Category Archives: Uncategorized

Storm World

Uncategorized
Spread the love


Spread the love

Litani, a novel by Jess Lourey

Uncategorized
Spread the love

My childhood home had a double-barrel certified scary basement.

The wooden stairs leading down varied in size and smoothness, as they had all been replaced at different times over the century since the house was built. A large area of the concrete floor had been dug up as though something was buried down there. Two large kraken disguised as furnaces lurked in the darker nether regions. I would have to walk past them to get to the hidden chamber in the far corner, inside of which was the tunnel leading to an exit door I’m pretty sure I was the only person aware of. This cellar sat beneath a house occupied by a family (mine) that believed in spirits, poltergeists, and all of that. When WP Blatty’s “The Exorcist” came out, my mother obtained a copy and had all the family members read it so we would know what we were up against. That is when I learned that my cousin, at that time a Catholic Archbishop, had been trained as an Exorcist in the Vatican. The scary cellar, the buried chamber in the backyard, the concrete crypts in the woods near my house, the famous haunted cemetery a few blocks away (Graceland, home of Hattie the Hitchhiker, the ghost of a young woman who died on the corner by my house), all of it, created a world of built in horror for my very young self.

I’m sure that growing up in Scary Movie scarred me, but I grew out of it, and forgot about it, and never really thought about how a childhood spent in a world with some very dark corners could have an effect on an adult. Everything was fine. Then, I discovered Jess Lourey’s novels.

Now don’t’ get me wrong. Not all of Lourey’s novels are born in childhood horror of one kind or another, but several are. Her breakthrough novel Unspeakable Things resonates with me, since as an anthropologist with links to forensics and living in the same region, I have special memories of some of the things that shaped that book. The first novel of hers that I read was Bloodline, which is scary novel to Minnesota what a Coen Brothers’ film is also to Minnesota … is it fiction? Or is it documentary? Fiction? Or documentary? Hard to say.

Litani addresses that thing that happened several years ago that you may remember, documented to varying degrees in true-crime news shows ala 48-Hours, when large numbers of people were accused of abusing large numbers of children, but then it all turned out to be made up. Except it wasn’t actually made up, just gotten wrong by the authorities. It happens that the author’s childhood included this story not just because it was on the news, but because it was in her neighborhood, or at least, her extended lived experience as a kid. If I was an author like Jess Lourey, there would be a novel about my basement. Lourey’s novel (this one and others) is better than my basement.

I can judge how fun it is to read a particular book by how many times I highlight a phrase and note “steal this” (I’m a writer). My copy of Litani is full of those marginal notes. The characters are palpable, the story is intense and driving, and the pages demand turning. There be monsters in Litani. Pick this up and discover how central character, the very young Frankie Jubilee, hopes to slay them.

Litani is a free-standing novel, no need to read it in some order in relation to other novels by this author. But Lourey has some that are in order, and a new series coming out, the second one being available now for pre-order. Check out her work. The Quarry Girls, Unspeakable Things, Litani, the first in the new series, The Taken Ones, and the aforementioned Bloodline stand out. An entirely different lineage (only two books so far) concern young Salem and her best friend and various family members engaged in the modern phase of an ancient battle between forces of good and evil, and those two novels are page turners.

Funny thing about many, maybe most, of Lourey’s books: They may be classified as horror, but horror usually has stuff that isn’t real (like “The Exorcist” — yes, for the record I know that is made up!). Lourey’s novels, as far as I know, do not stray into unreality or science fiction. Somehow, they don’t have to, and somehow, that makes the horror more well done than a lot of other stuff that is out there. You can read these novels at night, but the experience might make you give people you meet during the day the side-eye.


Spread the love

Nitpicking the Press: Numbers Count!

Uncategorized
Spread the love

This morning’s news story: “President Biden Will Remove 1.5 Million Lead Pipes”

Thanks, Joe, but “no thanks” to the culture of journalism, which sometimes strings words together that make no sense. We do not count pipe this way, usually. A line of pipe that runs from a main to a house may be made up of one or more pipes (usually more), if you count the number of tubular objects fixed together to connect everything up. Say they the installers use five pipe segments. Is that five pipes that President Biden will dig up, or is it one pipe all fixed together? The water pipe that feeds Boston, Massachusetts is a complex of pipes that runs about 70 miles, I believe there are two of them in parallel, and although they are not made of lead so President Biden will not be digging them up, I suspect there are tens of thousands of segments joined together to make that work. Or does this count as two?

So who is counting wrong? CONTINUED ON SUBSTACK


Spread the love

How Trump Ends

Uncategorized
Spread the love

I heard an absolutely awful person (via media not someone I know) proudly complaining that if a good friend or lover suffered a physical insult, such as tripping over a broken sidewalk and landing on their face, that she thereafter could not look at that person again without disdain.

That sounded unbelievable until I remembered this story: SEE MY SUBSTACK!


Spread the love

Enviro-Misconceptions and Wrongness

Uncategorized
Spread the love

Is climate change accelerating? No.

A subset of climate change scientists and activists are known in the mainstream science community as doomers. These are often credentialed and legitimate scientists who prefer the scarier interpretations of data, and who tend to have hair-on-fire reactions that they pass on to the general public. This does not help us in the broader mission of helping the public understand the science. Assertions that underestimate the amount of warming or the severity of effects do not help; assertions that overshoot the mark also do not help.

I wrote a substack on this, which you can visit HERE.


Spread the love

Happy Memorial Day: Take Down Your Flag

Uncategorized
Spread the love

There is a story about a young woman named Yara. Yara worked for the city of Franklin in the clerk’s office. During election season, she worked mainly on elections, and during the rest of the year, other things, including staffing the “input line,” the main telephone interface with the public.

One fine June morning she left her house in a quiet cul-de-sac walking distance from City Hall. It was actually her parent’s house; she was living with them until she saved up enough money to move to the Boston area, where she had deferred admission to a graduate program in public policy. Her passion was to work for the government, because she believed public service to be her calling, and she believed in good government. This was something she picked up from her grandfather, who had been a civil servant in Iran; he was an honest government worker, who believed in the elusive concept of democracy. Thus his removal to the united States decades earlier.

Anyway, Yara headed out towards work and as she passed by two side-by-side homes near the corner, the shuddered a bit, thinking about the occupants. They were known to her as MAGA people. One of the residents, a man in his 50s, had one time let himself into Yara’s home while the family was eating dinner, to tell them what the #BLM sign they had just put out on their lawn really means. About how it was racist, and all lives actually matter. And so on.

Read the rest on my substack.


Spread the love

Is global warming speeding up?

Uncategorized
Spread the love

Is global warming speeding up?

There has been some discussion about this recently. For some, if you look at the changes in global surface temperature, it seems like the rate of warming has increased. For others, an apparent uptick in rate of warming is just a normal short term shift in the rate of warming that is offset by prior and future downturns in rate. Regardless of whether there is a change in rate of warming, the question itself brings up a number of sub-questions of interest. Some of these questions are about climate science, some are about how to wrangle and interpret data, and some are about the rhetorical interface between science and the public conversation.

I have some thoughts.


Spread the love

My Bear And Man Thing

Uncategorized
Spread the love

Years ago I wrote about the bear and the man, sans the bear. (But there was a dog.) I thought it might be a good time to reprise.

Bold Assertions

Do you know me? Yes? How well and for how long, and how good is your memory? If you’ve known me for a while you might remember that in 2009, as chief proprietor of a widely read science blog, I shocked many people in the skeptics/science world (aka Friends of Big Bang) by coming out firmly against rape. Within a year or so I came out with another shocker: I suggested that under certain circumstances men out alone at night, when encountering a women also out alone at night, might give her a wide berth in order to not engender fear. Cross the street instead of bearing down (as it were) on the person you don’t even know.

These bold assertions overlapped in time with Elevatorgate. Remember that? My position — no on rape, and also no on being a dick — were sufficiently shocking in the world of self styled intellectuals (and actual intellectuals such as Richard Dawkins himself) that I and all the others who were saying similar things at the time were attacked relentlessly by a then growing MRA movement (Men’s Rights Activism). In fact, I’m pretty sure that Rebecca Watson and the women of Skepchick, PZ Myers, Myself, and a couple of others fueled the growth of that movement without intending to do so. As recently as several months ago, one of the MRAs threatened to harass one of my family members “until the day he dies” out of spite.

Read the rest on my substack!


Spread the love

Oldsplaining The Young Is Cheugy

Uncategorized
Spread the love

How many times have you been to a political meeting and someone says “we need to get more young people on board” or “we need to reach out to yoots” or words to that effect? Lots of times. Maybe almost every meeting that goes longer than a half hour, and they all go longer than a half hour. The conversation often veers into a discussion of strategies to find and recruit young folks, and sometimes, into a complain session about what the young folks are doing wrong….

Read my latest Substack. Also, bonus section on why you are wrong about polling. HERE


Spread the love

Mann’s victory seems to be timed perfectly to match its significance in today’s political climate

Uncategorized, ,
Spread the love

Michael E Mann, climate scientist, has won a law suit against iffy academic Rand Simberg deplorable radio jock Mark Steyn, for defamation. The details are in the statement released by Mann and his legal team, below.

This entire drama started with the famous “climategate” episode, in which emails passed among scientists were kidnapped and tortured to make them look like admissions or proof of a conspiracy to rig the climate data to show that global warming is real. There were conspiracy theories before that, of course, but this one was firmly tied into science denialism by the global right wing, and ultimately, the American right wing and republicans in Congress. This and related parallel shenanigans involving Congressional committees set the cultural stage for neo-conspiracies such as birtherism, and ultimately, conspiracies related to election denial.

We are seeing multiple juries of ordinary citizens and judges with diverse backgrounds awarding all of us with truth in the E. Jean Carrol case, the Michael Mann case, and elsewhere. The arc of the universe does not bend towards justice. Clearly, when left on its own, it bends away from justice. But persistence and simply being right can push it in the right direction, and that is what we are seeing now.

Thank you Mike Mann, congratulations!


Spread the love

Does the turkey make you sleepy?

Uncategorized
Spread the love

Maybe tryptophan, an ingredient in turkey makes you sleepy. Maybe not. I suspect it is has either no effect or a small effect. But when people say “the turkey makes you sleepy because it has tryptophan in it,” they are repeating an easily disprovable myth.

Let’s say tryptophan makes you sleepy. Why does turkey take the rap? Other things with tryptophan: Cattle, swine, chickens, fish. Pretty much, animals. Plants too. Tryptophan is a basic building block, aka amino acid, in your basic biological protein.

So if turkey makes you sleepy because of tryptophan, then when you mix up that whey protein super shake, to up your protein intake on a gym workout day, you should pass out. If you consume 120 grams of protein in your workout juice, that’s 2,160 mg of tryptophan.

If you look at a USDA list of nutrients, and search for tryptophan, you’ll find that pork, steak, hamburger, turkey breast, etc. etc. all have almost identical amounts of the amino acid, because the are, after all, almost identical animals (all tetrapods) at the 20,000 foot level (but don’t drop your turkey out of a helicopter at any altitude). But turkey breast has a tiny bit more than the other, for random reasons.

I think the real reason you take a nap is because you need a nap and the turkey takes the rap for your nap. The turkey is none the wiser, so go for it.


Spread the love