But the word ghost has meant many things including, originally, the life force of a human. When our ghost slips away, when we give up the ghost, we die. It leaves a vapor trail, or it doesn’t, or you have to be just the right kind of person, so sensitive and attuned, to notice the wisp as it departs this world.

Some says that our ghost may go on to haunt houses or classrooms, people or events. But this is just hearsay, the ramblings of the superstitious. Nobody serious believes in ghosts, any more than they believe in telepathy or bodily meridians, UFOs or the healing power of faith.

What a list. So confusing. Many believe in one or some or even all of these things. I am among them.

I also don’t believe in souls, at least, not in the way that people tend to mean when they say that they do. I do not think that humans are fundamentally different from our cousins among the primates. If our lives are enrobed in meaning not contained by “body” or “mind,” if we have something that could be described as a soul, so, I think, do they. We have more, but others have some. This is probably the deepest rift I have with people of faith, that I do not believe that humans are special due to divine gift. I do see great specialness in humanity, but I attribute that to a remarkable sequence of events, evolutionary innovations and cultural inventions, that made us into the unique, precious, extraordinary species that we are.

I do feel, however, that there is utility in the idea of a three-part identity. Body and mind are not quite sufficient, they don’t capture all of what we are. There is something emergent. We are more.

Over the last two weeks I became desperately ill. Saying that I became deathly ill seems like hyperbole, but in truth, that is what it felt like. I felt that death was there.

I have been very sick before. I have had flu before. I have, I think, had flu that blossomed into bacterial pneumonia before, bacterial infection raging through a body already battered.

Never before have I felt the core of my being ebb away, stealthy, leaving only a grey mass in its wake.

The sickness itself arrived like a king tide, overwhelmed me, overcame me. It had been such a good day—so productive and creative, so active and playful and connected—and now we were sitting before a fire with dinner in the oven and eggnog in our mugs. The visualization that came to me just before I was submerged was of a circular patch of pathogenic cells, sitting low on the back of my throat, out of reach, about to explode.

We had gotten back from a five mile hike in 45 degree weather just after the sun had set, had been dressed appropriately but not particularly warmly, and I’d been fine, but oh. Inside by the fire it was 75 degrees now and it was so cold. So so cold.

I went under. Muffled. Never gasped for breath. I went quietly in to the cold depths.

The first two days were standard flat-out bedridden feverish delusional madness. We’ve all been there, I think. It sucks. It feels endless, and yet we know that it is not. And then a change began, a return to some function, a greater sense of stability on my feet, a bit loss fogginess.

I felt a little better, and then, inevitably, worse. Time and time and time again—on days three, four, five, six, seven—what healthy trajectory there might be stopped, reversed, and settled somewhere darker, grimmer. Yes, there was the pain—a vise like headache, deep muscle aches and spasms, electrical shocks to all of my fingers and some of my toes—and yes, the discomfort—drenched in sweat many times every night, everything smelling so toxic, nausea, hallucinations, deep fatigue, the endless, hacking, wracking cough.

None of that captures it though.

…

…

It turns out I don’t want to write about this.

Why? Because it was nothingness. I disappeared. I thought: if this were my life, it would not be worth living. Not because I felt so dreadful, although I did. Pain, even pain that leaves every system raw and empty, pain I can deal with, at least for a while.

But the thing that would make it not worth living if that were to be my everyday was that I had lost my self. I felt like I wasn’t human anymore. My ghost was gone.

I couldn’t figure out what to think, or what to do, or even what to want to do. I couldn’t read. I certainly couldn’t write, even though I had been writing furiously, happily, daily, for weeks. I couldn’t choose. I couldn’t even watch. I do not believe in boredom, but now I had no idea how to consider…anything. I had never felt that before. I was just empty. Bereft of ideas, of agency, of desire—for anything. Ahead, behind, all around, just a flat grey space, nothing to recommend it. A waiting room. With no life force. No ghost. Leaden, dim, ashen, the whole world in soft focus. Or perhaps there was simply nothing on which to focus. All was gone.

I couldn’t find my brain. I couldn’t find any interest in anything. I remembered that I had been interested in things, once, but now, this.

I had gone from writing thousands of words a day, to being unable to make a choice on Netflix. Literally1.

I kept rallying, in small ways that felt big at the time, as we discovered things that helped—electrolytes, coffee, Iodine—each of which, for a few hours, released me from intense pain. But then the smothering grippe would come back, and I would remember that I had never returned at all. Those brief releases, and then the slow, sodden sinking back into the muck—those were just the physical experiences of the illness. I had never returned, even with the useful interventions. I was gone, and what was left of me, wasn’t changing at all. This was my state. Neither here nor there. This was what would always be.

It felt as if across a long distance, across which I could not shout, I was disappearing. Disappearing? Who? What was disappearing? How silly. There was nothing to disappear. The walls of the waiting room dissolved and I was on a rowboat, unmoored. This, this little rowboat in a grey sea, was all there was. This was eternity.

Day five and I found myself beginning to accept the little rowboat.

It was fine. Whatever.

NO.

I howled in rage so as not to accept my fate.

I howled in rage and took action by taking my feverish, unnourished body out in to the Pacific Northwest weather of November and going for a walk. A walk! I couldn’t be that sick, right? Three days earlier I hadn’t been able to get out of bed and now I was on a hike. Yes, it was short—just three miles. And yes, inclines that normally meant nothing to me winded me. But I was out there.

I saw the two bald eagles who are often by the lighthouse and I remembered that I love raptors. They work for no one. They are pair-bonded, weaving eternally with one another, both entwined and independent. I remembered those things, but I also could not remember why I cared.

I walked. Plodded. Footstep after footstep through pebbled estuary and soft pine paths and a grassland faded by the end of the season and along the high bluffs, where the views are grand and you can see across the Strait of San Juan de Fuca to the Olympics. Here you can calibrate your meaning in life. Except that I could not. I felt like a visitor to life, and a short-term one at that. Nothing resonated. I continued to disappear.

My ghost was leaving me. I had no access to her now, and she had ever less connection to me. This thing, this human condition, that I had always insisted was fully integrated—you cannot speak of the duality of man, the conflict between body and mind, between mind and brain, between brain and behavior, for the interconnections are too vast—this thing was unraveling in me. Becoming unhooked.

We are more than the sum of our parts, until we start to become less than them. I was fading away. Once the ghost left, there would be nothing left. Just a shell.

I was back in the little rowboat soon enough. There were no oars. No horizon. Nowhere to be. What would the use of oars even be?

The next day I howled in rage again and determined to find myself but where to begin? The whole endeavor was pointless. If I couldn’t figure out who or what I was, why was I trying? Just disappear. Fade away. It’s easier. I didn’t want to disappear. I knew that I still had work to do…but who was this “I” who was mentioned? What is the work?

I did not try to go on another walk. I did not even step outside.

Instead I drifted in the rowboat on the flat grey sea. It was misty but not cold. There was nothing to be seen. No way to propel myself. No way to find anything, including me.

My breathing became shallower yet on day seven, but I thought—oh, I am just losing capacity because I am sick, I am still ambulatory. The fact that my inhale stopped softly about 2/3 of the way to a full breath, every time, should have alarmed me. It did, but only faintly.

My capacity for alarm was fading. I was no longer howling in rage. I had become quiet. I was scared now, but I was also settling in. Giving up. I had the rowboat. It would suffice.

I did not give up and on day eight I did get antibiotics which are now kicking the crap out of the infections, much to the chagrin of the rest of my multitudes. I will have to regrow the good bacteria well and quickly, but first: relief. Relief and return.

The rowboat is gone and I am back now, my ghost firmly settled within me. I am integrated again, whole. Still not fully well, and I suspect that I will wear the scars of this illness for a time, perhaps in ways that I will never fully understand.

I wonder, too, about the nature of ghosts and souls, or the many other words that can mean similar things. Anima. Psyche. Spirit. Essence. Yes, essence. Our essence is emergent, and cannot yet be explained by a materialist understanding of the world. Many think that we’ll be able to explain it someday. Maybe we will. Maybe we won’t.

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Polyface Farm has beckoned me since 2006, when Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma came out, and I, like so many others, fell in awe with Joel Salatin and his farm.

I was a professor at one of the country’s most liberal colleges then, and when I assigned Pollan’s book to my students, they too fell for the promises therein: that we can and we must remember what we have been, what the Earth is, what we are all capable of, and grow our food and communities with attention to ancient and actually sustainable ways.

Back then, Salatin reports, about 80% of the visitors to Polyface Farm were on the left, politically—tree huggers and granola-eating hippies, back to the land types who, if push came to shove, were hoping that the government would solve their problems. These were people who reviled corporations, but trusted the government.

Now, the ratio has flipped: about 80% of the visitors to Polyface Farm are on the right—homesteaders and homeschoolers and hunters, back to the land types who are more likely to push the government away than invite its help.

In fact, there is much in common between the two groups: a hunger to return to the land, our roots, our home. A desire to connect with self, community, and all of humanity. The differences emerge when we start talking about who, ultimately, should be in charge of our fate. Am I responsible for my choices, and must I deal with the consequences, no matter what? Or ought there be a safety net, protecting me from some consequences—and if so, how many?

When does a safety net become a security blanket, infantilizing in its comfort, preventing adulthood and self-worth from ever blooming?

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My father grew up on a family farm in northeastern Iowa, back when family farms were still common there. He was born in 1938, the third of four children. They had pigs, which he admired, and chickens, which he did not. They grew corn. They had a kitchen garden and a nice barn and a gleaming silo and even, after a while, indoor plumbing. Running to the outhouse in the middle of an Iowa winter night was not one of my father’s favorite memories, but it was something he remembered.

Farming is tough, we have all been told, the margins so thin, the vagaries of weather and plagues and crop failures so difficult to predict that nobody with potential should consider doing it. This was what my father’s father told him, and indeed told all of the siblings: get off the farm. Find work that is more stable, more expansive, more modern. Make your way in the world, not on the farm.

And so he did.

By the time I was born the farm had been sold and my father had long since moved away, having become a computer engineer before most people had heard of such a thing. I grew up in LA in the ‘70s and ‘80s, about as far from life on a farm as it seems one could get.

And yet there were lessons that my father had learned on the farm that he kept throughout his life, and one of them was that when there is work to be done, we do it. We do not try to avoid the work, or spend our efforts calculating how to outsource it. First, we attempt it ourselves.

It was a vaguely perfect Saturday in west Los Angeles1 and, at 11 years old, I was inside with my nose in a book. The decrepit fence between our tiny eighth of an acre and that of our neighbors to the north had taken a tilt for the worse, and my father decided that it was time for a new one.

I enjoyed learning sports and math from my father, but I also liked reading and making art, inspired by my mother. I had no particular interest in building a fence. My brother, four years my junior, was game for the task, and it didn’t occur to me that my presence was called for. I continued to read.

“Come on, Heather,” my father said. “Time to get to work.”

“I’m reading, Daddy. Let little Doug help.” His anger came fast.

“I will not raise a helpless daughter,” he yelled at me. “Today, you are learning how to build a fence.”

This is one of very few times I can remember angering my father.

The message was abundantly clear, sufficiently so that I remember it more than forty years later: We do not avoid work.

We also do not make or do unnecessary work.

There is work to be done. It is good and honorable to do it. And so we do it, and we do it well.

On that day, we built a fence.

The Brownstone Institute held a conference last week at Polyface Farm, and I was lucky to be part of the event. Much could be said about it, but for now, for here, I will restrict my comments to just one thing Joel Salatin said during his keynote address. He asked:

How do we generate self-worth?

His answer:

Successfully accomplish meaningful tasks.

My sons are now young adults, hovering either side of 20 years old, and they are studying engineering and science, among other things. This last Summer they worked long hours on several farms most days of the week, sometimes leaving home at 5 am and not returning until after 10 pm2. The work ranged from tedious to inspiring, and required patience, pattern recognition, and problem solving. There are no bullshit jobs on farms, no make-work.

A well-meaning relative scolded them lightly, told them that next Summer they should be doing internships, by which he meant official internships in science or engineering, indoor work where they could keep their collars clean and white. They have their futures to think about, after all, and careers to build. Farm work is retro. Farm work is primitive.

Except that it is not.

Oh, it is surely wonderful to be freed from worrying about life’s necessities—staying warm enough, and dry; having enough good food and clean water. Once those things are taken care of, it can be delightful to be freed from more—letting the machines wash our things, and cook our food, and keep the temperature just so. Then it can seem like such a convenience to have our food made uniform and safe, designed in labs and produced in factories, easy to heat and to eat on the go. Our thirst for convenience encourages us to outsource more—we’ve already outsourced the making of our clothes and our customer service to faceless people half a world away, why not ask machines to do our thinking for us. Then, having fallen out of the habit of reckoning with things, we can outsource our analysis to the experts, who arrive all shiny with their credentials and their certainty and assure us that they have it all figured out, if only we will follow and comply.

Where you decide to call it a slope, and how good your traction on that slope is, will vary.

Another way of framing being freed from having to think about the necessary things of life, is that you are utterly dependent on those who still know how to do things. Worse yet, once the technocrats wrest power from those who do things—which they have-- you are utterly dependent on them. You exist and thrive at their pleasure. You have forfeited agency and autonomy for convenience.

Anecdotally, I can say this: my older son already did a year-long, full-time engineering internship, right out of high school. For this opportunity he was and remains grateful, and he learned tremendously. But even then, while he was solving perplexing engineering problems many days a week, he came up to the islands on the weekends and worked one day many weeks on a farm. He wasn’t driven by the money. He liked the work. He liked being outside all day, even in the Winter, working with his hands, solving problems, and—again and still and always— successfully accomplishing meaningful tasks.

It is not clever to reduce our workload to nothing, unless the work that we are minimizing was already meaningless.

Jeffrey Tucker, founder of the Brownstone Institute, has a new book out. It is an inspiring little book, a quick read, and I recommend it. Spirits of America defines and celebrates what Tucker understands to be several fundamental American characteristics—frugality, independence, physicality, thankfulness, among many others. In the chapter on the spirit of work, he writes (p23):

Hard work is a virtue. There is no line between work and life; they are the same. We used to know that. That’s how this country was built: with blood, sweat, tears, and heavy tools and long hours. To be inert is to be miserable.

To be inert is to be miserable.

Yes. To what end do we want our labor to be “saved”? What are we saving it for?

Let us stop handing over our agency and worth to those who promise an easy life. Ease is not the goal.

Salatin’s words once again: we generate self-worth by successfully accomplishing meaningful tasks. On his farm, people are the lifeblood, rather than infrastructure, or electricity. Real farmers are doing real work.

I wonder why the people who are showing up at Polyface Farm are of a different political bent than they used to be.

Some people on the right, who never trusted the government but were a little too eager to believe in promises from the private sector, were once tech-optimists and anti-agrarians. In the chapter on agronomy in Spirits of America, Tucker writes that, for much of his adult life, he couldn’t understand why anyone regretted a move off the land. Before exposure to ample critique of industrial food and Big Agriculture, his thinking was (p58):

What’s wrong with corporate farming? It’s feeding the world and we would starve otherwise. We need big companies, huge machinery, oceans of pesticide and fertilizer, and consolidated supply chains. We simply cannot and should not go back.

So there’s that.

But I also wonder if those of us who showed up 10 and 20 years ago, and called ourselves liberals, aren’t many of the same people who show up now. We’re not democrats anymore though. We’re politically homeless, or maybe we call ourselves conservatives or libertarians now.

We haven’t changed, or not much. Just as many on the right have woken up to the problems of Big Ag and Big Food in light of what happened to us all during Covid, many who thought of ourselves as being on the left have woken up, too. We appreciate the 2^nd Amendment more now, having seen some of what the government is capable of. And we are more wary of regulations, for the same reason. But we’re still fundamentally interested in conserving the Earth, and its inhabitants—people included. We prefer our food real, and the moneyed interests far away. Problem is, real food has become ever more difficult to source, and discerning who and where the moneyed interests are, has become a devilishly hard game.

Don’t we all, every last one of us, feel the tug to be more connected—to ourselves, to other people, and to the land itself? Work brings us together. Much has been said of the lack of work ethic among the young now, but I believe that this is always said of the young.

Perhaps more mothers and fathers need to be telling their sons and daughters that it’s time to build fences. Because again: we generate self-worth by successfully accomplishing meaningful tasks.

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“…she told me a secret about getting older: While people would see me as older—as Tara at twenty or Tara at forty or Tara at sixty—on the inside I would remain the same person I had always been. To young me, that was a stunning revelation.”

- Tara Couture, on p171 of Radiance of the Ordinary

I still marvel at this.

I did not know Tara at twenty, or at forty, and neither of us is quite yet sixty, but I am grateful to know her now, and to bring to you this week a taste, just a taste, from her new book.

Some of you will be familiar with Tara’s exquisite writing from Slowdown Farmstead, and some will remember Mila’s Story. Whether you read her every week, or had not heard her name before just now, I assure you that you will discover the unexpected in her book. For oh, it is a good and glorious book.

Tara, by her own admission, likes finding her weak spots. In so doing she reveals strength. She explores the world and meets it as it is, but also asks questions of it, and strives to improve that which can be improved.

Life grows bigger. And then, life grows smaller.

- p76, in the chapter called Motherhood

Radiance of the Ordinary: Essays on Life, Death, and the Sinews that Bind was published by Chelsea Green Publishing this month, and the following chapter is printed here with permission from the publisher. Couture’s book arrives in three parts: Harvest, Home, and Evermore. This chapter is from Home.

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Of Blood and Butterflies

In the autumn it is time to harvest our animals. They are fat and slick from a spring and summer of feasting on sweet grasses and forages. They are at their prime, thick with health and joyful with their lot in life. I walk among them, bringing pails of apples for their dining pleasure. Some of the old cows come right up to me, asking me to pop the apples right into their mouths. Others are shyer and will only take the apples if I lay them on the ground at their feet. I know who’s who. Some, like my oldest milk cow, Bea, prefer a nice, deep scratch on the soft, malleable little flap of skin under their chins. She’d rather get that than an apple any day.

I walk among our herd, looking at their bodies. Looking to see who’s “finished.” I vividly remember how Richard taught me to do this many years earlier. We stood together, leaning over his fence on a quiet prairie afternoon. An endless blue sky, uninterrupted by forest or mountain, spread out above us. His was the land of the prairies. A red-tailed hawk perched on a fence post across the field. He could spot those hawks with ease, whether they were nearby or a tiny speck in the distance.

Richard pointed out the steers to me, one by one, explaining the differences in their bodies. “You see that one, Tara? It’s not ready.” I asked “why” again and again that day. And then, every time we worked around the cattle, I pointed out the ones I thought had a nice finish on them and waited for his expert assessment. He saw things that my lack of experience blinded me to. But I began to understand, in my feeble way. Mostly, I realized, as with everything, there is an art to being a cattleman as much as there is the skill and knowledge.

Now I walk among my herd, Chief Evaluator, deciding who lives another year and who dies. The responsibility of my decisions weighs on me. As I move through the herd, looking at their bodies, I remember each of their stories. When they were born and to whom. I look at my fat heifer whose grandmother is still here, the two of them bonded. When they chew their cud, mesmerized in peaceful pleasure, they do so together, side by side on a grassy mound before the tree line. The heifer hasn’t had a calf in four years, despite the bull’s best efforts. She’s infertile, and her time here is coming to an end. There’s no decision left to be made, only acceptance to be had.

Two fat steers, both over three years old now, are contenders as well. I walk between them, looking at their rear ends, the fat cover over their bodies, that rounded fullness still absent in their younger herdmates. And all the while, as I look at these living animals and imagine the flesh beneath their hides, all of life sings around me. Birds and sweetgrasses. The cattle move about peacefully, lazily swatting at flies with their tails, staring off into parts unknown. They are hypnotized by their own chewing and burping and swallowing, their collected forages making their way through the various chambers of their ingenious digestive systems. They are a marvel, a brilliant, life-giving marvel, and I am going to eat them. Not only am I going to eat them, but to eat them, I must kill them.

In our world of wedges—great buffers to keep us comfortable—we have created all manner of devices to keep us from the grit of life. But grit remains. We just pass on our refusal of participation to the poor soul who cannot refuse. Every autumn, when it comes time to harvest our animals, I think of the person standing in the pool of shit and body fluids in a commercial abattoir. Every day, all day long, that person looks into the eyes of fearful, wild-eyed beasts and fires a captive bolt stun gun, slashes arteries, and jumps back before the blood fills their rubber boots. In a moment meant to be a sacred act, a great responsibility between eaters and that which nourishes them, it’s an abomination. These beautiful animals are treated only as meat, even while their spirits still have hold. It’s a separation disguised as an efficiency, but in truth, it’s a robbing of our relationship with nature. A gift slapped away.

I was once told not to name my animals. “Too hard to kill them if they have a name.” Every now and then someone still says something similar. I don’t suppose they’re ready for my standard response.

“Why would I not name an animal? One of the great joys of farming is having relationships with my animals, spending time with them and getting to know them. Is it because they’re going to die that I should not name them? Every single person I know is going to die, but I don’t limit myself in my relationships with them.”

I’m usually met with a shrug or a concession. “I suppose.”

I anticipate the fall animal harvest for weeks before. It’s a busy time, and it’s emotionally exhausting, too. We will harvest sheep and pigs if we have them. We will harvest some of our cattle and rabbits, chickens, turkeys, geese, and ducks. We will fill our freezers and our root cellar with the meat of our farm and that which we hunt. From the day they are born, every single one of those animals moves toward the day of their death, and that death, save an accident, will be at our hands. We are duty bound to the responsibility, the rightness of our obligation.

Harvest day is a dreaded day in my heart. It’s heavy with responsibility and sadness. Sometimes I feel unworthy of participating in the day. But it’s also a day of great reverence and gratitude. There is profound joy in the overwhelming magnificence of God’s creations.

“Duty bound.” That phrase used to mean something. It’s a phrase wrapped in honour and sacrifice. To the duty, in the duty—rightness. Rightness matters to me, to us. Within our gratitude for the life-giving nourishment these animals provide us lives the duty of our hearts. Our animals, born here on this land, will know no trailer, no line to the gallows. They will remain here, under the same sky they gazed upon when they were born. They will be in their herd, peacefully lounging, when a bullet enters their brain and their life ends. Their blood will return to the same earth their bodies fell onto as they slipped from their mothers’ warm bodies.

In the moments after we kill an animal, we sit on the earth, hands on the animal’s body, praying our prayers of thanks. I tell stories I’ve collected from having known the beautiful beast. We send it off with words of gratitude while all around us something profound is happening. There, in the field, a mystical transformation. The physical into the ethereal. The contained into the limitless. Not something ending. Something expanding beyond the borders of life. Under my hand, the warm body transforms from that which I have known into that which isn’t mine to know. And in the wake of this alchemy, a body remains. Nourishment. Ever-giving life.

We have given our animals a good death, solemn and sacred, and now there is joy. Absolute joy. Joy in the relief of everything having gone well. Joy in the abundance of beautiful nourishment. Joy in the assuredness that life continues on. We hang the body and carefully slide our sharp knives along the inside of the hide. The thick skin slowly peels back to reveal the quality of life we have given to the animal. The fat is deep yellow from the sweet, rich forages of our land’s pastures and wilds. The muscles and organs are deep red, rich with maturity and the effort of carrying this animal up hills and into valleys, through trails and wild places. The meat smells sweet and earthy and I am proud. I’m proud for the work we have done. I’m proud we have done things the hard way, moving these animals daily across our land, keeping them for years longer than they would live in a feedlot, making sure they were given all we had to offer. I am proud because the meat that’s left for us is a thank you more important than any measure or gauge. Evidence better than any other of a life well lived.

The blood pooled on the grass around us attracts a lone yellow swallowtail butterfly. She comes and floats her delicate legs on the congealed blood, feeding on it. We watch in amazement. Every year we hope the hungry swallowtail butterflies will return for their blood feast. The first time we witnessed this, we were startled. Weren’t butterflies meant for daisies? But nature, as nature does, laughs at our ignorance. Of course a butterfly delights in the nourishment of blood. Of course the wasps find us, landing on the flesh of the animal and pulling off little round balls to bring back to their homes. Of course we’re all tied in together.

And therein lies the wisdom of a butterfly, weighing her actions not against the opinions of her butterfly clan but with the knowledge built right into her, fed into her from antennae connecting to a mysterious ether beyond. She encourages me to be brave, too. To embrace the wildness and rawness of the parts that lie dormant inside of me, cultivated into submission by a culture that tells fairy tales in place of deeper meaning. We believe in our limitations and weaknesses because they are a comfort to us. Familiar and dependable.

But when I’m honest, I cannot deny that here in this field, there is something beyond the reach of my words or reason. There is blood on my hands, on my arms, soaking through the linen of my shirt and into the open skin that contains me. Blood from another life is absorbed into me, becoming part of me. I don’t just see it there, I feel it, deep in my body, changing me, layering me, pulling me deeper and deeper into an untouchable realm. It’s beauty-full. Full and saturated, concentrated and thick. This is a world ungovernable by man. This world cannot be manipulated with fairy tales. There is nothing here that can be marred by the misunderstandings of a lost human. This is real. This is true. The blood fades into thirsty butterflies, human skin, and the dark, cool earth. All of us connected, now, through that shared blood.

That same blood flowed from my ancestors and into me. The blood of their animals, hunted in forests and farmed in fields. From the earth into us and back to the earth again. To my descendants, a drop of my blood with all of life echoed through it.

I wonder, how do the swallowtails drink if too many people buy meat from grocery stores? How does the blood return to the soil? How do the coyotes and the vultures feast on the entrails from the farmer and the hunter? Our wedges, our separation, spills over into all of life. A chink in the chain. We cannot divide ourselves without dividing everything.

A world of wedges. Lovers kept from lovers. The great healer kept from the ill at heart and mind. A cheap peddler’s promise of easy and slick sold to the hungry while the truth is kept tucked away. It’s too hard. It’s too ugly. You’re too feeble of mind and spirit. Look here, watch this, eat this. The real business of life, they assure us, is the business. Go to the right school. Wear the right clothes. Buy the right car. Lust after material possessions. Then lust and lust and lust again. Gerbils on a wheel staring out of their plexiglass cages on their endless pursuit to nowhere.

The bison removed the biggest wedge I had—my fear of death. A fear so strong I had unknowingly shaped my life around it. Without that day with Richard, without the many days that followed, wherein I immersed myself in what I was being taught, I don’t know if I would have survived the pain of what was to come in my life.

Radiance of the Ordinary: Essays on Life, Death, and the Sinews that Bind, by Tara Couture, came out this month, and I highly recommend every single page.

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Early one dark and rainy evening on our last night in Barcelona, we wandered into a Catholic church that was different, totally different, from any church I had ever seen. We had seen so much gold and glory in the cathedrals and palaces on this trip, and this one had little of it. The glitz and glam are gorgeous, but they do not invite a person in—at least not me. This church, however, was inviting. The holy family—forgive my language—looked fully human. This did not reduce them, but enhanced them.

Not too far away is Güell Park, liberally sprinkled with Gaudí buildings. Antoni Gaudí (1852 – 1926), famed Catalan architect, is most renowned for the still-in-process Sagrada Familia, an elaborate cathedral built in homage to the holy family.

The structures in the park are, like that Catholic church, more down to earth. In a way. They also feel like fantasies made real with clay and glass, iron and stone.

Far, far to the West is Cádiz, a sun drenched town that sits on a peninsula out beyond where it seems there should be any land at all, poking out into the Atlantic. There are several castles, two of which are at the ends of spits of land which are now connected, but were separated by water when the castles were built. At what is now the Castillo de San Sebastian, a Venetian boat arrived in the 15^th century with a crew afflicted with the plague. With permission, they made landfall, recovered, and built a chapel, which over the centuries morphed into a castle, a first defense against enemies arriving by sea.

Now, Cádiz is free of plague, and Venetian boats do not make landfall there anymore. Now, Cádiz feels like the land of cranes. Here is one at sunrise, with a statue of Simon Bolivar at the bottom of the photo. What you cannot see here is the (unfortunate) placard below the statue: Simon Bolivar: Heroe de la Raza (hero of the race).

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Travel is not as I remember it.

The number of people who travel is growing, but the world is not. The places, therefore, the ones from history, the places which those who think about such things will know the names of, are inherently more crowded.

One such place is the Alhambra, a great Moorish complex that began to come into being in the 9^th century, and is now an immense relic in the middle of modern Granada. It was citadel, palace, and administrative center for hundreds of years, a city-fortress in which two thousand people once lived, a center of the Islamic Golden Age. Even now, empty of furnishings and the bustle of royal life, it is extraordinary. Within the Alhambra’s Nasrid Palaces (Palacios Nazariés), geometrically ornate tiles and carvings adorn every surface—floors, walls and ceilings—in wood, plaster, stucco, and ceramic, one room into the next, more and more and more, interspersed with perfect gardens.

The number of visitors to the Alhambra’s biggest draw, the Nasrid Palaces, is capped at something like 8,000 per day, which is both a lot, and a little. Tickets are sold out months in advance. Even with the earliest timeslot to enter one morning, on a chilly morning in the off-season, we are amid throngs. Throngs shuffling. Throngs taking selfies with cameras on their phones. Throngs trying to pretend that they are alone, that the other throngers do not exist. But also, throngers who are not quite sure what it is that they are supposed to be doing there, either.

Yes, of course, there has always been the tourist problem. How do we simultaneously expand our horizons, appreciate how many ways there are to be human, how many different ways there are to live, while not destroying what we seek in the process? It is a true conundrum, a cultural observer effect. Just as has been noted in physics, wherein the act of observation itself changes that which is observed (see Schrödinger’s cat—or rather, don’t, unless you want to change what is true about it), there is no way to visit a place as an outsider without bringing the outside in with you, no matter how hard you try not to. And of course, many people are not trying at all.

My very first research, in which a natural experiment unfolded in front of me in Costa Rica, involved a self-described “eco-tourist lodge.” It was one of those places to which good-hearted people frequently go when they want to see wild nature, while also feeling that they are careful stewards of the world—protecting wild nature, seeing to it that the locals are included in the profits, that sort of thing. This “eco-tourist lodge” had, a few years before I arrived in the region at a nearby field station, introduced a non-native species of dart-poison frog to a forest that already had quite a fine species of dart-poison frog, thank you very much. The lodge had thought that the new species would be more appealing to (eco)tourists. But the original (and very fine) species of dart-poison frog was intimidated in the presence of the new, bigger, brasher species, and was, I would discover, going locally extinct. That, unfortunately, is sometimes how “eco-tourism” plays out.

It is also, in general terms, how tourism often plays out.

Being herded here and there, moving like so many cows or salmon to a destination, unthinking, prompts existential angst in me. What, after all, is the point.

In Granada we walked up through the Sacromonte neighborhood, which is where thousands of Roma (“gypsies”) used to live in Granada, in homes built into caves in the stone cliffs. Many Roma still live there today. At some level, we were gawking. We didn’t want to gawk. That wasn’t the hope or the point. We wanted to get a feel for what it would have been like to live, as Roma, in caves, in the sides of cliffs, above the city of Granada, next door to the Albayzín, the Moorish quarter, across a ravine from the Alhambra, its fortified palaces impressive from every angle.

In the Sacromonte, someone was selling access to his cave, for the tourists. Sidewalk cafes advertised vinos, bebidas, tapas on chalkboards. Many tourists were there in organized groups; unsure how to navigate back streets without a guide and the comfort of twenty other tourists, they had hired a leader. As we passed one such group we heard the guide say, "there is a woman here who does not like the tourists, so stay with me. With me it is okay.”

I understand that woman, whom I never saw. She doesn’t want any of us there, where she lives, in her neighborhood. She must have issues with some of her neighbors as well. Some are selling access to the caves; others are selling overpriced drinks. Tourism is how the money comes in now. That doesn’t mean that she has to like it.

More than twenty five years ago, Bret and I traveled through Turkey. It was late Summer, the season of the apricot harvest, and as we drove through the vast Anatolian plain, every town gleamed orange from a distance, apricots laid out on mats on all the roofs, drying in the sun. When we stopped for gas we were invited by the station attendant to join him for some apple tea. We accepted. In Cappadocia, as in the Sacromonte neighborhood of Granada, people have lived in caves, but for a much longer time, building elaborate structures onto and into cities that came before. In Cappadocia we were befriended one day by a local man, who showed us some of the nooks and crannies that visitors generally did not find, and we had a picnic of meats and cheeses and yes, dried apricots with his extended family, and were invited in to his home to meet the elders who were not up to a picnic, and the whole thing was not a scam and he refused to allow us to repay his gifts of time and knowledge and hospitality with anything but words of gratitude, refused it over and over and over again.

I wonder if that sort of serendipitous exchange is possible now. I think it probably is not. The world has grown too crowded, and too suspicious.

It is not just the crowds, though. It is also the globalization, which brings homogenization. We travel to see outside of our own perspective, but there is McDonald’s, just feet from the mind-blowing bridge and ravine in Ronda. When you are done having your mind blown, consider having a Big Mac. It will taste just like you remember.

If it is always possible to pull back into the familiar, there is little risk of discovery.

And if the computer in your pocket promises access to anything you might want to know, anytime you want it, you will surely lose curiosity. There will be a flattening of cultural affect.

Yes, you will surely look some things up. And yes, you will surely take some photographs. I certainly do both, and I will continue to do so.

But there is such value in not knowing, in sitting in the not knowing for a while, and allowing yourself to wonder—What if? Why? How did these people accomplish what they did? How is what I am seeing even possible?

And there is also value in not documenting—or at least, not documenting until you have had the experience that you are supposedly documenting. People who live wholly behind their cameras may have good photographs, but they are not laying down memories of their own lives.1

When we think we can know anything immediately, as easily there as here, then as now, we lose the very particularness of this time and place. But it is precisely the particularness of this time and place that allows us to feel alive.

The abyss in Ronda is so startling, it is difficult to conceive of. Unless you are right there, on top of it, it can seem imaginary. At dusk, a startling cry emanates from somewhere in it, haunting and sharp.

“It’s a peacock,” says Bret. And he is right. Pavo real, in Spanish. Royal turkey. A royal turkey, right here in Ronda. We do not learn why there is a peacock here, nor why he is so forlorn that he shrieks into the darkness each night.

In a bakery several blocks away, on a morning that is neither haunting nor dark, a woman takes particular care in wrapping up little cakes, arranging them just so on brown waxed paper, tying them neatly with colored twine such that, when carried, they are balanced just right. A few blocks away, another woman sweeps outside her shop, with a broom made of branches, a broom that appears to be both functional, and pleasurable to use. After this work, her establishment is notably more inviting.

The small pleasures of a natural whisk broom or a well wrapped package of pastries would not seem to compare to the glories of mosques and cathedrals, palaces and parks. All of the places that we went to that can be named and require tickets to enter were in fact as glorious as they seem like they might be—the Alhambra in Granada and the Alcázar in Seville, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona (the fever dream of Gaudí which is still being built) and, especially, the Mezquita in Córdoba. But that should not detract from the value of a good broom, a well prepared package.

The whole of southern Spain, at least of Andalusia, is a temporal mosaic of sky god religions. Islam and Christianity in particular have been vying for dominance for many hundreds of years, each one ascendent in its time, the others sometimes being tolerated, sometimes not.

In the year 950, Córdoba was a thriving city of 100,000 people, its streets lit at night with oil lamps, water piped in from outside of the city, its neighborhoods dotted with myriad mosques, palaces, and public baths. The city was under Muslim rule, but Christians and Jews lived there too, and people spoke not just Arabic, but Hebrew and Latin as well. At the university, men studied medicine and math, literature and the law. The Mezquita of Córdoba was already built then, a mosque of endless columns and arches in red and white stripes that is jaw-dropping today—what impression must it have made on people over one thousand years ago?

But the golden age of Córdoba, ruled over by the Arabic Umayyads, would not last forever. Fighting among rival groups of Muslims led to its decline, and the city fell to Christians in the year 1236. And the Christians, rather than building a separate cathedral and letting the mosque be, or tearing down the mosque and building a cathedral in its place, decided to build their house of worship inside of and up out of the mosque, leaving most of the mosque intact. That is what exists today. The Mezquita is a mosque – cathedral. Or perhaps it is a cathedral – mosque. It is called both things. For nobody seems to know which it is more of now—mosque, or cathedral.

All of those places—the Alhambra and the Alcázar, the cathedrals and mosques—were magical and mystical, historical and necessary. But we saw them coming. They have already been well described. It is the things we cannot predict, those things that we do not see coming and which have not already been analyzed endlessly, that are the true experiential gems.

In addition to its historic Mezquita, Córdoba has a Roman bridge that spans the Guadalquivir river. Just downstream of the bridge is a giant, ancient wooden water wheel, in and around which lives a colony of feral cats. Many of them appear to be Siamese. The water wheel is mounted on high stone walls, on which pigeons roost, clinging to shallow impressions on the vertical surfaces. Cats sit above the birds, looking down, considering.

In Grazalema, a white hill town within the vast olive, cork, and cave filled Sierra del Grazalema Natural Park, we were stopped by a man named Juan. He was celebrating his 75^th birthday when he saw Bret taking a photograph in a grocery store and guessed, for reasons that he never did explain, that we must be Scottish. Upon learning that we were American, he jokingly made the sign of the devil at us, before inviting us to join him for some tapas and a drink.

And in both Córdoba and Seville the trees were full of oranges, beautifully ripe oranges. But they were ripe bitter oranges, not good for grazing right off the tree (yes, we tried)— better that they be made into bitter orange marmalade, then eaten with thin slices of Manchego. One night in Seville we happened upon orange thieves stealing all of the oranges, pulling them off trees and filling bucket after bucket, stashing the fruit filled buckets in the backs of vans. The orange thieves, it turns out, were not thieves at all, but employed by the city, municipal workers paid to harvest the oranges and—I hope—turn them over to people who would in fact make bitter orange marmalade out of them, which in turn would be sold, the profits turned back into public works projects. Or at least that is my dream.

The only whisper of violence or threat of any kind that we saw, in nearly three weeks of mostly urban exploration, was in Granada, a physical confrontation between two men. They were Glovo delivery guys—Glovo being the local equivalent of DoorDash—and also North African Muslim men by the looks of them, being held apart by other North African Muslim men, until those holding back the combatants could do so no longer, and the alley in which the altercation started, where we happened to be walking at the time, no longer contained the anger. The two men spilled out on to the busy street, on to each other, a punch thrown, a phone hurled onto the pavement, and then they were separated again, pulled back by their respective people, tugging at them. On the street, where we had hustled to make sure that we were not collateral damage, all activity stopped, watching. Police soon arrived. Half an hour later, the police were still there.

Other than that, we literally never felt at risk in Spain, not even a hint, and it was…odd. Police were around, but hardly ubiquitous, and people were raucous at times, in places, but nearly always it just felt like there were a whole lot of people living their own individual lives, often in close quarters with others, and everyone was pretty much getting along. Doing the civilization thing.

Doing the civilization thing. It’s what we all need to be doing. It has become rather rare in American cities. We might take a few hints from older cultures than ours, people who have lived among difference and disagreement for far longer than we have, and have learned to make it work. We might give “doing the civilization thing” a solid try.

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The Pacific Palisades of my youth had all of those iconic LA things, and more. It was a sweet little town within the big city of Los Angeles, an enclave of neighborhood eateries and stores, tucked between Malibu and Santa Monica, nestled up against the Santa Monica mountains.

I grew up in the Alphabet Streets, a neighborhood formed in 1921 by Methodist ministers who named the streets after Methodist bishops—Albright, Bashford, Cary, and so on.

From my home in the 1100 block of Embury, I would walk half a block, turn right, go another short block, left, and in a few steps more I would be on Swarthmore, in the village. There was a gift store that sold plants, a clothing store, and a Baskin-Robbins. Across the street was Mort’s Deli, rich with the smells of pastrami and latkes. Mort’s was beloved, and when it disappeared nearly twenty years ago, even those of us who hadn’t been back in years mourned its demise.

On Sunset, another block or two away, was the First Old-Fashioned Food Company, or something like that, a narrow, dark restaurant with juicy burgers, thick fries with the potato skins still on, and sawdust on the floor. I guess the sawdust is what made it old-fashioned. Or maybe it was the potato skins on the fries. Down Sunset a few blocks and across the street there was a popular hot dog place, which I remember as being in a little white clapboard building. Inside the small room where you ate there was a model train going around and around and around, high on the wall. I think the dogs were good, but the train was, at least for me and my brother, the real attraction. The Hot Dog Show, it was called. This was in the days when matchbooks were a popular way of spreading the word about a place:

If burgers and hot dogs weren’t to your taste, there was always Barreras. The storefront opened on to a tidy brick patio, and they had the most delicious thin crust pizza.

For a time we had an old movie theater, too. The Bay Theater. That’s where my family went to see the first Star Wars movie. And then it closed and Bay Pharmacy and Norris Hardware took over that space.

Or so I remember.

From kindergarten to third grade I walked the several blocks to my elementary school, crossing Sunset and ending up on Via de la Paz. It had been remodeled since I attended, and revisioned into a Charter school, but in the Summer of 2024 I went back, walking through the old neighborhoods, and taking pictures.

This is now all gone.

Also on Via de la Paz was the hobby shop that would later become a Radio Shack. I think. But when it was still independent it provided hours of intrigue. I would look through the tiny motors, propellors, and parachutes, and imagine what I could make with them. I spent my money on wire, electrical sockets and plugs, and balsa wood, which all came together, along with beautiful papers, into boxes and lamps that I built. I still have two of the lamps, and many of the boxes, their bones built from the goods in a hobby shop long gone, in a neighborhood now burnt to the ground.

The father of one of my friends flipped houses for a living. Maybe they didn’t call it that then; maybe it wasn’t exactly flipping. I only know because every two years or so, her family would move, the latest project done and sold, on to a new property. I don’t really know what the rest of my friends’ parents did. They were professionals. Up-and-coming. There was already considerable wealth in the Palisades when I grew up there, but it wasn’t uniformly wealthy. Lots of people, like my parents, had come from places far to the East, the California dream beckoning. Like so much in Los Angeles—and in California more broadly—this was a place to aspire.

From one window in my parents’ bedroom, if I climbed up on to the back of a loveseat, I could just barely see the ocean. It formed a different kind of thin blue line, a trick of perception, as if the vast Pacific Ocean were just a border between land and sky.

Sometimes, in elementary school, I walked all the way down Temescal to the ocean itself. When I was in middle school, my mother and I got up early every morning for a few months and ran on a path on the beach, training for a 10k. We stopped after a homeless man was found dead there. A few years later a friend and I wandered cluelessly onto the nude beach, marveling for a few moments, then becoming embarrassed, then concerned, before realizing that it was not just a nude beach, but a gay beach as well, and we were quite safe from all the men whom we were now among.

Will Rogers State Historic Park was too far to walk to, or rather, there were no sidewalks and access was via a part of Sunset where the road was curvy and the cars were fast. But I spent a lot of time there as a child. It was a giant park with endless trails and stables too, and in stark contrast to the rough and tumble nature of the rest of the park, there was a polo field there, the only one I ever saw.

Will Rogers has burned down as well.

When we turned on the tv or went to movies, we Angelenos would tend to see familiar places, even if we didn’t know it. Korea looks like southern California, is one of the less accurate lessons I took from watching hours of M*A*S*H, the deeply funny and dark and raw show about an American Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War. Wonder Woman, The Six Million Dollar Man, Three’s Company…all of those strange shows from the 70s and 80s were utterly in and of LA, even when they were pretending that they weren’t.

Every fall, scorching Santa Ana winds would come in from the east, pummeling our already parched city. If the winds coincided with a spark in the hills, brush fires erupted, sweeping across chaparral and houses with similar abandon. I remember one fire, coming over the mountains towards our house, now four, maybe five blocks away. I stood on the roof with my father, a little girl, with all the neighborhood fathers on their roofs, hoses in hand, wetting down the tinder of our lives. The fire, which we could not yet see, kissed our faces with raw heat. Finally my father ordered me down, back to the room where my mother had put my little brother and our two cats. We were ready to escape to a car packed with family photos, as soon as my father yelled go.

I fell asleep curled on a pile of blankets. The next morning I woke confused, sweating, my sinuses filled with ash. The winds had turned, and the danger was past. My parents were haunted by our closest call yet, while the children and animals clamored for breakfast.

- From Antipode, my first book, published in 2002

Now. The Alphabet Streets are gone, as is the elementary school, and the library. The car wash and both supermarkets burned down. I don’t know if they managed to save the fire station, but I know that they were trying. The fire jumped PCH and destroyed houses and restaurants right down to the sea. So many cherished, historic institutions gone. LA will never be the same.

What happens when tens of thousands of people are suddenly homeless in a city where real estate is already limited and in high demand? This catastrophe will inherently manifest differently from a hurricane in Appalachia, or an earthquake in Ecuador. Many of the people displaced by the LA fires have considerable wealth, but money can’t buy things today which do not yet exist. Money may be able to hasten their existence, but what about right now? What will the ripples be along the whole West coast, the entire country even, as Angelenos decide whether to stay or to go?

I remember the Fourth of July parade through the Palisades every year, and hanging out outside my Dad’s friend’s Terry’s house on Hartzell, was it, or maybe he lived on Sunset itself. Either way it was close enough to the parade route, and the kids played tag while the adults drank beer in those 1970’s folding lawn chairs made of tubular aluminum and thick woven straps.

After the parade each year we’d go up to the Highlands where my parents’ other friends, the Bryans, had an amazing house with a pool and a balcony high above it, which I was allowed to jump off of into the water below. I am not sure that the other parents approved.

The Highlands were accessible by only one road, Palisades Drive1, which branched off Sunset and snaked upwards into the hills. It was that road on which people abandoned their cars as the fires roared in last week, unable, presumably, to get onto Sunset, their only escape, as it was already full of other people fleeing. Later, fire trucks couldn’t get through until bulldozers were brought in to clear the cars away.

I was gone long before Mort’s Deli disappeared. That whole block, where I had worked my first retail job, scooping ice cream across the street from Mort’s, got reimagined with very high-end shops and restaurants in 2018. Before it had just been the village; now it was Palisades Village. The new shopping center was saved by privately hired firefighters. It now stands alone, an island among rubble.

In June of last year I was back in the Palisades for the first time in many years. I introduced my children, now young men of 18 and 20, to the places of my own childhood. I took them through Palisades Park, and just seven months before fires would destroy it all, I wrote this:

The sprawling park where I played tennis, but also engaged in endless, unsupervised games in what was then wilder territory, is still there. It is tamer now. This is not just because it seems smaller to my adult eyes, but also because it has been developed. In one stretch of eucalyptus forest that I remember playing hide and seek in as a child, a place that got dark and brooding even in the white southern California sun, there are now ball fields and manicured paths. But there are still places to play.

I am one of very few people here who do not seem to have a reason to be here. Men and women play tennis, the pro shop is buzzing, and a tennis camp for young children is just getting started. There are middle schoolers gathered for softball. The playground is busy with little ones and their caretakers—mostly nannies, by the look of it. There is bocce too now, and that is where the elders are convening.

A few rangy lawns still exist in this park. One remains a little wild, much as I remember it, steeply sloped, with picnic tables at the bottom, the smell of barbacoa detectable on the slightest of ocean breezes. The other remaining lawn is flat, uninteresting. Once, while in elementary school—the school was just a few blocks away—our class was walking by that flat, uninteresting lawn, and at the far edge, in the shadows, under some bushes, I detected movement. A couple having sex. Only a few of us noticed, and we all kept walking, looking, not looking, looking again. Somehow, this story assures me that those were simpler times. There is no possibility that people could get away with having sex in the middle of the day there now. But in the rest of LA, things are more decrepit, more gritty, more dangerous. It all feels more fraught. I would rather a child see a flash of sexual pleasure between consenting adults than navigate the under-maintained streets among the drug-addled and mentally-confused.

Palisades Park is gone now, too.

These times are not simple, but many of the forces we reckon with now are what people have reckoned with for eons. Fire and flood, hurricane and tsunami. Let us take care of our green Earth, believing not that we can engineer our way out from under all of her forces. Let us replace our hubris with respect, and discard quick fixes in favor of long time horizon thinking.

This is, and will always be, the only Earth that we have.

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I love Christmas, and always have, even though it was never imbued with religious meaning in our home. When I was growing up in Los Angeles in the 1970’s, Christmas meant a twinkling Christmas tree, and holiday decorations throughout the house—the Hawaiian bells from my parents’ honeymoon, a tall wooden nutcracker, delicate golden ornaments from the Danbury Mint, a new one every year. There were always homemade cookies, and homemade eggnog, too. Once, my father took me to midnight mass at the local Catholic church. Occasionally, we sang carols with our neighbors, to our other neighbors. Sometimes my mother would host a dinner party. At other times, grandparents would visit, or a dear family friend. Always, my mother made her exquisite chicken liver pâté. And whatever tensions may have been palpable in our family at the time, we tried to put them aside around Christmas.

In our home now, we have two young men who have returned from semesters in Europe, a warm fire in the wood-burning stove, and a hookah smoking caterpillar on the top of our tree. I don’t remember when the hookah smoking caterpillar became our tree-topper, but he has been so for some years.

This week, I am sharing three recipes for sweet things, things that are not at all good for a person, but which one might still enjoy on occasion. I am no purist. A medium rare rib eye topped with butter and generous sprinkles of large flake sea salt is delicious and nutritious; a ginger cookie is merely delicious. There is, I posit, room for both in a human diet.

Also here: a recipe for fudge first published in The Los Angeles Times, made every year by my mother when I was growing up.

Finally: hazelnut butter and cacao nib meringues. You are welcome.

Perhaps soon I will write about dry fasting. After this season of feasting, it may well be time.

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Brown Sugar Ginger Crisps

These cookies look unimpressive, but I promise you, if you like ginger, and butter, and crispy goodness that melts in your mouth, these cookies are a revelation. They were originally published in Gourmet Magazine, I believe, in November 1989.

Cooking time will vary significantly depending on the thickness and material of your baking sheets, and how accurate your oven is. These cookies aren’t all that fussy though; they just don’t want to be burned.

Ingredients

• 1.5 cups (= 7.5 oz) flour (I use gluten-free flour)

• ¾ tsp baking powder

• ½ tsp salt

• 2 sticks (1 cup) butter, softened

• 1 cup packed (= 6.5 oz) brown sugar

• 1 large egg yolk

• 1 tsp vanilla

• ½ cup (= 3 oz) finely chopped crystallized ginger

• ¼ tsp ground ginger

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350° F.

2. Whisk together flour, baking powder and salt.

3. Beat butter and brown sugar with electric mixer at moderate speed until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes.

4. Beat in yolk, vanilla, and gingers.

5. Add flour mixture and mix at low speed until just combined.

6. Drop heaping teaspoons of dough about 3” apart onto ungreased baking sheets. Bake in batches in middle of oven until golden, 13 – 15 minutes.

7. Cool cookies on sheets on racks ~5 minutes, then transfer with metal spatula to racks to cool completely.

Mexican Chocolate Fudge

Back in 19 sixty-something, or maybe it was 19 seventy-something, when this recipe was first published in the Los Angeles Times, apparently all it took to make something “Mexican” was the addition of cinnamon.

This fudge is stupendous. You will need an electric skillet—the “electric” part means that you don’t have to monitor the temperature of the candy as it cooks. This means that you end up with perfect fudge every single time. The only reason that I own an electric skillet is to make this fudge. It’s that good.

You will also need both evaporated milk, and mini marshmallows. The only reason that I own either product is, again, to make this fudge.

Ingredients

• 2 cups sugar

• 3 Tbsp butter

• 1 tsp cinnamon

• 1 cup evaporated milk (not sweetened condensed milk)

• 1 ½ cups chocolate chips

• ½ cup miniature marshmallows (I use these)

• 1+ tsp vanilla

• Chopped pecans, if you desire (I do not)

Directions

1. Combine sugar, butter, cinnamon, and evaporated milk in large electric skillet.

2. Set thermostat to 280° F.

3. Bring mixture to a boil; then cook for five minutes (set a timer), stirring constantly.

4. Turn off skillet, and add chocolate chips, marshmallows, vanilla, and nuts (if you must). Stir vigorously until chocolate and marshmallows are melted and smoothly blended.

5. Pour and scrape into 8” square pan. Cool before cutting.

Hazelnut Butter and Cacao Nib Meringues

I do not remember the original source on this recipe. If I had to guess, I’d say it came from Gourmet, before the untimely demise of that lovely magazine, or Bon Appetit. But I really don’t know. Regardless, these are unusual and delightful meringues.

Ingredients

• 1 cup raw, skin-on hazelnuts

• ¼ tsp salt

• 4 – 5 large egg whites

• pinch of cream of tartar

• scant ½ cup (3 oz) granulated sugar

• scant ¾ cup (3 oz) powdered sugar

• a bunch of cacao nibs (or coarsely chopped coffee beans)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350° F. Toast hazelnuts on rimmed baking sheet, tossing once, until golden brown, 10 – 12 minutes.

2. Reduce oven temperature to 200° F.

3. Line baking sheets with parchment paper.

4. Bundle nuts in clean kitchen towel and rub vigorously to remove skins. Let cool.

5. Blend hazelnuts and salt in a food processor until a smooth, creamy nut butter forms. It will be very fluid—keep processing if it is still stiff.

6. Using KitchenAid, beat egg whites and cream of tartar until frothy, about one minute.

7. With motor running, gradually add granulated sugar and beat on high until medium peaks form, about six minutes.

8. Gradually add powdered sugar and continue to beat on high until stiff, glossy peaks form, about five minutes more.

9. Gently fold half of hazelnut butter into meringue, leaving plenty of streaks. Add remaining hazelnut butter and fold once just to barely blend. Mixture should be marbled with thick ribbons of nut butter.

10. Spoon heaping spoonfuls of meringue onto baking sheets. Make them tall, as they will flatten slightly in cooking. Sprinkle abundantly with cacao nibs.

11. Bake until dry, 2 – 2 ½ hours.

12. Store airtight at room temperature.

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The author begins by referencing the episode of DarkHorse that we streamed two days after the election, in which I said, among other things, that I had a great sense of relief, and could not stop smiling.

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Heather:

I completely agreed with your opening statement on DarkHorse last week, and felt exactly the same. But here in the bluer than blue part of Washington, hugging Puget Sound, I realize I am still in the minority. No matter—at least, for the first time in four years, I feel the relief of being in sync with the majority of people in the rest of the country. I hope for a return to sanity.

But….I was pretty sure one of my closest friends, who has not made a peep since before the election, was unhappy. Even though she has been disgusted with the Dems for years, I could sense her unhappiness from many miles away, on Whidbey Island. 

We were supposed to meet this Friday to celebrate her birthday, and I was guessing it was probably not going to happen, though I was game. But I was still going to be mum about the whole thing, because I was very sure she would not want to hear my opinion. And maybe is even incapable of hearing it.

When I heard whoever it was—Julia Roberts? I can’t remember—tell women to go along with their Trump-voting husbands, and then secretly vote for Kamala anyway, I thought, what kind of marriage is that? And what kind of terrible advice is that to give?!

But I also understood it, because that’s what I've been doing with my dear friend, who I love deeply, but who I know has no real respect for my differing opinion. I tried my best to keep our relationship going during Covid, but she dumped me and I was heartbroken. A year later she contacted me, said she realized I had been right, and could I ever forgive her? Of course I did, but I asked her to read Kennedy’s Fauci book first, which to her credit she did, and agreed with much of. She was Covid vaccine-injured and that caused her to question everything.

So we repaired our relationship and carried on. Until today, when she texted me, completely unasked, about what she called her deep grief and fear. After never bothering to get one previously (since she has never been out of the country), she has gotten a passport application and plans to mail it in a few days. She is mourning the country, she said, and no longer wants to live here; neither does anyone in her family. Where can they go, they’re asking. Maybe to a friend in Mexico. She’s grieving, she said. This country is no longer safe for her family she said, again. “So welcome to the brave new world of oligarchical anarchy,” she said. I have no idea what the fuck that is.

As usual, my friend feels free to share her anguish with me, because, like so many of our friends and family members, she cannot conceive that I might feel the exact opposite. And that’s a large part of how we got here: Hubris.

We’re so right, many of them have been saying for years now, and we have God on our side. How could any sane person see anything differently than how we see it? And if do you think differently, well, you're just plain wrong, and you’re probably an “ist,” - a racist, a sexist, a misogynist, and especially, our favorite word, a fascist. 

I know my friend is having an imaginary existential crisis, but as a counselor, I also know it’s all too real to her. There is nothing I can say, I suspect, that will convince her otherwise. 

I started to write back, saying I was sorry she felt that way, and sympathizing with her angst, because I felt the same way after Bush won the second time. I wanted to leave the country. Unlike many Americans, I could, because I have multiple citizenships. But I didn’t, because after I got over my anger and shock and disgust, I also understood that’s the nature of democracy; you win some and you lose some. It’s ok. Life will continue. 

But as my husband and I drove to Lowe’s for a 4x4 this afternoon, I suddenly had a big AHA! moment:

This is the same playbook that was used to frighten the bejesus out of people during Covid.

I realized that there doesn’t need to be another pandemic to keep people scared and controlled; any idea or boogeyman will do. In this case it’s Donald Trump. He’s coming for you and your children. He is evil incarnate. He will destroy the world. It’s hardly a surprise that some people are reacting irrationally, and with complete, utter hysteria.

Rather than explain to my friend that I am relieved that Trump won because I think some of the fabulous people he's surrounded himself with will do a fantastic job, if allowed, especially the person I wanted to vote for, RFK Jr.; or that Rogan’s interview humanized Trump for me; or that Trump’s stunts at McDonald’s and in the garbage truck were funny and brilliant, I have protected her from my opinions because I know she can’t take them.

I honestly want to say that the majority of us have spoken, and you just need to deal with it and move on, or even better, give the new administration a chance.

Or how about, why is it you can dish it out but you can’t take it?

Or, I have my own existential crisis, because I’m sure if I tell you how I really feel and think, our friendship will be broken again and you will divorce me for a second time, but frankly, I think falling out over politics is immensely stupid and we agree on so many more things than we do not, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

But I think for now the best thing I could say to my friend is what I’ve just written about the playbook, above, followed by: Don't be played again. But I have no confidence that it will be well received, and every sense that it will not.

At the end of her text my friend said she was too bruised to see anyone (self-lockdown), so our celebration of her birthday is postponed, indefinitely. Maybe forever. She eventually saw through the madness of Covid, but here we are and she’s being fooled again. Why? I have no idea. I wonder if this, too, is what you’re seeing?

Let us hope that we can have honest and kind conversations with people who are still so convinced we are wrong, and the world is ending for them.

All the best from the Puget Sound

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We are connected in ways that are sometimes too tenuous and subtle to recognize, our friendships and our hurts and our sparks of insight, but also by big, bold entities that literally revolve around one another. Last Friday, I had the following experience:

I was driving away from the sunrise. This was no technicolor sunrise, but rather a cloud drama, all shifting and blowing past one another to reveal panes of pale blue, stormy depths, even god rays. Over the horizon the light rose, its source never quite visible. Just that thrumming glow.

Ascending the hill, a white-capped Salish Sea to my left, there was now a glow ahead and above me, pushing through the clouds. But the sun was still behind me. Nearly directly behind.

The road climbed and turned and I was face to face with the moon. Giant, yellow, and full.

It actually brought tears to my eyes. I didn’t expect it.

And then the moon disappeared again behind the hill as I drove on. There was nowhere to stop. Appeared again—this time with a wisp of cloud across just a sliver of it—and once again disappeared.

The moon, the source of light in front of me, was itself reflecting the sun, the source of light behind me.

And then that evening, out on the water with my dear husband, we saw the inverse. The sun was setting over water that it turned to liquid gold. Loons and gulls and murrelets and cormorants were silhouetted by it. The tide was coming in fast, but the sun was taking its time.

We turned to see the same hill on which I had been driving that morning, and watched the moon appear. Giant, yellow, and full.

We moved with the tide and the moon disappeared, then reappeared again.

The sun setting as the full moon rose.

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Three presidential elections in a row, and three rounds of excitement and relief.

We are in a hall of mirrors. We can be sitting right next to someone who has been shown entirely differently “facts” about what is true—facts which demonstrate how decrepit Joe Biden is, how sexist Donald Trump is, how incompetent Kamala Harris is.

I don’t believe the middle of those three statements, and I do believe the others. Many people believe the opposite of what I do. None of us are inherently fools or fascists for believing what we do.

Science is about figuring out what is true. We scientists don’t always get there, and we won’t necessarily know when we do. We make mistakes—lots of them—and it is incumbent upon us to correct those mistakes when we discover them. Science is a messy, non-linear process, and scientists are only human. We all have capacity to discern fact from fiction, though, to think scientifically. One easy step to take is to distrust any who tell you that they are the voice of science. Science is not something to be followed, or to be believed in. Science is something that you do.

One thing is certain: (almost) nothing is certain.

Fact-checkers have become popular in recent years as arbiters of truth, as have their mouthpieces, the mainstream media. They are not. They get a lot of things very, very wrong. The problem is not so much that they get things wrong, though, but the certainty and authority with which they do it. We were assured that SARS-CoV2 didn’t come from a lab. (Oh, but it did.) The mRNA Covid shots are safe and effective. (No, they’re not.) Donald Trump said that there were some very fine people among the white supremacists in Charlottesville. (He did not.)

Our sense-making apparatus is upside down and inside out, and even most of the scientists don’t seem to know what is going on. Just as many big names at Kamala Harris events were paid to be there1, so too are many scientists paid to come to conclusions that satisfy their funders. These don’t sound like democratic or scientific processes to me. Everywhere you look, people are being paid to endorse people or products or ideas, while claiming that they arrived at their conclusions entirely on their own. This is not only dishonest; it is tearing the fabric of society.

Meanwhile, the warmongering neocons whom Democrats like me used to disdain, are being welcomed in to the Democratic Party.

That sentence may be difficult to parse. To be clear: I still disdain the neocons. And I am no longer a Democrat.

Any party that embraces the neocons is not the party for me. Establishment politicians are running to the Democratic party, because that is their only remaining safe harbor. That should tell us all something about what is happening over in Republican land. It’s chaos. Many of us hope and believe that the chaos will result in far better things in the future. Chaos is inherently unpredictable, though. So even though more than half of us who voted, voted to undo many of the things that have been done by the new Democrats, and this can be seen as a vote for chaos, we are not certain. There is no certainty here. We are optimistic. And it would make sense for everyone, no matter how you voted, to be optimistic, too.

Many of us came together for Unity on the National Mall in September, for the Rescue the Republic Rally2. MAHA was there in the greatest numbers—Make America Healthy Again—but all sorts were represented—left, right, and center, if those terms even mean anything anymore. We are Americans. We care about America. And we want to see our people, and our country, thrive.

Allow me to tell you a bit about some of the people I met in the two weeks leading up to the election3. Traveling from my home in the San Juan Islands, off the coast of Washington state, I was first in Key West, then in Miami, then Pittsburgh, then Livingston, Montana. Two conferences, a party, and curiosity about the world explain the trip.

Specifically, I want to say a bit about some of the amazing women whom I met.

There were young women, and middle aged women, and old. Maidens, mothers, and matriarchs, if you will. Young mothers and middle-aged mothers, women who will become mothers but have not done so yet, and women who know that they never will. Women who became mothers during their peak fertility, when they were young, and women who waited until the doctors called them elderly for having their first baby after 35. Women who are childless by choice. Women who are fiercely pro-choice, and a few who are not. Some, but not many, have had abortions in the past.

Women in partnerships with men, relationships that are healthy and strong. Women in partnerships who are struggling, wondering what comes next, whether the relationship will last. Women in intimate relationships with other women. Women who are single, and like it that way.

Women who have suffered addiction, or abuse, or rape; women who have not, in the past, been allowed to make their own choices, but fought hard for their freedom. Women who put themselves through years of schooling to attain advanced degrees; other women who eschewed the degrees in favor of other ways of making meaning in the world.

I spoke with a former mayor, a fashion designer, a comedian. A future theologian, a former sportscaster, and self-described hippies. Writers and analysts, doctors and lawyers, professors and entrepreneurs and scientists.

All of these women, to a person, are smart and strong and capable. And everyone whom I have mentioned here voted for Trump4.

These are not self-hating women. They are not immolating themselves for a cause, nor voting the way that some man wants them to vote. These are independent, curious, adventurous women with talent and passion and drive, who see in Trump hope for the future5.

Many Americans cannot imagine how independent, curious, and adventurous women could vote for Trump. They are looking at a wholly different set of “facts.”

If you are one such person—if you are terrified or angry, outraged or anxious—I would invite you to follow the advice laid out here:

Maybe I am wrong to have bet on Trump. I doubt it. But whatever happens next, we should all be united in having optimism for the future. We are the ones who will realize our dreams.

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Famously, we have lost our manufacturing base. The problems started long ago, though, long before we moved the work overseas, or passed it off to robots. Factory and production work had already become less human as principles of “scientific management” took over in the early 20^th century. Also known as Taylorism, after the man who invented it, this new way prioritized efficiency of production, reducing human beings to single tasks, tasks that would be done over and over and over again. Many of those tasks can in fact now be done by machines, but what of the original loss? Human workers used to see a process through from start to finish—spotting errors, making improvements, and having pride in workmanship. No more.

The problem, as advocates of Taylorism would have it, is that humans introduce human error. But reducing human error to zero should not be our goal. Perhaps, instead, we should work to enhance human productivity and engagement and flourishing.

Human flourishing. It’s a fashionable term. In a way, the term just kicks the can down the road, as we need to decide what it means to flourish. But we can probably all agree on what flourishing does not look like. Flourishing does not look like people with no skills and no passions, staring endlessly into pocket computers.

“Scientific management,” and other abominations on the human spirit that are done in the name but never the true spirit of science, care not for human flourishing. Taylor wrote in his original monograph on the subject in 1911:

“In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.”

And so it has come to pass.

As our work becomes ever more virtual and less physical, it inherently becomes less synchronized as well. Our world in pixels is asynchronous, all of us in our own pods, on our own individual timelines. Ah, what freedom! But we can all be more easily gamed when our worlds are asynchronous. There are no checks left on what we saw, or what happened, because we inherently saw it alone, without witness. (The same logic holds for elections—remote, asynchronous elections are more easily gamed.)

Both men and women have historically made and done things, many many things. But our manufacturing base moved offshore, our population became suburban, and our domestic work was largely replaced with conveniences that just need to have their buttons pushed. We are making and doing less and less.

This—as much if not more than what we have replaced our real physical work with, the conveyor belt of screens—is contributing to our deep unhappiness. We don’t do enough things in the physical universe.

While inadvertently attending an annual street festival in Key West a week and a half ago, I was struck anew by the loss of makers and doers1.

Fantasy Fest’s final blowout event was a big parade on Saturday night. I assumed there would be live music. I love live music dopplering towards me on a parade route, and then away. If someone is throwing hoops or batons or doing acrobatics in the vicinity, all the better. All of that human creativity and playfulness and skill on full display, inviting all to watch and be entertained, be impressed, be in awe.

Alas, there was no live music. All of the music during this parade came in the form of polished recordings by famous people, played for the crowd by a D.J. on a float. Nobody present was making music. Nobody.

Okay, perhaps some creative floats, then.

Yeah, not that either. The official website promised a “splendid moving party with festive floats,” but it did not deliver.

There was, if I’m being blunt, nearly no skill on display at all. The DJs nominally have skill, I suppose, although it’s entirely mediated by technology. There was no dancing, no acrobatics, nothing.

Growing up in LA in the 1970s and ‘80s, I dubbed the ethos there one of “gaze culture.” Everyone was observed and assessed at all times, and most people hoped to be observed and assessed in turn. That culture of spectacle, of voyeurism, of exhibitionism, has spread everywhere, as so much of what happens in Hollywood seems to do.

Back in Key West: it’s called Fantasy Fest—so what’s the fantasy? I posit that the fantasy on display in the parade was this: witness my party. My party is: I have on sparkly or feathery clothes, I am drunk, and I am swaying to (recorded) music.

Even the logistics of the party were on display—generous pouring of drinks for the hard-working (!) floaters, whose jobs seemed to consist entirely of throwing beads at the people on the street.

A crate of bottled water, half open, sitting askew on the deck of a float that should have been all fantasy.

A stack of five empty pizza boxes sitting prominently on the edge of another float, just below eye level. These banal details communicated this:

You are looking into our party. Our fantasy is to have you watch us party.

If the party had been anything unique or creative or surprising, I might have been willing to overlook these failures, the glitches in a matrix they were trying to create, the unfortunate view behind the scenes.

But no. I don’t think that they were trying to create a matrix, a fantasy world. The label was fantasy, but I saw nothing fantastical, not really. There was nothing created here. The goal was simply to be looked at.

And so I arrive at my primary critique: Americans don’t aspire to create anymore. To produce, to discover, to invent, to explore new spaces, literal or metaphorical. To move people with their art, their craft, their words, their insights. We walked into the last two days of an annual party that lasts well over a week, a festival dedicated to fantasy, in which I saw nothing that inspired me. Nothing that made me think, or laugh. Nothing that put me in awe of what humans are capable of. Nothing.

I am bereft. This will be the end of us.

Where has our aspiration gone?

Facebook culture has famously recommended that its developers “move fast and break things.”

Some things are already so broken that they may need to be almost entirely reimagined before functional systems can be built in their place (I’m looking at you, academia). But breaking things as a rule brings chaos. Breaking things is the ethos of antifa—they have demonstrated excellence in destruction, while utterly failing at creation.

What we need is not to break, but to make, and also to do. Make music and dance. Build functional, beautiful things—tables and lamps and bowls2. Grill meat and make bread and savor and share it. Lay tile and pipe and wire. Walk and think and walk and think and walk and write, or paint, or drum or however it is that that you choose to physically express the ineffable in your head.

If you live in a place and a way where it is possible, ferment and preserve the fruits of the land, chop and stack wood and become ready for winter, make things that will keep you warm, literally and figuratively.

As maligned as Portland, Oregon is in much of the popular understanding—and I have written and spoken3 frequently about its descent into chaos, having lived there from 2018 through 2022—the fact remains that underneath all the destruction lies a beating heart of people who make beautiful, deep or delicious things, and have pride in their work. They are artisans of wood and glass and clay, and also of meats and vegetables and yeast. They share their creations with the public, asking only that they be paid for their work, and that their work be appreciated.

It is not so much to ask.

We need more physical engagement with the world, and more synchronous work and play.

The problem in part is one of scale—not all workers who make physical things will be craftsmen. The smaller the scale, the greater the agency of the individuals who are working, but of course the less efficient as well. The unscientific and unhuman principles of “scientific management” will not abide a slide into inefficiency. There is work to be done!

In the final chapter of A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21^st Century, we discuss the need for a fourth kind of frontier for humanity. Of the first three: we have run out of geographic frontiers, at least on this planet; technological frontiers may appear to provide abundance without cost, until we run into limits of the physical universe; and transfer-of-resource frontiers are theft, and therefore dishonorable. We are therefore left looking for a new kind of frontier. We do not describe or predict the specifics of a fourth frontier, arguing that it is only possible to seek the adaptive foothill that might lead do society-wide solutions. But a character trait of individuals who may be successful in finding that foothill, the beginnings of a fourth frontier, is having craftsmanship.

An artisan who takes pride in the quality and durability of their work is enacting some portion of a fourth frontier mentality, one in which the life span of a product is as important as its function. A table or sideboard made by a local craftsperson is not beloved merely because it is more beautiful than what can be assembled from a box bought at Ikea, but also because the person in possession of a lovely and functional piece has a chance of handing it down to their children, or other kin, or friends. So, too, would we like to be able to deliver unto the next generations a lovely and functional world.

Instead of being bereft, let us aspire. We can aspire to be makers again, to bring back to our own shores, and to our own selves, the ability and drive to build and create, to make and to do. We can shepherd in a new era of human flourishing, and of American flourishing as well.

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Today is the day, fellow Americans. Please vote. Here is some of my thinking behind my vote for president this year.

There are many Americans who have followed a similar path.

Last week’s DarkHorse made a case for Trump. But I am still met with dismay and disbelief by some family and friends. Increasingly, what I hear is this:

“I understand that you can’t possibly vote for Kamala. But what are the reasons to vote for Trump?”

Here is one set of answers.

Trump is not owned.

Trump is not the nominee for the Republican Party of old, just as Kamala is not the nominee for the Democratic Party of old. Dick Cheney has endorsed Kamala Harris, and all the neocons are becoming Democrats, saying that Trump has “suffocated the soul of the GOP.” Traditional power is scared, and it is concentrating in the modern Democratic party.

Trump doesn’t answer to the power brokers of either party. He is his own man, and he is WYSIWYG—What You See Is What You Get. This is part of what people don’t like about him—they don’t like his tone or his humor, his meandering or his jibes. I understand. I didn’t like any of that either, although I got over it. You know what he never is? Insincere. He is human, and he is willing to show us his humanness. I far prefer a president who is comfortable enough with himself to reveal that self to the American people, than someone who is always hiding behind prepared words and fictions.

Trump is taking counsel from truth-speaking patriots.

Among these is Bobby Kennedy, Jr, who was my preferred candidate for president. Kennedy left the race in August, and endorsed Trump. More important than that, Trump has embraced Kennedy, and we are told that Kennedy will be empowered in a Trump administration.

Kennedy sees the death grip that Big Pharma, Big Food, and Big Ag have on the American people, and he has the capacity to address those problems. We have become a sick, out of shape, and confused people. We accept meds for every perceived ailment, including the ones caused by the last meds. The ingredients in the prepared foods on our grocery store shelves are a toxic brew—far more toxic than the products allowed on the shelves in other countries. Our food pyramid is inverted, and the recommendations coming out of nearly every agency tasked with watching out for our health are the inverse of what healthy people should do. Do not listen to the FDA, the USDA, or the CDC. Instead, eat animal proteins and fats, and produce that has been grown with as little chemical intervention as possible, savoring every single bit. And then do what is free and feels good. Go outside and face the sun. Walk. Form relationships. Touch people, and also grass and water and soil. Be barefoot under a night sky.

With Kennedy on task, many of the federal agencies, including those which fund science, will be on notice, and will have their houses cleaned. Finally.

The FDA was supposed to oversee the safety of our food and our drugs; instead, they are in bed with big pharma. The CDC was supposed to help us stay healthy and avoid disease; instead, they too are in bed with big pharma, and run by useful idiots. The NIH and NSF are supposed to be overseeing the funding of science; instead they, too, are in bed with big pharma (note a trend?), and also so bolloxed up that they don’t know science when it hits them in the head. They are funding politicized garbage which often doesn’t meet the basic expectations of science. Covid revealed the rot in medical and pharmaceutical research, but the rot is everywhere. Politically popular answers are generated by power brokers behind the scenes, and then research is funded and conducted to arrive at those answers. This “science” is conclusion driven, rather than hypothesis driven, and is therefore not science at all. Actual science that arrives at different answers—atmospheric Carbon is not the only thing responsible for our changing planet; puberty blockers are not safe for children—is disappeared.

It is also true that, in the final year of his first term, as Covid became the thing that we were all focused on, Trump halted funding to the World Health Organization1. At the time, I thought this was yet another randomly batshit move of his. I was wrong. During Covid, the WHO revealed itself as an extra-governmental agency that seeks authority over people which nobody should have, ever. The United States should not be part of the WHO. Trump was right.

We need science back, real science, not feel good solutions that don’t help anyone. The Democrats think they are the party of science, but they are not. Trump, with Kennedy and his other advisors, will steer us in the right direction.

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Trump is better for Americans.

In Trump’s first administration, prices of household goods fell, and jobs were created (until Covid turned everything upside down). People could afford to live. Trump understands the value of small businesses, and worked to support them. Since 2020, though, according to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, the price of food and beverages has gone up 22.6%, the price of housing has gone up 25%, and the price of gasoline is up 55.8%. Many Americans are suffering—finding it ever more difficult to feed and house their families—while the media spins stories assuring us that the economy is strong.

Trump is not ashamed to be working on behalf of the American people. We are Americans, electing an American president. It is not just our right, but our duty, to want a leader of our country who puts our country first. This is neither racist nor elitist.

Trump talked big about building the wall at the southern border, and some of his rhetoric was inflammatory and mean. This was another place where the mainstream media got into my head. I always knew that a secure border was a necessary precondition for a healthy society, but I was foolish to believe that Trump’s talk of a border wall was over the top, anti-legal-immigrant, anti-human even. Once again, I was wrong. Trump failed to build the wall, though, and under Biden-Harris, the immigration problem has become catastrophic.

In April 2024, the House Committee on Homeland Security released their latest “Startling Stats Factsheet” which provides details on the people apprehended at our southern border (reported at homeland.house.gov). In March of 2024, encounters with Chinese nationals at the southern border had increased by 8,500% compared to March of 2021, and the vast majority of these Chinese nationals were single individuals, not families. In Panama’s Darien Gap in January of 2024, Bret and Zack Weinstein (my husband and first born, respectively) observed several immigration camps, full of people heading north to try to get in to the United States. At some of those camps, like Lajas Blancas, Latin American families were common; in stark contrast, the massive San Vicente camp was mostly populated by single Chinese men of military age.

Humanitarian crises do cause families to flee terrible regimes, and while open borders are never the answer, sometimes people make difficult decisions that put them on the wrong side of the law because they truly have no choice. But young men immigrating solo, often with criminal records in their home countries, are living an entirely different story. Families tend to flee war zones. Young men tend to go towards war zones. A flood of illegal immigrants across our southern border of fit young men of fighting age looks a lot like a war—or preparation for a future war—is coming to us.

Trump was aware of the problem, and was roundly mocked for being concerned about it. The problem has gotten far worse since he left office—since Kamala was put in charge of stemming illegal migration across the border, and failed utterly. Now, Trump is even more focused.

Trump is better for women.

How can the “grab ‘em by the pussy” guy, the one who installed Supreme Court Justices who helped take down Roe v Wade, possibly be good for women? The claim will seem laughable to many who still count themselves democrats, but Trump is the better choice for women.

Trump sees the reality that men are men and women are women, and that one cannot become the other. He will not be swayed by social pressure to say otherwise.

This is far more important to the health and safety of all girls and women, and to the health and safety of children, than either his sexual peccadillos or the fact that Roe is now history.

The ideology that believes that humans can change sex; treats children’s and young people’s fantasies as truth; and is willing to put children on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and even butcher them with surgery, is barbaric. There is no other word for it. Men who give themselves female names and pronouns, and put on lipstick and a dress, do not magically become women. Pretending that such men are women puts actual women directly at risk. Men, no matter how they dress or what they call themselves, have no place in women’s bathrooms, in women’s domestic crisis centers, in women’s prisons, or—less critically but somehow more obvious to everyone—in women’s sports.

People with kinks should not be encouraged to take them public. Even if you believe that such people should have the right to publicly display their kinks, however, those rights should never be allowed to infringe on the rights of women and children.

Trump will work to ensure this.

Just as I expect the United States government to care more about my rights and the rights of other citizens than it does about the rights of people who have immigrated here illegally, I also expect the United States government to recognize that the vast majority of children are not and never will be wards of the state. Children do not belong to the government, despite what Biden and other democrats have explicitly claimed. Parents have sovereignty over their children; the state does not.

But the Biden-Harris administration has made several forays into this space, by removing parental rights and inflating the role of the state in overseeing children. Earlier this year, for instance, the current administration expanded the scope of Title IX to provide protected status to the (fictional) concept of “gender identity.” This paves the way for parents to be kept ignorant of their children’s “transition” in ideologically controlled schools. Indeed, Gavin Newsom, governor of California, has already done just this, his actions being directly downstream of the Title IX reforms. Parents need to be able to parent without interference from the state, and Trump recognizes that.

Would I rather that Trump hadn’t been so crass, and that he had more respect for his wives and the other women in his sexual orbit? Of course. But Trump having been a cad is not relevant to his fitness for the office. As for Roe: I have always been and remain pro-choice. I have also heard from constitutional scholars that Roe was bad law, and would fall eventually. The Justices whom Trump appointed to the Supreme Court appear to me to be knowledgeable and honest. What’s done is done.

In contrast, all the children and young adults who are currently being sold a fantasy, and being given irreversible drugs and surgeries in support of that fantasy—they are not done. They can be protected and preserved now. We owe them that.

Trump is also not just better for women, but for members of any group that has historically been disadvantaged. Trump sees the problems with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and its spawn, including “anti-racism” and all the woke nonsense. He sees that these things are actual racism, while simple-mindedly claiming to be the opposite. DEI is destroying education, and poisoning our children’s minds with terrible, dehumanizing ideas about other people. Trump will begin to unhook the activist ideology from our children and from our schools. He will not, unlike the democrats, insist that we judge people on the basis of the color of our skin.

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Finally, Trump is better for America, and for its core values.

Trump will actually support the Constitution.

Again, this will seem absurd on its face to those who believe that he encouraged an insurrection on January 6. The evidence against that is strong, however.

Trump believes in the First Amendment, and will uphold it. In contrast, the democrats are now the party of censorship. They believe in hate speech; they believe that they know it when they hear it, and they believe that they should be the ones to silence it. They encouraged and in some cases strong-armed private corporations to censor—shadow-ban, demonetize, remove accounts—people whose voices the democrats don’t like (including our voices at DarkHorse). The Biden administration literally formed a Ministry of Truth, short-lived though it was (its formal name was the Disinformation Governance Board). The Biden administration defined and took a stand on mis-, dis- and mal- information, definitions currently housed at the site of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. They are as follows:

Misinformation is false, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm.

Disinformation is deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate a person, social group, organization, or country.

Malinformation is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.  An example of malinformation is editing a video to remove important context to harm or mislead.

Given the government’s definition of malinformation, you could correctly infer that the government could cry “malinformation!” any time a true thing has been said, which the government doesn’t like. Who is to say what counts as manipulation? Given that “fact-checkers” have, in many places, replaced actual scientists as arbiters of truth, and given that said fact-checkers generally have no idea what is true, often getting things exactly and perfectly backwards, what is to stop the government from claiming that some inconvenient fact is being reported in an attempt to “manipulate”? I often hope to change people’s minds, by putting things in front of them that will allow them to see things from a different perspective. Is that manipulation? It could certainly be construed that way.

Regardless, According to Biden’s Department of Homeland Security, all count as terrorism. And the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012—signed by Obama late on the last day of 2011 from Hawai’i, when most of the country was partying or asleep—allows the president to command the military to imprison civilians indefinitely, without charge or trial. Things that might prompt such indefinite imprisonment include being alleged to support terrorism. And those civilians might be foreign nationals, but they also might be American citizens.

Follow it through: Since 2012, being declared a terrorist by the U.S. means you have no constitutional rights, regardless of your citizenship status. Since 2021, engaging in mis-, dis-, or mal- information can all be regarded as acts of terrorism. Saying true things which the government feels is manipulative can be declared an act of terrorism, the punishment for which might be being disappeared without a trace.

This is the America the Democrats have brought us. The Democrats have had considerable help from the neocons, who used to be Republicans, although those are not the Republicans who are in charge now. The America being facilitated by Biden—an administration about which Harris can come up with no examples of things that she would do differently—is an America in which our health, safety, and jobs are at risk; an America in which families are losing the ability to parent their children, and children and women are under attack; an America in which our founding documents are treated as disposable.

Given who he is collaborating with, what he accomplished in his first term, and what he says now, I strongly believe that Trump will move us into a better future.

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(The complete livestream was taken down by YouTube, because that is the kind of thing that they continue to do. This button delivers you to a clip of my speech.)

Video of speech

Join the Resistance

Thank you all for being here today. Here. You are here, born in remarkable times, in a remarkable country. This is the time and place where you exist, and it is your sacred duty to embrace reality, and choose between abdication of your rights and duties, and engagement. You are here.

Each of you an improbable creature on an improbable planet in an improbable cosmos.

We humans have the longest childhoods on the planet. This is not happenstance. It is not luck. Dragonflies don’t need to learn how to be dragonflies—it’s all hard wired in, no childhood necessary. Mice need to learn how to be mice, a bit. Crows, though, crows and wolves and dolphins and elephants and all the great apes, including us—we all need to learn to be what we’re going to be. Humans most of all. Born utterly helpless, human babies are all potential and opportunity, so many years of development ahead of them, during which to explore, imagine, create, play, experiment, make mistakes, and learn. We are improbable, and marvelous, and utterly human. We are right here.

To be born an American baby, in much of the latter half of the 20^th century, was a lucky thing. The schools were good, and you could learn real things. Mothers were as likely to tell their rambunctious youngsters to “go play outside” as anything else. Healthy children were not medicated. Sick children were rare.

Life was not perfect then; it never can be. But children had time.

• Time to climb trees, build hideouts, and have battles with sticks and cones.

• Time to sit with friends and talk.

• Time to think, and to be alone with their own thoughts.

• Time to imagine—imagine the most amazing things—and to sometimes go deep into those fantasies, and maybe even begin to believe them.

• And nobody confused imagination with reality. Not the adults. Parents understood that it was their job to provide a structure, with honorable rules, within which their children could explore, and take risks. And parents had the full authority to do their job.

Now, though. Now:

The children of America are once again learning to be suspicious of each other based on the color of their skin. The Democratic party, which supported slavery, then transformed itself into the party who brought us Civil Rights, has transformed itself once again, to become the party of Racism, preaching that the color of your skin is proof of what is inside your head.

Now, the children of America are learning to be scared of one another, scared of disagreement, scared of exploring both landscapes and ideas. They are locked down in the name of safety, kept from anything that might bring harm their way—restrained in much the same way that a straitjacket restrains a violent mental patient. Our children are being treated like mental patients…and many of them are thus becoming mental patients.

Our children are being drugged and drugged and drugged some more—drugs to “treat” normal childhood variation. Speed to make the active young boy more compliant in the classroom. Anti-anxiety meds to quiet the concerns of the sensitive girl, and make it far more difficult for her to learn how to soothe herself down the road. Children are not normally sick, but American children are, and ever more so. We are a chronically sick people, and our children are following in our footsteps.

The solution to this is not, as the Blue Team would have us believe, to negotiate with pharma to make the drugs cheaper. Most of what ails America’s children cannot be solved with pharmaceuticals.

President Biden claimed this Summer that “we have finally beaten pharma after all these years.” Hardly. What the Biden-Harris administration did with their Inflation Reduction Act was to lower prices for prescription drugs, instead of asking why so many children—and their parents, and most Americans—are on so many pharmaceuticals in the first place. It’s unprecedented. We must and we can Make America Healthy Again, starting with our children. The solution does not lie with pharmaceuticals.

The solution lies, in part, with food. Real food, grown by real farmers, not sludge dreamed up in a lab and put together in a factory.

Our children are being made sick and miserable by what they eat. Most of it is not food. It is hyper-processed, full of agro-chemicals, lacking nutrition but full of addictive potential.

So many American children are now diabetic or pre-diabetic, have metabolic syndrome, autism—this is new. These are new problems. Half of American children are overweight, nearly half of those (21% total) are obese. Children. And yet Ozempic and its pharmaceutical relatives, the newest magic pills with which to disappear your ills, are being given to children as young as six years old. Instead of medicating children to treat their brand new illnesses, we need to address root causes. And keep Big Food and Big Pharma far away from our children.

Corporations are being allowed to contaminate our children’s bodies, and get access to their brains—to advertise to them. Meanwhile, the schools are indoctrinating them.

Our children are being indoctrinated into a new religion, a religion called The Science. The new religion called The Science has no bearing on actual science, but because it comes wrapped up in a package with a nice name, the new religion is trusted and believed. The Science teaches fantasy. Fantasy like:

• boys can become girls, and girls can become boys.

• frosted mini-wheats are healthier than eggs.

• the only way to be healthy in the face of a new pathogen is to submit yourself to the authorities, comply with their orders, and take into yourself new technology that is, we are now well aware, neither safe nor effective.

Meanwhile, the children of America are learning nearly nothing of actual science—of its wonder and expansiveness, of discovery and uncertainty and hypothesis and excitement and that tingling in the back of the brain when you’re on to something, but…what is it? What is it? I can’t quite….wait. There it is. Eureka! Our children are being denied their moments of discovery. I did not know. But now I do. I figured it out!

Children are naturally full of wonder, asking questions, forming opinions, abandoning beliefs in the face of new information. They do not, by and large, accept that there are things they cannot know, or cannot ask about, unless they are beaten down. The human spirit is inquisitive and creative.

America’s children need to spend time off their screens and in the dirt, growing food and flowers; they need to spend time with pen and ink and color and clay, learning to represent their world; they need to spend time moving their bodies with speed and with skill; they need to spend time observing the world around them and being encouraged to ask questions of it—

• Why are there so many colors of flowers?

• How do eyeglasses work?

• What’s it like on Mars?

—and they need to have classrooms with teachers who are not afraid of saying

• “I don’t know” and

• “how would we figure out the answer?” and

• “no, we’re not going to google it.”

Gardens and art and sport and actual science. These are some of what the children of America need, and which precious few are getting. Instead of gardens and art and sport and actual science, our children are getting gold stars for everyone, rainbow flags, declaring one’s pronouns, and a pathological focus on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

The human spirit is inquisitive and creative. But the human spirit can be beaten down.

The schools are doing just that, becoming centers of ideology and control. The schools are very successful at beating down the human spirit.

In the new religion called The Science, being advocated for by the Democrats, there is nothing new under the sun, no hope and no wonder and no excitement.

It’s not science, it’s technocracy.

Everything is already known. The experts have the answers. The experts will deliver you what you need—processed food, a pill and a shot, a screen and endless apps in which to waste your days.

This is life for children in 21^st century America.

A life lived through screens, pharma, and fake food, rather than one lived through creativity, exploration, and the fruit of the land.

It is the parents’ job to model and teach honesty and integrity, loyalty and kindness, determination and courage. Parenting comes with the responsibility to restrict your children, to establish and enforce honorable rules—and to gradually loosen those binds, and allow the children to take risks that are appropriate to them.

It is also a parent’s job to provide as much opportunity as possible for their children, and to teach their children that any opportunities that did not come to them, or that they lost, they need to find for themselves.

But parents aren’t being allowed to parent. Parental rights are being taken away. The very core of humanity is under attack.

When rioters were allowed to take over many American cities in the Summer of 2020, including Portland, Oregon, where I then lived—it was the Black Lives Matter movement that was at the forefront. Black Lives Matter didn’t turn out to be about Black Lives Mattering, but about enriching the founders of the movement through graft, and overturning much of what Americans hold dear. Included among the principles that BLM had on its site in June of 2020 was this: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.”

The rioting that was spearheaded by BLM was allowed by democratic mayors and governors, encouraged even. They said it was the compassionate thing to do.

The attack on the family has been written into the very principles of activist organizations that are adored and promoted by democratic leaders, among them Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

The attack on parental rights shows up in myriad ways, both direct and indirect.

In states from Indiana to Texas to Montana, parents are losing custody of their children because they dare to try to protect them from the fantasy, propagated by The Science, that boys can become girls, and girls can become boys.

This Summer, following the Biden-Harris administration’s sweeping new “reforms” of Title IX, which now explicitly provides protected status to the fantasy concept “gender identity,” California became the first state in the nation to allow schools to keep such information about children from their parents.

And in Minnesota, Governor Walz signed legislation allowing the courts to take “temporary emergency jurisdiction” of children when “gender-affirming care” isn’t forthcoming.

These are direct attacks on children, on parents, and on families.

The indirect attacks are no less brutal. They may not look like attacks, but that is what they are. A parent, usually a mother, becomes convinced that, in the name of kindness and compassion and that religion called “The Science,” they should abdicate responsibility for their children, hand it over to teachers and activists on social media who tell lies, lies like

“if you don’t help trans your child, he will kill himself.”

In fact, when your boy wakes up in the morning and says he’s a girl, it is not time to embrace his fantasy. You did not just get a daughter. You have a boy who is exploring identity, and it will pass, if you let it. Explore and imagine is what children do.

These confused parents are told that it is the loving thing to do, to allow their children to be destroyed with drugs and surgery, drugs and surgery they do not need, drugs and surgery from which they can never fully return. Under The Science that the Democrats have brought us, a technocracy masquerading as the Enlightenment, parents’ fears are being played, convinced that if they don’t follow the newest thing—the latest expert, advice, or drug—their child will suffer.

You don’t want your child to suffer do you? You do love your child…? Well then – do what we say, and everything will be fine.

Do not fall for it. Do not affirm. Do not comply. This is not the loving thing to do.

Family culture, traditions, and rules are what help children learn how to be. Parents having and enforcing rules about screen time or curfews, food or gaming or porn, are doing what they are supposed to do.

But parents are being told that they must abdicate their responsibilities, for the good of the children. This is not good for children. It is exactly the opposite.

The way that children are living now—

• kept inside because the outdoors is dangerous,

• so scheduled that none of their time is their own,

• sedentary,

• socializing through technology that is curated by algorithms,

• high on processed foods and pharmaceuticals—

They’re effectively prisoners. Prisoners in their own lives.

We can set them free. We must set them free.

Bobby Kennedy said, as he stepped down from his run for the presidency in August, “We need to choose to love our kids more than we hate each other.”

Yes. Yes we do.

Now—look around you, at all these beautiful and courageous fellow Americans with whom you stand, and meet them. Say hello. Offer a hand. Learn something of them, their humanity, their story. Where do they come from, and how do they find themselves here? Do that, too, with people elsewhere, on all of your days, and find, again, I hope and I believe, how much more unites us than divides us.

Remember, finally, that you are here, to embrace what is real and what is right. You are here to seize hold of your autonomy, and of your authority, and to resist any who would dispossess you of truth.

Thank you.

Rescue the Republic

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Unfrosted is Jerry Seinfeld’s latest project. It’s his directorial debut, and he co-wrote and starred in it, too. Seinfeld likes to complain about how “PC” everything has gotten—politically correct. Seems like a legit complaint. PC is the wording of the 90s, but still—PC, woke, same idea. In both instantiations, people are demanding ideological conformity while taking both the sanity and the humor out of life. So Seinfeld thinks the world has become PC. Comics often act as bellwethers in this regard—at the point that audiences start trying to straitjacket them into jokes that they deem appropriate, comics sound the alarm. Other than being a bit late to this particular party, I’d say he’s right.

This movie, though. This movie is a piece of work. It’s a fictionalized account of the real life feud between Kellogg and Post. Cereal giants of the 1960s, both based in Battle Creek, Michigan, Kellogg and Post competed to bring the world’s first ever “toaster pastry” to the market. Post got a product on the shelves first; they called it—I kid you not—Country Squares. Enthusiasm fizzled. Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts followed soon thereafter, and for them, enthusiasm has apparently not fizzled yet.¹

I used to be a Democrat. Two of the things that I did that felt democraty include:

I bought as much of my food as possible at farmer’s markets, and got to know the farmers who grew my food. I bought organic, and avoided GMOs. When given a choice, I bought food that was grown closer to how it had been before humans got involved—cows that had spent their lives grazing outside, coffee grown in the shade on farms with canopy trees, tomatoes and strawberries picked at perfect ripeness, transported as little as possible, eaten fresh and raw.

And I refused pharmaceuticals except when absolutely necessary—the notable exception being vaccines, which I barely questioned until Covid raised my awareness. Over the counter drugs were no better. The rule of thumb in our house was: the longer it’s been on the market, the more likely it is to be safe. Aspirin seemed like a pretty safe bet, as did some antibiotics, in moderation. Everything else? Buyer beware.

I still do these things. My behavior was always informed by an evolutionary understanding of the world, a fundamental preference for solutions that have stood the test of time (e.g. beef over lab-grown meat), and wanting as little corporate product and involvement in my life as possible. Such behavior just doesn’t seem democraty anymore. It seems like the opposite.

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I have also heard, but only from people without children, how much better it would be to have twins. “Get it all out of the way faster,” they say.

Right.

Once, before I had children, I was interviewing for a faculty position at a liberal arts college, when I happened to meet the school age children of the chair of the hiring committee. He—the chair—was swapping duties with his wife, a hallway hand-off that included both me and their children. Despite having had little experience with children at that point in my life, I somehow charmed the little ones, enough that they remembered me when I showed up in their parents’ world later, after I had been hired. Their mother, a formidable scientist, told me then that having children was transformational, and that it only got better as time passed.

“The babies, you’ll fall deeply in love with them. But you can’t do anything with them,” she told me. “Soon enough, though, you can talk to them, and go places with them, and show them the world.”

Later I was witness to her wonderful children growing up and becoming adults, and yes, she had shown them the world. And they, too, came to show her the world as they were coming to understand it.

I was two weeks shy of my 35^th birthday when I had my first baby. Not quite an “elderly primigravida” in the language of obstetrics, but very close. By then I had earned a PhD in Biology and done award-winning research in Madagascar and written a book and married the love of my life and gotten a tenure-track job.

I don’t regret having all of those experiences before becoming a mother. Nor do I regret having a professional life that I loved after becoming a mother. But of all the things in a life that a person could regret, motherhood has got to be at the bottom of the list.

When I was 34, Bret and I discussed whether it was time to start a family. We had been married for five years, living together for well over a decade. We wanted children ultimately—or really, we felt sure that we would have wanted to have had children if the opportunity passed us by—but neither of us felt it viscerally.

Predictable decline in fertility with age being what it is, I had long thought that, given that we said that we wanted children, doing so by the time I was 35 made sense. But there was a lot in our lives that was still up in the air, including considerable financial insecurity. So we decided to wait for at least two years, and then revisit the topic.

Two weeks later I was pregnant.

Sometimes the world delivers exactly what you need, even when you have very different ideas.

It is a particular feature of my personality that I love risk and I love to explore, and I did not want to be restricted from roaming wild on the Earth. Pregnancy was, as I rather predicted it would be, hard for me, as it is inherently physically restrictive. I wanted to bike and play sports, eat raw cheese and drink whiskey and travel. Instead I lumbered more with each passing day, my horizons narrowing. About seven months in, one biologist to another, I told Bret that this whole mammal thing was a truly stupid way to reproduce. I never regretted pregnancy, but I did resent it.

This is what women often hear about. How hard it all is. How dangerous and difficult and restrictive and boring and high stakes and unfair the whole thing is.

I didn’t like being pregnant, either time. It was, indeed, hard on me.

Motherhood was not.

Because my children, my two beautiful baby boys who are now young men launched on adventures that are just beginning…my children are my children. As soon as they each were born, I held them and I knew. There are no words for it. I am a person who comes up with words, but for this, there are no words.

Those who would have you avoid parenthood, though, they have words. Words to scare you with: dangerous and difficult and restrictive and boring and high stakes and unfair. I can come up with counterparts to those words—exhilarating and worth it and expansive and exciting and yes, high stakes, and the most extraordinary thing that you can do. But those words still do not capture the experience.

I didn’t proselytize for motherhood upon becoming a mother, as many do. It’s your life, I figured, do as you please. However. I did have occasion to say to people, if and when they asked, that there is nothing like it, and that you cannot understand until you are a parent, and that it is the best thing in the entire world.

Not that I didn’t sometimes want to go places that I could not go with young ones. I wanted to start taking them to the jungle when they were very young. Too young, I was compelled by Bret, for we would be taking too many risks taking very young children to the kinds of places I wanted to go.

Instead I started leading study abroad trips for undergraduates, getting some of my fix for wild tropical nature that way, knowing that my children were safe with their father, at home.

When they were old enough, we began taking them to the jungle together.

How old is old enough, you might wonder. That is a discussion for another time.

Here are Zachary and Toby tasting lemon ants. And here is Zachary’s first piranha. And Toby enjoying a butterfly. All are from the Amazon. They were old enough.

People without children are often the most confident in their opinions about children, and how to raise them.

A few days after the birth of my second child, I heard from someone who had no children, that having two children is easier than having only one.

I’ve heard about social workers, all of whom were childless young women, lecturing mothers on why enforcing rules and having expectations of children is bad for their morale. “It makes them feel bad.”

Even, from the same childless young social workers, of someone’s beloved son, “Sometimes you just have to accept that your child will be dependent on the state.”

A mother who wanted nothing more than to be away from the handouts, to give her child what his first family had not been able to, to do so both with love and with rules, was told to give up such goals. Best to let the state handle this. The state knows best.

Confidence is a kind of tell in this context. Confidence often reveals total ignorance.

I’ve heard people say that having children is bad for the planet, or will get in the way of their having the careers they want, or just doesn’t suit their lifestyle. They are certain that they do not want children.

And I’ve seen some of those people completely change their minds, their partners baffled and hurt, their trust breached. The thing is, it shouldn’t be surprising that people change their minds on this subject. Especially women.

As a society, we’ve become fanatical in our pursuit of never having a sad or unpleasant moment. Do make sure that everything is comfortable and easy and causes you no concern. What we forget in our quest for comfort and ease, with nothing else to strive for, is that comfort and ease quickly become dull, banal and generic. They are inherently uninspiring. The people who have successfully created a life for themselves that is only comfortable and easy—as opposed to one that pursues engaging comforts in between challenging work—become grim and grey. They are the blank-eyed drones, easily coerced and easily convinced, so long as their comfort and ease do not go away.

Having children will make you less comfortable. It will not be particularly easy. And it will rouse you and remind you that you are not all that there is. You are but a tiny speck in the universe, doing your best, and now, with this beautiful child, you are more than that. You have another speck to care completely about, someone with whom you will be bonded forever. And ultimately, when you have succeeded, that someone will become independent, and free.

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The attempted assassination of Trump is not yet old news. There are whispers and concerns about how this could have been allowed to happen, who made it happen, how many people were involved, whether it was staged. Of course there are. I don’t know that we will ever learn the truth. But in the moment, in the moment after Trump dodged a bullet and ducked for cover and assessed himself and found himself only trivially injured, in that moment, he made a brilliant political move which did not merely energize his base. Oh no. It brought many of us in.

That night I saw a unifying force. I saw a patriot.

Trump’s secret service detail tried to get him off the stage and into a car and he said wait wait wait, wait. Wait.

He stood, made a hole for himself in his security detail so that he could see the crowd—and so that the camera could see him—and fist pumped at all of us.

Fight. Fight. Fight.

And yes, we will.

Do you remember when we were told, wistfully, that once Biden got into office, things would go back to normal, and that this would mean that we wouldn’t have to think about politics every single day? That, apparently, is what Trump was doing to some Americans—making us think about him all the time, and it Just. Wasn’t. Fair1.

And yet, it seems to me that with Biden as our figurehead, there are many of us who are in that very space. I don’t want to be thinking about politics all the time. I would like to have elected leaders who are trustworthy and competent. But under Biden, nothing is as it seems. We are given platitude after platitude, and they just keep on being wrong. It is difficult not to be concerned.

Instead of more politics, here are three poems that I find thought provoking. Perhaps you will too.

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This Is the Land of Missed Opportunity

By Steve Cannon

This is the universe

where fortune

finds itself

in love

with misfortune.

This is the territory

Of slackers,

Where nothing changes

But change.

This is a place

in space

where everyone says

to the other,

“you blew it,”

and nothing,

if ever,

gets done.

Published in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Edited by Alan Kaufman. Thunder’s Mouth Press 1999: 618.

The Vacation

By Wendell Barry

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.

He went flying down the river in his boat

with his video camera to his eye, making

a moving picture of the moving river

upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly

toward the end of his vacation. He showed

his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,

preserving it forever: the river, the trees,

the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat

behind which he stood with his camera

preserving his vacation even as he was having it

so that after he had had it he would still

have it. It would be there. With a flick

of a switch, there it would be. But he

would not be in it. He would never be in it.

Published in Good Poems. Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor. Penguin 2002: 295.

Cast-Aluminum Espresso Pot

By Elizabeth Macklin

Where one mother cleaned the pot,

scrubbing and boiling

the thing in ammonia, one did not.

One left a light film of coffee on,

as much as would not

come off with water alone, and some rubbing.

So? What harm would it do?

The pot grew brown over

time: it showed how a flame threw

heat in a black design from a blue burner

over the years, and how you, too,

could get away with not having everything silver.

Published in Sustenance & Desire: A Food Lover’s Anthology of Sensuality and Humor. Edited, with Paintings, by Bascove. Godine 2004: 18.

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The county seat of San Juan County is on San Juan Island itself, in Friday Harbor. The courthouse is here, as are many environmental non-profits; the ferry landing is right in town, so you can visit without a car. There is a glorious national (historical) park on the island, which includes the place of the Pig War that resulted in the U.S. laying claim to these islands— and there are visible remnants of the people who came before the Europeans. In all of these islands, the Coast Salish people left behind middens—trash heaps—which are visible in many of the coastal banks, and at low tide, their long abandoned oyster beds are visible, as half circles raised above the surrounding cobbles.

San Juan is one of the ferry-served islands of the (collective) San Juan Islands, the other three being Orcas, Lopez, and Shaw.

Orcas is the most mountainous of these islands, with glorious inland lakes in the massive Moran State Park, and is famous for attracting both artists and celebrities. The small town of Eastsound is smaller than Friday Harbor, and quite sweet1.  Eastsound being a long way from the ferry landing, there are fewer day trippers from the mainland than in Friday Harbor.

Lopez is laid back and friendly, and flat enough that it attracts the greatest number of bicyclists. People literally wave as they pass one another on the road. Town is smaller yet than Eastsound.

Shaw is the smallest of the ferry-served islands. The one and only store on the island just celebrated its 100^thanniversary; for many years it was run by nuns. Right next door, there is now a second business on the island. It is a tap room.

The waters around these islands were once full of salmon, orcas, and other species of whales. All are still here, although their numbers have dwindled. The kayaking is gorgeous, as is the hiking and biking. At summer solstice, the sky has sunlight for nearly 18 hours, and the clear blue skies, low humidity, and highs in the 70s throughout most of the Summer often feel like perfection. At winter solstice, however, the time between sunrise and sunset is just over eight hours, and storms out of the Pacific bring high winds, driving rains, and king tides that can make travel by land or sea treacherous. The sky feels low, heavy, and menacing. Winter is a gray season, even though we are in the rain shadow of the Olympic mountains, and receive only half the rain of  nearby Seattle.

As you might imagine, the number of people on these islands swells in the Summer—people come from Seattle, certainly, but we have visitors from all over the world. Year-round residents of the county, according to the 2020 census, number only about 18,000 people. We are distributed primarily among the three largest islands—San Juan has nearly half, Orcas a third, and Lopez, which is about half the size of the other two and the least densely populated, has only one sixth of the population of the whole county. We should expect, therefore—and my experience biking and hiking on Lopez for many years with my family supports this expectation—that there’s not a whole lot of human activity on Lopez. Not a lot of business, and not a lot of trouble.

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It was thus with some surprise that, on the earliest ferry out of San Juan on a Thursday morning in early Summer, I saw the population of the ferry, in both people and cars, appear to double when we made our stop at Lopez. We had left the dock in Friday Harbor, on San Juan, at 5:35am. The ferry was heading to the mainland—Anacortes—and so was everyone on the boat. Islanders go to the mainland for medical appointments and to see friends or shows, to pick up appliances or stock up on lumber or go to SeaTac—the airport. Many islanders report that the best part of any off-island trip is coming home. I have often found this to be true.

What could explain a ferry-going population of people leaving Lopez that seemed equal to that leaving San Juan, when the population of Lopez is a third that of San Juan? My intuition that something was off was informed both by my experience in these islands, and by my rough knowledge of some of the numbers that I’ve shared here. But my intuition was also based on observations that were untested and unquantified. It’s not that people and cars aren’t countable—of course they are—but I had neither the time nor the inclination to conduct a careful count, so I don’t know. Maybe my sense of things was off. Certainly there were more cars down below, on the car deck, but how many more? Was it really twice? Were the amount of cars that had gotten on at Lopez actually surprising? I tucked my sense away, not forgetting it, but not putting too much credence in it, for later retrieval and assessment.

Later that morning, I walked into a small independent lighting store in the charming town of La Conner, where the owner was restoring an antique lamp. I told him that I was coming from the islands, where there are no services such as the ones that he offers, and he said, “yes, we get a lot of island business here.” He paused then, reflecting, and added, “especially from Lopez these days. I don’t know what that’s about.”

Call that observation number two. It’s hearsay, it’s anecdotal, it’s unverifiable. But unbidden, I had heard something that was consilient2 with my observations on the ferry earlier that day. We humans are always looking for pattern; sometimes we miss it when it’s there, more often we attribute meaning to things that have none. Coincidences happen. And our brains tend to be verificationist once we’ve got an idea in our heads—I think there’s something going on on Lopez, so I am more likely to remember conversations like this one, and more likely to throw out as irrelevant any suggestions to the contrary. I am hyper-conscious of this tendency of organisms to do this, so am, I think, less likely to make spurious connections than is the average bear, but nobody is fully able to rise above their bias. All of that said, consilient observations are precisely the kind of proto-data that we look for when considering whether or not there is a pattern to be discussed or revealed.

The next day, I was reading our weekly paper, The Journal of the San Juan Islands, which always publishes the Sheriff’s Log for the county from the previous week. Usually, the Sheriff’s Log is a sedate mixture of speeding violations, reports of dogs at large, and occasional calls about possible domestic violence or trespass, most of which turn out to be nothing. And usually, they are mostly from San Juan and Orcas, with an occasional report from Lopez. This week, however, out of 35 total incidents reported, fully 43% came from Lopez. Lopez, remember, has only one sixth of the population of the county—that’s about 17% of the population generating 43% of the Sheriff’s reports.

Call that observation number three. Unlike my sense that the numbers of people coming on to the ferry from Lopez were out of proportion to what I expected, however, in this case, I could quantify my sense that something was off.

Specifically, what I could do with the Sheriff’s Log was calculate whether the observed numbers—that is, how many actual events there were from each islands—were significantly different from the expected numbers—that is how many events we would expect from each island.

There is an elegant class of statistical tests—wait, don’t leave, this is good stuff, I promise—which are simple and easy to use, called “goodness of fit” tests. Goodness of fit tests assess whether something that you have observed directly—some actual measurement from reality—is a match for what you expected. You might ask: How do I know what I expect?

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Knowing what to expect is part of the art of science, specifically of pattern recognition, and of hypothesis generation, and of experimental design, and of statistical analysis. Learning to bring to explicit consciousness what it is that you expect is one way that we move from intuition to rational conclusion. Intuition is generally implicit—I feel like there’s something wrong here, I’m going to turn around, things feel off—and there is nothing wrong with that. But when you have an opportunity to check your intuition against measurable outcomes, you should do it. Among other things, this will help you refine your intuition in the future. The more explicit you can be about what you think is wrong, why your spidey sense is on full alert, how you think you’re being misled or manipulated, the greater the chance that you can avoid a bad outcome yourself, communicate to others what you understand, and have an ever more accurate understanding of the world.

In the case that the Sheriff’s Log revealed what seemed to me a strangely high number of events from Lopez, I dusted off that most famous of goodness-of-fit tests, the Chi-Square, and did an analysis on the data. You can do this too. It is, really and truly, not that hard. And it is so empowering.

I won’t walk through all of the analysis here,3 but will briefly describe the logic.

The actual data (observed values) were: 15 out of 35 Sheriff’s Log events happened on Lopez; 20 occurred elsewhere in the county.

To calculate my expected values, I began with the assumption that the only thing that should affect how many events happen on a given island is its population4. That is: events will be evenly distributed across the population. From U.S. Census records, we know that only 17% of the population of the county lives on Lopez. Thus, our expected value of events on Lopez is 17% of 35 total events. Seventeen percent of 35 (just multiply 0.17 by 35) is 6.

Six events were expected to happen on Lopez. But 15 were observed to happen there.

Now there’s a little Chi-Square magic that you do, where you take the square of the difference between observed and expected values, and divide the whole thing by the expected value, and that no doubt sounds complicated, but again, it really isn’t. In this case, the result is staggeringly significant. Which is to say that those numbers coming out of Lopez, at least for this one week in June of 2024, were way out of whack.

Now we’ve got numbers to go with our intuition. Those numbers had felt wrong to me—felt really, very wrong—but I did just a little math, and now I have quantitative back-up. Is something up? Yes, something is up. I don’t yet have any insight as to what it is that is up, but I do now know that what I’m actually observing is significantly different from what I should expect to observe.

What are statistics for? In modern times, too often, statistics are used to confuse, muddle, and scare the populace into doing something. Given that they are used this way, it’s even more important to have some grasp on their power, and their execution. With the ubiquity of computers, statistical tests have gotten more and more complicated. When people had to do all the math by hand, there was a constraint on complexity, and we thus had tests that were less powerful, to be sure, but also far harder to game, harder to hide statistical chicanery in. Many—perhaps most—modern scientists who use statistics, have a specialist statistician on whom they rely to do their stats for them. This means that in many cases, not even the scientist who “did the research” really knows what happened to her data between generating it, and having results to share with the world. Take data, put it in a black box, and nod sagely at the fancy-sounding result that comes out the other side.

Personally, I don’t want to trust the analysis of data that I worked hard to collect, to someone using models and software that they can’t explain in English to me. I also don’t want to trust the analysis of society to such models and software. If something feels off—if it feels like you’re spending way more at the grocery store than you used to, but are assured that the economy is booming; if you’re told at the doctor’s office that some measurement that they did of your blood means that you need to start taking prescription drugs right away, but you feel healthy—do what you can to check the math, or the analysis, of the people who are trying to convince you of something that feels wrong. Maybe you’ve changed your buying habits, and food prices are stable—or maybe the prices of eggs and fruit and meat really are climbing faster than in previous years. Maybe you do have a condition heretofore unknown to you which will benefit from medical intervention—or maybe the system that says that a level of X means you need to take Y is flawed. Especially if their solution requires a second fix for their first fix—drugs to deal with side effects of the other drugs they’ve got you on—seriously question if they have any idea what they’re doing. All too often, they do not.

What are statistics for? What statistics are supposed to be for is to remove bias from our interpretation of the world. Along with the scientific method, statistics allow us to accurately describe pattern, and to assess how likely that pattern is to have happened by chance. Put another way, statistics allow us to quantify coincidence, and minimize magical thinking as explanation for what we see around us. As humans walking around a complex world, we try to make sense of what we see, and try not be misled by our own observations and presumptions that there is pattern when perhaps there isn’t any. In this job, statistics are our friend. Just having familiarity with goodness of fit tests, and the Chi-Square test in particular, can make you far more self-sufficient, and allow you to hone your intuition. There are a lot of situations where the Chi-Square test can’t be used, but also a lot where it can be.

One more thing: The events out of Lopez in the Sheriff’s Log were not just quantitatively unexpected, but qualitatively unusual as well. While San Juan had a number of traffic violations and a couple of thefts from businesses, and Orcas had some animals-at-large and domestic disputes that resolved quickly, Lopez had several incidents in which individuals were sufficiently “suspicious” or “argumentative” or “yelling during the early morning hours” that police were called. Lopez also had home burglaries; and an on-going investigation into a death. It is more difficult—and more subjective—to conduct statistical analysis on qualitative data, and I will not attempt that here. But what these left me with was more consilience—more pieces of evidence that suggested that something was not quite right on Lopez.

At the time of this writing, my story doesn’t have an end. It is not, therefore, a very good story. Something unusual was going on on Lopez in early Summer 2024, but I do not have a good bead on what that something might be. I’ve heard a few hypotheses, all of which are a bit vague. What explains the unusual level of activity, police and otherwise, on Lopez? Some blame the ferry system. No, suggest others, it’s the lack of affordable housing. Actually, say still others, it’s all that newly built affordable housing. Presumably this is not an exhaustive list of possibilities. Perhaps none of these even come close to describing what is going on on Lopez. But the list is a good start: It’s the boats. It’s the lack of housing. It’s the abundance of housing.

Imagine if I took what I do know—something unusual is happening on Lopez—and attached it to one of these possibilities, making a construction that sounded like this:

“Higher numbers of police reports on Lopez due to the housing shortage should prompt locals to push harder for housing solutions.”

That last sentence is a hypothesis masquerading as a result. The thing I know is that there were higher numbers of police reports than expected; I did the statistics. I did not, however, in any way test or try to explain why there were larger numbers of police reports.

First you establish that there is a pattern that needs to be explained. Then you get down to trying to explain it. Explaining it is difficult, though; sometimes even impossible. So very often, in journalism and in the popularizing of scientific results, we see a conflation of “there’s a pattern” with “this is why there’s a pattern.” Arguments often look like this, with a logical flaw right in the middle, at step two:

1. We know X.

2. X is because Y.

3. Therefore we need to do something about Y in order to address X.

We do know X, but we don’t know why X is true. Thus, line 2 is unfounded; it might be true, it might not be. We do not know, and no work has been done to suggest it either way. But uncareful journalists and scientists, in combination with a public that wants to have trust in its institutions and authorities, slide right by what we don’t know, and make claims of truth, in the name of science, that are unfounded. Once again, with the details from this particular story:

1. We know that police activity on Lopez is unusually high.

2. Police activity on Lopez is unusually high because of the housing shortage.

3. We therefore need to do something about the housing shortage in order to reduce police activity.

It is true that we know 1, but we do not know 2; thus 3 is pushing an agenda that is unwarranted by the available analysis.

Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not. When I say that a housing shortage may not be responsible for high levels of police activity, I am not saying that I think it is not responsible. I am also not saying that I don’t believe in housing shortages. Nor am I weighing in on whether such a shortage exists on Lopez right now. I am making precisely no claim in that realm whatsoever, moral or otherwise. I am just stating the bounds of what we actually know. That is the responsible, careful, scientific thing to do.

In the 21^st century, though, being responsible, careful, and scientific can get a person branded an alt-right conspiracy theorist. It’s worth being called names for standing up to powerfully bad analysis. There is more powerfully bad analysis on the way, of that we can all be sure. It will be designed to confuse, divide, and scare. The better we all get at recognizing rhetorical tricks, such as claiming the mantle of science when all you’ve actually got is a nicely worded statement and a fancy degree, the better we can resist the scaremongering tactics to come.

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It begins in a vast underground subway system. The trains are not part of a city’s infrastructure, or rather, are not part of an organic city, one that has been allowed to grow up with the needs and desires of generations of inhabitants. Everything is new. This newness includes, vaguely, whatever complex this subway system is serving. There is an intimation of a vast busy-ness above, an implied thrum as of hundreds of thousands of bees going about their business. On the trains, though, all is quiet.

The trains, which are immaculate, all bright white and chrome inside, are also, aside from me, entirely devoid of passengers. They move smoothly, swiftly, and silently between stations that are, in turn, like the trains: clean, bright and empty.

I do not know what my business is here, but I have with me my usual bag—a small black backpack that holds my laptop, on which most of my work lives, as well as a notebook, in which I take notes by hand. I am deeply tired. The soft rush of movement underneath and around me, transporting me someplace that apparently I want to be, or need to be, or have been informed I should be, is taking me someplace, but the trip does not seem to end. There is no harshness to the surroundings. No screeching of brakes or flickering of fluorescent lights; no loud protestations from the angry or the insane, nor piles or puddles of human exudate that one must navigate around.

I am lulled to sleep, then wake suddenly, confused, the realization coming down—I fell asleep in public, what was revealed? Did I drool, lose track of my things, slump onto a stranger? What if I had drooled, though? In a public space devoid of other people, what would it matter?

The train stops at yet another bland immaculate station, just like all the rest, and I step out. I must transfer here, and the appropriate platform somehow requires no navigation to get to at all. There is another comfortable and clean bench on which to sit and wait, which I do. My backpack is next to me, my mood is even, my expectations nil. This is not a land of hopes or dreams, but of getting things done. I do not know what task I am on, but presumably, I am a member of the group of people who gets things done.

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So wrote Immanuel Kant in 1784, claiming his words to be the motto of enlightenment. Kant further points out that relying on others to do your thinking for you—outsourcing your decisions to people who claim to be experts—may be easy, but it is not mature.

“It is convenient to be immature! If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual advisor to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all. I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me.”

I need not think, so long as I can pay.

Ask yourself, if you will, what you are paying for the ease of not having to think for yourself. I posit that many are paying not just with dollars, but with their health, and their morals, and their dignity. Indeed, in some cases, people have paid with their lives.

The Enlightenment brought reason to the forefront of decision making for a world that was ready to be freed from outdated beliefs. A couple of hundreds of years later, we are not living as autonomous, free thinkers. Instead, we have largely replaced the old authorities with new ones, while still believing that we are using reason to arrive at our conclusions. We flatter ourselves. It’s a risky delusion.

People from across political and ideological spectra are claiming the mantle of science, and of certainty. You can’t have both science and certainty though, and anyone who claims they do has revealed that they know nothing of science. If you would #FollowTheScience or claim that “In this house we believe that science is real,” while taking it on authority that the guys in the lab coats with the fancy degrees are arbiters of truth, then what you have adopted is a religious position, not a scientific one. And you most definitely do not have an enlightened position.

Many people who believe that they are on the “side” of science and enlightenment also believe that Trump is a threat to democracy, and to our very way of life. I may have once believed this myself. I like to humor myself that I was only suspicious that this may have been true, that Trump might have been a threat to democracy back in 2016, but I do not know how much nuance I actually had. I did advise my students, in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, that they were wrong to imagine that Trump’s election meant that half the country was sexist and racist; but I also shared the slack-jawed, glazed-eye look that was nearly ubiquitous in liberal enclaves then, and worried that we might be in for a scary ride once Orange Man hit the Oval Office.

Now, however, I believe that Biden—and whatever it is that is pulling his strings—is a far larger threat to democracy and the American experiment than Trump ever was. Biden has demonstrated a willingness to go full authoritarian. During Covid, he enacted vaccine mandates. People lost jobs, families, and lives to Biden’s anti-democratic orders.

And yet I have heard that it is irresponsible, even morally reprehensible, not to support Biden, a president who became authoritarian before all of our eyes.

I think it irresponsible to vote for such a man. But in some people’s eyes, that makes me the existential threat. (And supporting Bobby Kennedy is, we are assured, merely a proxy vote for Trump.) I would again remind people how Kant thought about enlightenment: have courage to make use of your own understanding. If all that you are doing is finding experts to make decisions for you, you have handed over the “tiresome job” of thinking for yourself, and you have abandoned access to the tools of the Enlightenment.

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Inquiry is the heart of enlightenment. Absent inquiry there is no development of wisdom. As Kant also says, what enlightenment requires—and therefore what humans require—is freedom to think and to speak.

I have been scolded and slandered, demonized and demonetized, for using my freedom to think and to speak. My husband, Bret Weinstein, draws even more ire and venom than I do. Rageful hatred is thrown at him remarkably often and—at him or at me—it always sounds very much the same.

How dare you seek to understand what is true. How dare you speak what you believe to be true. How dare anyone else listen to what you have to say. This is not the time. Now is the time to fall in line, to comply, and to obey.

(What goes unspoken is: we will tell you when it is your time to speak.)

Education and seduction are etymological sisters, both from Latin. To educate is to bring out or lift up. To be educated is to be led forth from narrow, faith-based belief, into intellectual self-sufficiency. To seduce is to draw away. To be seduced is, often, to be led astray by false praise.

To those who are angered by Bret’s and my tendency to think from scratch and first principles, rather than from authority, and on sharing our thoughts with a willing audience, I say this: You want us all in thrall to the gods that have seduced you. You may think that they have educated rather than seduced you, and you may call your gods by different names—you may call them scientists or elected leaders or public health authorities—but they are the new gods. They act with impunity, they speak from authority rather than from reason, and they discourage skepticism and inquiry. These are the new gods, same as the old gods. You have been seduced by them. You have not been educated.

We—Bret and I and all those who seek truth—prefer to educate our audiences rather than to seduce. It is inevitable, though, that those who would lead by seduction, and those who have been seduced, do not appreciate those who would lead by education.

There are some scientific conclusions for which the evidence is so strong that I cannot imagine them changing. Evolution explains the vast diversity of life that we see on Earth. In animals that reproduce sexually, there are two and only two biological sexes. The Earth is not flat, it is not the center of our solar system or our galaxy or of anything extra-galactic. We are just here, evolving, trying to make sense of our world.

That said, I would remind us all of Richard Dawkins’ apt observation: failure of imagination is not an argument. While we cannot let the sophists win, by tying us in knots and wasting our time defending obvious points, we also need to resist certainty, even about things that we are relying on the most to be true.

There are some other scientific conclusions for which I once believed that the evidence was supremely strong, but my position has shifted as I have learned more. Prime among those positions that I once held but now doubt is this: vaccines that have made it to the market in the United States are largely safe and effective.

In a recent Q&A on Locals, a DarkHorse supporter shared this useful framing: Feel, felt, found. It goes like this: “I understand how you feel. I felt that way, too. But listen to what I have found…”

When confronted with my past self, or with people who sound like I used to, I might say: I understand how you feel about vaccines: everyone should take the ones that are recommended by the CDC, because that keeps us all safe. I used to feel that way too. But here is some of what I have found:

The rapid and extreme expansion of the childhood vaccine schedule in the U.S. was unjustified by changes in childhood disease prevalence. Furthermore, that rapid expansion was closely followed by rises in other childhood illness and disability.

Some of the newly added vaccines are for diseases that children are never exposed to. Americans without passports don’t get vaccinated against yellow fever; why are babies getting vaccinated against hepatitis B?

None of the vaccines currently on the childhood vaccine schedule have been tested against placebo.

The vaccine makers have complete immunity from damages caused by their products.

In some cases, the pathogen that has been identified as causing the disease in question, while both real and capable of causing devastating illness, does not appear to be the singular enemy in the public health story that we have been led to believe (see, for instance, The Moth In the Iron Lung for a surprising historical take on polio, which points the finger at agrochemicals that poisoned not just insects, but also people, with heavy metals).

We might well be better off cleaning up the rest of our act, rather than adding poison to poison, and hoping that two errors create healthy human beings.

I understand how you feel. I felt that way too. But listen to what I have found.

Sometimes I will be in error. I would not have you trust me simply because I think that I am right, or because I have scientific credentials. You need not listen to anything in particular that others have found. But if you are certain that your cherished beliefs are correct, and that they cannot abide scrutiny, be skeptical of yourself. Your certainty is a tell. Your certainty may be hiding an insecurity, which in turn may be covering an error.

Kant wrote, in that same essay on enlightenment from 1784, that “all that is needed is freedom. And the freedom in question is the most innocuous form of all—freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters. But I hear on all sides the cry: "Do not argue!" The officer says, "Do not argue, drill!" The tax man says, "Do not argue, pay!" The clergyman says, "Do not argue, believe!"

It is not just our right, but our duty, to make public use of our reason in all matters. Do be curious. Do inquire. Do argue. And do share what you learn.

I need not think, so long as I can pay.

Above all, think before paying anything more to those experts who would take from you the gifts of the enlightenment.

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Travel is mind-expanding. It stretches perception, shifts the horizon, opens doors that you didn’t know existed, and allows for reflection of the value and wonders of home that perhaps you had become blind to. Some of the most unforgettable travel moments are only so in retrospect. At the time, peak experiences can be brutal. But not all of them are.

Disclaimer: This is not medical advice, nor should it be taken as such. What is written here is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

You are responsible for your own choices. In a litigious culture such as that of the United States, you can safely assume that rebar at eye-level and chasms in the asphalt will be marked and fixed as soon as possible, and that playground equipment and balconies will not break free and send children or partygoers crashing down. You are less likely to get hurt wandering around in the U.S. (or any WEIRD countries), than if you were to do so in Madagascar, say, or Ecuador, two countries in which I have spent significant time.

It is safer, therefore, in WEIRD countries. People can wander around foolishly and have a low chance of getting hurt. By “foolishly” I mean such things as being incapacitated from alcohol, or being so socially focused that you do not pay attention to your surroundings.

This safety that we have in the WEIRD countries, it comes at a cost. Being able to wander around foolishly is part of what has created generations of people who are a little bit scared, and somewhat confused, and quite lacking in experience. Travel is experience. But only if you dive in and let the tides take you, knowing that sometimes, rip tides happen, or rogue waves, or worse, and danger can be a learning experience and provide an ecstatic high, or it can be deadly. And it’s not always possible to know which ride you’re on.

Now I’ll make a few more enemies, and explain what I don’t mean by “travel.”

Going to Disneyland is not travel. That one’s easy. Disneyland is a fantasy and may well be a necessary tonic and a joy for many people, but it is not travel as I mean it. Any escape into a constructed universe that could be anywhere on the planet—also on this list: Las Vegas—is, by my rubric, not travel.

Going to Club Med is also not travel. (Full disclosure: When I was 18, my family and I went to one; my memory is hazy. It was the first and last time that any of us did so.) On a map it appears that you have traveled, but inside the compound of a Club Med, all is scripted and conforming to the cultural and social norms of the place you left. This is also not travel, in the sense that I mean it.

One step further: Going to Cancun or its immediate environs does not appear to be travel, either. I could tell many stories about Bret Weinstein’s and my adventures traveling through the Yucatan (and on South, all the way through Costa Rica) one Summer when we were young, and our shock at how the eastern Yucatan had changed when we went back with our children at the end of 2016. We were able to escape the gringo tourist hordes by going inland and south towards Belize, but the local culture had all but disappeared. American dollars (including ours), and the promise of more, has wiped out most of what made the Caribbean side of the Yucatan extraordinary, except for the climate and some straggling aspects of nature.

If travel is about new experience, the discomfort of travel should be expected. You don’t need to relish the discomfort. But “getting outside your comfort zone” will be…uncomfortable. If everything that you see, hear, smell, taste, touch, think and do while traveling is something that you were able to fully prepare for with advance research back home, then really, what is the point? If you are traveling in order to document the fact that you traveled and to post that documentation on-line and thus create and curate a representation of your life that others may look at and swoon over, there is a good chance that you do not have memories of the travel itself, but only memories of the documentation. (This is a topic for another time, but I also feel strongly that even the most creative and technically skilled photographers should put their cameras down sometimes and have experiences without consideration of how they will look through a lens.)

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Now that I have probably struck a nerve, or three, with most readers, I will address the topic at hand: Why you should eat street food when you travel. (But first, one more time: I am not a medical doctor, and I am not dispensing medical advice.)

As I see it, there are two broad reasons to eat street food when you travel, the first cultural, the second biological:

1. Eating food that is cooked and eaten by local people offers a portal into their culture. Be appreciative, kind, and generous, and demonstrate that you are not just respectful of but actually enthusiastic about the food and history (architecture, myth, science, art, religion, sport, language…) of whatever place you are in, and you will find local people who will interact with you, if that is what you want. Once you end up in conversation with people, whole worlds open up. (To that point: I was once invited to a turning-of-the-bones ceremony in Madagascar, in which the ancestors are disinterred so that the village elders may tell them of the goings-on since last they spoke.) And this can happen almost no matter how little you know the local language. You do need to demonstrate that you are making an effort, however—that goes a very long way. Show up as the ugly American who repeats themselves loudly in English when people don’t understand you, and neither your food, nor your trip, will be very interesting.

Another way of putting this point is: Eating what the locals eat is actually experiencing their culture. That is travel. And the food is often extraordinary. Not always, but often. You won’t get molecular gastronomy at a street cart, but if that’s what you’re looking for, my advice isn’t for you, at least not on the topic of food. In the broad category of street food I’ve had while traveling, there have been perfectly grilled meats (on the bone, and in tacos, and as kebabs); vegetables whose names I don’t know and whose flavors reminded me of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on; fruits with mesmerizing colors and aromas; beignets and cheese, steamy soups and tomato salads, pancakes both sweet and savory, and a local rotgut that I think was taking the varnish off the table in real time. I’ve also had deep fried beetle larvae, and if that’s your thing, terrific, but it doesn’t turn out to be mine.

2. Your gut microbiome can change, and the sooner it mirrors that of the gut microbiota of the people around you, the more likely you are to be healthier, happier, and better able to enjoy not just the delicious local cuisine, but also everything else that you have traveled to experience.

Your gut microbiome responds to diet (easily digestible NYT version; and the original research: Collins et al 2018). The make-up of your gut microbiome has effects on sleep and hypertension (Durgan et al 2016), and obesity (Turnbaugh et al 2006), among other things.

Twenty or so years ago, we thought that we were singular, made up entirely of human cells. Maybe we granted that there were some mites living in our eyelashes. In stark contrast, current thinking suggests that, in a living adult human, there are more cells of foreign organisms—the microbiota, consisting of bacteria, viruses, and eukaryotes—many of which live in our guts and help us digest and process our food, than there are human cells. Clemente et al 2012 wrote an excellent review, and here is the beginning of an abstract of another terrific paper on the subject (Chow et al 2010):

So: When you travel, you can try to be a sterile being, ignoring the reality that you already contain multitudes of foreigners within you. Or you can embrace your new environment, cautiously approach new and interesting cuisine, expect to get some GI distress for 24 – 48 hours, and then find yourself, on the other side of that, able to enjoy everything about your new locale more fully, now that you are more of it.

If you are only going to be in a place for a day or two, and you know that you have a very sensitive GI tract, you might opt to take the sterile route, to keep yourself free and clear of the local microbes until you land somewhere for a longer time.

You should, if you are in the privileged position of being able to travel to places that are very different from the one you call home, and especially if those places are in the tropics:

• Get fully vaccinated;

• Take malaria prophylaxis if that is called for where you’ll be;

• Modify your behavior to limit exposure to the vectors that cause many tropical diseases (I’m looking at you, Anopheles mosquitoes); and

• Have a course or two of antibiotics on hand that you can treat yourself with if you absolutely need to, especially if you are in very remote places. Do not take antibiotics unless you are in real distress and far from medical help. If you do take them, make sure to take the entire course. And if you still have them at the end of your trip, donate them to a local medical clinic, where they can do some real good.

I do all of those things, and I eat street food with something like abandon. I do not require of the vendors whom I buy food from that they wash their produce in bottled water, or that they throw out meat that has been sitting in the sun with flies on it. That’s the kind of advice that you will get from others, and following it will mean that you have a lower chance of getting a very nasty intestinal bug. Eating street food has risks, and it’s not for everyone. You can’t predict what all will happen if you do so—in that lies some of the risk, and also opens the possibility for transcendent experience.

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References Cited

Chow, J., Lee, S. M., Shen, Y., Khosravi, A., & Mazmanian, S. K. (2010). Host–bacterial symbiosis in health and disease. In Advances in immunology, 107, 243-274. Academic Press.

Clemente, J. C., Ursell, L. K., Parfrey, L. W., & Knight, R. (2012). The impact of the gut microbiota on human health: an integrative view. Cell, 148(6), 1258-1270.

Collins, J., et al. (2018). Dietary trehalose enhances virulence of epidemic Clostridium difficile. Nature, 553(7688), 291.

Durgan, D. J., et al. (2016). Role of the Gut Microbiome in Obstructive Sleep Apnea-Induced Hypertension. Hypertension, 67(2), 469–474.

Turnbaugh, P. J., et al (2006). An obesity-associated gut microbiome with increased capacity for energy harvest. Nature, 444(7122), 1027.

Velasquez-Manoff, M. (2018). Opinion: The Germs that Love Diet Soda. New York Times, April 6, 2018.