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Professional writer, editor, napper, and dog-snorgler. Knows you are, but what is she?

Our Future Success Depends on Rocks from the Sky

A geologist with the Division of Meteorites at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum holds a slice of a meteorite. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Steve Curry’s meteor-hunting hobby turned into a business, then an obsession, then a connection with the same “sovereignty” movement as Cliven Bundy, and eventually landed him in jail after an armed standoff with law enforcement. But before all of that he was a mentally ill man who was really excited by meteors. In The Verge, Brendan Borrell walks us through the entire strange and sad story.

“He was extremely knowledgeable,” says Robert Stollsteimer, who became what he calls “a groupie.” An elderly woman in Olathe, the next town over, became convinced her yard was jam-packed with meteorites, and she donated $15,000 to Curry so he could buy meteorite-testing gear. Channel 8 news in nearby Grand Junction ran a story about Curry discovering the first moon rocks in North America. It was startling, to say the least. “He’s found outlines of crustaceans, snails and sea worms inside his meteors,” the report said. “Proof of alien life.”

Though Curry had yet to make any considerable proceeds off of meteorite sales, he began to picture himself as a captain of industry, a railroad tycoon of yore who could give back to his frontier town. He established the Osirius Foundation with plans to funnel proceeds from his meteorites to charity. He handed out meteorites to people he met like they were party favors. He also donated five specimens to the Montrose County Historical Society, which, according to the receipt he scribbled out, were worth $58,994,500.

During a meeting of the Montrose City Council, Curry gave a presentation about his vision for the town’s future. “I would like to present to the Council, an economic stimulus proposal involving an abundance of natural resources found here,” he wrote in a handout he distributed that day. He spoke of building a meteorite museum in town and creating a fenced-in park atop Sunset Mesa, where visitors could observe meteorites in situ. “With your assistance, support, and cooperation,” he declared, “I would like to market Montrose, and Montrose County, as the new ‘Meteorite Capital of the World.’”

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Nothing But Time and Tides and Salt and Mud and Warren Ellis

The Red Sands Maunsell sea fort in the Thames estuary, off the north coast of Kent. Photo by Russss via Flickr (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Graphic novelist Warren Ellis, of Transmetropolitan and Planetary fame, has a chapter in the new book Spirits of Place dedicated to the place where he lives: the Thames Estuary. It’s home to the Maunsell Sea Forts and the S.S. Richard Montgomery, a ship that sank in 1944 with cargo of thousands of pounds of undetonated ordinance; home to areas with Harry Potter-esque names like “Mucking Marshes” and “Foulness”; home to Viking settlements and pirate radio stations. Once described by 8th century Mercian King Offa as “a terrible place,” it’s an odd, out-of-the-way part of the world.

Even in the Eighties, R&B bands ruled Southend. I’d go some nights to an underground space between a bar, which would be rammed with bodies dancing to standards – this was the decadent point in the period, where a lot of bands were just playing stuff you knew from the Blues Brothers soundtrack album. And I’d stagger outside at some point for air or a cigarette or whatever, and the side door to the steps would open, and a plume of steam would belch out and rise up into the night, and I could pretend that I was in a real place, a real city with real history and culture where that happened a thousand times a night, every night.

Some nights, people would just stand around and watch that pillar of air and heat and sweat and kisses rise into the sky.

For a space that’s been close to a blank slate for as long as it’s been here – nothing but forest, settlements stuck to coasts and creeks – even an appropriated identity is an improvement. And not unsuitable for an island that’s barely even there and a delta that probably isn’t.

It’s his part of the world, though.

I live out here on the Thames Delta, still, a ten-minute walk from the shore. It’s a placeless place that tells stories about itself because it’s rarely existed in a dense enough form to generate its own history. It’s nothing but time and tides and salt and mud, and sometimes the mud reflects the sky and you just can’t see anything.

I tell stories for a living. I sit by the rivers and creeks with the ghosts of my ancestors, the Viking priests and dead writers and cunning folk, and I see the water run by and count the tides. We launch futures from here, but here we stay, as time flows by and the sea becomes the sky and a ship full of bombs ticks away.

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Sometimes a Coat Is Just a Coat, and Sometimes It Ruins a Kid’s Life

A black trench coat hangs on a mannequin against a light gray background
Photo by Housing Works Thrift Shops (CC BY 2.0).

For The Oregonian, Bethany Barnes takes an in-depth look at the experience of 16-year-old Sanders, an autistic high school student put through an extensive “threat assessment” (aka, “We think you might be the next school shooter”). Are threat assessments effective? What happens when the behaviors flagged for a threat assessment overlap the symptoms with totally separate physical or neurological issues?

It was easy to figure out why the teen’s attire worried people. Sanders’ signature piece of clothing was a big black trench coat.

Years ago, Mark gave Sanders the riding coat he picked up on a youthful adventure in Australia. Sanders loved the weight of the coat. As a person on the autism spectrum, he welcomed the heaviness. It provided comfort in a world that often overwhelmed him. He wore it no matter the weather. With pride, he would note that when it gets above 85 degrees, it will be 104 degrees inside the coat, a fact he learned in science class. He was so associated with the coat that one time he didn’t wear it, he was marked absent by mistake. Sanders eventually wore out Mark’s old coat and his grandma got him a new one for Christmas.

Now, what had begun as a beloved hand-me-down, an armor that made Sanders feel secure and protected from the world, made him vulnerable.

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Can the Political Override the Personal?

graffiti reading "the feminists are taking over!"
And not a moment too soon. (Photo by Rich Anderson via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0))

In an essay at n+1, Harmful to Minors author Judith Levine looks back at her ideological and sexual history, and at the contradictions that challenge a young woman simultaneously burgeoning into her feminist and her sexual selves. Her wide-ranging retrospective paints a particular picture of a young feminist in 1970 en route to exploring bigger issues: the concept that the definition of “consent” might be historical, and the tensions between the personal and political (or what we think is the political) in the midst of the sexual revolution.

His fly is unzipped. When did that happen? He is kissing my mouth. Technically speaking, he’s a good kisser. I concentrate on this and try to relax, as instructed.

His pants are on the floor and mine are halfway down my legs. Did he do this or did I? He presses himself against my crotch. I squirm. Does he think I’m encouraging him? He moves more vigorously. Sal’s and my lovemaking, languid and aimless, floats before me like a childhood idyll. Adam’s parts are making contact with my parts, one businesslike step after another.

This is sex is the adult world, I think. Boy meets girl. Boy fucks girl. Girl fucks boy. Boy gets what he wants. Girl—no, Liberated Woman—gets what she wants. I wanted this, I remind myself.

If heterosexual sex is like sleeping with the enemy, should the good feminist be a political lesbian? Perhaps unfortunately, desire doesn’t really work like that.

But it is one thing to know something and quite another to feel it, and there’s a great distance between what you think you should desire and what you desire. With women I see the light; the light burns with rage at men. But in the dark with a man, another desire burns. The inescapable fact is that I still want men and want them to want me; I still wish to love and be loved by a man. With time and the help of consciousness-raising and a growing pile of users’ manuals like Our Bodies, Ourselves, I am getting to know my body and liking sex more and more. But it will be years before I have an orgasm in the same room with another person, as one CR group member puts it.

I continue to conduct my sex life according to the folkways and wisdom of the sexual revolution: If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with. When I fail to be swept into sexual ecstasy, the rumor of frigidity whispers icily into my ear. The women’s movement, meanwhile, has given me permission both to please myself and to reject men. I whipsaw between self-abnegation and self-righteousness. The feminism that is the key to my sexual liberation also erects a barricade between my beliefs and my happiness.

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The Benefits of Spinsterhood

A bedroom with white walls and two large windows. In the middle is a bed covered with colorful blankets and pillows.
Photo by Emily May (CC BY 2.0)

Men who live alone have a special name for their homes: bachelor pads. But what do women who live alone have, other than the ability to absorb and discard endless comments about when they’re going to get married? In Curbed, solo-living advocate Ashley Fetters looks at the history, stereotypes, and trends around women who choose to maintain their own spaces.

Solitude is often considered a privilege when we can afford to choose it and a punishment when it’s thrust upon us, and the same seems to extend to solo-living situations: Moving out to a place of one’s own for peace, quiet, and privacy is an occasion for congratulations, while living alone as a result of being abandoned or left behind is a much more pitiable affair. In other words, there’s an assertive, active image of living alone and there’s a sad, passive image of living alone.

And as anyone who’s read Simone de Beauvoir might intuit, it’s easy to assign a certain masculinity to the “active” and a femininity to the “passive”—hence, for example, the disparity between the mischievous way one might say “bachelor” and the pitying or scornful way one might say “spinster” (no matter how much work women like Kate Bolick have put into arguing that spinsterhood is something to aspire to).

There’s been a tendency over the last century or two to imagine the solo-living man as someone who has chosen peaceful privacy and the solo-living woman as a sort of flawed societal leftover. Or perhaps more alarmingly, a woman who has chosen to reject her preordained role as helper to a husband and family.

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Just Try It, You’ll Like It, It’s Good for You

a bottle of soymilk next to a bowl of peeled soybeans and another bowl of whole edamame pods
Photo by Kjokkenutstyr Net (CC BY-SA 2.0).

The supermarket dairy aisle is increasingly the aisle of alterna-milks… but it all started with soy milk. Nadia Berenstein‘s deep dive into the history of soy milk at Serious Eats explains how soy milk was a hard sell for Americans until the Seventh-Day Adventists — who are vegetarian as a matter of of faith and are responsible for inventing many plant-based meat substitutes — decided to have a go at it.

Adventism’s soy-milk saint is Harry W. Miller, a doctor and medical missionary who spent decades in Japan and China, where he first became interested in soy foods. In 1931, Miller established an Adventist medical center in Shanghai, where cow’s milk was scarce and costly and where, though a handful of commercial soy-milk factories had recently begun operations, soy milk was usually not considered suitable for young children. In a series of feeding experiments, Miller and his medical staff showed that infants raised on soy milk were healthier than those given cow’s milk or Western baby foods; only breastfed babies did better. Cheaper and more nutritious than dairy milk, soy milk, Miller believed, was a perfect food—not just for babies, but for everyone—and he planned to build a soy-milk factory in Shanghai to make it more widely available.

There were just two problems: the flavor, and the farting. As traditionally prepared in China, soy milk often had a bitter taste and a peculiar flavor that soy-industry researchers call “beany.” “Beany” has variously been described as chalky, cardboard-y, or fishy; resembling sweaty feet; or reminiscent of licking a wet popsicle stick—all of which hint at its prismatic unpleasantness, particularly to Western palates.

Miller eventually had a divine revelation and figured out how to de-fart soy milk, but his first try at mass production didn’t go so well.

Miller’s Vetose Soya Milk factory began producing a bland, un-beany soy milk in Shanghai in 1937—a terrible time and place to start a new business. When the Japanese military invaded, Miller and his family fled, and the factory was destroyed in the ensuing fighting.

(Don’t worry! He started over again in Ohio.)

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Arundhati Roy: “Fiction is a Universe”

Arundhati Roy talks to a student during a 2016 march demaning the release of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University students who were arrested on sedition charges. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

In The Guardian, Tim Lewis curates an unconventional interview with Arundhati Roy: all the questions come from fans, famous and not. I particularly love her articulation of the ways in which all her writing, fiction and non-fiction, is political, in response to a question from writer Lionel Shriver about whether Roy worries that her activism detracts from her fiction.

I have always quarrelled with this word “activist”. I think it’s a very new word and I don’t know when it was born, but it was recently. I don’t want to have a second profession added to writing. Writing covers it. In the old days, writers were political creatures also, not all, but many. It was seen as our business to be writing about the world around us in different ways. So I don’t feel threatened or worried about that. For me, my fiction and my nonfiction are both political. The fiction is a universe, the nonfiction is an argument.

What I do worry about is the fact that writers have become so frightened of being political. The idea that writers are being reduced to creators of a product that is acceptable, that slips down your throat, which readers love and therefore can be bestsellers, that’s so dangerous. Today, for example in India, where majoritarianism is taking root – and by majoritarianism, I don’t just mean the government, I mean that individuals are being turned into micro-fascists by so many means. It is the mobs and vigilantes going and lynching people. So more than ever, the point of the writer is to be unpopular. The point of the writer is to say: “I denounce you even if I’m not in the majority.”

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“The Beasts of the Crossing Have Been Pushed Into the Light”

The Sonoran Desert, photo by brewbooks via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

There’s nothing I can say about Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s Jezebel essay, “A Theory of Animals,” about being an immigrant in the age of Trump, that is one-tenth as good as anything in the essay itself. Go read it.

Undocumented immigrants are good at surviving. We know how to find jobs, how to take care of each other when we are sick, what neighborhoods don’t require Social Security numbers to sign a lease, what public libraries have the best foreign language books, what local cops you can trust a domestic violence complaint to. We’ve built cities underground and for years we have thrived. We’ve watched Jay and Ye make “driving Benzes without benefits—not bad for some immigrants” a gangster boast. But the sun has come up on a new day. They know where we live now. They know how we’ve been surviving. They are determined to get rid of us, and we can no longer rely on our community’s miraculous evolution alone to protect us. We cannot expend all our energy every day just to survive, just to see another morning, like a desert animal. Because what is the lesson there? That we must shrink our hearts to make it? That we should grow thorns and hurt our loved ones if they come too close? That we should grow skin so thick that we may stop feeling? That we should lie still and not say anything, want anything, demand anything, strive for anything, march for anything, to expend as little energy as possible just to wake up in the morning for another day of being hunted for sport?

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The Dangerous Beauty of Russian

A Russian stamp from 1992 showing children's book character Cipollino, a little onion who fights the unjust treatment of the his vegetable friends and neighbors at the hands of the upper-class -- Prince Lemon and Lord Tomato.

Keith Gessen‘s parents left the Soviet Union when he was six, young enough that he speaks unaccented English but old enough that he still knows Russian — which he’s now teaching his son Raffi. In a lovely essay in The New Yorker, he reflects on bilingualism, child development, and why he’s teaching Raffi the language of a country he won’t even take him to visit.

When we started reading books to Raffi, I included some Russian ones. A friend had handed down a beautiful book of Daniil Kharms poems for children; they were not nonsense verse, but they were pretty close, and Raffi enjoyed them. One was a song about a man who went into the forest with a club and a bag, and never returned. Kharms himself was arrested in Leningrad, in 1941, for expressing “seditious” sentiments and died, of starvation, in a psychiatric hospital the following year; the great Soviet bard Alexander Galich would eventually call the song about the man in the forest “prophetic” and write his own song, embedding the forest lyrics into a story of the Gulag. Raffi really liked the Kharms song; when he got a little older, he would request it and then dance.

It’s difficult to encourage bilingualism when life is lived overwhelmingly in English, but eventually, the songs and stories and conversations begin to pay off — but to what end?

Raffi hummed the Nautilus Pompilus song on the way home. A few days later I heard him singing it to himself as he played with some Legos.

Ya hochu byt’ s toboy
Ya hochu byt’ s toboy
Ya hochu byt’ s toboy

And a few days after that, he said his first Russian sentence. “Ya gippopotam,” he said. I am a hippopotamus.

I was deeply, stupidly, indescribably moved. What had I done? How could I not have done it? What a brilliant, stubborn, adorable child. My son. I love him so much. I hope he never goes to Russia. I know that eventually he will.

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Looking for a Greener Death

An aquamation unit. Photo via bioresponsefuneral.com.

Aquamation, a method of body disposal that uses lye to dissolve muscles and organs — basically, anything that isn’t bone or tooth — is more environmentally-friendly than cremation and has a growing number of supporters who want it for themselves or their loved ones. Right now, though, it’s difficult to access and is only legal in a handful of states. As Emily Atkin’s story in The New Republic reveals, there are several groups with a vested interest in keeping it largely illegal, and they’re not afraid to use inflammatory rhetoric to get their way.

Representative Dick Hamm’s speech made national news that day, and not only because of his business interest in keeping human aquamation illegal in Indiana. “We’re going to put [dead bodies] in acid and just let them dissolve away and then we’re going to let them run down the drain out into the sewers and whatever,” Hamm said, comparing the process to “flushing” a loved one. This wasn’t accurate. Aquamation uses lye, not acid, and similar fluids are flushed down the drain during the embalming process. But Hamm’s hyperbole was effective. Though he was the only lawmaker to speak against the bill, it failed in a 34-59 vote.

The idea that aquamation is unnatural or gross or even immoral has impeded its adoption in other states. A bill to re-legalize it in New Hampshire, where it had been legal for two years before being repealed, was rejected in 2009 after lawmakers gave speeches similar to Hamm’s. “I don’t want to send a loved one to be used as fertilizer or sent down the drain to a sewer treatment plant,” Republican John Cebrowski said. His Republican colleague Mike Kappler added that “he didn’t want to drive by a sewage lagoon where a relative’s liquid remains would wind up.”

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