them for how different life could be after high school.

—And that is one of life’s little miracles.

Even one semester of college had meant a new environment, new people and novel confusions. —Come that first Christmas, Tom had been dating another Bromwell first-year for a few weeks, and I had, well, I had—

—I had erred, but even that meant moving on.

Jane and Daria had crossed paths with Tom at Good Time Chinese, the twenty-third of that December, and it had been, to an extent that Daria found amazing at the time, free of awkwardness.

Over a boothful of buffet plates, Tom went from “ex-boyfriend” to “ex from back in high school,” and that transition felt better than Daria had ever imagined it could.

“Well,” Jane said, “there’s also paying for the entertaining suite at the hotel next weekend. Don’t forget that.” She spread the coat out across the floor, dorsal side up. “Now,” she said, rubbing her hands. “Paint.”

Saavik rose. “I’ll go put this in my laptop and find some good frames you can work from.” She paused and turned to Daria. “So. What do you think?” The eyebrow rose again.

“Uh. Not having heard any stories, I…” Her thoughts were still ranged over their college years, the interval in which Tom had become “friend for longer than we had ever been dating each other.” She blinked and refocused on the present moment. “I mean, I don’t think I know anything important. You live in South Boston and commute to an office job on the Red Line, passing the long haul after JFK Station by reading library books. You’ve lived in the Boston area at least since you were a teenager. You and Tom have been together for not quite a year. You’re left-handed and use lavender shampoo. You ta—well, that’s not important.”

All three of them were staring at her.

—Jane has that “it’s happening again” expression.

“The way you pull a DVD off the shelf, the way you make hot chocolate, how you adjust the knot in your tie. Left-handed. Your nails are painted but trimmed short. Balance of probability: you spend a good deal of time typing. You wear an analogue watch on your right wrist. Also consistent with left-handedness, or just to spite Encyclopedia Brown—but you turn its face inwards. That’s Tom’s habit, to make it easier to surreptitiously check the time while sitting at a conference table. Maybe you picked that up for the same reason. The old coat you gave to Jane. There’s a fish logo sewn onto the tote bag you brought it in—the seal of Alewife Brook College.”

“Could be secondhand,” Jane said.

“Possible, but less likely once you factor in the shot glasses left in our kitchen. Alewife Brook was a commuter school. I know from looking for an academic job here in town that it merged with North Cambridge Community six years ago. Assuming you attended just or shortly after high school, your family was local then.”

All three of them were silent. She plunged on.

“When I put Tom’s coat away, I saw yours. There was a book half-sticking out of one of the pockets. A paperback, rebound in library buckram. You had used last month’s T pass for a bookmark. The ticket machines print the point of purchase on each pass. You had bought yours at Andrew Station. There’s no reason to buy a monthly pass during the middle of a commute, so Andrew is where you catch the train each morning. Jane said that you were responsible for the restaurant supply membership. You work at the restaurant supply company in Quincy, and you commute there on the Red Line.”

Daria stopped and drew in a breath. “And you left your hat here. I think I have it in my room.” She smiled weakly.

—Also in that coat pocket, scrunched in with the book? Plainly for use during your commute? An old pair of earbuds, the jack end uselessly bent. If a man keeps old earbuds, he might just be disorganized or a packrat. If a woman does… You use them on the T every day, to make it appear that you are listening to music, but you’re not. You don’t want men trying to talk to you. But are you afraid you’ll miss a sign of danger if you actually block out your surroundings?

—You take spironolactone.

Daria lifted her shoulders for a deliberate moment and then let them drop again. “See? I don’t know anything important.” She turned to glance down at Tom. “Why don’t you make up for your boyfriend here and tell me about yourself?”

* * *

—I am remembering, for some reason, not the events, but recounting them to Jane on the way to pizza afterwards. “I just looked at the two of them, and somehow I took everything in and knew exactly what to say. The stains on Bing’s teeth, the trash in the DJ van, the wrapper for nicotine gum, the Cheeto dust on the Spatula Man’s fingers. One mention of heart disease and they both just cracked.”

—“You got your father out of bed and jumping for joy, and you saved our school from morning DJ inanity. Promise me that you’ll temper your powers with wisdom.”

—“I vow to use my Sherlockian talents for good. Or, more precisely, for evil.”

“You’re right about the family and college and my job,” Saavik said. “I’m a keyboard jockey for the restaurant supply company. I guess I’m just lucky you couldn’t deduce that I was once in an a capella group.” She jestingly clapped a hand to her lips. “Oops!”

—Did she really break through to me? Am I seeing again?

“So… How did you and Tom meet?”

At this, Jane let out a bark of laughter, and Tom, sighingly, pulled out his phone and began doing something complicated with its touchscreen.

“What?” Daria asked. “I thought that would be an innocent enough question.”

“It was a party for burners,” Saavik said.

“Pardon?”

“Burning Man people,” Jane filled in. “Forgive Daria here. She’s been living in trackless Midwestern wastes.”

“I didn’t think you’d ever gone to Burning Man,” Daria replied.

“Me? Hell no,” Jane said. “An unsustainable city of illusions thrown up in the Nevada desert? Thanks, but I’ve been to Las Vegas, and I hated it. And it had showers.”

“I was there,” Saavik said, “I mean, at the party, because a friend from my acting troupe was there. I’m in this group, we do live performances of classic radio plays. Like, last year, I was several terrified civilians in War of the Worlds at the Somerville Theatre. But, the party. Tom knew some people because Jane knew some people—”

“I wanted to build replicas of the Mars rovers,” Jane said, “so you could drive them around the playa from the comfort of your own Mission Control.”

“And,” Saavik continued, “some people were YouTubing, as one does. Lots of nostalgia, lots of clips transferred from VHS, you know? Then somebody switched from MathNet to Sick, Sad World.”

“Oh, no,” Daria said. —Surely this can’t mean—

“Somebody found—well, the video said it was a `lost episode’ which never made it to DVD. There was this poor kid who claimed to’ve been abducted by aliens, who later came back and made him lose his job.”

“Alien Love Goddesses,” Daria said, and buried her face in her hands.

Saavik said, “And then Tom here looks at the artist’s recreation and yells, `Holy shit, I think I dated both of them in high school.'”

“I had stepped outside,” Jane said, “so I missed the fun.”

Tom said, “Which meant that nobody was there to back up my story. But I had saved all my high-school stuff to my college computer, and what with one transfer and another and then cloud storage—”

He handed the phone to Daria.

It was a pretty good photo, as far as group shots went. Inside a gymnasium, with the bleachers folded up and pushed to the walls, a corral of sorts, filled with construction toys and the children and parents playing with them. Jane, Tom and Daria were crouched over an extemporaneous robot, built from clear, palm-sized plastic spheres with gears and linkages within. Daria was caught in profile, gravely attaching a miniature propeller. All about them, children scurried.

“That was a good day,” Daria recalled. “Jane, you remember, just after you dumped that Nathan jerk on his ass?”

—And Tom and I felt like we were in a rut and needed something to do, and Mack Mackenzie suggested—

“And I wanted to go somewhere Nathan wouldn’t be seen dead,” Jane said, “and Mack said that Jodie’s parents were making her volunteer at the science festival at Lawndale State. Hey, are they in that photo?” Jane stepped over the piles of sorted fabric and took the phone from Daria’s outstretched hand. “Neat. You can almost see Mack rescuing Jodie’s sanity.”

Trent Lane had taken that picture, Daria remembered now.

“Tom showed off that photo,” Saavik said, “and we got to talking, and one thing led to another, as things sometimes do.” She smiled at Tom, and Daria thought, —Oh, right. That’s what people can do for each other. Contentment. Satisfaction. Happiness. Dammit.

Tom took his phone back from Jane. To Daria, he said, “Want the pictures? I can share the folder somehow with the mobile app, I think.”

“Uh, sure,” Daria said.

“Now then,” Saavik said, rubbing her hands together, not a little gleefully. “Tom has never quite been able to explain how you and Jane ended up on Sick, Sad World.”

* * *

“Let me get this straight,” Saavik said to Daria. “You introduced Trent Lane to DJ Qiana?”

“She rented a room one summer in the uh, off-campus living group where I stayed my first two years of college.”

Jane wondered aloud: “Ah, the frasority. Whatever happened to them?”

“Didn’t I read,” Tom began, “about a frat up at Raft which flooded when someone tried to use a sprinkler head as an attachment point for bondage play?”

“Qiana was doing her thing with live coding of electronic music,” Daria barrelled on. “Trent was in town to get away from the Lane house in Lawndale.”

“My other brother Wind had moved back in,” Jane explained. “With his third wife. And the kid he hadn’t known about from his second.”

“Trent met Qiana,” Daria said. “Sparks flew.”

“I believe,” inserted Jane, “that her exact words were, `Sweet Jesus, it’s Jane in a guy edition.'”

“Then,” Daria continued, “in 2008 or so, they got the contract to record the new soundtracks for the Sick, Sad World DVDs.”

Saavik asked, “Music rights problems?”

Daria said, “That’s one reason why the DVDs took so long to come out at all. Then one day, Qiana introduced me to Myron Eldridge, the producer, and he goes, `Season four! Artie and the UFOs!’ I gave him a copy of my book, and he read it and offered me a paid blogging gig on their new website.”

Saavik interjected, “I never saw on the website where it said you were an Alien Love Goddess, though!”

“There were crazy legal issues with that whole season,” Daria said. “That episode still hasn’t come out on DVD. And, to be honest, I didn’t really want that to be seen as the reason I got the job. Myron’s a pretty cool guy. He understood.”

“Yeah,” Saavik said. “No reason to borrow trouble, when you’re already a woman on the Internet.”

* * *

“You’re kidding,” Daria said to Saavik. “Super Smash Bros.”

“Yep,” Saavik replied. “I always played as Samus. And my boyfriend at the time, he was pretty much a jerk, said to me, `Heh heh! Maybe you’re really a girl.’ And I thought, wow, that would make a lot of things make a lot more sense. For starters, it would explain why trying to live as a gay teenage boy wasn’t making me feel any better than trying to live as a straight one. I turned that corner, and—modern medicine to the rescue!”

* * *

“My parents grew up on opposite sides of 495,” said Saavik. “He called fizzy sweet drinks `sodas,’ and she called them `tonics.’ And yet they’re together to this day!”

Tom pondered this. “I guess on a scale from one to Montagues versus Capulets, that’s pretty survivable.”

“See, now that’s a thing which bothers me,” Saavik exclaimed. “Everybody gets that wrong, I guess because none of the movies do it right. The feud between Romeo and Juliet’s families is dying. It’s old news. Everyone would be happy enough if they found a decent excuse to end it while saving face.”

Jane was skeptical. “Really?”

“Read the play! The only person on either side who takes it seriously is Tybalt. The heads of the families are all,” and here Saavik closed her eyes and tapped the index finger of a splayed hand against her temple, “`Tis not hard, I think, for men so old as we to keep the peace.’ Sure, there are some ruffians in the ranks, but they’re petty brawlers who’d have themselves a riot if you passed them a football.”

“Or,” Daria said, “as they call it in Europe, `a soccer.'”

Saavik pressed on. “That’s why Juliet has to be so young, so she can idolize her cousin Tybalt and soak up all his stories, without any maturity getting in the way. You know what her father says about Romeo, at the party? He says `Verona brags of him to be a virtuous and well-governed youth.’ And he’s supposed to be talking about the only son of his sworn enemy? Pull the other one!”

“For that matter,” Daria said, “when Romeo’s friends want to go to the party, and he says they shouldn’t, his reason is that he had a bad dream about it. Hence the whole Queen Mab speech from Mercutio. But you know what Romeo doesn’t say?”

Jane suggested, “`When motherfuckers go to the wrong party, that’s when motherfuckers get shot’?”

Saavik yelped: “Exactly! He’s not concerned about a fight to the death, only that Rosaline will be there.”

“Rosaline,” Daria added, “is a Capulet, and none of Romeo’s friends say that it’s a problem.”

“So,” Tom said, “MTV lied to us.”

Saavik replied, “That’s what makes it a tragedy. Everything could have worked out fine, with the feud ending in a great big happy wedding. But no, all the wrong people were dunderheadedly romantic at the wrong times.”

Daria commented, “Looking at you, Lorenzo.”

“And it ends in misery instead.”

“This reminds me,” Tom said, turning to Daria, “didn’t you once completely fluster your English teacher by insisting that Hamlet was neither mad nor indecisive?”

“Mr. O’Neill was easily flustered,” Daria responded.

“Like ohmigod!” Saavik jumped in. “I have so had that fight. I mean, isn’t it obvious that Hamlet can’t just go and kill Claudius? He needs proof that Claudius bumped off his father. Nobody else even heard the Ghost say so, and they don’t know it’s really his father’s spirit. Hamlet out and out says that. He wants to be made King, not get drawn and quartered for murdering Claudius. He doesn’t really screw up until he misses the chance to stab Claudius after the mini-play, and that’s because he thinks Claudius is praying, and he wants to make sure the man is damned on top of being dead—”

Saavik broke off and looked around the room.

Daria stepped into the gap. “The way I see it, Hamlet and Claudius should be played like L and Light in Death Note. Their soliloquies and asides are internal monologues where they try to outthink each other.”

Saavik clapped in delight. “And the Ghost is the Shinigami!”

Tom and Jane caught each other’s eyes. “Are we ready for this?” she asked.

He sighed. “As long as they both didn’t have to memorize the
Canterbury Tales or something.”

Saavik began, “`Whan that Aprille with his shores soote…'”

“`The drooth of March hath perced to the roote,'” Daria continued.

“Enough!” Jane yelled.

* * *

Other people began to filter in. Some brought clothes, and some brought beer. Daria soon lost track of their names. There was a David and a Diana and a Liam, along with others besides. Jane introduced her to a Morgan, a young genderqueer fire-spinner with floppy indigo hair. Saavik came by to explain the varieties of cake and muffin available in the kitchen, and she told Daria that Morgan was the only member of her old trans support group who she still kept in touch with.

“The only one?”

“Watch out for her,” Morgan said. Ze smiled, a little crookedly. “Daria here is a writer, and writers are always gathering new research material. You get to know that gleam when they make smalltalk.”

“I’ll be careful,” Saavik assured zir, faintly wryly.

“Look, a distraction,” Daria said, pointing at the pomegranate muffins.

Chuckling, Morgan turned to Saavik and asked, “Are you going to be in the radio play this year?”

“Eh, sadly, no,” Saavik said, launching into a story of overlapping time commitments that Daria lacked the context to follow.

Tom found her a few minutes later, leaning against a milk-crate DVD shelf. “You OK?” he asked.

“Lots of people,” Daria said. “I may have to make good on my threat of hiding in my room and reading. I just… didn’t have time to psych myself up for an actual event.”

“This’ll probably go on until all hours,” Tom predicted. “It’s not the most coordinated of planning meetings.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“If you’d rather take a break from them all, you could crash at my place instead.”

“Your place?”

“I rent an apartment over in Back Bay country for when I’m in town,” he said. “I could drive you over there. You could lay low until tomorrow, have some peace and quiet. Then maybe tomorrow we could catch up, without the madding crowd?”

“Peace and quiet, you say? But surely you have stuff you need to do here, with the things and all.”

“Not so much that I can’t take a break.”

Daria considered. “Fine. Let me find my toothbrush and things.”

Saavik and Tom exchanged a quick peck at the elevator doors. Then she clasped Daria’s hand. “Hamlet with Shinigami,” she said. “It has potential.”

* * *

Tom’s car looked to be the first hybrid ever driven off the assembly line. —All these years under the bridge, she thought, and he still drives a rust buggy—just an environmentally aware one, now.

“Were all these dents the result of trying to park in Boston?”

“The dents are from up and down the I-95 corridor,” he said. “That missing paint on your door is from dropping Jane off one night in the North End.”

“Oh.”

Tom guided the car into the Sullivan Square rotary. “A new life awaits us in the Off-World Colonies!” he declared, taking in the concrete expanse with a wave of his arm.

“If you expect an empathy response from me,” Daria said, “that transport jumped into hyperspace a long time ago.”

Tom just grinned.

He drove Daria south, across the river, and then west along the curve of it, weaving through taxis as the early nightfall closed upon the city. He took one turn and another and another, and suddenly the Public Garden was going past on their left, posh brownstones on their right, the trees potted everywhere all gingercaked with snow.

“I never really got to this part of town,” Daria said. “Except, I think, there’s a bookstore on Boylston or Newbury. And another one in the Pru, and one… uh, I guess I tried all of them in between Raft and BFAC at least once.”

“Borders imploded a while ago. You missed the descent of the vultures for their clearance sale.”

“Oh, I was a vulture too, when they cleared out of Evanston. Bought myself a stack of manga and two spinny book-rack things. Those stayed with… um…”

“Ah.” They were stopped at a light. “The indie place with the café is still here. Books by the Ton, too.”

“Lot of New Age stuff at the indie place. I liked their pancakes, though.”

“Tell you what,” Tom said as the car hummed into forward motion again. “Tomorrow morning, we go out for brunch. And pick up a how-to guide for getting your chakras rotated while we’re at it.”

“I did let my quantum crystals go 3,000 miles without a tune-up.”

Tom parked the car with the unfazed confidence of someone who had endured the ordeal many times before, and who had a resident parking permit to back up his decisions. “Welcome,” Tom said, opening the passenger door for her. “To Boston’s answer to Madison Avenue, and the home of the 66-dollar cheesecake!”

“Not quite my speed,” Daria said.

“Perhaps a stroll down Commonwealth Avenue, Boston’s attempt to answer the Champs-Elysées? You could pay your respects to the statue of William Lloyd Garrison.”

“They have such a thing?” Daria asked. “Maybe later. How about… dinner?”

They ordered carry-out at a Japanese noodle place around the corner from Tom’s apartment.

“No, this is on me,” he insisted. “It’s time for my soaking.”

“Well, we broke-ass academics have nothing to lose but our girlish waistlines. So, fine.”

Daria was thankful for the Quinn’s Choice winter boots she wore, as she plodded through the standing slush on the sidewalk. The wind picked up and she shivered. “Supposed to get cold again tonight. And all of this will freeze solid.”

“There’s that Morgendorffer optimism!” Tom said. “Remind me to get online and check into zamboni rentals.”

Daria shot dagger-eyes at him.

“What? Oh,” he added, remembering. “The thing with the thing never to be spoken of again.”

He held the door open for her, the bag of carry-out in his other hand, and then he led her up the stairs.

His “Boston place” was not large: a nook of a dining room, an excessively poofy sofa facing a TV on the wall, a kitchen somewhere between cozy and cramped, and behind a bead curtain doorways to bedroom and bath.

“Silverware! Music! Drinks!” Tom exclaimed, setting the food on the table and sallying forth into the kitchen.

“Only the best in awkward-pause-filling technology,” Daria said.

“What was that?” he asked, his head in the refrigerator. “Something about filling the inevitable awkward silences born of our tortured pasts?”

“Something like that.”

—He looks good, Daria thought as they removed dinner from the sack and sorted it across the table. —Growing up gave him… some character. Definition. Around the eyes. Those sea-green eyes. They look better for having seen.

She gave herself an inward shake. —Yes, he looks good. She lucked out.

They listened to Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Brandenburgs while they ate.

“You know,” he said, “You could come to the convention with us next weekend. Write it down for #SickSadWorld. And Jane would love the amoral support in the artists’ hall.”

“Oh, Tom, I haven’t a thing to wear.”

“Given the route some people go with cosplay, that might be exactly… well, isn’t covering this kind of thing your beat?”

“My beat,” she sighed, “is Ninja Turtle movies. Oh, and the perennial struggle between Aliens and Predator.”

“Xenomorphs versus Ninja Turtles,” he said. “I’d watch that.”

“It would still be better than Prometheus.”

He laughed, and she smiled.

“Maybe I’ll go,” she said, surprising herself.

“Really?”

“Well, if we can find a schoolgirl uniform which fits me, and a giant plush squid.”

“Kind of last-minute, but Jane does have resources at her disposal.”

She smiled again.

They finished their noodle soups without speaking. Daria looked about the apartment. A game console, a few generations behind the bleeding edge, was plugged into the TV. On the floor beside it were a few jewel cases for game discs. Cannibal Frag Fest 3000, a compilation of one hundred one arcade classics, and a billiards simulator which looked like it had been packaged with the console.

—How do you play billiards, she wondered, with a cue the size and shape of a VCR remote?

—Tom and pool, she thought. A memory arose unbidden.

“Something funny?” he asked.

“Oh, it’s just… you remember the time Jane and I visited you on spring break?”

“Spring break? At Bromwell? Freshman year?”

“Yeah. We drove down from Boston, and—”

“And crashed at my dorm, yes.”

“And for some reason which rhymes twice with `Cain,’ we got kicked out of that frat party, and we ended up in the basement of the student center, which was almost deserted on account of the vacation and all.”

“And I was talking with… some upperclassmen from my go club, and you and Jane were playing pool on the ratty-ass table there… ah!”

“Playing badly, very badly, yes.”

“I was going off about…”

His Christmas-new TiVo, which he had pulled apart and souped up with a redundant hard-drive array, a sizzling-fast WiFi interface, a flux capacitor and dilithium-crystal regenerator and so forth and so on. “Why,” he had said, “it makes my nipples hard just thinking about it.”

Just in time for the last sentence, Daria had walked into earshot, pool cue over her shoulder. “Is he talking about his TiVo again?”

They broke into giggles over the memory.

“And when… and when…” Tom collected himself. “You guys had left back to Boston, the older boys on my hall were like, `Dude, this is the first time a freshman has brought his own babes.'”

“I remember that,” Daria said. “You e-mailed me about it.”

“Really?”

“Mm-hmm. And I wrote back—”

The recollection struck Tom, and they said in unison, “Jane is a `babes’?!”

And they tumbled down into giggles again.

“Oh God, oh God, I had forgotten all about that,” Tom said. “How do you remember an e-mail from, Jesus, from 2001? And with all of them you wrote back then!”

“Two hundred sixteen pages in the first year,” Daria said. “I gathered them all into a book to… to keep them from getting lost.”

“Do you still have it?”

“The file must be on my computer somewhere. I think my print copy… ended up with Jane’s stuff. Maybe it’s at her place. She might have mis… It was Cendrine who printed it up nice.”

“Oh.”

—That crazy sentimental idea was how I met Cendrine in the first place, thought Daria. —Thanks to the first nonawkward conversation in months I’d had with… yeah. And so I met Cendrine, and so she came to my birthday party that fall, and so she met Jane and so and so. Down into the great attractor of emotional shit I can’t handle.

“Earth to Daria?”

She tried to pull herself back into the conversation.

“Uh, just wait until they send you up here, Major Tom.”

She sighed.

“Look, Tom, I… I’ve been through… altogether too much, and it’s all still pretty fresh, and I never know what will lead me down the wormhole into memories I’d rather not live through. But because I never know in advance whether a given trigger will send me into a funk or for how long, and so much of it is associations other people don’t know about and could hardly follow if they did…”

She trailed off. He waited.

“Just don’t blame yourself if something you say seems to poke a hole in me, OK?”

He nodded.

“I’ve been in a place like that, too,” he said, serious. “Jane and I will be here for you, however long it takes.”

“And… and Saavik?”

Tom smiled and looked down. “I’m pretty sure you made a good first impression. And she’s had… her share of troubles. Grounds for empathy will not be a problem.”

“Do you think she and I could be friends?”

“Wow! The years have changed you.”

“To-o-om…”

“I hope you can. Really and truly.”

His unguarded sincerity made Daria smile slightly, then bite her lip, look down at her interlaced fingertips, then look up to catch his glance again. “OK… OK then.”

The music filled their silence for a little while.

“Dessert?” she asked.

Tom sprang into action and scuttled to the refrigerator. Looking into the freezer, he said, “I’ve always wanted to say this—but we really do have purple stuff, Sunny D—”

“Come again?”

“Saavik must have left a bottle in here to see what it would turn into.”

“And the purple stuff?”

A pint of black raspberry ice cream from Emack & Bolio’s. They spooned it into a pair of coffee mugs and returned to the dining table.

“Was it the summer after that when you came back to Lawndale and we all got stoned in that field they were digging up to put in the new strip mall?”

“Must have been. With the giant concrete pipe things, and—”

—Me crouching inside a concrete tube, Jane popping out of another singing the Super Mario theme, then leaning over the mouth of my artificial cave and being all “just like old times again?”

“And the Caterpillar equipment for tearing up the field, and—”

—Jodie Landon of all people climbing up into one of the damn machines and a great diesel rumble and Jodie calling down—

“Guys, I don’t know how to turn it off!” Tom and Daria laughed.

—Then five of us squeezing into my car for what turned out to be a low-speed getaway, back to Casa Lane where we probably smelled less of pot than everything else present, and Jodie fell asleep in Jane’s lap…

“That took me for a loop,” Tom said. “Daria Morgendorffer, baked as a pie.”

“Caution: Contents Lukewarm.”

—That was the fourth time for me. The first, the summer before. The second, the first Friday of term, 4:20. The third, the…

Mercifully, Tom’s voice overrode her thoughts. “Was it the summer after that when we went to the Books by the Ton they put in there and moved all the copies of Naked Lunch into the high school summer reading section?”

“No, we did that at a different store, when… No, you’re right, because Lindy was the café manager there, and I remember I never met her while you and I were dating.”

“That does sound like one of our dates, now you mention it.”

“Well, it was… it was Lawndale. What was there to do?”

“Point.” Tom paused momentarily in thought. “Hell, I think my third or fourth date with Jane was her coming over to my house to use our scanner on her portfolio.”

Daria stirred her ice cream about in the coffee mug. “God, it’s like… multiple layers of the past… annual floods of Lethe, or something.”

“In what way?”

“Well, they buried all those concrete pipes, whatever they were for, right? So that’s that anchor of memory gone. And I never went back to that mall after the next summer, because my parents moved to the other side of town.”

“That’s right—that did happen about then, didn’t it? After your mother finally made partner to fill that abruptly vacated spot.”

“That took me off my feet, when Dad called. `Hey, kiddo, guess what? Mom’s promoted, I’m retiring and we’re moving. That’s right! No need to be near a school now, with you and Quinn making your own way out in the great big world.’ `But Dad, all the good times we had in that house? Like, uh…’ `When I set it on fire?'”

“Word on the country-club circuit was that Schrecter popped that blood vessel while he was on the phone with your mother.”

“Law of averages. He was overdue for a serious health problem, what with that credenza drawer full of uppers and all.”

“You’re kidding—that story is true?”

“Everyone at the firm knew.”

“Wow.” The ice-cream mugs were empty. “Want to play a dungeon level of Cannibal Frag Fest 3K?”

“No, I’m… not really up for serious social commentary tonight. And you should get back to the costume party.” She rose and gathered the remains of her dinner. “There’s a young woman waiting there who wants to work on your cape with you.”

“My… oh. Thanks.”

They migrated the remains of dinner into the kitchen and disposed of what couldn’t be saved.

Tom added, “You sure you’ll be OK staying by yourself tonight?”

Daria nodded. “Since everything went down last November, I’ve been with Quinn, with Quinn and Stacy, with Quinn and my aunt and my parents, with Jane… I’m ready for a little alone time.” She paused. “But I’m holding you to that brunch promise.”

Tom grinned. “Hug?”

“Definitely.”

They held each other, not tightly, but with relaxed familiarity.

“You hang in there,” Tom said, quietly.

“Mmm.”

They pulled apart.

“I’ll text you when I’m up and around,” Daria said.

“Two p.m.?”

“Is my name Lane?”

“I hear even Trent keeps better hours these days.”

“The mind recoils at the image.”

“Take care, Daria. Help yourself to whatever you need around the apartment.”

“Thank you. See you tomorrow. And… backup hug?”

They held each other a second time, and then Daria let go. They told each other “Tomorrow” once more, and then Tom waved from the stairs.

And Daria was alone.

—This will be, she told herself, the longest solid stretch of undiluted Daria-time since Quinn found me in Ilium.

“And I haven’t a clue what to do with myself.”

She paced from the kitchen to the sofa and back.

“Is there a problem with that?”

She packed to the sofa and plopped herself down into it.

“Damn it. You really fell into the memory fugue pit, didn’t you? Damn it. And you’re going to make your best friends walk on eggshells until the unspecified future date when you somehow get better? Bad plan.”

She closed her eyes and pushed up her glasses to rub her lowered eyelids.

“Admit it.”

She opened her eyes and stared dully at the inert TV.

“Admit it.”

Her gaze dropped.

“You should have nailed him.”

She inhaled, slowly, and exhaled, puffing out her cheeks.

“You should have jumped his damn bones thirteen years ago. You should have deflowered yourself upon him. You would have been a terrible lay. A no good, horrible, very bad piece of teenage gloom cookie. You would have sucked, or rather, failed to suck with any dexterity.” She sighed. “And he would have accepted it. He would have explained in his Reasonable Voice that nobody is great their first time. And you would have gotten better. A bit. Maybe. And you could have gone off to Raft with a bit of experience and understanding instead of an insecurity you were too intellectual to admit and a perfect psychological setup for disaster. A long, slow-burning disaster.”

She crumpled forward and buried her face in her hands.

“It would have been nice to make somebody happy by wanting them. Ever.”

She felt for a while like she might cry, but the bleakness kept tears from flowing. She sat, no longer speaking, waiting to be able to stand and move again.

A while later, her phone rang.

“Jane?”

“Yo! Saavik says she has a black pleated skirt—sorry, skort!—which you can borrow, and we can scrounge up a blouse, hit the Garment District for a blazer—”

“Jane, what are you on about?”

“I don’t quite know how we’ll handle the squid, but I’m sure we can improvise—”

Daria felt her face turn red.

“Jane—”

“This writer knows the plural of octopussy, next on #SickSadWorld!”

* * *

Daria stood at the door of Tom’s bedroom.

“No,” she said aloud. “That would be… well, he did say I could help myself.”

She pushed the door slowly open with her right index finger.

A dresser, with one drawer not slid all the way closed. A nightstand, its top drawer likewise. Two paperbacks and a crumpled soda can atop it. A bookshelf running the length of the wall. Two other books atop the quilt at the foot of the neatly-made bed.

“Inherent Vice and The Deeper Meaning of Liff,” she said. “Well, if I just want to veg out…” She extended her arm, then let it fall back. “Maybe TV would work better.”

Tom had a dinged-up laptop plugged into the TV set. Its screen showed the playlist they had listened to over dinner. Daria looked over the three remote controls from different manufacturers, chose the one whose brand matched the TV set and pushed the power button. The flatscreen glowed into life, showing the same still image as the background wallpaper of the laptop screen. She was willing to bet the image was a Jane Lane: a team-up of superheroes posing in the ruins of a city, their faces obscured by floating fruit. Futzing with the computer trackpad, Daria quickly realized that she could drag windows from the laptop monitor to the TV and back again.

“Okaaaay… I suppose I could call and ask how to get the TV to show anything else, but then Jane would just belittle the value of two degrees from Raft and a doctorate from Bromwell. Hmmm…”

The laptop was also running a movie-player program. Daria found its list of recently-viewed files. Tom and whoever else had lately been over had watched three episodes of Serial Experiments Lain and after that Evangelion 2.22.

Daria shrugged. “Good and twisted enough for me.” She set Evangelion to playing, dragged the window over to the TV monitor, hit the key to fullscreen the video and wandered into the kitchen.

Anime hadn’t really been a thing when she was younger, she reflected, sipping a glass of cranberry juice. Back in Lawndale of dubious and questionable memory, she and Jane had rented Venus Wars and Project A-Ko from the good old Lackluster, but apart from a few such VHS tapes, the medium hadn’t really been represented.

—The night before room-selection meeting at Digamma House, she thought, as the movie mayhem kicked in. —How did they explain it? Choosing rooms at 6:00 in the morning cut down on combativeness. Best to do such things late… or early. Some houselings had set an early alarm, but she chose to pull the all-nighter option in the common room, joining the others who found it easier to stay up until morning. That was the night she encountered Urusei Yatsura and Bubblegum Crisis and Neon Genesis Evangelion. Six or seven episodes in, her head was glassy and her thoughts fogged and the dawn breaking.

“I didn’t think it could be done,” she said as the credits rolled. “That was more disturbing than the original show.”

She checked the time on her phone. (No texts. No missed calls.) It was still early enough to take a walk, maybe explore the neighborhood, snark inwardly over Back Bay fashion victims… but in the cold and the slush?

“Why not make an early night of it?” she asked herself.

Unzipped her backback, withdrew the brown plastic bottle. Two pills rattled within as she lightly shook it.

“Early evening,” she said.

She carried her pack into the bathroom, dropped it by the door, rooted through it for loose sleeping clothes and turned on the bathtub taps.

“Looks like I get my rose petals and candlelight from Big Pharma tonight.” Standing at the sink, she swallowed the pills with a cupped handful of cold tap water. She left her day clothes on the floor and her glasses atop her flannel sleepwear beside the sink.

“Damn it,” she said later, watching the bubbly water lap just below her kneecaps. “This really works.” She chuckled softly, then more loudly. Her glasses were too far away, and the world was too blurry to bother with. She let her hands trail back and forth near her shoulders, feeling the waves of warm bubble-bath which their motion created, waves passing over her chest and reflecting off her folded legs.

“You’re mellowing, Morgendorffer,” she told herself.

It had been a long time since she’d tried a drug, she realized. Too long? Dalliances with frivolous diversions, set aside as childish things? Or enriching experiences, some of them, pushed back and away as she’d tried to follow a path which by now was pretty plainly not working?

“I’m not sure,” she had told the woman.

Caitlin, one of Quinn’s friends from that waitressing job, a student at Lawndale State. Holding a ceramic pipe and a Bic lighter in the fingers of one hand, offering them to Daria while her other hand held a bag of marshmallows ready to be immolated by the snapping and popping campfire in the forested hills outside the Lawndale where high school had just recently become part of the blessed past.

“Not your thing? That’s cool.”

“I just don’t know if I should do anything which would help me relate to my parents.”

They had all laughed, Caitlin and Quinn and Jane and Tiffany (whom she’d never met before—but there was always bound to be a Tiffany).

“Daria, you’re a riot.”

Daria had smiled and almost blushed, and then had taken the pipe with its packed bowl after all.

“I tried to gather more firewood,” she recalled, splashing herself with abrupt flicks of her fingers. “But every time I reached down for a stick, it turned out not to be there.” Remembering how strange it had felt, as if the machinery her brain normally used for filling in gaps and shadows had thrown its gears.

Jane had found her, grunting and humpfing, a dead tree trunk as thick as her neck over her shoulder. “Damn it, this one’s not getting away!”

“I was stoned out of my gourd,” she said to herself, naked in Tom Sloane’s bathtub. “Hmm. I appear to be stoned out of my gourd right now. Not being able to stop smirking would probably have been a good clue.”

Her fingertips had begun to prune.

“That was fun,” she admitted. “And the first time at college wasn’t bad, either. Nor was the time after that, if I’m honest with myself. I mean, getting my head skritched felt pretty nice. It was the dumb decisions I made after I sobered up which hurt. And when the weirder stuff was around, like the time Trent and the band came up to play Longfellow Tech…”

She pulled herself out of the bathtub, eventually, and redressed in her loose flannels.

“Mm-hmm-mmm. I wish I could hug someone while I felt like this. Must find a willing victim somehow…”

She slept that night more peacefully than she had in months.

[on to chapter 3]

Are dolphins making self-glorifying edits on Wikipedia?
Cetacean needed, next on #SickSadWorld!

Content note: Realist beginning of an eventual fantasy. Mentions of infidelity, depression, consensual kink. Past Daria/OC; past Jane/OC; offscreen Quinn/OC.

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS the first Saturday of 2013, and Daria Morgendorffer
felt like Hell.

She watched the roadside from the passenger seat. A food-and-fuel plaza appeared in the distance down the turnpike, then grew and slipped past her window. A row of parked semi trucks fanned out in a momentary peacock of parallax, which closed up again as the exit lane of the plaza merged into the highway and vanished behind them.

“You didn’t have to drive me,” Daria told her sister. “I am capable of planting myself on a train for a few hours.”

“Oh, come on,” said Quinn Morgendorffer. “Like I would make you bother with all that. I mean, I know that writers love trains on general principles, but you’d have to schlep all your stuff from South Station to wherever it is Jane is staying, whereas I can provide door-to-door luggage service.” Quinn pointed her thumb over her shoulder, back towards the trunk of the Prius. “Besides, I’d love to spend a night in Boston, and on the way back I can have brunch with my fellow podcasters and make a working trip of it.”

—My little sister Quinn, thought Daria. —Quinn who is Regional Director of Quality Assurance for a sporting-goods company so well-known even I recognized the name. Quinn who cohosts a podcast that teaches young women about mathematics. Quinn, married and trying for a kid.

“And double besides,” Quinn went on, “I like helping people move into new places, you know? All the mundane stuff, like buying salad tongs and figuring out how to do the laundry, it, you know, becomes special again.”

—Quinn, who might not have an absolutely perfect life, but who is on top of things. Who, in fact, got all the able-to-stand-on-two-feet genes. Who is, let’s face it, Mom, but with better work-life balance and bouncier hair.

“Jane says they have on-site laundry,” Daria said.

“And you get to live with Jane again! How awesome is that?”

“And here it turns out I’m riding in a time machine,” Daria deadpanned, “and I didn’t even notice when we hit eighty-eight.”

—Except that since the last time Jane and I shared a place, things have… reversed.

Quinn looked away from the road momentarily, shot a quick smile at Daria, then returned her gaze to the highway.

“Jane said we could meet her at her work, right?” asked Quinn.

“She only gave me the one address,” Daria replied, “and she said she’d be working this afternoon, so I guess that’s what we do. Which means you get to experience the joys of driving, not just through Boston, but Somerville too.”

“Ha,” Quinn said. “Put on the power playlist, would you? We’re going to need a strong sound going into this.”

* * *

“Nicely done in the rotary,” Daria said. “I thought it was very neat, how you got around those two buses.”

“What two buses?”

They were near the address which Jane had given. By all appearances, it was in a light-industrial corner of town. The businesses, in buildings of dingy and sometimes sooty red brick, all had a definite closed-for-the-weekend look, save those which might have been closed since the recession hit.

Daria mused aloud. “So this is where they manufacture used air conditioners.”

“In my town,” Quinn replied, “the used air conditioners are hand-crafted and artisanal.”

Daria looked down at her sleek new phone.

“Your destination will be on the left,” she said.

Quinn’s head swiveled to port. “So it is!” She bopped the turn signal with the heel of her hand, then slowed the car and swung the wheel. They rounded the curb into a parking lot, roughly half full.

The lot fronted two brick buildings, side-by-side. The one on the left was a single storey, judging by the windows, but with a high roof. The building on the right poked above its companion with three extra floors. A narrow walkway between them had been covered over with new metal construction, and a shallow ramp led up to the glass door set into it. A sign on the taller building said, in a typeface which made Daria think of the good ship Enterprise in the original movies: MOONBASE ILLYRIA.

“This is the place,” Quinn said. She parked the car in a spot on the street side of the lot and pushed the power button. “Hope she’s here.”

Daria unfastened her seatbelt and reached to the floor space beside her seat, where she had kept her winter coat. She leaned forward to pull it on, then stepped out of the car and immediately zippered her parka.

They crossed the lot, Quinn at a light jog and Daria more sedately, and approached the door.

“Buzzer, or try her cell phone?” asked Quinn.

Daria heard the running of booted feet behind her. She had turned partway in the direction of the sound when its source met her in a flying hug which carried her into Quinn, who was then caught up in the embrace in turn.

“No need,” said Jane Lane.

—Still tall and lithe and fleet, I see, thought Daria. —Still with the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen, set in that angular heart of a face which has driven boys and girls to distraction lo these many years.

“Hi Jane,” Daria said, into Jane’s onyx-black asymmetric bob.

Jane gave them both an extra squeeze before disengaging. “I was around by the loading dock when you two came in,” she said. “By Gad, it’s good to see you.”

—Still my best and oldest friend.

“So this is what happened to the movie-prop-making company?” Quinn asked.

“Yup,” Jane replied. “Farrell Multinational set up a trust endowment thing in some patron-of-the-arts shenanigans, and we moved up here from Providence to expand.” She rubbed her hands, which Daria now saw were bare and starting to turn red. “How’s about we carry on inside, then? Let’s go get your stuff!”

“Wouldn’t it be a wasted effort,” Daria asked, “to carry the bags in and then carry them out again when we go to your apartment?”

Jane canted her head sideways. “I guess I didn’t get everything across by e-mail after all,” she said. “Come on inside. You’ll love it!” From an inside coat pocket she pulled out a prox card, which she slapped against a sensor panel beside the door. The entrance unlatched with a solenoid thump. Jane swung it open and ushered them inside.

* * *

The rubberized mat on the linoleum floor, the bulletin board tacked up with Title IX notices and instructions on phoning cab companies, the vending machines at the far end of the hall: everything conjoined to remind Daria of a place where one waited for an auto dealer to complete warranty repairs. The squeal of a saw munching through something heavy streamed out through the door to their left.

“Set construction job,” Jane explained, “kind of came down to the wire. Got to make furniture for the baddies to destroy when the federales bust the joint.” She waved them down the hall and through another door, one leading to their right.

Daria’s first impression was that a bicycle shop had run away with a mannequin warehouse and raised a child who aspired to become a bank robber. “We’re kind of overbooked at the moment,” Jane said, leading them past an unoccupied reception desk, around a beaverboard partition and onto the shop floor. She grabbed a burlap sack from a nearby workbench, reached inside and tossed something from inside at Daria. It slipped past her hands and bounced into her chest, where she trapped it in her arms.

“Money?” she asked.

Quinn peeked into the bag. “At least fifty large.” She flipped through one of the rubber-banded stacks. The inside bills were blank.

“All to be destroyed in the third act,” Jane said. “Come on, elevator’s this way.”

Daria inquired, “You guys do a bit of everything, I guess?”

“Along with some other stuff. Custom mechanical design and prototyping, sometimes, but that’s not really my job. Some of our specialized tooling, we rent out to local makerspaces. Sweet Jesus, this town is crawling with makerspaces. Oh, this is kinda neat—” From another table they passed, she snagged a small metal item.

“Cigarette lighter?” Quinn guessed.

Jane nodded. “Some people Farrell knows are throwing an unironical Great Gatsby party. He made sure we got the deal to provide tchotchkes at properly immodest fees.”

“If that’s the case,” Daria said, “I hope that’s just your prototype, because it’s not nearly tacky enough.”

Jane grinned and beckoned them onwards.

“Over in the short wing is where we keep the heavy machining stuff, for sawing and milling and welding and lathe-ing. This side is more geared for soldering, 3D printing, painting. And now—into the big metal box, Morgendorffers!”

The steel doors closed, and the freight elevator rumbled upwards. A bell chimed outside.

“Second floor: camera testing, where the movie magic happens! No, we don’t film porn here. But we’re not above providing the set decorations.”

Ding.

“The third floor is still under development. We’re, you know, conceptualizing the possibilities. Mostly right now it’s where we store the molds for replica food.”

Ding.

“A-and the top of the heap! Directly ahead, the Moonbase gallery.”

The first thing Daria saw was the hardwood floor. It was a nice floor: new, even, polished. Her attention worked its way upwards, and she took in the walls, spotless and soothingly eggshell. Paintings, not too closely crowded together, each illuminated by mild track lighting. Sculptures in wood and metal and glass, on pedestals or hanging from the I-beams which ran just under the ceiling.

“Oh my gosh,” Quinn said. “This place is amazing!”

“Be a shame if something happened to it,” Jane said, in her best gangster voice. “We use this space for showcasing what our people can do. Also for a Girls Who Code event and an antique pen swap meet and so forth. Now, we make our way around the central exhibit walls and turn this corner—” She jogged backwards, beckoning them on.

They came to a painting in the style of Hokusai’s views of Mount Fuji, done on several floor-to-ceiling panels. Jane went to the side and grasped a handle which Daria had not noticed.

“And all will become clear,” Jane announced. She pulled the handle sideways, and the painted panels revealed themselves to be segments of a folding door.

“You don’t have to open it all the way just to go through,” Jane said, “but it’s ever so much more dramatic this way.”

Beyond the accordion door, there was now revealed a lounge. Two sofas, two coffee tables, chairs of the papasan and bean-bag species. Against the walls were shelves, some in wood, several built from repurposed milk crates. Daria saw, in the corner, a pinball machine, themed on the movie Clue.

“OK, we’re still giving it the old college try in some respects,” Jane said. “The projector is over there if you want to watch movies or cat videos or what-have-you. Now, you’ll need keys…” She darted through the dining room and into the kitchen.

“Oh, there’s a kitchen too,” Daria noted.

“Question?” Jane was rummaging through a drawer.

“I’m not exactly clear on the situation here,” Daria admitted.

“Aha!” Jane sprinted back to Daria bearing keys and a prox card. Holding up the card: “Front door.” Next, she flourished a key, with a bright orange plastic sheath on its untoothed end. “For the elevator. You’ll need it to get onto this floor outside of regular business hours.” Another key, tagged in black. “For the door from the gallery. And the one in green is for your room.”

“My room?”

“The other live-in supervisor got married and moved out to Stoneham, so she’s now a live-out supervisor. Her room’s all ready for you.”

Quinn was delighted. “You’ll get to live in a place with its own art gallery! How cool is that? Daria, this’ll be fantastic!”

Daria said, “I was expecting a… a couple rooms in a subdivided house somewhere in, I dunno, Camberville. This is… This is amazing, Jane.”

Jane pushed the card and the keys into Daria’s hands. “This is my home,” she said. “And it’s yours, too, for however long you need it.”

—My best and oldest friend, Daria thought again.

“Right, then!” exclaimed Jane. “Half bath in the gallery, full bath just over there, we should work out a shower schedule I suppose, but it was fine with two or three people living here before. Your bedroom is the last down that little hall—and, Quinn, there’s a guest room for you tonight. Umm, what else… If you could chip in, let’s say, one hundred fifty a month for food and household sundries, does that sound reasonable?”

“That’s it? For living in Boston?” inquired Daria, incredulously. “I can make that much from my blog.”

Quinn said, “Or even from teaching.”

Jane said, “Hey, the company owns the building, and I’m on the board. One of our original plans for this whole place was to make, you know, an artist colony. That’s why we’re all above the table, dual-zoned and everything. We might still carve up the third floor into apartments, but it turns out planning that kind of thing takes time. Who would have thunk? But, your place to stay, that’s sorted!” She was off again, pointing at things in the kitchen. “We’re pretty well equipped, helps when we have staff meetings at lunchtime. Feel free to use the technology at hand. Mi Zojirushi es su Zojirushi. Let’s see…” She looked out a nearby window. “This part of town is kinda dead as far as places to go,” she said, “but if you head up Washington towards Union Square, them’s some good eats. Bars and so forth. Go through Sullivan to Broadway and there are some legit taco places. And go far enough up Broadway, you get back to your old stomping grounds, of course.” Jane glanced down at Daria’s feet, then blinked. “Speaking of stomping… new boots? Of the après-ski variety?”

“Um, yeah,” Daria said.

“Oh, dear.”

“What?” asked Daria.

Jane puffed air from the side of her mouth. “You left him with only the clothes on your back, didn’t you?”

Daria deflated. —So this is where we get into it all. “More or less. How could you tell?”

“Daria, Daria… You match. New parka, new boots, even a new scarf—all from the same company. Employee discount, I’ll wager—you’ve got the hook-up.” She looked over to Quinn. “And one with an infallible color sense.”

Smiling wryly, Quinn bowed her head.

“It’s true,” Daria said. “Right now, most of my worldly possessions were retail therapy.”

“And Christmas gifts,” Quinn added. “Show her the new phone that Aunt Amy got you!”

“Ooooh,” went Jane, turning the device over in her hands. “Posh. I need me an aunt at Encom. Well. Let’s go unload the car, then, shall we? And Daria here can tell me all about what it feels like to be stylish for once in her life.”

Daria aimed a questioning look at Quinn. “You’re leaving me with her tender mercies?”

“Cheerfully, sis.”

* * *

Luggage in hand, Jane and Daria executed an awkward little no-you-go-first dance at the door of Daria’s new bedroom. Quinn was migrating shirts into the closet. “To-o-old you,” she called over her shoulder, “bringing hangars would be a good idea. You can at least start off with your possessions in some semblance of decency.”

The bed itself was on a wooden loft which spanned most of the room. Jane stepped around the pine-wood ladder which gave access to the loft and added the duffel bags she carried to the collection of Daria’s earthly goods in the middle of the room. Apart from the luggage, the floor space was empty. Setting down her suitcase, Daria noticed a few dents in the carpet which suggested that a desk had been moved out. She saw that Jane had to duck to avoid the chains of chili-pepper lights which had been strung under the loft, and she wondered if Aisha and Giulio were both short like her.

“We’ll have to see about shelves,” Daria noted.

“We live above a machine shop,” Jane crowed. “We can build—”

Daria tipped her suitcase flat onto the floor. The contact was surprisingly loud.

“Those the kruggerrands?” Jane asked.

Kneeling, Daria unzipped the case and flipped it open.

Jane exclaimed, “You brought me bubble wrap!”

“So now you can never say I did nothing for you.”

Quinn stood beside Jane and peered over Daria’s shoulder. “I’m amazed you fit them all into one bag.”

“These are just the ones I took with me because they’d be the hardest to replace.” Daria reached into the case and withdrew one of the bubble-wrapped hardbacks from the top layer. She offered the book to Jane. “You might find this one amusing.”

Jane undid the wrapping and scrunched the sheet of bubbly under her arm. “The first six books of the Elements of Euclid,” she read, “in which coloured diagrams and symbols are used instead of letters for the greater ease of learners. Damn. People were serious about titles in those days. Oliver Byrne, 18—Jesus, 1847?” The pages were only faintly yellowed. Jane turned them carefully. “Wow. The graphics do have a certain voom to them. Kind of a Mondrian vibe, a bit of Bauhaus before its time.”

“Quinn would have killed me if I had forgotten that one.”

“Truer words,” Quinn said, “have only seldom been spoken.”

Jane closed the book, gently, and stared at its cover.

“Is something the matter?” asked Daria.

For a moment, Jane was silent. Then, “Would you two sophisticates like some tea now that we’ve lugged all this up here?”

The kitchen had a stretch of counter dedicated to beverage preparation, including a milk steamer and a row of spigots for different flavors of chocolate syrup.

Daria asked, “What, no samovar?”

“Should we get one?” Jane set about spooning leaves from a tin.

Soon, all three repaired to the lounge, equipped with steaming mugs of tea. Jane planted herself in a papasan chair and folded her knees up to her chest. “All right, give.”

Daria had a sense of what would have to come next, but she pushed it off. “Huh?”

“You told me you’d give me the details when you got here. You’re here.”

“Uh.”

“C’mon,” Jane said. “You’re the storyteller and I’m the audience. Story time!”

Daria looked from Jane to Quinn and back again. “All right.” She took a deep breath. “You remember my Melody Powers stories from high school?”

“Oooh, this is a tale with a prequel. Yes, I remember.”

“OK. Fast-forward from high school to the year Two Thousand Eleven. It’s summertime, and I’ve been an adjunct professor for two semesters. I haul myself back and forth between job and boyfriend twice a week, and I spend my time on the bus blogging for SickSadWorld. One day, on my way out of Chicago, I realize, these things called e-readers exist, and I have enough old fiction saved up that some of it is bound to be decent. I pull out my old files, fix up the worst of the problems, and release to the world Operation Obsidian: A Melody Glass Adventure.”

Quinn said, “And it was a hit beyond your wildest dreams!”

“Turns out,” Daria said, “I had a fan base all ready to go. Melody was just the right combination of ’80s nostalgia, ’90s nostalgia and `hey look a chick kicking ass’ to appeal to SickSadWorld readers.”

Jane exclaimed, one fist in the air, “Hit all the buttons!”

Daria continued, “I got some walking-around money and some fanart… And I got an introduction to a writers’ circle for
self-published authors. Brett and I both started going to their meetings pretty regularly. They weren’t all instant soulmates, but, you know…” Daria shrugged. “I was meeting new people.”

Quinn shifted in her seat.

“Life was looking up. Brett and I stopped arguing about whether I was treading water in my job. I took the fall off from adjuncting to start my second academic book. And it was at least interesting,” Daria said, “to meet people who’d made it much bigger than I had. Some of them had even gotten picked up by traditional publishers for dead-tree editions. Tell me, Jane: did you ever read Furnace, Hammer, Chain?”

“Tried to,” Jane said. Then, a little defensively: “Hey, this was back when you could reach into the lint trap at the laundromat and pull out a copy. I got, I dunno, a few chapters in before it was `hurled aside with great force,’ as you writers like to put it.”

“And why, pray tell?”

“First, for starters, the sex. It was too badly written to get off on. Second, everything else. All the other stuff around the sex was creepy stalking-is-love bullshit, which then cashes in its bonus miles and upgrades to outright abuse. The heroine hates all other women. Which is fun when it plays together with the homophobia. Asking if the `hero’ is gay is the worst insult ever, because if a man catches The Gay, that makes him like a woman. Lesbians are sort of okay, though, because you can’t get worse than being a woman already. That’s the kind of fractally wrong that I think I’m entitled to take personally. There’s a being-kinky-is-a-sickness theme running through the whole thing, which is rich coming from an author who clearly has some race issues and a disturbing fascination with anorexia and an attitude about women looking childlike which one normally hears from Reddit guys coming out of the bloody ether to insist that, well, actually, it’s technically ephebophilia. Seriously! Any brain that could invent that book must need professional help, and—oh. Oh my.”

Daria stared at her, face blank, gaze level.

Jane braced her fingers against her forehead. “Your. He. With. Her. He. They.”

Daria said, tonelessly, “That they did.”

Quinn sighed. Jane’s hands made grasping and pulling motions in her bangs.

“That is just,” Jane began. “I mean, that is just so completely…”

Daria told her, “I saw pictures.”

“What?!”

“That’s how I found out. The fan in my jalopy-top died, so I went to use Brett’s computer to buy plane tickets for my Christmas visit to Lawndale. You know how web browsers autocomplete for you when you start to type in a website?”

“Oh. Oh.”

“The short version is that I happened to notice that certain, uh, instructional videos had been downloaded. I looked to see where they had been downloaded to, and… yeah.”

Jane shook her head, slowly. “What in the name of…”

“There were timestamps, too,” Daria said. “It was a recurring recreational event. Pretty much the whole time I was going out of town half of every week. And with some regularity during the past fall, too.”

“Shit, Daria. I’m so sorry. I guess you, you gave him what for?”

“And then I left, with, as you inferred, the clothes on my back. Plus a bag of my hard-to-replace books, the hard drive from my dead computer and a phone with a cracked screen.”

“And your engagement ring,” Quinn added.

“Oh, Daria,” Jane said, “you can never get much for those when you pawn them.”

“Which is why I left it along with my tip in the diner where Quinn found me on Thanksgiving morning.”

“You did?”

“She did.”

“At least the hash browns never lied to me.”

Jane unfolded herself to the floor and walked to Daria. For a moment, Daria thought that she was in for a hug, but Jane crouched down before her and took her hands. Then Jane brought Daria’s hands upwards and, leaning to meet them halfway, kissed each one in turn.

“I’m so, so sorry,” Jane said, and for a moment Daria thought her friend was apologizing for the gush of affection. And then Jane looked up at her. “We’ll make… We’ll make this better,” Jane said, almost in a whisper.

—And she is the one, thought Daria, who is on the edge of tears right now?

Carefully, Daria withdrew her right hand from Jane’s hold and patted the hair atop Jane’s head.

“Um,” said Daria. “There there.”

Jane broke into a smile. With the back of her free hand, she wiped her eyes. Then she stood and let Daria’s other hand fall out of her grasp. “Wine,” Jane said. “I think at this point all three of us need wine.”

* * *

Jane deemed the wine selection at home insufficient for the purposes of a welcoming party, so she insisted that they go out to the “boozeohol store.” This in turn required piling into the pickup truck which Jane and her colleagues used for Moonbase business. Daria squeezed into the middle seat. After a few turns, her sense of direction recognized she was in terra incognita and shut down.

As she climbed out, her boot caught in the detritus which had been more or less shoved under the seat. She bent down and came up with a hat, now slightly squished.

“So that’s where that went,” Jane said. “First the glasses, now the hat,” she added in a voice that was a little more absent and to-herself.

Daria descended to the pavement, steadying herself against the doorframe with one hand while carrying the hat in the other. “A fedora? Why, Jane, I didn’t know you were in the habit of bringing home Pick-Up Artists.”

Quinn interposed: “Sheesh, Daria! You of all people should be more discerning.” She reached out a hand. Daria tried to toss the hat with a bit of spin. It veered to the left, but Quinn caught it and momentarily scrutinized it. “First of all, going by the brand, this is a woman’s hat.” She sniffed, carefully, twice. “A woman who has a fondness for lavender shampoo. Second, the narrow brim with the upturn at the back and the snap-down at the front means this is a trilby, not a fedora. Both of which, incidentally, are named for famous woman characters in the theatre.” Quinn continued as they entered the liquor store. “Fédora was the name of the princess in Sardou’s play, a rôle written for and made iconic by Sarah Bernhardt. It was the suffragette’s hat, the hat of adopted and subverted masculinity. Even setting aside the incorrect terminology for the hat itself, using fedora to stand for jerkhole guys is beyond ironic—and irony is so two years ago. It says, `I, Daria Morgendorffer, know nothing of sartorial expression beyond the mating habits of arrogant cishet white guys aged 18-to-30 with terribly unflattering OKCupid profiles.'”

Jane cackled. “Game, set and match to the spiffy redhead!”

Quinn popped the hat back into shape and indicated the tag on the inside band. “If I recall correctly, this logo changed to a new design three autumns ago, so the item is at least that old, and it’s far too upscale to have been a ten-dollar purchase at the stand next to the food court. Appropriate brim width almost always scales with shoulder breadth, so this would look terrible on your average dudebro, but quite fair upon—” And she gently seated the trilby upon Daria’s head.

“‘You have to understand the way I am, mein Herr,‘” Jane sang, not exactly in any particular key.

Daria took the hat off again and tried giving it a good going-over. There was a noticeable patch of wear on a seam, about where it might get rubbed if she carried the thing by its front end using her left hand. She noticed a couple streaks of what could have been violet nail polish, slightly darker than the hatband.

—Index finger on the outside, thumbnail making contact on the inside. Worn for some time. An expensive item, not replaced.

—Owned by a left-handed woman of only moderate means?

—Whatever—now you’re being silly.

* * *

The trip to get wine became an as-long-as-we-have-the-truck expedition to find Daria an office chair, and then a venture to pick up an early dinner in boxes and cartons from Good Time Fusion. They parked the chair in Daria’s bedroom and unloaded the food onto the dining table.

The early night had gathered in by the time Jane was nibbling on the last of the scallion pancakes. “I remember, the first December I spent in this town. That evening when I dragged your ass to a holiday party at some halfway house for alumni that Cendrine knew about?”

“You dragged me to so many parties, they all blur together.”

“But you do remember, you came down to Davis Square and we had Thai food before we caught the bus to wherever the shindig was?”

“Vaguely, I guess.”

“We were standing at the bus stop, the one right by the theater, and it started to snow. Just flurries, no big deal. And I thought, I’m waiting for public transit here in the snow, in a city square full of pedestrians and people actually doing stuff and enjoying themselves, next to an indie cinema, with my belly full of Thai food. And I realized, this simple little experience was the perfect I’ve-gotten-out-of-Lawndale moment.”

“Aww,” Quinn said. “And you got to share it with the best part of Lawndale, too. I think my moment like that was seeing my first palm tree.”

“What about you?” Jane scooped sriracha sauce onto the last piece of scallion pancake and shoveled it into her mouth.

Daria pondered. “I guess I felt like I was in a different place as soon as I got here. The whole environment was big-city stuff for me at the time, and I was pretty unnerved. Until the first time I felt comfortable—and Quinn is going to laugh at me for this.”

“Never! Let’s see, it couldn’t have been at a bar, and it wasn’t a sports event, I’m sure.”

Jane offered, “Sorority party.”

“Shopping mall,” Daria confessed. “I was with some kids from my froshling orientation group—this was a few days before classes started—and we ended up wandering about the Copley mall. We were crossing the skyway that connects the Copley part with the Prudential part, and it struck me. This was a place built for the purpose of making people feel comfortable while they spent money. The very artificiality of it was soothing. It was simple, and it was purely itself, and it made sense. Even though it was too upscale to sell anything I could use. And that’s where I mellowed out a bit.”

Quinn said, “We’ll have to make a pilgrimage to this most transformative place. And who knows? Maybe what you can get a use out of has changed.”

* * *

Daria voted for assembling furniture before starting to drink. This met with a chorus of “well, you’re no fun,” and the night was well advanced by the time they uncorked the first bottle. Among them, they emptied that bottle over the course of three Adventure Time episodes on Jane’s projector TV.

Quinn, who had risen the earliest, was starting to slump into the sofa cushions. She jostled awake when Jane declared, “Bathroom break! I nominate Dariatron to pick what we watch next.”

Jane wobbled as she stood.

—Uh oh. Tell me that she is not…

Daria was waiting for her when she emerged from the bathroom. “Two glasses of wine,” Daria said softly, “and you can barely walk. The last time you couldn’t drink me under the table was when…”

Jane said nothing.

Daria whispered, “Did things get bad again?”

“Come with me a sec,” Jane told her. Daria followed her friend around the corner and stood at the door of Jane’s bedroom.

The bed was lofted, like the one in Daria’s room. Under it were a dresser, a stack of plastic storage bins and a treadmill, all of them a bit dinged and dented.

“I take these,” Jane said, “to keep things from getting bad.” She grabbed a pill bottle from the top of her dresser and tossed it to Daria.

“Mirtazapine,” Daria read. “As I recall… this hit you pretty hard.”

“It’s not so rough this time,” Jane replied. “I just…” She took a step and wobbled into the treadmill. “Shit. I just need to stop, at, like, half a glass of shiraz, I guess.”

Daria stood beside her and placed a hand on her shoulder.

“It didn’t get Dark Age bad,” Jane insisted. “You think I could do all I do running this place if it had?” She smiled wanly.

“I’m… I’m here for you,” Daria said.

Jane pushed herself away from the treadmill and stood upright. Her arm went around Daria’s shoulders, and her voice was close and quiet in Daria’s ear. “That was supposed to be my line this time around,” Jane whispered, a little ruefully.

“C’mon,” Daria told her friend. “Before Quinn gets the wrong idea.”

—The wind down Huntington Avenue is cold.

—It is the Sunday before Thanksgiving, 2001.

“Psssh. Hey, Dariatron—” Jane leaned over and took another brown plastic pill bottle from atop the dresser. “This is—this is a leftover from an old prescription combination. An old treatment combo. Should still be good, though.”

Daria took the bottle, which rattled in her hand. “Clonazepam,” she said.

“‘n case you have trouble sleeping. Here, have a couple.” Jane handed her another bottle, this one empty. “I’ve got plenty of spares to carry them in.”

Daria opened the clonazepam vial and tipped its contents into her palm, where the pills formed a perfect quincunx, like dots on a die.

—It is the summer after freshman year. I am standing in a smoke-beseiged dorm room on the freak side of Longfellow Tech. Cendrine is sorting capsules on her desk, a battered paperback of Shulgin open for easy reference.

“I have had some insomiac nights lately,” Daria admitted.

“One of these ought to be plenty to mellow you out,” Jane advised.

Daria transferred two pills into the spare container and returned the others to their home vial.

“Rationing yourself, eh?”

“Just being prudent. C’mon.”

Quinn stirred on the couch when they returned. “Hmmm. Hi again,” she said, mostly asleep.

Jane sat on the other sofa. “You know, we do have an actual bed you could use.”

“Oh, Jane,” Quinn said. “Such an offer to make to a respectable married woman…” And she was asleep again.

Daria let herself fall backward into the bean-bag chair. “That reminds me,” she said. “Any girlfriends or boyfriends running about that I should be aware of?”

“None of mine,” said Jane. “Mm. Next episode?”

—It is spring semester, senior year at Raft. I am reading course requirements, trying to decide if I want to stay on for my master’s. Jane knocks on my door. She is crying. Cendrine has been in Cali-grad-school-fornia for months now and wrote to say she met someone new, that she met another woman, and Jane is crying…

Daria leaned forward to pick up the keyboard from the floor. Tapping the arrow keys to skip through the list of shows which the computer could provide, she said, “Tonight, on How It’s Made: Babby.”

Jane snorted and chuckled.

“Hey,” Jane said, “have you seen The Secret Life of Machines? It’s kind of the same, but quirky and English, very English.”

“You know how to find it?”

Jane reached out her arms and wiggled her fingers. “Gimme gimme.” Daria passed her the keyboard.

—She knows—

—She knows me plenty well enough to realize that I have enough surplus brain to be upset on two or three levels beneath what I have already said—

—moving into a room at Raft and finding eye-hooks driven into the drywall above the bed—”What are these for?”

Jane moved to sit beside Daria and snuggled around her.

—the flash of curiosity all through me—

—realizing I can’t trust anyone that much—

—tagging along with friends going to that shop in Central because they needed Manic Panic—

Jane’s head was drooping onto Daria’s shoulder. “Could get to like this,” Jane mumbled.

—nineteen years old and erasing my browser history with needless guilt—

—And now I am remembering how it felt to remember then how the pain of being pierced didn’t matter, didn’t matter at all because I was holding the hand of the boy I was crushing on—

“Am I the only one still awake?”

Neither Jane nor Quinn made a reply.

And now Daria’s memory at its most eidetic played back for her images of rope corsets and clover clamps and spider gags and cages, always cages; recollections of JPEGs furtively saved and then deleted; memories of trying to construct the perfect sentence to express her desires, at times out of instinct and, on other nights, to seek some kind of sense in them.

—I see those women—

—”I see those women,” I wrote myself, “and all I can think is, I wish I were that beautiful, so I could be exploited like that. Now and then. Consensually. By someone I love.”

The light from the projector screen played over the room.

—That one moment of elation when it looked like the man who shared my life had an interest in the same—

—That one moment when all the curiosity came back so strong I could taste it and was on the cusp of being satisfied—

Jane’s weight was sinking Daria further into the chair. Getting up without waking her was beginning to seem a dubious proposition.

* * *

Daria stood in the morning air, her fists clenched in the lined pockets of her parka.

“You know, sometimes the hardest scenes to write are when a character is just putting her overnight bag in her car for her trip back home.”

Quinn lowered the trunk hatch. “Oh? Why is that?”

“Because if it’s just about the overnight bag, then the scene shouldn’t exist at all. Unless it’s a spy thriller or something, I guess, and you need to establish that the papers are in the car. Otherwise, the scene has to have something else going on. Emotions. Under the surface. And emotions are scary.”

Quinn embraced Daria.

“Does that help any?” she asked, squeezing Daria tight.

Daria returned the hug. “A bit.”

Then, they parted.

“Drive safe,” Daria admonished.

“I’ll text you when I get there. And I’ll visit the next chance I get. And I’ll give Aunt Amy your best.”

“I need to call Mom and Dad and let them know I’ve settled in.”

“I’ll back up whatever story you give them.”

“Thanks. Go on, you’ve got a brunch to catch.”

Quinn climbed into her car. “Don’t be a stranger, sister mine.”

“Strange, me? Never.”

Quinn smiled, closed the door, buckled herself in and thumbed the ignition button.

“Finding route to home,” Daria said. “Recalculating.” She watched her sister drive away, and then she let herself back into the Moonbase Illyria facility with her new entry card.

Muttering, she began to compose narration. “Another city, another residence, thought Melody. There was no reason to think this one would last, that this domicile could become a home in any emotional sense, in any meaning other than the logistical. But the idea still had appeal, or perhaps only the feeling that it should be attractive, that it would please another woman, the woman she had stopped trying to be a long time ago…”

She stepped into the elevator and turned the gallery key.

“As the elevator carried her upward, Melody gauged the situation as though she were compiling a mission profile, as she had done for so many operations in the past. Those were her talents: planning, patience, execution. Those were the habits by which she had lived, for which she had earned praise from the only quarters that mattered to her.

“Now, they were rote exercises, with no satisfaction about them, only the bleak promise that if she kept them up, she could live long enough to continue carrying them out.”

Daria stepped into the gallery and slid out of her parka.

“It had been her choice. Melody Glass… would wait.”

* * *

On Monday, Daria woke late and found an e-mail from Jane waiting on her newly-handed-down Encom tablet. “G’mornin’ sleepyhead,” it said, “help yourself to whatever in the kitchen. I’ve got to get in the zone to review designs and finalize approvals and bitch out a couple deadbeat bar-stock suppliers, but I’ll be up for dinner. Wuvnhugs, J.”

Daria showered and changed into day clothes. She padded from her bedroom to the kitchen, did a quick scan of the fridge and tried the door to what looked like it might be a pantry. It stuck slightly but yielded to her pull, and she flicked the light switch she noticed just inside.

“Well, you’re set for the winter, Mrs. Torrance,” she said aloud.

Liter cans of mango pulp and boxes of ribbon pakoda and bags of chana dal must have come from an Indian grocery, as did the stacked boxes of samosas in the deep freeze. Baking staples and flats of canned goods looked like they hailed from the nearest Payday. But the number-ten cans in overbearing quantities on the lower shelves, and the frozen packaged goods marked not for individual sale, and the shaft of gouda in the fridge which looked like it could club a baby mammoth—where did those come from? Unfamiliar brands, logos which had last been redesigned circa 1978—ah, there, on a ten-kilo brick of Belgian dark chocolate: US Restaurant Supplies — Quincy, MA — Quantity Cookery since 1919.

She brushed her fingers over the labels on a row of restaurant-sized spice jugs. “I haven’t seen this much curry powder in one place since—”

—Digamma House. Dying days of August, 2000. Standing in the basement kitchen, suddenly very far from home, facing my first afternoon on cooking team. One of my newly acquired frasority siblings pulling a cling-wrapped metal bowl from the middle fridge. “We were going to use this lobster for a Rush event, but we made tacos instead. I guess we can cook it like chicken?”

—The others are sophomores and juniors, all experienced in cooking for twenty-five or thirty, all having their dish of choice already in mind. So the lobster falls to me.

—I am standing over a titanic wok of lobster curry bisque. It is, terrifyingly, a thing like my father would make. A sophomore tests the yellow liquid. I expect her to turn ashen. But she smiles at me. “It’s good!”

—I fail to believe her. I mentally add up the costs of ordering pizza for everyone instead. I keep doing this until we carry the three courses upstairs and call our siblings down from their rooms and suddenly people are going to the wok for seconds.

Daria counted out eight small frozen samosas and set the oven to warming. “This’ll do for my lunch, but dinner should be…”

—Deep-frying a turkey that fall for my first Boston Thanksgiving, serving it up with cornbread stuffing and sweet-potato casserole.

Yes, there was a number-ten can of sweet potatoes in the pantry. Duly noted.

—Back in Lawndale for Christmas. The familiar buildings on the drive to Morgendorfferhaus look like faithful depictions of a story I feel I have written. My sister collides with and squeezes me at the door. “Migod, Daria, you look fantastic!”

—I murmur a reply.

—”No, really! The freshman ten for you was, like, the freshman minus five.”

—I ponder this and realize that I’ve trudged to and from and around campus five or six days a week, and that I’ve been eating better—if I want sugar tarts, I have to buy them myself.

Daria returned to the deep freeze and began to rummage.

—My father, wanting to cook something special to celebrate my return. My mother, just out of his eyeshot, slumping her shoulders.

—”Sure, Dad. How about we go to the store for some food parts? Just you and me.”

—”You mean it, kiddo?”

She carried an armful of frozen chicken thighs, plastic-sealed into icy bricks, to the kitchen counter and set them in a bowl of warm water. The oven beeped its readiness, and she slid in a baking tray with the samosas. She returned to the pantry, to check more closely what vegetables might be available. And there, just inside the door: “Is that… Diet Ultra Cola… in blue flavor?!”

Daria had not seen the blue Diet Ultra Cola since she had moved away from New England. Was it only a hit with people who had killed taste buds with coffee milk? “Antifreeze for my heart,” she said, and carried the 3-liter bottle into the kitchen.

—My father and I have returned from the supermarket. I am rolling out a long sheet of aluminium foil. I delegate to my father the tasks of chopping, stirring, putting water on to boil—but not spicing, never spicing. My mother and my sister watch with puzzlement and ill-concealed concern. I call Jane and tell her and Trent to be over in forty minutes.

—We dine on lemon-pepper baked salmon, steamed broccoli and asparagus, fettucine alfredo with a sauce I learned one week on cooking team and improved the next.

—Quinn gobbles the food in between expressions of incredulity. My mother looks at me as if I have performed a Christmas miracle.

—My father: “I was thinking, tomorrow we do a good old hearty tomato sauce!”

—”I’d be down with that,” I say.

—Jane is talking around her pasta. “You must have learned how to do tomato sauce up there—you gotta know how to feed twenty guys.”

—”Leave the gun, take the cannoli,” I reply.

—My father makes pistols with his fingers. “Pchyew! Pchyew!”

* * *

Jane came up the stairs and through the gallery a little after eight that evening. “Well, that was a totalllhey what smells delicious?”

Daria waited diffidently beside the dining table. She held her hands behind her back. “It didn’t seem right to start without you,” she said.

Between them, upon a round metal tray centered neatly on the table, a deep, newly crafted, fragrant pizza.

Daria displayed the pizza cutter she had been keeping behind her back and offered it to Jane, handle first.

Jane took it without a word and carved three radial divisions through the pie. Daria had set two places at the table. Jane pulled the nearest slice onto the waiting plate and sat before it. She rotated the plate a half turn, then lifted the slice, its apex curling down under its own weight.

She brought the point into her mouth with her tongue and took a bite. Her eyes, which had been very wide, closed, and a long, low noise of satisfaction came from deep within her.

“Marinated chicken,” Daria said, “and olives and artichokes and spinach, stuffed in the crust. Topped with jalapeños and roasted garlic.”

Jane swallowed and leaned back in her chair, loose and lanky. “The spinach is so we don’t die?”

“You got it.”

Daria popped the tab on a can of seltzer water and poured half of it into each of two glasses, which she filled the rest of the way with chocolate almond milk. She pulled a slice of pizza onto her own plate and sat down across the table from Jane. They each took a glass.

“I’ve missed having you around,” Jane said.

“Likewise.”

They clinked their glasses together.

“Till we come to bad ends,” Daria said.

“Freakin’ friends.”

[on to chapter 2]

Displacements in land surface due to the M7.8 Gorkha earthquake, measured by satellite radar altimetry. Source: NASA

One of the striking things about this image is how, even if this was the only information you had about the earthquake – no geological cross-sections, no focal mechanism – you could still tell that you are looking at the results of a large rupture of a thrust fault that shallowly dips to the north. The broad zone of uplift in front, with an equally broad zone of subsidence behind, is a clear signature of this kind of structure. To understand why, you first have to think about what is happening in the build up to this earthquake. Plate tectonic forces are constantly driving India northwards, thrusting it under the Eurasian plate. The contact is a gently northward dipping fault zone that is usually locked by friction down to depths of 15–20 km or so; this means that the motion of the underlying Indian plate will also drag crust on the overriding Eurasian plate down and to the north with it, causing subsidence above the locked portion of the fault. This effect dies off further north as the fault gets deeper and weaker – higher temperatures mean ductile rather than brittle deformation dominates, so the fault is no longer ‘strong’. In this region, land squashed between India-driven motion to the south, and strong Eurasian crust to the north, is squeezed pushed upwards.

Deformation of the land surface above a frictionally locked, shallowly dipping thrust fault. Subsidence above the shallow part of the fault is balanced out by uplift down-dip of the locked zone.

However, this is (mostly) elastic strain – remove the forces causing this change of shape, and it will bounce back to its original shape. This is exactly what happens when the accumulated strain across the fault becomes large enough to overcome its friction, and it ruptures in an earthquake. The region above the previously locked thrust pops back up as it catches up with decades or centuries of plate motion; and the uplifted crust to the north drops back down as the tectonic vice it was caught in relaxes.

Deformation of the land surface associated with a large earthquake on a shallow thrust fault. Release of accumulated strain causes uplift above the shallow part of the fault and subsidence further down-dip.

To make things even clearer, you can quite nicely project my schematic cross-section above onto the broad patterns of uplift and subsidence seen in the radar data.

How the pattern of land displacement measured by radar altimetry matches up well to the pattern expected from an earthquake on a shallowly dipping thrust fault.

What makes this even more impressive is how quickly we have this picture – a few decades ago, you’d need months – or years – of levelling surveys to work out how the land surface had changed elevation after a major earthquake. Now we’re only limited by how soon an orbiting radar satellite is going to pass overhead.

Players: 2 nurses, 1 clerk, 2 doctors, lots of patients

Doc 1: “Hey, what’s up? I’m sitting on my ass here and there’s a room full of patients waiting.”

Nurse 1: “Hold on Doc, I’m almost done checking one in.”

“So, Mrs. Smith, do you feel safe in your own home?”

Patient 1: “It’s Sister Jan, actually. My convent is quite safe.”

Nurse 1: “And when was your last sexual encounter?”

Patient 1:” ??”

Doc 1 to Doc 2: “Oy. Why don’t you check up front, see what’s up?”

Clerk to patient: “I need to ask you a series of questions as part of our mandated check-in process. Is that OK?”

Patient 2: nods

Clerk: “I’m sorry, your answer has to be verbalized. Would you like me to repeat the question.”

Patient 2: “No, thanks.”

Clerk: “So you don’t agree to answer the questions?”

Patient 2: “No, I mean yes, of course I will. I was saying no about repeating the question.”

Clerk: “OK, that’s fine. First, are you here today as a result of an auto accident, an injury sustained at work or in the armed forces?”

Patient 2: “I’m not here for an injury. I’m here for my blood pressure.”

Clerk: “Sir, please don’t talk about your privileged health information in the lobby like this. I could get in big trouble. Can you just answer the questions yes or no?”

Patient 2: “Yes”

Clerk: “So you are here because of an injury sustained in one of the mentioned contexts?”

Patient 2: “No! I mean I’ll answer yes and no!”

Clerk: “OK, are you a dialysis patient?”

Patient 2: “No.”

Clerk: “Have you travelled outside the continental United States in the last 90 days?”

Patient 2: “Yes.”

Clerk, donning a mask: “Where did you travel?”

Patient 2: “Windsor, Ontario. I love the duty-free shop. Just a hop over the bridge and back!”

Clerk: “The government requires I ask you about your race. Can you tell me whether you are caucasian, African American, Hispanic, Native-Pacific Islander, Declines to Answer, or Other?”

Patient 2: “I’ll take ‘Declines to Answer’.

Clerk: “Now I have to ask about your ethnicity…”

Patient 2: “Wait, we just did that. I declined.”

Clerk: “That was for race, Sir. This is “ethnicity”.

Patient 1: “I’ll make it quick for you. I decline to answer.”

Clerk: “What is your shoe size?”

Patient 2: “Uh, 12″

Clerk: “Good, we’re getting there. As soon as we finish you can see the nurse.”

Patient 2: “What about my doctor appointment? It started a half-hour ago.”

Clerk: “The doctor cannot see you until the nurse evaluates you. Just a few more questions now. Do you eat meat?”

Patient 2: “Yes.”

Clerk: “Beef, chicken, fish, goat, or other?”

Patient 2: “Uh, any I guess.”

Clerk: “Please be specific.”

Patient 2: “I’ve eaten them all at one time or another. Except goat.”

Clerk: “Is there something special about goat that keeps you from eating it?”

Patient 2:”What do you mean?”

Clerk: “Is the reason you refuse to eat goat one or more of the following: I don’t like the flavor; I never got around to it; It’s against my religion; I believe goats are strictly for sexual satisfaction.”

Patient 2: “It doesn’t say that!”

Clerk, turning the screen around: “Yes, it does, see? Please just answer.”

Patient 2: “I’ll take the one that said never got around to it. That’s the last one?”

Clerk: Ok, the last one, “I believe goats are strictly for sexual satisfaction.”

Patient 2: “No! I never got around to it!”

Clerk: “Whether you’ve acted on your urges isn’t my business. I only enter your responses.”

Patient 2: “No, I meant that I never got around to eating goat. I don’t believe in goat sex.”

Clerk: “You should have been clearer. I’ve already exited that screen and you cannot change your answer.”

Doc 1 to Doc 2: “I don’t think we’re ever getting out of here.”

It examines, under the surface of an adventure story, the psychological foibles which can lead people into Randroidism. That’s a very different animal. But some people seem to take “When everyone is special, no one will be” as the movie’s actual moral. Let’s unpack that.

First, who says it? 1. The villain. Yeah. That’s always a great place to look for the moral of a story. And, ironically, Buddy/Syndrome is special: he has the same superpower as Bat- or Iron Man. 2. A middle-aged man who feels unappreciated and projects his own troubles onto other situations. Again, yeah. Basically defines “reliable source,” I’m sure.

What’s the first event that sets the conflict in motion? It’s not the lawsuits against the supers. It’s Mr. Incredible failing to live up to a social obligation by brushing off Buddy.

What’s the first thing we see Mr. Incredible do in the present day? He helps a woman long past her productive years to loot a corporation. He doesn’t exploit his knowledge of the system for his own benefit; instead, he risks his own job, acting against his own self-interest, to benefit another person who can do nothing material for him in return. And the movie unambiguously portrays this as the right thing to do.

What’s the happy ending—or, rather, the coda? The supers learn to rein in their powers, to come in second best, so they can remain incognito and be there when civilization needs them. Again, the movie depicts this as a clear-cut good thing. But Rand had something to say about people who deliberately do less than their best in order to fit in better. When Dagny Taggart suggests she do just that, Francisco D’Anconia slaps her face so hard she tastes blood.

Stepping outside the text of the movie for a moment, does Syndrome’s “make everyone super so no one is” plan actually make sense? No. If you could buy rocket boots, they’d be, in principle, analogous to mountain bikes or skis or rollerblades. That is, they’d be a technology that opens up new kinds of activity: hobbies for some, pro sports for others. Saying they’d erase individuality is like saying camera phones were the doom of cinema, or that the mechanical typewriter was the end of literary genius. The plan doesn’t hold up, either within the movie or outside. But it doesn’t have to: it’s a fantasy from the mind of a maniacal supervillain.

The villain is a man who built his entire life around his grievances. The hero, as they do in many stories, has a few points in common with the villain. But the hero learns to see beyond, and rise above, the flaws they share with the villain. That’s what puts them on the hero side of the ledger.

On that note: the people who claim that Lois Lowry’s The Giver is an Objectivist novel. Yes, the quiet, emotionally intimate story about slowly learning wisdom through suffering, where a child risks starvation and freezing to death in order to have a slim hope of making his community a better place after he is gone. The story of how family is a matter not of blood but of love, how the flattening of natural beauty is to be mourned, how solitude can be joyful and loneliness painful in equal measure. The book that literally, not figuratively, says this:

“Giver,” Jonas suggested, “you and I don’t need to care about the rest of them.”

The Giver looked at him with a questioning smile. Jonas hung his head. Of course they needed to care. It was the meaning of everything.

But apparently for some folks, anti-authoritarian is automatically Objectivist. Because the world is simpler when you’re a misunderstood teenager.

our engineers could build a computer smaller than a room, but would prefer not to

#nixiepunk is the censored chapter of David Kahn’s Codebreakers

you are about to enter a dimension not of sight or of sound but of tungsten and neon

#nixiepunk now controls your television. All four stations.

Japan didn’t conquer the world. MacArthur hasn’t left yet.

#nixiepunk means trading your goggles and mirrorshades for heart-shaped sunglasses

There are canals on Mars. There have always been canals on Mars.

#nixiepunk is finding a buyer for the 3 kilobytes of hot drum storage in your Royal McBee

“I’ve taken care of our little rat problem,” Tom said icily.

#nixiepunk means you can reuse your Mad Men gear at DragonCon. Be grateful, you cheap bastards.

Three electrodes and the truth!!

#nixiepunk will bury you. Face down, 9-edge first.

Of all the ways to revisit the values of Eisenhower’s America, #nixiepunk may be the least frightening.

Johnny looked up from the control panel, his face bathed in the warm, phosphoric glow of the newly installed monitor display’s cathode ray tube. The monitor was a bit of nonsense, of course, something for the pinheads who signed the check to coo over, impressed by how modern the workstations were. But it fed him no information, no data; that’s what the dials, gauges, and indicator lights on the control panel in front of him were for. Right now, they were telling him that something was wrong.

— Johnny of the CSD

HAGeoDog determinedly steered me towards the trail along the Cuyahoga River, which winds through downtown Kent. The river and its clear influence on our town’s history provided the perfect visual setting from the stories I was hearing in the podcast. While I’ve taken this walk dozens of times in the nearly three years I’ve lived in Kent, I always find new things to appreciate along the way. Here are a few of today’s musings.

When I moved to glaciated northeastern Ohio, the last thing I was expecting was bedrock slot canyons, but here they are. There is a short reach of gorge within Kent, and a much more impressive gorge downstream in Cuyahoga Falls and Akron (but that is a story for another time). The stretch in Kent is known as Brady’s Leap, for a multi-layered story of an Army captain leaping the river in a single bound. The river is wider now then it was when it was leapt, having been blasted during construction of the Pennsylvania and Ohio Canal, and it is surely unleapable, but it is still unexpected and beautiful.

Bedrock gorge at Brady’s Leap, Cuyahoga River (Photo by A. Jefferson, March 2015).

A little way downstream, I can stand on former reservoir sediments in what is now a park, an look upstream at the Main Street Bridge. As I do, I can contemplate both what this place looked like until the dam came out in 2004, with much higher and stiller water than we see today, and the importance of river crossings in tying together the Kent community. No one else was going to leap to get across the river, so bridges were key, and their number has fluctuated over the two centuries of white settlement in this spot. Today, our town as 4 of them, and when one is closed as the Main Street bridge was all summer long, the river becomes a pretty good barrier to moving about.

Main Street bridge, Kent. (Photo by A. Jefferson, March 2015)

But rather than barriers, rivers have long been transportation corridors, and the Cuyahoga is no exception.

Rivers have long been transportation corridors. Historic Kent depot behind the modern freight train running next to the river, with its remnant lock system. (Photo by A. Jefferson, March 2015).

The lock, which dated from the short-lived Pennsylvania and Ohio Canal era (~1840-1857), blew out in the Great Flood of 1913 (see here for a photo of that event). But the lock is what saved the dam in 2004, because taking out the lock structure enabled the river to be free flowing through town, achieving the restoration objectives while preserving the heritage of the dam itself.

Kent dam. The city will turn on a recirculating pump and make water appear to flow over it when the weather is warmer. (Photo by A. Jefferson, March 2015)

Looking downstream from the dam, the river appears to split into two channels with an island in between. When I first moved to town, I was puzzled by this apparent island braided reach, but I have since learned that this is yet another place where the legacy of the canal continues to shape the river. The left channel is the old canal itself, while the right thread is a pretty little mixed bedrock-alluvial reach.

Looking downstream from the Kent dam (Photo by A. Jefferson, March 2015).

It’s clear that while humans may have created the island 160+ years ago, the river is working to reshape it of it’s own accord. Several channels have been cut through to join the left and right threads of the river, and at the bottom of the island, there’s a beautiful gravel and boulder bar that changes every year.

Boulder bar in the Cuyahoga River, downtown Kent. (Photo by A. Jefferson, March 2015)

If I’ve learned one thing from thinking about the interweaving of human history and rivers, it’s that things never stay the same for very long. As we contemplate what can seem like insurmountable problems of politics, infrastructure, environmental degradation, or life, I think we would be wise to spend time by the river, flowing endlessly on while the trappings of our society come and go in its course.

If you like the intersection of history and geology, you might also enjoy this post from 2009 on Landsford Canal in South Carolina.

I also promised myself I’d read 12 actual, honest-to-goodness books in 2015, and I’m a few books into that quest as well. Those are being interspersed in the storify too. Recently, Jacquelyn (instigator of all my memes, apparently) and Kate Clancy shared this article “I challenge you to stop reading White, Straight, Cis Male Authors for One Year.” Since the first two books I read in 2015 were by women, and the one I’m currently enjoying is also woman-authored, I decided to hop on the bandwagon and make my 12 books a litany of lady literature.

Enough with the preamble, here are the papers and books I’ve read in the first two months of the year.

A reverse chronological order listing of my 2015 adventures in academic reading.

If we judge by how other Muslim Americans report feeling, it was an act of terror. It made many Americans feel less safe. If we judge it by the scale of the atrocity and it’s likely long-term affects on Muslim Americans, I’m not so sure.

In the time that the three kids were murdered in NC, thousands in the Mideast were murdered, many in the name of religion and terror. In France the prisons continued to be populated 50% by Arabs/North Africans. In the U.S., black women were raped, black men were assaulted by representatives of government, and prisons continued to fill up with young African Americans.

Terrorism isn’t a simple thing. When Timothy McVeigh blew up the Federal Building in OK, most Americans were able to shrug it off as some crazy white dude. On 9/11, we all felt less safe, and allowed our government to make us so by engaging in domestic spying and unjustified foreign wars. I’ve spoken to Chaldeans whose families in Iraq are under threat by ISIS and are living in terror.

Terrorism is subjective. There are the individual acts, and the direct effects on the victims. There is the wider effect. And there are the imbalances of power.

What the discussion allows us to do is to identify systemic problems. Muslims are often demonized in the US. This leads to small-scale acts of terror, and to larger ones, some that we call wars. And these distract us from one of our biggest acts of societal terror: the continued subjugation of African Americans through our school-to-prison pipeline, our ghettoization of education, the Jim Crow job ceiling (which is not a “southern thing.”)

I’m no expert in race. I’m obviously not black, nor a scholar. But if we wish to make sense of the murder of the Muslim students in the south it makes sense to evaluate or domestic and foreign policy that is springs from. The only steps we’ve made toward our domestic terrorism is to ignore it. The only steps we’ve taken to avoid wars in the Mideast…well, we haven’t. We have a really big hammer, and everything from the Med to the Indus is a nail.

If we really want to make sense of terrorism, let’s clean house a little. That will only make us stronger to deal with very real external threats.

In order to accomplish this exciting new research, while providing education and training for hydrologists interested in engaging with real-world challenges, I’m recruiting a graduate student and post-doc to join my group as soon as June 1st. The graduate student will focus on a comparison of the benefits of five types of green infrastructure at the Watershed Stewardship Center, while the post-doctoral scientist will be developing projects at the watershed scale, with questions about green infrastructure efficacy and climate change that can be answered using hydrologic models.

If you are interested in either of these opportunities, please check out the job ads (grad student, post-doc) and apply! We are in the process of selecting the graduate student, and will start review of applications for the post-doc on March 1st.

The front entrance to the Watershed Stewardship Center, featuring a green roof, cistern, and constructed wetland. We’ll be studying the water quantity and quality improvements yielded by the green roof, in comparison to several other types of green infrastructure at the site.

A constructed wetland at the rear of the Watershed Stewardship Center. The wetland is one of five green infrastructure practices we’ll be studying.

Land ho! The end of our return journey across the Drake Passage. Photo: Chris Rowan, 2013.

Cape Horn from the south. Photo: Chris Rowan, 2013.

Two things you might not know about Cape Horn: it’s named not for its shape on a map, but for the Dutch city of Hoorn, and as the chart makes clear, its quite a small island – home to a small Chilean coastguard station and a memorial to sailors who encountered ‘The Horn’ in far more deadly conditions than we did.

Bridge chart showing Cape Horn and other associated islands – you can also see how the good weather allowed a closer approach than normal. Photo: Anne Jefferson, 2013.

Sailors’ memorial on Cape Horn. Photo: Anne Jefferson, 2013.

Past ‘The Horn’, looking back southwest. Photo: Chris Rowan, 2013

Our last glimpse of Cape Horn, as Corinthian headed back to Ushuaia. Photo: Chris Rowan, 2013.

Leaving Cape Horn behind us, all that remained was to sail back along the Beagle Channel to Ushuaia, disembark Corinthian, wave goodbye to the lovely crew and expedition leaders, and head to the airport for the long flight home – which ended up being quite an adventure in itself.

People who bleed from their GI tract can fool you. One minute they’re sitting up and talking, the next they are unconscious and in shock. This one didn’t fool anyone. When I spoke to the transferring hospital, they told me that they’d already given her eight units of blood, and another was hanging in the ambulance. I suggested they take her back in immediately, but the ambulance was already on the freeway.

When it comes to active bleeding, you can give all the blood in the world, but without stopping the bleeding, the patient will die. From the vague report we received, she had cirrhosis of the liver and was bleeding from a broken vein in her esophagus. Supposedly, she was coming her to get a shunt that would stop the bleeding.

No one knew anything about her. She was in late-middle age and was soon unable to tell us much more. The attending physician who accepted the transfer had never met her and knew little more. Still we were able to get a radiology team in to evaluate her for a shunt.

There were two of us on call in the ICU, one making all the phone calls, the other helping the patient. She didn’t look all that bad, didn’t have all the signs we usually see in a long-term liver patient. But she was definitely still bleeding. Blood coming from the rectum has a particular smell that stays with you forever.

While we waited for our experts to respond, we “resuscitated” her which in this case meant placing large IV lines and pumping her full of blood and saline. We stabilized her enough to get her to radiology, but they told us that the procedure wasn’t going to help. Someone mentioned a weighted balloon down her throat but I can’t remember what happened to that idea.

What I do remember is a woman, lying in bed, in a place she’d never been, surrounded by strangers and the scent of blood, waiting to die. I stuck a needle into a vein in her arm to collect some blood, but it looked like cranberry juice, not thick, red, life-sustaining blood. At this point she was unconscious.

All of us in the ICU struggled to keep her alive, but watched as blood continued to flow into a vein and out her bottom. We all knew what would happen, each nurse, the doctors. We saw she was losing her life in front of us, her consciousness occasionally making a brief appearance before diving back into oblivion. When her heart stopped there was no need for CPR; our chest compressions were only circulating thin, pink fluid through her arteries and veins, carrying no oxygen, no life.

We watched her bleed to death before the sun rose.

Some companies want special forms filled out, some want us to meet certain arbitrary-seeming benchmarks, and for the life of me, I have no idea how to even figure out all these different programs.

One company now lists me as “meeting quality standards” but not meeting “cost-effectiveness standards”. I requested the data on that one: I’m at the peak of the bell curve. Apparently I need a few more SDs to the left to make it. These results are posted on their website and sent to members.

My best doctor-patient relationships do not develop from an insurance website but from personal recommendations. Yes, patients are paying more of their health care costs, but the decisions whether to spend money happen in the exam room. If I think the patient needs a test, I recommend it. If they feel they cannot afford it, we discuss it some more and come up with a reasonable plan.

I’m not sure I care about what the insurance company thinks, but that’s probably naive.

My incentive check mentioned at the top was for $5.92. I’m going to go with a strange philosophy: practice quality medicine based on the latest evidence to the best of my abilities. Hopefully the rest will fall into place.

I might not be cost-effective when I suspect a cancer and get all the diagnostic studies done at once, but it’s better for the patient, so I’m going with it.

As the father of the world’s most wonderful ten year-old, I wonder what every parent does: how to protect her from harm, disappointment, sadness, grief. Of course it can’t be done, and shouldn’t be, and it’s probably selfish to try. I know she will experience sadness and it will become part of the her larger self, but I can’t stand to see her hurting. Nothing is worse than watching a child who can’t be comforted because you just cannot make some things right.

Maybe that’s part of the problem in the exam room. In some ways, it’s easy to take on a parental, or at least protective, role. Many doctors share the illusion–delusion?–that we share with parents, that we can make it all better.

Neither parents nor doctors can make alright all of the time. But we can give our children comfort and space to be sad. We can give our patients space to grieve with someone they feel is somewhat insulated from their pain.

First year resident picking up phone to call attending cardiologist after evaluating a new admission: “Dr. Heart, this is Dr. Doshi at MH CCU. I’m seeing Mr. Rubinstein who came in with chest pain.”

Dr. Heart: “Well, what did the EKG show? Are his enzymes elevated?”

R1: “I can’t tell you that.”

Dr. Heart, about to tear R1 a new one: “Why are you calling me before you have the relevant information, Doctor?”

R1: “Well, the ER wanted to get an EKG but Blue Globe Insurance doesn’t allow for ER doctors to order cardiac procedures. That’s why they transferred him to the unit.”

Dr. Heart: “For tonight, you’re the cardiologist. What does the EKG show?”

R1: “Well, that’s the thing. BGI only allows for a board-certified cardiologist to order an EKG. In person.”

Dr. Heart, about to lose his shit: “Well, let’s start with the basics then. Tell me his history and his physical exam findings.”

R1: “His chief complaint is ‘I feel like an elephant is sitting on my chest’. I can’t gather more information without a prior authorization.”

Dr. Heart, humoring the young doctor: “And I suppose you’ve gotten that authorization then?”

R1, starting to sweat, and speaking as if reading from a script: “A prior authorization can only be obtained from the member’s primary care physician.”

Dr. Heart: “And I suppose you’ve called this person?”

R1, sounding a bit embarrassed: “Yes. But…she said that she cannot apply for a prior auth tonight because it can only be done by computer from a verified HIPPA-compliant terminal between the hours of 6 am and 7 am…Guam Standard time. Which she said is impossible because that was yesterday, or it’s next week, or something. And besides, if she requests an authorization she’ll lose her incentive payment without which she will not be able to afford computers, and without computers she can’t request prior auths.”

Dr. Heart, sarcastically: “Can you at least tell me it Mr. Rubenstein yet lives?”

Uncomfortable silence lasting several seconds.

R1: “Um, no. He’s been discharged. Care management said that he didn’t meet inpatient criteria.”

Heart: “And why is that?”

R1: “There was no history and physical or EKG findings on the chart to justify admission.”

Heart: “Then why are you calling me?”

R1: “The Quality Committee is reviewing your actions in this case and they are meeting tomorrow to decide whether to revoke your privileges. Oh, and shiva will be at the Rubenstein home starting tomorrow night.”

I had the honor of speaking to a science communications seminar class at the North Carolina School of Science & Mathematics, recently described by Dave Dewitt at our NPR affiliate as, “[C]reated 35 years ago for serious NC students with grand aspirations. It was the first residential school of its kind in the country, and it’s public. The course catalog rivals many major universities, with classes in robotics, biomedical engineering, and astrophysics.”

Dean of Science, Dr. Amy Shenk, invited me to talk about the Ebola Virus Disease outbreak ongoing in west Africa in terms of its challenges to public science communication. I’ve put together my collection of stories written in my role as a contributor to the Pharma & Healthcare section of Forbes.com. With my training as a pharmacologist, I naturally focus on what drugs are in development to treat the potentially fatal disease. But what I’ve learned is that drugs have little use if a health system lacks infrastructure to even monitor blood or administer intravenous electrolytes.

General thought questions

What do you know about Ebola hemorrhagic fever (now called Ebola Virus Disease, or EVD)?

What were you thinking when news of the outbreak first broke?

What did you think about bringing infected U.S. missionaries to Atlanta for care?

What message might this send to the people of west Africa?

Where did science communication go wrong? Where did it go right?

For the following articles:

Which of these do you think have particularly high value (or low value!) in communicating the complexity of the Ebola situation to the general public.

Does the simple listing of facts lead to understanding, addressing legitimate concerns?

What ethical issues does the use of experimental Ebola drugs raise that present a general science communication opportunity?

Kroll Ebola articles at Forbes

Do We Have Any Drugs To Treat Ebola? – 29 July 2014

Should We Be Concerned About American Ebola Patients Coming To Emory Hospital? – 1 August 2014

Ebola ‘Secret Serum': Small Biopharma, The Army, And Big Tobacco – 5 August 2014

FDA Moves On Tekmira’s Ebola Drug While Sarepta’s Sits Unused – 7 August 2014

Beware Of Fake Ebola Supplements – 14 August 2014

American Missionaries Cured of Ebola Infections; Brantly: ‘Today Is A Miraculous Day’ - 21 August 2014

How Will We Know If The Ebola Drugs Worked? – 26 August 2014

NIAID/GSK Ebola Vaccines To Enter US, UK Human Safety Trials – 28 August 2014

BioCryst to Launch NHP Ebola Drug Safety, Efficacy Studies ‘Within Weeks’ – 29 August 2014

WHO Ebola Drug Panel: Use Survivor Serum To Treat Ebola Victims – 5 September 2014

Gates Foundation Commits $50 Million To Ebola Containment Efforts – 10 September 2014

Cuba Responds To Ebola Crisis As Black Market For Convalescent Serum Emerges – 12 September 2014

CDC Ramps Up Ebola Worker Training In Advance Of Obama Announcement – 16 September 2014

Explaining the drugs, informed consent

Ebola, Experimental Drugs and Informed Consent: Should Those At Risk Simply Take The Doctors Orders? – by Elaine Schattner – 31 August 2014

Vaccines and public health – Another science communications challenge 

Final, somewhat unrelated issue on science communications relative to tomorrow’s NOVA documentary on vaccines: The need for humility in public health communications, by Dr. Brian Zikland-Fisher of the University of Michigan. The polarization of vaccine attitudes, regardless of scientific facts, requires a middle ground where people can have legitimate concerns addressed.

• We must acknowledge that each parent has the right and the authority to make his or her own choices, and that it is our failing (either in the quality of our vaccines or the persuasiveness of our message), not theirs, if we have failed to convince them that vaccination is the better choice.

• We must acknowledge that we have the best chance of convincing a skeptical public when we put the weaknesses of our arguments and the risks of our interventions front and center and acknowledge the fears that they evoke.

It may seem counterintuitive, but embracing humility may be the best thing we can do. Humility will build trust in those who believe (sometimes accurately) that we are not telling the whole story. Humility might resonate with those parents who genuinely want to do right by their children but have not been convinced by “the facts.”

The conflict itself is a painful, violent remnant of European colonialism, fed by hatred of Jews, apathy about Arabs, ignorance of complexity, and continued geopolitical gaming. It’s senseless to argue about which land “originally” belonged to whom—the entire region has been a battle ground since Biblical times. What matters most is the current reality on the ground.

The current reality: The region that makes up Israel and the putative Palestinian state will eventually become two independent states, one majority Arab, one majority Jewish. Utopian visions of a single state are also a colonial pipe dream as can be seen with nearly every other state in the Mideast. When this will happen though is anyone’s guess, as the parties continue to play out their zero-sum game of futile militarism.

To “take sides” in this conflict as is shown in the media is also a fool’s errand. The people of both states have an absolute right to live safely and govern themselves. But they are in each others’ way and the world has made a decision: Israel, the stronger state-entity is the bad guy.

This is true. And it’s not. Israel has done some horrible things. That’s not surprising given that it is in a perpetual state of war, surrounded by countries that wish it dead and by non-state actors doing the actual killing. No one “wins” wars. It’s always the so-called non-combatants who suffer the most. But to paint this as a simple “Big Bad Israel” against the poor Palestinian refugees is incorrect at best, anti-Semitic at worst.

The classic “tu quoque” fallacy—“I know I did, but you did it too!”—is easy to fall into here, but there is truth to the complaint that while Israel has killed civilians in defending its citizens, its neighbors are slaughtering their each other in numbers unimaginable in Israel and Palestine. It is good and proper to hold nations accountable for their actions, but why this special focus on Israel’s misdeeds?

The origins of the State of Israel lie in Europe. While there has always been a Jewish presence in Israel, the greatest number of Jews until the mid-20th century lived in Europe. Mostly-secular Jewish intellectuals saw that Europe, with its endless pogroms and laws limiting Jews’ freedoms would not be a permanent home for the Jewish people, no matter how much they might wish it. They came up with a plan to form a state where all Jews would be welcome, and would survive by their own hands, live by their strengths, and fail by their own faults. The dissolution of colonialism along with the Holocaust gave birth to the Jewish state, and several kinds of hatred and prejudice gave rise to what will become a Palestinian state. Many Arabs were forced out of Israel during the War of Independence, many more fled, and those that did flee did not find welcoming homes in other Arab countries. Jews however continued to find relative safety in Israel, a safety they fought for daily.

In many ways the greatest tragedy of the conflict is the de facto partition that tore Jewish and Arab neighbors apart, and that exiled Jews from Arab lands, forcing them into the new Jewish state and creating more hostility between Jew and Arab.

But that’s history. The now is not so different for the people of the region. Violence flares often. The killing in Israel and the Territories, the limits on freedom, the daily humiliations are not nearly of the scale in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Egypt. But the killing is real. And so is the hate that drives the world to focus on Israel’s culpability. Israel and the Territories fill a small bit of geography, and it’s a bad neighborhood. Distances are small. Hamas, a terrorist organization dedicated to preventing a two-state solution can easily attack Israeli civilians, keeping Israelis scared and alert. And wakening their military might. Hamas is also embedded in a very crowded strip of land, one that makes any fighting deadly to non-combatants. The problem here isn’t that Israel is killing civilians in its fight for survival but that there is fighting at all.

The only way to stop the violence in Israel/Palestine is to continue good-faith negotiations, but this is difficult when Israelis build settlements in traditionally-Palestinian lands and when those who claim to represent the Palestinians dedicate themselves to murder. And it’s not just terrorism used as a negotiating tool. Hamas’ goal is the complete annihilation of Israel and its Jews. This is why there is an “asymmetric” war, why Israel must maintain a powerful military, why Israel’s right manages to garner so many votes. Jews don’t want to lose their country, and they don’t want to be murdered.

And the pro-Palestinian demonstrations cropping up around Europe and the US, and the BDS movement, reveal the real feelings of the rest of the world. The greater world isn’t out to “save” the Palestinians but to destroy the Jews. To non-Jews this inevitably sounds paranoid, but we have a little bit of experience here. And look at the demonstrations around the world–they are not pro-Palestinian, not anti-Israeli, but anti-Jewish.

If the world is serious about helping bring peace they will give up their hypocrisy and recognize that as horrible as the situation is, the violence is minimal compared to the rest of the region. The violence in the Mideast is not a “Jew thing”. It is regional. It is horrible. It may be unforgivable. But it is not Jewish. There is a war, a war in which one side is divided as to how to live in peace with its impoverished neighbors living in unjust conditions. The other side simply wants to kill all the Jews. And it has found easy allies throughout Europe and the Mideast.

Israel has no real friends. The Jews never have. America is the closest thing, but politics are fickle. Europe made its feelings clear for centuries. Terrorists with a stated purpose to kill ALL the Jews are lobbing rockets at Israeli civilians. Any Israeli government that did not respond militarily would rightly fall. What else is Israel to do? If they were to suddenly lay down arms and recognize the pre-67 borders, recognize a Palestinian state, and pull out of the West Bank, what would happen? Would they suddenly have a valuable trading partner across the border? Would the two states suddenly become the economic powerhouse they could be together?

Clearly not. Palestinian politicians aren’t ready to keep peace with Israel, no matter the conditions. They probably couldn’t if they wanted to as one radical army or another would move in and set up bases to attack Israel. And as long as Israelis feel this threat, and see that they have no one in the world who will say, “Israel has the right to live in peace,” it will be politically impossible, and perhaps literal suicide to treat with the other side.

Those who are not intimately tied to this conflict, who are not Palestinian, Jewish, or Israeli, can have opinions but they cannot understand what we feel. Palestinians and Jews legitimately feel we are fighting for our survival, our very right to live. To judge us harshly is to participate in the colonialism that got us into this mess in the first place.

Want to help? Then help support Palestinians who aren’t anti-Israel. Support Israeli organizations that are pro-Peace. But don’t tell us to lay down our arms just because of ridiculous concepts of “asymmetry” or what have you. In war, people die, usually innocents. The way to prevent it is to support peace, not to demonize one side or the other.

I approach the champs du bataille warily, my step slow. Had I a true squire, he would wipe the sweat from my brow; instead, i must be content to blink it away. I cannot raise my hand because the Foe is most unforgiving. His wounds seem light but the misery does come, if days after the encounter.

At the last moment I’ve brought my fickle friend Mont-de-Santo. He has failed me so many times, but he is the only one mad enough to join this folie a deux.

I pick my way through the hedge, my weapon lowered at first. And then I see the advance line: trefoil, edged by rubor of spite. And this is a warning, a shaking of spears, for its poisoned edge is a harbinger of erythematous misery.

I can delay no longer. I begin to hack my way through his ranks, but he seems unfazed. He bobs up and down, perhaps thinking me risible. He isn’t wrong. I look down, his line unfazed by my attack, no breach to sally through. I check my leather and cloth and bend down to do the work of a true knight. I grasp the enemy one or two at a time, by the neck, and pull, hoping to unseat him.

Have I found a weakness? Why does he seem to give way so easily? Oh! Woe! He has struck! I have unseated him, yes, but his hind has flown forward striking my wrist below the gauntlet. I should retire from the field and tend to this as I know it will inflame at a later time, but the heat of battle is upon me. I tear at him, no longer careful of his strikes but amok with rage. For each I unseat, more take their place to unleash their insidious poisons (not poissons for that is a different story altogether).

Finally, nearly surrounded, I retire and find my sometimes-friend Monte-de-Santo at the edge of the champs with that same look he always has, the one that says, “you may not want to but you will always return for my help and in return I will ask you for a favor.”

And it is done. The outcome unsure. Monte-de-Santo has returned to his place up high, my edged steel has been sheathed, my armor soaked in sweat. I strip it off carefully, not knowing where the Foe may have struck.

“A bathrobe?? Are you naked? In the laundry room? What the hell is wrong with you? You know the poison ivy is just going to grow back!”

Ah, a maid who cares more for my welfare than her gardens. I may just live to fight another day.

Click on the image to download the full-size version of this flyer for posting and dissemination.

I’m excited to announce that my 2014 spring tour of the three-county, Research Triangle region will kick off this Friday night at Intrepid Life Coffee & Spirits on Historic West Parrish Street in downtown Durham. I’ll start around 9:00 pm and play two, 75-minute sets.

I’ll be playing many of your old Dogs in the Yard classics from my band in Denver as well as some new and not-so-new original compositions. I’ve also gotten really excited about playing other great local music I’ve heard around the Triangle and on my last trip to Denver for the Association of Health Care Journalists meeting in late March (where I also had a nice night of jamming with Dan and Jay from the Dogs).

I’m particularly excited to be playing at Intrepid Life, my go-to coffee shop for business meetings in Durham. You’ve probably heard the story about the owner, Matt Victoriano, a Marine combat veteran who served two tours in Iraq.

He was first interviewed by WBUR’s Here and Now in Charlotte at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, where he had visions of opening a brewpub. Plans changed – not the least of it due to the challenges of small business loans for returning veterans – and we were fortunate that he chose Durham to open Intrepid Life Coffee & Spirits Bar.

The updated version of Matt’s story came earlier this year when Here and Now’s Robin Young caught up with him to check in. When I heard this story, I was impressed that the owner of Joe Van Gogh coffee roasters in Hillsborough loaned Matt equipment to get the place off the ground, instead of just thanking him for his service to the country.

So I emailed Matt when he opened the place and offered to play for free pretty much anytime to do my part to support his mission to advocate for veterans and progressive non-profits in his community space. Editor Lisa Sorg describes the vibe perfectly in her INDY Week piece last month.

So even if you don’t come to hear my sets, I encourage you to drop by Intrepid Life this Friday night, or anytime. If you can’t find street parking, you can try the city lot by Rue Cler and the Post Office, then just walk through Orange Street past Phoebe Lawless’s Scratch bakery.

I have a soft spot for people with the guts to volunteer their lives to serve in the military for this country. My Dad was a Marine and Heather’s been working at the VA hospital in Durham for almost two years. And my longtime Texas songwriting idol, Darden Smith, has been using his musical prowess to help veterans process their emotions through songwriting retreats – a project appropriately called SongwritingWith:Soldiers.

Matt has made an investment in our community so I hope that we can all make an investment in him – and in downtown Durham.

Still, it has served us well. I haven’t had the flu in recent memory despite multiple exposures and the Pal Family has steered clear as well. But as of last week, I’m the captain of a plague ship.

MrsPal started coughing last week, then wheezing. Later my phone rang and she told me that her body was aching and she had a fever of 102. It was obviously flu, but I still had her come to the office for a test. Influenza b. Yuck.

So we sent PalKid to a friend’s house for the weekend to keep her away from the bug. This morning at 4am she came into the guest room (where I was isolating myself) to say, “Daddy, I’m shivering worse than when I get out of Lake Michigan.” Shit.

No reason to keep mother and child apart any longer, so I plopped her in bed with mom, hopped in the shower, and skedadled.

PalKid likely has influenza b as well. This year there were two basic flu vaccine formulations: a trivalent and a quadrivalent. Both vaccines contain two types of “a” and one of “b”. The quadrivalent has an additional “b” strain.

The CDC didn’t recommend one over the other. Both matched the circulating flu strains well. So there are couple of reasonable hypotheses as to why my family is down for the count.

1) The flu vaccine covered their strain but it didn’t work well enough
2) They both got the “b” strain not covered by their shots
3) The vaccine covered the strain but has worn off

All of these are plausible and it doesn’t matter too much at this point. Next year’s shots are likely going to be identical to this year’s, but next time, I’m bringing home the quadrivalent.

Meanwhile, PalKid is eating ice cream and watching Minecraft videos. She may end up liking the flu a bit too much.

Excuses melted away with the last of the snowbanks and my sneakers stiff with un-use are getting some fresh air. Unfortunately, this weekend’s lovely weather was accompanied by a miserable case of influenza b which has left my spouse bed-bound. The trail will just have to wait for her a few more days.

With the warm air (which is expected to take a quick break this week allowing a bit of last snowfall) comes tornado season marked by the whines and howls of my terrified child. Not that she’s ever seen a tornado but every time the sirens go off or the weather even looks threatening, she’s grabbing her favorite stuffed animals and heading for the basement.

At the moment though I’m at one of those trampoline places where pop music blares, whistles whistle, and kids scream as the leap from platform to platform. It’s a migraine-inducing hell, but the kids do seem to love it. It’s strictly a no-shoes affair and I just saw some adult walk out of the bathroom in bare feet. I’m not squeamish, but I can’t imagine what twisted circuitry would allow a grown man to stand at a urinal in bare feet. Yech.

I suppose I should just be grateful I’m not holed up in the plague-house. I’ve enjoyed serving up meals in bed and all, but if I want to escape unscathed I’d better keep myself anywhere but home.

Start spring out right. Go for a walk. Look down at the crocuses. Enjoy the rumble of spring storms. Shake off the long winter and get outside.

Like the parade of tired patients slouching into my exam room, I basically gave up, and as you know, once you give up, it’s hard to get out there again.

But the roads are finally back in their pot-holed glory. The lawns, yellowed and battered by unrelenting snow are looking, well, dead, but at least I can see them. And PalKid asked me to pull out her bike.

There are people out walking! Lots of them! And we took off tonight, she in her pjs on her bike, me in my muddy-weather running shoes. These were intervals, alright. I kept up with her on the flats, and lost her when I took a break to walk. I didn’t bring my Garmin, but we probably did a couple of miles and would have kept going but for the dark.

So, I think I’m back. Join me out on the trail and get your asses moving. The world won’t run out of cookies.

Nearly all healthcare plans now include so-called preventative care, including some sort of yearly check-in visit. Medicare’s version of this is the “Annual Wellness Visit”. Most patients think this means they are getting a complete physical, and often they do, but this isn’t going to continue.

Medicare’s Annual Wellness Visit has a very limited set of requirements, including screening for depression and dementia, making a list of all the doctors someone is seeing, and calculating their body mass index. It’s really a brief visit, and doesn’t pay all that well.

Despite this, many of us have been including a more traditional physical. This adds on considerable uncompensated time to the visit. A time will come when AWVs are brief visits done by assistants, and the patient will have to come in for a physical on another day (which will not be covered at 100%, as the AWV is). I suspect many patients won’t like this.

The same may happen with non-Medicare plans. Doctors’ offices may have patients come in for a brief prevention visit with a physicians’ assistant, fill out any health screening forms, and make them come back at another time for a real physical.

It’s all better than being un-insured, but don’t be surprised when your doctor tells you that your yearly physical isn’t your yearly physical.

We humans like concrete answers, especially when they conform to our beliefs and worldviews. And this scares me.

Yesterday I was sitting at the cafe and the woman next to me struck up a conversation. Turns out her kid is autistic. “He got that stupid MMR shot, you know.”

Yeah, I do know, but what do I say to the irrational stranger about it? Do her friends also just sort of shut up when she goes off on the “MMR causes autism” thing?

There are plenty of nice people who believe destructive things. We don’t like pi. It doesn’t fit with how we see the world. Yet, it exists. So now what?

How far does this special relationship extend? Primary care doctors can’t bill for time with their patients unless it’s face-to-face. This is one of the reasons your doctor might not want to spend a lot of time on the phone or email with you. It’s also one of the reasons we may require you to come to the office to complete complex forms or change a prescription. These activities require work, and our main work is thought. Without you in my exam room, I’m not sure about that medication change or that disability form. And I can’t ignore the fact that I’m not paid for my time unless you’re in the office with me.

In my opinion, some doctors go too far, requiring monthly visits for simple prescription refills, but there are times when it’s necessary to drag someone in to make sure the drugs are working and not causing harm, or to make sure you are working on your dietary habits and exercise.

Saying ‘no’ to patients isn’t easy; we’re in this job to help. But it’s often the right thing both clinically and economically. This brings up another question, one we don’t often talk to patients about: how should we treat our time when the office is closed? The tradition has been to take patient calls after hours and on weekends, perhaps rotating this time on call between partners.

But there are murmurings out there about this uncompensated time. After all, what can I do for someone on a weekend? It’s not usually wise to diagnose someone over the phone. It’s also not so good to renew prescriptions on the weekend; it’s a poor use of time and for those of us with paper charts, it’s nearly impossible to know what’s appropriate.

For a primary care doctor, the answer to many phone calls is, “Call the office on Monday,” or, “Go to the ER.” 

As a patient I want to be able to reach my doctor on a weekend, but I would understand if he should decide to change his policy.

What say you? How can we maintain communication and deal with the problem of uncompensated care?

They eat horses, don’t they?

“My Beloved…” and other dinosaurs.

WCSJ2013 in Helsinki, a photo-tour

Updates, Events and Miscellanea

Previously in the “Best of…” series:

2013

August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

2012

December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

2011

December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

2010

December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

2009

December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

Also, if you missed it on social media, I was quoted in New York Times yesterday, in Comment Ban Sets Off Debate, about the value of comments on science news articles and blog posts, as this is a hot topic these days after PopSci closed comments (and was also hot topic back in January when I wrote this post about it). Short quote, but does not misrepresent what I said (and yes, we chatted for an hour, that’s how it works), and gave me a new nickname “Weed Wacker” among my bloggers ;-)

Boeing 747, ready to go from San Francisco to Heathrow, London.

What I really liked, though, was something that is apparently banned on US air carriers, but both of Finnair flights (to and from London to Helsinki) had – a cockpit cam! While the screen shows many more different flight stats than JetBlue does, and one can also watch the view from a camera facing straight down (which is really nice when approaching the Land of 1000 Lakes), during the last few minutes of flight, during landing, everyone’s screen is automatically turned on to the cockpit cam. It feels like playing a video game, piloting the airplane down onto the runway!

Cockpit cam view, just seconds after landing at Heathrow from Helsinki.

Helsinki is gorgeous:

Plenty of water

Easy to relax on the square in front of the University

Cathedral in the middle of the day

Cathedral in the middle of the night, i.e., that two-hour period when it's not as bright as usual in the middle of the summer!

I checked in:

Of course, I added my Twitter handle to the nametag ;-)

And picked up the Program:

It's all there, black on white.

First morning plenary, by Hans Rosling “A fact-based world view – people, money & energy”

Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling, giving the first plenary

A Hans Rosling slide

A Hans Rosling animation

Hans Rosling polled us, and we all failed miserably!

The first morning plenary panel was What about ethics?

Deborah Blum at the first morning plenary panel

Deborah Blum on Chemophobia

Deborah Blum on Chemophobia

JAYFK makes an appearance

SA Guest Blog makes an appearance

Chemophobia

More Chemophobia

Even more Chemophobia

I went to many sessions, but did not take photos in each one. And those I took from the back row with my iPhone, as you can see, are not very clear, but OK….

What happens outside USA and UK?:

Nina Kristiansen, Chief Editor of ScienceNordic

Says who? – Challenging the experts on medical knowledge:

Mikael Fogelholm, Professor in Public Health Nutrition, University of Helsinki. (I think)

Wearing many hats? How to preserve independence was already covered in great detail by Kai Kupferschmidt and Anne Sasso.

The day ended with an evening at the National Archives of Finland:

City of Helsinki welcomes science writers

Second day’s morning plenary – Deborah Blum: “The Poisoner’s Guide to Life (And Communicating Chemistry).”

Deborah Blum communicates chemistry

Deborah Blum communicates chemistry

Then, there was a plenary panel, The Rise of the Science Blog Network: Lessons from All Corners of the World, organized by Deborah Blum, moderated by Lynne Smit, with panelists Betsy Mason, Alok Jha, Ed Yong and yours truly:

View of the panel while being on the panel.

Alokh Jha explaining something I agree with a moment later (perhaps we all agreed too much!).

You can watch the whole panel webcast here (You can watch webcasts of all the plenary talks and panels):

Next panel was “The ‘killer’ science journalists of the future.” But if you’ve ever been to my blog, you know I wrote a lot about it already, see: #sci4hels – ‘Killer’ science journalists of the future ready to take over the world!, and #sci4hels – the ‘killer’ science journalists of the future want your feedback, and #sci4hels – What makes one a “killer” (science) journalist of the future?. Of course, preparing for this for almost a year, they did an amazing job and were rightfully stars of the event (but also see this and this).

Last strategy meeting before the panel

It's about to start!

In front of a packed auditorium

Rose Eveleth introduces the panel

Lena Groeger demoes Cicada Tracker

Kathleen Raven tackles the tough questions from the audience.

Erin Podolak and Kathleen Raven, relaxed and happy during a break a little later.

A deserved outing:

On the island...

An old fortress

A church

Reindeer calf for dinner.

An old cannon

Geese and goslings

The third day started with the plenary talk “Mental preparation for a vulnerable world“:

Janne I. Hukkinen's slide

Late breaker session: Big data, big brother:

Dino Trescher (Germany), editor and founder of Constart Correspondent Network.

Making Sense of Uncertainty:

Making sense of uncertainty

Closing Plenary: New Horizons:

Ivan Oransky

Connie St.Louis

Barbecue dinner at Heureka, the Finnish Science Centre, was the last event:

Entrance to Heureka

The rainbow colors of the building

The Fire dance

Plenty to play with

Easy to roll a ball in the water

Phase space in sand. It's beautiful!

In the basement of Heureka, in the replica of a WWII bomb shelter, at the moment the bomb struck and lights went out.

Breakfast with Vesa Niinikangas, outgoing WCSJ President.

A sparrow at the Helsinki airport, at my gate.

Beautiful city, I hope to be back one day.

I am also included (as #101) in the last issue of WIRED’s 101 Signals for Science:

"...aggressive..."?

On September 23rd and 24th, I’ll be participating in The Evolving Culture of Science Engagement event at MIT, followed by the Story Collider on the evening of 23rd, and by ScioBeantown tweetup on the evening of 24th. This may be followed by a tweetup in NYCity a day or two later – TBA.

Then I will go to Belgrade, Serbia to participate in the UNESCO South-East European Science Journalism School on October 2-5th, (more background, Facebook event page) where I will be involved in several workshops and panels (and will get to see my Mom).

Later in October, on 23rd and 24th, I will speak to health & medical journalism and science students at University of Georgia in Athens, GA. The rotating Atlanta/Athens science tweetup will be in Athens for that occasion.

Finally, on November 1-5 I’ll be in Gainesville, Florida for the annual NASW/CASW ScienceWriters2013 meeting, where I am organizing two sessions.

If you will be at any of those events, come by and say Hi.

But I finished My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs (amazon) by Brian Switek (homepage, blog, Twitter) today and I am glad I did.

Many of us, decades ago, got excited about nature, science and yes, dinosaurs, by reading books like The New Golden Treasury of Natural History. While a few went on to become dinosaur paleontologists, for most of the others life and career took a different turn, and they perhaps think that what they learned as kids still stands today.

I may be somewhere in the middle. Although I did research in biology, dinosaurs were not the focus – I took one graduate-level class on them just for fun. I try to keep abreast with the advances in dinosaur research, but I am not in the field and can’t pay attention to every detail and every new paper. Which is why I read Brian’s blog (and a few other paleo blogs), read an occasional book (like Brian’s), and, if I can, I go to a meeting where I can quickly get up to date (e.g., 2012 SVP in Raleigh as it was next door, so no big travel arrangements or costs).

Brian’s first book, Written in Stone, was written more for people like me, at least somewhat uber-geeks of all things fossil. But the second book is bound to be a gripping read to a much broader audience than just us geeks.

The first book had quite a lot of Latin language, and lots of detailed taxonomy and systematics. I understand why this is important, and I understand why some people get excited about it (and I certainly enjoyed reading it myself, but I am a geek). But I have always seen taxonomy as a nifty, sophisticated, high-tech scaffolding on which the actual building will be built…and I was always more interested in the building itself. Not so much how various species of dinosarus were related to each other, as what we can learn from those patterns about the mechanisms by which evolution works.

The second book is all about the building! Not so much how dinos were related, but why. How they evolved. How their extinction can give us clues as to how they lived. And, to me, the most interesting aspects of paleontology are figuring out the way dinosaurs lived – their physiology, behavior and ecology, from the way they sensed their environment, or communicated with each other, to the way they looked, mated, raised young and grew up. And Brian’s book covers all of this, vividly, and will leave you not just better informed, but excited as if you were five years old all over again.

If your busy life prevents you from digging in and finding all the details for yourself, yet you’d like to know how the understanding of dinosaurs changed since you were a kid, Brian’s book is a perfect solution. There, in one place, and written in a way that makes reading fun, is everything you need to know to get caught up. You will not become an expert, but you won’t be hopelessly out-of-date any more.

And you will be shocked how the world has changed since you were a kid reading Bertha Morris Parker – our understanding of dinos is very, very different and much, much better today than it was just a couple of decades ago. The green, scaly monsters who deservedly died of their own oversized stupidity when the asteroid struck, are now stuff of dusty old books and memories, not the animals we understand them now to be. You will be viscerally struck by realization how fast science can move while you are not watching!

If you have kids of your own, and you are starting to introduce them to dinosaurs through museum visits, books, or blogs, reading this book first will save your face in your kids’ world. You will save yourself from the embarassment of your own kid telling you, loudly in front of everyone at the museum, “Moooooom! That is not true! It didn’t have green scales, it had black feathers!”

If you are a kid yourself, just starting on the journey of love for dinosaurs, nature and science, this is a great primer, putting in one place, in easy, non-technical language, the current knowledge about dinosaurs, how it changed over the past decades (and centuries), how we know what we know about them today, and what are still the outstanding questions – perhaps there for you to solve.

It was also interesting for me to read this book for other reasons. This is the first time I have read a book in which, I feel, it’s my world, I am there in a way, right there in the book. When Brian mentions visiting a dinosaur quarry after a meeting in Flagstaff, I was at that meeting. When he writes how he snuck early into Yale’s Peabody museum to converse with the Apatosaurus before the other conference goers arrived to drink wine from plastic cups, I was one of those with a plastic cup. When he talks about the press-only preview of the AMNH Giant Dino exhibit, I was there, snapping fuzzy iPhone photos (including one of Brian himself). When he mentions artist Glendon Mellow, I know the guy. It is kinda weird to read a book that happens in a world that so tightly overlaps with my own!

But one thing I was thinking as I was closing the back cover of the book was: how awesome it must be to be a kid today! If stupid, fern-munching, pond-wading Brontosaurs of the 1960s could excite me and so many others, how much more exciting it must be for today’s kids to enter straight into the world of flashy, feathered, super-fast, super-smart dinosaurs! Not just weird-looking, long-dead monsters of the past, but incredibly sophisticated and exciting animals that, if they were not so darned unlucky, could have still ruled the Earth today, and deservedly so, without you or me around to study them and discuss them.

That’s a strange threat! Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go there to visit the wine country, see the art in Florence, learn some history in Rome, and enjoy the Adriatic beaches?

Not if you hear the above and you are a horse! Especially if you were a horse back in the day when I used to ride in my now-extinct homeland of Yugoslavia.

With total number of horses in the country small and dwindling after the cavalry was disbanded in 1948, with fast urbanization of the country reducing the number of horses working the fields, and before equestrian sports started taking off again in the late 1980s, there was no need for a dedicated horse slaughterhouse. Occasionally a really urgent case would be slaughtered in a cattle slaughterhouse. A horse in agony after an injury would be killed on the spot (e.g., on the racetrack) and its meat donated to the perennially strapped-for-cash Belgrade Zoo for lions and other carnivores, But most horses at the end of their lives ended up on trucks headed to the meat market of Italy (and probably a few also to Austria – but I don’t have access to any documents, just what everyone in the horse business at the time knew).

With all the horse meat ending up in Italy, there was not much left for domestic consumption. Thus whole generations grew up without ever tasting it. The culture gradually changed. A horse butcher had a store in Belgrade for about a decade in the 1960s, but had to close due to low demand. Later, in mid-1980s, another entrepreneurial butcher opened a horse-meat store, this time promoting it as a delicacy rather than utilitarian, cheap alternative to beef. That store did not last long, either.

While there is no taboo against eating horse in the Balkans, there are definitely cultural forces that prevent it from being as popular as it is for its neighbors to the West, And those forces are divided by generations.

According to the elders, especially those with clear memories of World War II, horse meat was a poor man’s food, only to be consumed in times of war or famine. If you can afford beef, pork, lamb and chicken, why should you stoop so low as to eat the tough, acidic horse meat?

On the other hand, youngsters saw horses in a much less utilitarian way. They did not remember thousands of cavalry horses, cart horses, and draft horses filling the countryside. They did not remember poverty and hunger. Every horse they met had a name, be it a nice riding school pony, or a stunningly beautiful sports horse.

Obviously, neither of the two age groups could be easily persuaded that horse meat is a delicacy.

I saw that generational divide myself one day, back in the 1980s. We grilled some horse steaks…at the barn, right after we finished riding, grooming and petting our horses. There were horses inside, happily munching their oats in their stalls. There were other horses outside, sliced and roasting on the grill. How conflicted everyone’s feelings were!

But that was an excellent opportunity for all of us to discuss and debate the ethical, utilitarian, economic, nutritional, ecological and other angles of horse consumption. Why older people found it easier to eat the meat than the younger folk? Why was it easier for men than for women? Why some found it delicious, while others hated its texture and taste? Many of the young, pony-obsessed girls wouldn’t touch it, while younger boys gave it a try despite obvious disgust.

In the end, it all came down to names. You cannot eat an animal whose name you knew when it was alive. Name gives it a personality. An animal whose name you know is also an animal you know well – its looks and behavior and personality. It’s a friend. Friends don’t eat friends.

The steaks we had came from a horse we knew nothing about. Not the name, not age, sex, breed, color, anything. Perhaps the previous owner really loved that horse, cried when loading it onto the slaughterhouse truck. Just like one day, certainly, someone in Italy was going to eat the flesh of our horses we loved, and could do it because of not knowing those horses personally.

But by buying and eating that horse’s meat, we helped that previous owner recover some of the financial loss. Perhaps it was a farmer who lost a horse essential for working his farm. Without taking the meat price for the old horse, the farmer would not be able to buy a new horse, and would not be able to work the farm and feed his family. The circle of life would have been broken, both the human one and the equine one.

That was the economy of individual horse ownership by regular people. Of course, if you are rich or live in a rich country, and if you can afford to keep all your horses out on pastures until they die the natural death, by all means do that. But most people cannot afford that. And yet they need to have horses for their livelihoods. Eating horse meat is an essential part of such an economy.

I can attest that this statement is true.

But then it got tricky. The problem became more complex. After all, it is relatively easy for an individual to decide not to eat horse meat because of ethical concerns. But that is the meat of a dead horse who died in order to provide that meat. So, how do you try to use ethical considerations to explain why you refuse to eat meat of the horse who is still alive? I am talking about marinated, delicious testicles of the stallion who is still prancing out in the paddock. In a country where offal is a perfectly normal part of everyday cuisine, and one can order sweetbreads in any decent restaurant. No harm was done to any animal. So, why not eat it? Not an easy question to answer. And it’s pretty obvious that the answer is not rooted in ethics, economics, ecology, nutrition or health concerns. It is psychological and aesthetic, thus it is rooted in culture.

And this is where we switch gears, as we need to start comparing cultures, in this case Balkans with America.

“Behaving or not, you’re going to Mexico!”

The question “shall we eat horse meat?” is coupled with the related question “shall we slaughter horses?”. In both countries, most of the horse slaughter (and consumption) is outsourced to other countries (Italy in the case of the Balkans, Mexico in the case of USA). Yet the attitudes are different. There, if there were more horses and there was more appetite for meat, there would be horse slaughter in place with almost nobody’s objection. Without too much emotional opposition to eating horses, economic forces would be allowed to dictate what happens on the ground.

Here, there is an overabundance of horses, but because there is no appetite for meat at all, slaughtering horses is considered a very bad idea. Hence such outcry when the slaughter of horses was recently made legal again after a long time (and opening a slaughterhouse is fraught with difficulties).

If unicorns were easier to catch, they would be a staple diet in at least some cultures.

The shift in culture that I started observing in the 1980s there, already occurred much earlier here in the States. Horses are still used in agriculture there, especially in more mountainous regions where tractors are ineffective and uneconomical. Many small farmers cannot afford tractors, or have too little land to need one. Older people still remember the life on the farm, and even kids have seen horses working in the field. The movement from country to city happened too recently.

Here, agriculture has long ago moved from small farmers to gigantic agribusiness. Very few people have any personal experience with a horse working the land. Most horses are used for pleasure and sport – they have names and are treated as pets, rather than as beasts of burden.

Also, there is an overproduction of horses here. So many horses are bred, often of poor quality, that many never get to be ridden at all – they go straight to Mexico while still young. It is not that just old, sick or lame horses get slaughtered, it’s healthy foals! It’s not just a natural circle of life, it’s production of horses directly for slaughter.

Then, there is the issue of food safety. There is a reason Europe does not allow import of American horsemeat, no matter how much demand there may be there (and demand is dropping there as well). One never knows if the meat came from a racehorse (or if it’s horse meat at all). The rules for drug use (from steroids to painkillers) in racehorses in the USA are so lax compared to other countries, that it is almost certain that the meat of an American racehorse is unfit for human consumption. And how can one know if the steak or sausage came from a draft horse or a racehorse? With eating horse in America being potentially dangerous, it’s not strange that people don’t do it, and the cultural tradition of eating horses quickly dies out. If your parents never ate horse meat, you won’t either. Cultural food habits start at home.

But there are other reasons why American culture is so strongly against eating (and thus slaughtering) horses. I vaguely alluded to some of those already, but now need to be more explicit. And for this, we need to go back to the old master, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins and his 1976 essay La Pensee Bourgeoise: Western Society as Culture, in which he takes a close look as to why Americans eat cows and pigs, but don’t eat horses and dogs.

Manly Men in the Feed Lot.

True, “in most parts of the world, people are grateful to eat whatever is available to them.” Vast areas of the planet have scant vegetation. Plant agriculture is impossible due to poor soil. People need and want to live there anyway, at least as nomads if not settlers, but cannot sustain themselves on an occasional root or berry. They have to carry their food with them, but that also takes up energy. So the best way to survive in such harsh environments is to have the food walk along with them. Cattle, goats, sheep, camels, donkeys, mules, asses and yes, horses, are the sources of daily nourisment, both meat and dairy.

In places of plenty, in times of plenty, one can afford to have culture, rather than necessity, dictate what foods are deemed OK and what foods are not:

Yet the point is not only of consuming interest; the productive relation of American society to its own and the world environment is organized by specific valuations of edibility and inedibility, themselves qualitative and in no way justifiable by biological, ecological, or economic advantage.

There is no nutritional reason not to eat horse. If anything, horse meat may have some advantages over beef. If production of horse meat was a viable, large industry due to high demand, it would have similar environmental impact as beef industry has now, and the economics would be the same as well. Low demand is due to culture, which determines even how food taste is perceived. It is not surprising that food preferences then become deeply ingrained, and offers of locally unusual foods elicit strong negative responses based entirely on emotions, rather than rational calculations. So even during times of crisis and famine, those cultural and emotional obstacles prevent the population from taking advantage of available food sources, regardless of governmental, corporate, scientific or media efforts to help enlighten the population about it. The angry reactions are based entirely on cultural norms and emotional sense of disgust. Sahlins uses this example from the Honolulu Advertiser of 15 April 1973:

“Horses are to be loved and ridden,” Gallagher said. “In other words, horses are shown affection, where cattle that are raised for beef … they’ve never had someone pet them or brush them, or anything like that. To buy someone’s horse up and slaughter it, that, I just don’t see it. “

Sahlins again:

In a crisis, the contradictions of the system reveal themselves. During the meteoric inflation of food prices in the spring of 1973, American capitalism did not fall apart-quite the contrary; but the cleavages in the food system did surface. Responsible government officials suggested that the people might be well-advised to buy the cheaper cuts of meat such as kidneys, heart, or entrails-after all, they are just as nutritious as hamburger. To Americans, this particular suggestion made Marie Antoinette seem like a model of compassion (see fig. 10). The reason for the disgust seems to go to the same logic as greeted certain unsavory attempts to substitute horsemeat for beef during the same period.

When I came to the States, I understood that I would not be eating horse here at all. Which is fine with me – I tried a steak once and a sausage once, and while they were OK, I can totally live without them. But when we castrated a couple of colts at the barn, none of the whites would touch the testicles. But they were expertly prepared by an African American friend and we ate them with great appreciation.

Salome serves roasted unicorn head, which inludes cheecks, lips, tongue and brain.

As I wrote at length a few years ago, one of the specifics of American cuisine, due to culture, lies in its history. When we talk about Balkans food preferences, we are covering pretty much everyone who lives there – the class divisions and cultural divisions were always quite miniscule there. But when we talk about American food preferences, we tend to forget a big chunk of American culture. Whites prefer beef to other species, and will almost universally not eat offal. But there is a whole parallel culture, often unmentioned. The soul food, the Southern food, all the offal and innards and roadkill and strange foods that were cooked, and recipes perfected into delicacies by generations of African Americans, descendant of slaves who fixed steaks for the white masters and learned how to utilize everything else from the slaughtered animals. They have no problem with offal – or horse – as that is an intergral component of that subdivision of the American culture. Sahlins:

The poorer people buy the cheaper cuts, cheaper because they are socially inferior meats. But poverty is in the first place ethnically and racially encoded. Blacks and whites enter differentially into the American labor market, their participation ordered by an invidious distinction of relative “civilization.” Black is in American society as the savage among us, objective nature in culture itself. Yet then, by virtue of the ensuing distribution of income, the “inferiority” of blacks is realized also as a culinary defilement. “Soul food” may be made a virtue. But only as the negation of a general logic in which cultural degradation is confirmed by dietary preferences akin to cannibalism, even as this metaphorical attribute of the food is confirmed by the status of those who prefer it. I would not invoke “the so-called totemism” merely in casual analogy to the pensee sauvage. True that Levi-Strauss writes as if totemism had retreated in our society to a few marginal resorts or occasional practices (I 963a; 1966). And fair enough-in the sense that the “totemic operator,” articulating differences in the cultural series to differences in natural species, is no longer a main architecture of the cultural system. But one must wonder whether it has not been replaced by species and varieties of manufactured objects, which like totemic categories have the power of making even the demarcation of their individual owners a procedure of social classification. (My colleague Milton Singer suggests that what Freud said of national differentiation might well be generalized to capitalism, that it is narcissism in respect of minor differences.)

Marshall Sahlins then delves into the question of words and names. As he reminds us, Red Queen said, “It isn’t etiquette to cut anybody you’ve been introduced to.” Horses (and dogs) have names. Most cows (and pigs) don’t.

Muscles of accepted food animals have cute monikers that hide what parts of the animal and which animal they came from. There is beef and pork and mutton. There are steaks and t-bones and round and chuck. But un-acceptable species don’t have such cutesy names for their muscles. Horse meat is called horsemeat. Dog’s would be dog-meat. Nothing to hide. Likewise, names for innards are not cutesy, hiding the obvious source: liver is liver, tongue is tongue, kidneys are kidney (though intestines become tripe, and testicles, probably due to puritanism, become whitebreads). Sahlins again:

Edibility is inversely related to humanity. The same holds in the preferences and common designations applied to edible portions of the animal. Americans frame a categorical distinction between the “inner” and “outer” parts which represents to them the same principle of relation to humanity, metaphorically extended. The organic nature of the flesh (muscle and fat) is at once disguised and its preferability indicated by the general term “meat,” and again by particular conventions such as “roast,” “steak,” “chops,” or “chuck”; whereas the internal organs are frankly known as such (or as “innards”), and more specifically as “heart,” “tongue,” “kidney,” and so on-except as they are euphemistically transformed by the process of preparation into such products as “sweetbreads.”The internal and external parts, in other words, are respectively assimilated to and distinguished from parts of the human body-on the same model as we conceive our “innermost selves” as our “true selves”-and the two categories are accordingly ranked as more or less fit for human consumption. The distinction between “inner” and “outer” thus duplicates within the animal the differentiation drawn between edible and tabu species, the whole making up a single logic on two planes with the consistent implication of a prohibition on cannibalism. It is this symbolic logic which organizes demand. The social value of steak or roast, as compared with tripe or tongue, is what underlies the difference in economic value. From the nutritional point of view, such a notion of “better” and “inferior” cuts would be difficult to defend. Moreover, steak remains the most expensive meat even though its absolute supply is much greater than that of tongue; there is much more steak to the cow than there is tongue. But more, the symbolic scheme of edibility joins with that organizing the relations of production to precipitate, through income distribution and demand, an entire totemic order, uniting in a parallel series of differences the status of persons and what they eat.

Of course, there are cultural (and language) differences between nations as to how they name the animals and how they name edible body parts. French is quite different from English in that regard, for instance. In Serbian, the words for muscle-meats from various animals are not cutesy but directly derived from the names of those species: govedo=govedina (cattle=beef), tele=teletina (calf=veal), ovca=ovcetina (sheep=mutton). Where eating animals is both an economic and a cultural necessity, where there is no taboo or even mild unease about eating meat, there is no need to come up with linguistic camouflage.

But what I find most interesting in Marshall Sahlins’ article is this passage:

The exploitation of the American environment, the mode of relation to the landscape, depends on the model of a meal that includes a central meat element with the peripheral support of carbohydrates and vegetables-while the centrality of the meat, which is also a notion of its “strength,” evokes the masculine pole of a sexual code of food which must go back to the Indo-European identification of cattle or increasable wealth with virility. The indispensabilitty of meat as “strength,” and of steak as the epitome of virile meats, remains a basic condition of American diet (note the training table of athletic teams, in football especially). Hence also a corresponding structure of agricultural production of feed grains, and in turn a specific articulation to world markets-all of which would change overnight if we ate dogs. By comparison with this meaningful calculus of food preferences, supply, demand, and price offer the interest of institutional means of a system that does not include production costs in its own principles of hierarchy. The “opportunity costs” of our economic rationality are a secondary formation, an expression of relationships already given. by another kind of thought, figured a posteriori within the constraints of a logic of meaningful order. The tabu on horses and dogs thus renders unthinkable the consumption of a set of animals whose production is practically feasible and which are nutritionally not to be despised.

The American meal – a big juicy beef steak surrounded by a little bit of vegetables mainly as decoration – as a manly man’s meal. The meal of the pioneer, the cowboy, the self-sustained, survivalist, rugged individualist. The beef steak as a descendant of the steak a hunter hunted in the past. Beef steak as a product of the hard work in the harsh environment in the vast expanses of the American West. Only the toughest need apply. The cultural mythology that led to placing beef at the pinnacle, that led to distaste for eating any other species (not for macho men!), that led to taboo against eating horses (companions and co-workers in the difficult production of beef), and that eventually led to hyperproduction of beef for the growing population by consolidating it from small farms into huge feed lots owned by large agribusiness. So, both the illogical, uneconomical, and environmentally damaging food instructure in the States AND the taboo against eating horse may stem from the same cultural source – the early self-sufficient pioneer man.

But that was centuries ago. Surely we have progressed since then. Remember when Michael Pollan made the full circle, from feed lot (symbolic hunt) through a series of organic and local small operations back to the non-symbolic, real hunt, he had difficulty pulling the trigger. We are more civilized now.

In his book A Primate’s Memoir, Robert Sapolsky relates how he adjusts his own diet depending on where he is. Earlier in his career he used to split his year in half. During the half spent teaching neuroscience at Sanford, he was a vegetarian. In America, one has that choice. But in the other half of the year, studying baboons in the field in Africa, he ate what the locals fixed. Yes, a zebra leg. Not just that he would have insulted the hosts by refusing, but if he refused it would incur additional expense and effort of the hosts – they would have to find nutritious plant food every day for him, something that is not as easy to do in that region. There are good reasons why local diet is mainly based on hunted animals.

Thus, the deep roots of the American culture may prevent us from ever eating horse. Although it makes no economical, health, nutritional or environmental sense, that is OK as it makes cultural sense and we can afford this taboo.

But we should re-analyze why outdated machismo is still guiding the way our food instructure works in damaging ways and perhaps do something constructive about it to bring it along into the 21st century, somewhat away from beef and gigantic feed lots and toward a more sustainable, environmentally friendly, public-health reasonable, nutritionally balanced food system.

~~~~~

References:

Marshall Sahlins, La Pensee Bourgeoise: Western Society as Culture, in Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976) (pp. 166 – 179)

Images:

Photo of me: original photo by Russ Creech, photoshop by Mindy Weisberger.

Unicorn on the grill and on the platter, original art from Taymouth Hours, 14th century, at British Library, additional photoshop by Sarah J Biggs. Originally posted on April Fool’s Day by Julian Harrison at Medieval manuscripts blog of the British Library.

Sharks have rhythm, too

ScienceWriters2013 – great program in Gainsville in November.

Previously in the “Best of…” series:

2013

July
June
May
April
March
February
January

2012

December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

2011

December
November
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July
June
May
April
March
February
January

2010

December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

2009

December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

The study of fish came late into the field of chronobiology due to technical difficulties of monitoring rhythms, at the time when comparative tradition was starting to make way to the more focused approach on choice model organisms – in this case, the zebrafish.

But the comparative tradition was always very strong in the field. Reading the old papers (especially review papers and loooong theoretical papers) by the pioneers like Jurgen Asschoff and Colin Pittendrigh, it seems like researchers at the time were just going around and saying “let me try this species…and this one…and this one…”. And there were good reasons for this early approach. At the time, it was not yet known how widespread circadian rhythms were – it is this early research that showed they are ubiqutous in all organisms that live at or close to the surface of the earth or ocean.

Another reason for such broad approach to testing many species was to find generalities – the empirical generalizations (e.g,. the Aschoff’s Rules) that allowed the field to get established, and that provided a template for the entire research program, including refining the proper experimental designs.

Finally, this was also a fishing expedition (no pun intended…oh, well, OK, intended) for the best model organisms on which to focus more energies – organisms that can be studied in great detail in both field and lab, that are easy to find, breed, care for, house and handle, and organisms in which circadian rhythms are clear, robust, and are easy to monitor with relatively cheap and simple equipment. Thus hamsters, cockroaches, and sparrows, green anoles and Japanese quail. Later, with molecular discoveries, organisms with better tools for genetic manipulation, even though perhaps not as good as circadian models, took precedence – the fruit fly, mouse, zebrafish and the like.

But it’s not that sharks were never looked at before. They may not run in wheels, but researchers can be creative and monitor the rhythms nonetheless.

Horn Shark and Swell Shark

The Nelson and Johnson 1970 paper appears to be the very first systematic study of daily rhythms in sharks. They cite a number of previous non-systematic observations in the field, all suggesting that many shark species are nocturnal (night-active). They combined field and lab studies in two species (horn shark Heterodontus francisci and the swell shark Cephaloscyllium ventriosum).

Pattern of activity of bottom-dwelling sharks in the field. From Nelson and Johnson 1970.

In the field, they dove at different times of day and night, counted and observed the sharks, and rated their activity levels. Both species were exclusively nocturnal, barely making any movements at all throughout the day, while actively swimming at night.

In the lab, they placed sharks in small pools, each pool in a light-tight enclosure. They controlled lighting regimes (e.g., constant dark, constant light, or various light-dark cycles) and they monitored the activity with a nifty sensor – a set of six steel rods in each pool, each rod hanging from above all the way to the bottom of the water. Whenever a fish pushed one of the rods (and they did not observe any avoidance), the rod would move and momentarily close an electrical circuit. This would be recorded as a dash line on long paper rolls by an Esterline-Angus recorder.

Afterward, they would take those paper rolls out, cut them (by hand) into strips, glue the strips (by hand) onto large pieces of cardboard, do the measurements and calculations (by hand, using rulers and compasses), and photograph the best records for publication. Yes, very manual work! In this day of computers, it’s pretty easy to just click. Our PI used to sometimes take us grad students to a back room to show us the old equipment and to describe the process, just so we would appreciate how easy we have it now.

Actograph of the Swell shark in different light conditions. From Nelson and Johnson 1970.

What they found is that the two species are quite different. The Horn shark readily entrained to the light-dark cycles (both 24-hour and 25-hour cycles), starting activity as soon as the lights go off, and ceasing activity the moment the light come back on. They kept swimming all the time both in constant darkness and in constant light. This suggests that their behavior is triggered directly by environmental light and not driven by an internal clock.

On the other hand, the Swell sharks showed circadian rhythms – they alternated between active and inactive periods in constant light and in constant darkness. In light-dark cycles of both durations, they showed a little bit of anticipation, starting their activity a few minutes before lights-off. This suggests that the daily alteration of behavior is driven by an internal circadian clock.

In a later study (Finstad and Nelson 1975), they changed the intensity of light of the experiment, and this time Horn sharks also exhibited internally generated circadian rhythms.

Dogfish Shark

Daily rhythm in the dogfish shark. From Casterlin and Reynolds 1979.

In 1979, Casterlin and Reynolds tried a different experimental setup and a different species – smooth dogfish shark, Mustelus canis. In their setup, as sharks swim through a series of chambers they break photocell-monitored light beams. Instead of simple light-dark cycles, they used light-dusk-dark-dawn cycles in which dawn and dusk light was dim, while daytime light was bright. Again, most of the activity was observed during the night:

Lemon Shark

In 1988, Nixon and Gruber took a bunch of Lemon sharks (Negaprion brevirostris) and placed them in a complex setup in order to simultaneously monitor both locomotor activity (that is: swimming around and around in circles) and the metabolic rate (oxygen consumption):

The lemon shark setup. From Nixon and Gruber 1988.

Daily rhythms of activity (top) and metabolic rate (bottom) in the Lemon shark. From Nixon and Gruber 1988.

The sharks were only tested in light-dark cycles, which is not a proper test for the existence of the circadian clock, but the data were strikingly “clean”. While behavior can be strongly affected by direct influence from the environment (e.g., sudden lights-on), it is harder to explain changes in metabolic rate purely behaviorally, suggesting that an internal clock is likely driving the day-night differences in metabolism.

Megamouth Shark

Megamouth shark daily dives. From Nelson et al. 1997.

This big guy is hard to find. The subject of this paper was only the sixth individual known to science. It was caught, they scrambled for about a day to get all the gear in place, attached satellite telemetry radiotransmitters, and let the animal lose to swim. What they saw was a distinct pattern of diving deeper before the sunrise, and rising up closer to the surface before sundown. While nothing can be said about circadian regulation, as the pattern could just be the animal following light clues or vertical migration of its plankton food, it is nonetheless a very cool study.

Hammerhead Shark

It is interesting that a number of senior researchers, as they come close to retirement and are not in the rat-race for grant funding any more, abandon the standard lab models and go back to the old comparative tradition, picking unlikely species (from chipmunks to Monarch butterflies) and moving out of the lab back into the field. It’s definitely more fun to do!

One of them decided to shift his focus to juvenile hammerhead sharks. Unfortunately, Milton H. Stetson suddenly died in 2002, and I could only find one publication from that work (Okimoto and Stetson 1995), which I cannot read as it was published in a conference proceedings (if anyone can scan a copy and send me, I’ll be grateful):

Nonetheless, this paper was cited in several other places, and if they cited it correctly, what Okimoto and Stetson found was that the pineal glands of these sharks (and later the same also found in dogfish shark Squalus acanthias) does not show cycles of melatonin synthesis and release in constant light conditions (it does in light-dark cycles). This does not necessarily mean that there is no clock in the pineal, or that there is not rhythmic production of melatonin, as later work in our lab showed that culture medium can have a dramatic effect.

Whale Shark

Combined 206 daily records of a whale shark dives. From Graham, Roberts and Smith 2006

In Graham, Roberts and Smith 2006, nine whale sharks were tagged with archival satellite tags which provided data on water temperature, illumination and depth. What they found are three distinct types of rhythms: ultradian (short), circadian (about a day) and infradian (long) cycles.

The short cycle was about 45 minutes long, essentially the sharks swimming up an down underneath the surface, not really diving very deep.

One day record of a whale shark diving activity. From Graham, Roberts and Smith 2006

The long cycle was a 29-day cycle, likely not generated from within the nervous system of the shark, but rather the animals following the snapper spawning events which are modulated by the moon phases.

The daily cycle was that of deep dives. The sharks made very deep dives – sometimes over a kilometer down – only during the day. Again, nothing in this experimental protocol can distinguish between internally generated rhythms and behaviors directly induced by the environment, e.g., light intensity, vertical migrations of prey, etc.

And yes, this is it, that’s all. Not much work on sharks done, for obvious reasons – they don’t do well in running wheels.

References:

Casterlin, Martha E., and William W. Reynolds. Diel activity patterns of the smooth dogfish shark, Mustelus canis. Bulletin of Marine Science 29.3 (1979): 440-442.

Finstad WO, Nelson DR. Circadian activity rhythm in the horn shark, Heterodontus francisci: effect of light intensity. Bull. S. Calif. Acad. Sci, 1975

Graham, Rachel T., Callum M. Roberts, and James CR Smart. Diving behaviour of whale sharks in relation to a predictable food pulse. Journal of the Royal Society Interface 3.6 (2006): 109-116.

Nelson, Donald R., and Richard H. Johnson. Diel activity rhythms in the nocturnal, bottom-dwelling sharks, Heterodontus francisci and Cephaloscyllium ventriosum. Copeia (1970): 732-739.

Nelson, Donald R., et al. An acoustic tracking of a megamouth shark, Megachasma pelagios: a crepuscular vertical migrator. Environmental Biology of Fishes 49.4 (1997): 389-399.

Nixon, Asa J., and Samuel H. Gruber. Diel metabolic and activity patterns of the lemon shark (Negaprion brevirostris). Journal of experimental Zoology 248.1 (1988): 1-6.

Okimoto, D. K., and M. H. Stetson. Effect of light on melatonin secretion in vitro from the pineal of the hammerhead shark, Sphyrna lewini. Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Reproductive Physiology of Fish, The University of Texas at Austin. 1995.

Images: Shark in the running wheel: shark from ClipArt Supply, wheel from Shaping Youth, photoshop by Tobias Gilk. Shark clock – ToadAndLily on Etsy (where you can actually buy the clock). Other images are figures from papers, according to the Fair Use principle.

You can follow the event on Twitter by following @sciencewriters and the hashtag #sciwri13.

The official Schedule was just released, and it is, as usual, a fantastic lineup of lectures, workshops and panels. Just check out the list of speakers!

As I have been over the past few years, I will be involved this year as well. I am a co-organizer of two sessions during the NASW professional development day:

On Saturday, November 2nd, 11:00 am to 12:15 pm:

A view from the future

In our new, rapidly changing media ecosystem, it is easier than ever to write about science — but harder than ever to be heard above the din, to build a reputation, and to make a living. How are science writers and journalists adapting to these shifting rules? Links, documents, data and transcripts, in addition to quotes, are expected by readers. How do today’s science writers use these ingredients to establish trust with online-only readers? How important is the brand name of the media organization vs. the byline of the writer? With researchers now able to directly communicate with the public, how has the role of the writer changed? These panelists, who occupy different niches within the Web-based media ecosystem, have successfully adapted to the new “rules,” and are helping shape the future of science communication. Twitter hashtag for this session is #vftf13.

Organizers:

Bora Zivkovic, Blogs editor, Scientific American.
Deborah Blum, Author; professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Moderator:

Nadia Drake, Reporter, Wired

Speakers:

Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato, Editor, EverydayHealth
Kelly Poe, Reporter, Greensboro News & Record
Cassie Rodenberg, Freelance, blogger at Scientific American
Julianne Wyrick, Student, UGA Program for Health and Medical Reporting

==========

On Saturday, November 2nd, 3:45 pm to 5:00 pm:

Rising above the noise: Using statistics-based reporting

Science writers must produce written, audio or visual stories that capture and hold the attention of a reader/listener/viewer. With so much information just one “swipe” away, editors and consumers are demanding stories that stay fresh and relevant long after the initial post. The one-word solution to such predicaments? Statistics. In this session, science writers with deep backgrounds in mathematics will provide key takeaways attendees can use immediately to help their stories rise above the noise. The takeaways will include: necessary vocabulary for talking about statistics, a framework for understanding how numbers can be manipulated, a checklist to ensure quality data, and, not least, examples of stories built solidly with statistics. Statistics is not a “catch-phrase” for serious journalism. It is key for better reporting and better story-telling.

Organizers:

Kathleen Raven, Freelance journalist,
Bora Zivkovic, Blogs editor, Scientific American.

Moderators:

Kathleen Raven, Freelance journalist

Speakers:

Hilda Bastian, Blogger & editor, National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health
Evelyn Lamb, Mathematician & writer, Scientific American
Regina Nuzzo, Freelance journalist & associate professor of statistics, Gallaudet University
John Allen Paulos, Author & mathematics professor, Temple University

===========

Good Night, Moon! Now go away so I can sleep.

#SciFoo in pictures

FtBCON: Science Communication

Previously in the “Best of…” series:

2013

July
June
May
April
March
February
January

2012

December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

2011

December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

2010

December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

2009

December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

Mars has two moons - Phobos and Deimos. Here we see Phobos passing in front of the sun, as seen from the surface of Mars. How would having two moons with different phases affect behavior of Martians?

Scientific papers usually don’t faithfully convey exactly how the researchers came up with the idea, or the chronological order in which the investigation proceeded. And there is a good reason for that – papers need to be standardized so other scientists can easily read them, understand them, replicate them and use them to perform further research.

But sometimes, a paper is honest about the process. It is wonderful – and shows that scientists are human, with a great sense of humor – when #OverlyHonestMethods sneak into the text of a scientific paper, surprising and rewarding the careful reader with an ‘easter egg’.

One such paper – on the effects of moon phase of sleep quality – just came out in Current Biology.

The first thing I noticed was that the data were collected in 2000-2003. Why did it take a decade to publish? Was it just sitting on a back burner of a PI for years after the student left the lab? Did it have to go through many rounds of peer review in several journals until it finally managed to get published? None of those reasons, actually! See for yourself:

We just thought of it after a drink in a local bar one evening at full moon, years after the study was completed.

And that is where we encounter yet another effect of the full moon (in synergy with ethanol) on human behavior, at least on WEIRD populations, such as scientists!

But jokes aside, this is also a great example of a paper that usefully re-visits and re-analyzes old data sets. Of course, the authors emphasize the positives of this post hoc approach – nobody at the time of the study could possibly know that the data would be analyzed in this way, so there were no possible subconscious psychological effects – it was a truly triple-blind study:

Thus, the aim of exploring the influence of different lunar phases on sleep regulation was never a priori hypothesized, nor was it mentioned to the participants, technicians, and other people involved in the study.

On the other hand, a study specifically designed to test for moon-phase effects on sleep quality would have been designed differently to ensure it has just the right controls and that maximum information can be derived from the data.

Research in chronobiology is frustratingly slow. In circadian research, each day is just one data point, so each study has to keep subjects in isolation for many days. In the study of lunar rhythms, each month is a data point and the subjects need to be kept in isolation for many months.

To determine if a rhythm is generated by an internal timer (daily or monthly) as opposed to being a direct behavioral response to environmental cycles requires a whole battery of tests, which are hard and time-consuming enough in circadian research, and twenty eight times more so in circalunar rhythm research

Back in the 1960s, it was possible to keep (well compensated) human subjects in isolation rooms for long periods of time (see pioneering research by Wever and Aschoff in the underground bunker in Andechs, Germany). Likewise, animal subjects can be kept and monitored in isolation chambers for long periods of time.

As lunar rhythms are more “messy” than daily rhythms, more data over more time are necessary for the robust statistical analysis. And, due to ethics creep, it is not certain that either animal or human studies of such scope can be approved and performed any more. So, one has to be creative and get quality information out of imperfect experimental protocols (just like we cannot wait to observe multiple cycles of 17-year cicadas, but have to invent creative, short-term approaches instead).

But this time, the researchers were just lucky! Their data-set came from an old experiment which was designed well enough for this new purpose. The key is they had LOTS of data. Their subjects came in to the sleep lab many times and a number of different parameters were measured. Ideally, each subject would stay in the lab for a few months instead of just four days at a time. But having such a huge data set allowed them to weave together a patchwork of fragmented data into a large, trustworthy whole. Each first night of the test was eliminated from the data due to potential influence of the previous day (and the so-called “weekend effect”, as people tend to change sleep times on their days off). Each phase of the moon was covered by multiple subjects multiple times. So they could employ powerful statistics to tease out the effects of the moon phase on various parameters of sleep quality.

And they found some interesting stuff! My colleague Dina Fine Maron has covered the paper in greater detail here. In short, human subjects with no access to information about moon phase, or any ability to perceive the moon itself or its light intensity, nonetheless slept about 20 minutes shorter on the nights of full moon, mostly due to taking roughly 5 minutes longer to fall asleep in the evening than on a night of the new moon. Levels of melatonin, hormone released by the pineal gland during the night, were lower during full moon nights as well. Some of the age and sex differences cannot be explained at this time due to imperfect experimental design – and that is OK. I’d rather see new interesting information coming out of an old data set, than never seeing it at all just because it cannot be “just perfect”.

There are many claims around about lunar periodicities in all sorts of human behavior. For some of those, there is no evidence the claims are true. For others, there is strong evidence the claims are not true. But a few subtle effects have been documented. This paper adds another set with persuasive statistics.

Is this a demonstration that there is a working circalunar clock in humans, operating endogenously, and independently from the actual moon? It’s not possible to tell yet. Those kinds of demonstrations (just like for circadian clocks) require a battery of tests, starting with documenting multiple cycles (I’d say at least three complete monthly cycles) in complete isolation, ability of artificial moonlight to phase-shift the phase of the rhythm in a predictable manner (consistent with a Phase-Response Curve), and hopefully identification of body structures or cellular components which are devoted to generation of the rhythms, with at least some hint of the mechanism how they do it.

We are far from it yet even in animals we can manipulate in lab and field studies. Much work has been done over the decades in the study of lunar and circalunar rhythms in various animals, mostly aquatic and intertidal ones. There are documented lunar cycles (but not necessarily internal lunar clocks) in a variety of organisms, including sponges, cnidaria, polychaetes, aquatic insects, and many different crustaceans including crayfish.

In the terrestrial realm, antlions possess internal lunar clocks, but many other species show modifications of behavior during different phases of the moon, including honeybees, rattlesnakes, ratsnakes, some rodents, some lizards, and lions.

The gravitational force of the moon is so weak that it can affect only very large bodies of water on the Earth’s surface. It cannot even affect smaller lakes and rivers. There is no theoretical mechanism by which any molecule or cellular structure in a human body can be so sensitive as to detect the gravity of the moon. So that hypothesis is out.

In field studies, animals can see and synchronize to the changing night-time intensity as the moon goes through its phases. But in the lab, as in the case of this study, there are no visual clues to the moon phase for the subjects, and, since they had no idea the data would be analyzed for moon phases, they probably did not pay attention to that before they entered the light-isolation lab.

With both gravity and light eliminated as potential clues, the internal clock remains the strongest hypothesis. But it’s still a hypothesis that needs to be tested before one can state with any certainty that it is the case.

As for evolutionary explanations for the existence of a putative lunar rhythm of humans? I would be very careful about this. Demonstrating that any trait is actually an adaptation (and not an exaptation or side-effect of development, or something else) is an incredibly difficult task. Just because something seems “obviously useful” does not make it an adaptation. It is an error of hyperadaptationism to pronounce a trait an adaptation just because it exists, and then to tack on a semi-plausible scenario as to how it may have been selected for. Evolutionary biology is much more rigorous than that kind of lazy armchair speculation.

Sure, if our ancestors actually had lunar clocks as adaptations, it is possible that the mechanism for it may still remain, even if in a weak state, in at least some of today’s humans. But maybe not. And like a rudimentary organ, it does not seem to have any obviously useful function for humans living in the modern society. Twenty minutes of less sleep, that’s all. But it’s good to know. So we can find good use to those extra twenty minutes, perhaps come up with new scientific hypotheses over a pint with colleagues at a local pub.

Reference: Cajochen et al., Evidence that the Lunar Cycle Influences Human Sleep, Current Biology 23, 1–4, August 5, 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.06.029

Images: top: by NASA, bottom: from the paper.

Unfortunately, there is rarely anything on the program that specifically touches on science or health journalism, despite it being a somewhat different – and difficult – area of journalism with some very specific challenges.

Luckily you, the community of science and health readers, can help out. The Program is, at least partially, built through community vote. You can see all the session proposals here. You can ‘vote’ for any of them by clicking on the little heart icon (the “Like” on Tumblr) and/or by reblogging it on your own Tumblr.

If you scroll down again and again and again, you will finally reach the only science-related proposal: Science and Health Go Social: What Journalists Need to Know. You can help this session become a part of the official program by liking and reblogging it, perhaps adding your own commentary.

The session was proposed by Patricia Thomas who runs the excellent Grady Health and Medicine Journalism program at the University of Georgia in Athens.

The proposed panelists are:

– Maryn McKenna, blogger at Wired, frequent contributor to Scientific American, and the author of Superbug and Beating Back the Devil.

– Barbara Glickstein, Health journalist, public health nurse and the Co-Director of The Center for Health, Media & Policy at Hunter College City of New York.

– and me.

So, just click here and ‘heart’ the proposal and help us get there and start a discussion on challenges specific to science and health reporting in the rapidly evolving new media ecosystem.

Instead, I’ll just post pictures and add some of the story in the captions. New iPhones have decent cameras, I take lots of pictures, so why not use them to tell the story about the trip and convey some of the atmosphere there.

On the way there I was stuck at Denver airport for a couple of hours. Southwest's computer system went down so they grounded the entire fleet. Half of my plane was already boarded, but my bad boarding number left me at the comfortable, air-conditioned gate instead where Southwest served us our pretzels, peanuts and drinks.

Thus, I arrived in California very late. This is why the hotel is called "Wild Palms".

The same hotel where we all stayed back in 2007...

Unfortunately, no time this year for a dip in the pool....

....or to enjoy the scenery...

...because the buses were already waiting...

...yes, Google buses....

...and this is how one knows this...

...they brought us to Google campus...

...where many arrive by bike....

....yes, Google bike.

Googleplex has waterfalls....

...and wildlife...

...and a statue of Sylvia Earle....

...and more wildlife...

...and a smart car....

...and a statue of the fish-eat-fish world...

...and some more wildlife.

I registered...

...got a cool t-shirt...

...had some famous Google food for breakfast...

...and tried to make tough decisions which of many proposed sessions to attend.

....after which we had some more of the famous Google food...

...but if that wasn't enough, there's lots of food around at all times...

...that one can sample....

...before the next meal comes...

Of course, it's not all about food. It's also about explaining science with cats!

Like this...

...and this (there's much more, this is just a tiny sample).

One can find interesting things even in the bathroom!

...and on the display tables.

One could use the DNA Lego code...

...to put together sentences...

....including this one that reads "I met Bora".

But Scifoo is really about the people....

...and more people...

...and more people...

...and even more people.

That is, until one spots the Farewell Chocolate Table...

And, of course, chocolate is essential as the Fifth Food Group.

Until it's time to say goodbyes and go off to the airport and a long flight to Helsinki - about which, next time!

Quick programming note – #SciFoo and #WCSJ2013/#sci4hels

ScienceOnline Events Update

Previously in the “Best of…” series:

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Likewise, if you will be at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Helsinki, Finland, on June 24-29th, find me and say Hello as well. On the 26th, I’ll be on a plenary panel – The Rise of the Science Blog Network: Lessons from All Corners of the World at 09:00-10:30am, and then immediately after that enjoying the other panel I organized – The ‘killer’ science journalists of the future at 11:15am-12:45pm. But you already know all about it, as I have blogged about that panel several times.

During those 10 days or so, I will be online pretty sporadically (except to livetweet from my phone), so be nice to the other bloggers on the network!

#sci4hels – What makes one a “killer” (science) journalist of the future?

Quick updates: Science Studio, travel and quotes.

What’s new at ScienceOnline?

Previously in the “Best of…” series:

2013

April
March
February
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2012

December
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September
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2011

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Over the past few months, we also engaged the community with our questions. The first question was about the need for specialization (also see), which also feeds into the question of a need for specialized skills, like coding (see this and this).

The second question was “What does a new science journalist do to get noticed? How do you get people to read your work, give you assignments, follow you on Twitter, and generally just know who you are?” This provoked a lively discussion on Twitter.

The third question, upon noticing that all the panelists are female (and many of the upcoming science writers are, too), was a discussion about breaking the glass ceiling in the media organizations.

We all pitched in together for the Question #4: How Should Science Journalists Deal with Breaking News?.

The final, fifth question was: “What is the obligation of a science journalist when it comes to education?”

Obviously, we covered a very broad range of topics. But now we need to focus. We’ll only have 90 minutes in Helsinki, and the attendees will come to hear and learn from “killer” science journalists of the future, hoping to get some advice on how to join their ranks and become one of those “killers”, successful in the fast-shifting world of modern media.

On Thursday we will publish our final post and open it up for discussion. Here, I want to make some quick, broad, Big Picture thoughts of my own.

What are the characteristics of a “killer science journalist of the future”?

Understanding that being in print, on radio, or on TV is sweet, still pays better, and still carries a cache with some audiences, but that this picture is changing fast. These 20th century types of one-way broadcast media are rapidly losing audiences, while new generations are essentially using only the Web for information, education and entertainment. Thus, it is smart to focus primarily on the online world, while still occasionally getting some money from the old media when possible.

Understanding that the currency of reputation in the new ecosystem is trust. As the readers rely less and less on the banners on top of the page and more and more on the names in the bylines, it is essential to build one’s own personal reputation and not to rely entirely on the institutional reputation of the media outlet for which one writes.

Understanding that, for one to gain the currency of trust in an online world, one has to constantly use the currency of trust – the hyperlink. A killer science journalist of the future profusely peppers one’s articles with links. Every place in the article that makes a statement should contain a link. Every such spot that does not have a link automatically is a red flag for the modern reader. What is the author trying to hide? Is the originator of information not credited properly?

If information is gained from a document, the document should be linked. If it comes from an article or a blog post, it should be linked. If it comes from a scientific paper, that paper should be linked. If there is a two-sentence quote, presumably taken out of an hour-long interview, it is important to link to the complete interview – transcript or audio or video recording. Every link is a gain of trust. Every lacking link is a loss of trust. Digital natives understand this almost instinctively. Modern online journalism is in many way just like science, including the importance of proper citation and credit for the past ideas on top of which one builds one’s new edifice.

There is no expectation that most readers will actually click on the links. The links are there as a proxy, a sign to the readers that the author has done the due diligence of actually doing the necessary research and finding the relevant sources (what quotes used to do in the old media, but now have the opposite effect online), and generally understands the way the Web requires proper credit of all sources of information. In cases of controversial statements, a small proportion of readers may click on links (even if they are behind paywalls – some readers will have access) and tell the other readers in the comments if the links actually support the statements in the text.

Understanding that the new media ecosystem is an open system. An open system is much stricter and faster in enforcing both the traditional journalistic ethics and the additional online ethics, and much harsher and faster at meting punishment on transgressors of such ethics than the old-style, closed ecosystem. Feedback is instantaneous, and often devastating. The best way to deal with criticism is complete transparency, humble admission of errors, and civil countering of incorrect information if such is presented in the feedback.

A digital native does not take harsh feedback personally, is used to harshness of online comments, shrugs it off but does not ignore the feedback – understanding that it is always a learning experience that helps one get better at the job. It is also understood that responding to feedback and involving the readers in the learning process is one way of getting better, earning trust, and gaining good reputation.

Understanding that self-promotion is not a dirty word the way it was in the 20th century. With a glut of information, and glut of overall online communication, it is necessary for the author to be seen and heard above the din. The only way to do this is to have the link circulate widely online, especially on social media. For the link to appear on social media in the first place, the author has to place it there first. If the piece is accurate, well documented, and well written, it will be spread around. For the link posted by the author to be seen, the author has to have sufficient number of people to send it to, particularly people who already trust and respect the author. Thus, building and nurturing one’s own community of friends, colleagues and readers, and being a part of other people’s similar circles, reciprocating the goodwill, is essential. This is the essence of the principle of horizontal loyalty (or “Friends In Low Places”).

Understanding that all of the above is still not enough. Doing it all correctly, diligently discovering information, linking to all the sources, not stealing ideas from bloggers and then linking only to traditional sources, being humble, respectful and transparent, and generally making a coherent article day after day, week after week, is still not enough. One day soon, everyone will be doing it technically correctly. How does one get noticed in such an environment then?

Yes, sometimes you’ll have to write a dull article for money. Perhaps too often. But the pieces that will really take off – and the pieces that will bring the reputation and trust, not just traffic – are pieces that are written with passion. So, follow your own curiosity and find your passion. Find your own obsession and turn it into your beat. Become a Go-To expert on the topic of your obsession. Ditch the boring old inverted pyramid (it was invented due to space limits of paper, something that vanished online) and start writing in an exciting way.

Or, if your passion is not any narrow topic, then your expertise – or your signature stuff, something for which people will keep coming back over and over again to check your work – may be something else: absolutely beautiful writing, or amazing visuals, or stunning art or photography, or video, or animation, or hand-coded interactive infographics, or whatever makes you excited. If you are excited, your readers will be excited, too. They will support you, tell their friends about you, and make you successful in the process. As long as the basic journalistic ethics and the additional online ethics are met, it is this added passion that will make the difference between successful writers and those who are…not so much…