Showing Up

personby Madeleine Robins
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A hand-lettered protest sign upside down, propped against a green plaid couch.Like five million of my fellow Americans, I spent Saturday, April 5, outdoors in the company of a few thousand neighbors, protesting the policies and behavior of the Executive branch, and the lackluster resistance by the Legislative branch. Here in San Francisco we were lucky: the sun was bright, the skies were blue, it was comfortably warm, and the minimal police presence appeared to be there to manage traffic. There were speakers at the rally I was at (albeit with a very underpowered sound system that made the speeches hard to hear) covering the gamut of areas of concern, from illegal deportation to attacks on civil rights, to tariffs, to the defunding of damned near everything I care about (National Parks, education, medical research, museums, etc.).  We waved our signs, chanted some chants, generally let the world know that we are angry–enraged–about the actions the current president and his minions have been taking since January 20. Then, as the rally wound down I wandered over to public transit and rode home in company with some of the folk who had been at the rally too (as evidenced by the signs and sunburn I saw around me). However angry we in the aggregate might be, the folks at the SF rally were polite and entirely non-violent; there were kids in strollers, elders in walkers, folks in wheelchairs, just… everyone.

My own personal bubble is filled with people who are concerned about the way things are going and how much worse it could get, so I was startled to encounter people in San Francisco who didn’t know that the rallies were happening. Not that they disapproved, they weren’t aware (when I stopped to get a coffee, the barista saw the sign I carried, asked what was going on. When I told her, she moved my coffee order up to the front “so you won’t be late”). I know there are  people in my neighborhood–yes, even in San Francisco–who think the actions of the current administration are just dandy (although I do wonder how they’re feeling given the state of the stock market right now). I think it’s important for me to remember that there are a lot of different ways to feel about right now. I don’t know how the small conservative cohort of my neighborhood feels about the rallies–one guy I ran into rolled his eyes at my sign, but said “at least you got a nice day for it.”

So what was the point?

Showing up. Being there among others who are as frightened and angry as I am. Part of the tactics being used to dismantle the government and disrupt social norms is to persuade us that we’re each in it alone, that we have no power, that we have no voice. But I felt good about showing up. I felt good that there were others–thousands of others in my city, and millions across the country–who also showed up.

Showing up doesn’t fix things, any more than Senator Cory Booker’s magnificent 25 hour filibuster on the Senate floor fixed things. Not everything one does creates a fix. But showing up creates solidarity, underscores the problems being protested, energizes the people there with an energy that can spill outward and onward. It can show the people with power who are wavering about taking action that there is pressure to act rightly. And it can get people off the bench: a lot of the speakers at the rally I was at encouraged people to do the things that create solutions: volunteer, run for office, make phone calls, rattle cages; there were places to sign up to do all of those things, and those tables were busy.

I know people in other states whose weather was not as fine as ours in San Francisco. They stood out in the cold and the rain, bundled up and with umbrellas and rainbows, and they showed up. I stand in solidarity with all of them.

A Week in the Life…

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m in the final throes of the thesis-writing. In five weeks, my thesis will be submitted for examination. This means the complete thing needs to be done by this Friday. Sounds fine? Except… this Saturday is Passover. Some friends helped me with some of the shopping and I’ve ordered everything else for delivery plus the fresh stuff at the market), but I need to have the flat clean (since I will be hosting) and the kitchen made as proper as I can. I come from a family that had special dishes for the festival, but my health makes a whole bunch of things not possible and complete kashruth is one of them. I do a best-I-can version, which is not at all suitable for anyone religious.

I do some thesis, do some Passover prep, meet another deadline, deal with the latest panic (my mouse died over the weekend, for instance and my printer is currently sulking), do some thesis, do a little work on my tax, do some of my exercises, wonder if I’ll get any sleep, worry about my mother (who has COVID, as do two of my close friends), do some thesis, do a little work on my tax, and so on until I can sleep. It will all be sorted by Sunday, and then I will quite possibly not wake up for 36 hours.

Tomorrow I have coffee with a neighbour. Normally I would ask to not do anything extra this week, because I’m already doing 18 hour days, but he’s very seriously ill and can be quite difficult even when he’s well and I cannot leave it long. So… tomorrow.

I will have to send someone a note about a Wednesday meeting. It’s with a local candidate. We have elections on 3 May, you see. I really need to talk to him and I’ve tried and tried and failed and failed and finally he comes to the Jewish Community Centre and it’s the Wednesday before my thesis has to be sent and before Passover. His timing is so bad.

He should have asked to see us last week, or left it until the week before the election. The timing suggests that he really doesn’t see antisemitism (or us, as the local Jewish community) as a high priority. Also, his office gave me the run around when I offered to talk to someone about why things are the way they are at the moment – and this is part of my academic expertise and I can be really useful… The staff of two politicians have given me the run around. I so miss my previous self, who was asked about things! Anyhow, I’ve decided not to offer my knowledge and understanding to politicians any more. I’d rather meet my deadlines and enjoy cooking for Passover.

Other people are asking me about things, which is a bit of a relief. My big insight for today is that it’s actually very easy to identify who is marching for hate and who is marching with hope that they can improve the wrongs of the world. It’s not what side people take (the good side of history that so many people claim right now… not actually how most of the world operates).

The way people march tells us so much. Look at the body language and listen to the slogans. Do the slogans provide methods to effect change, or are they declamations that lead nowhere. Does the group prevent others from passing, or block access to anywhere? How angry are the people, and what reasons do the slogans give for any anger? Do marchers stop and talk and listen, or do they simply shout, or do they accuse strangers of… almost anything. Telling strangers who the strangers are and shouting in their face is the issue here: actual change agents talk and listen, because change happens when people can see they’re a potential part of solutions. Those marches that breathe fire and brimstone and don’t take a moment to stop being angry, those marches where (as happened this week) a group surround a single stranger and bullies them – they’re the marching equivalent of Nazis in the 1930s. This doesn’t mean their cause is terrible: it means that these particular people are bullies.

Look at how people march and what specific goals they aim to achieve with the march, and whether not even a small part of those marching bully anyone watching or anyone trying to get past and you get a good notion of whether they really care about others… or whether they are informed by hate. If you don’t want to carry that hate with you, you need a way of winding down.

My way is often thinking about food. I have learned a whole new bread-making method in the last few weeks, entirely to handle the antisemitic hate I encounter. This week is not about that bread, however: now that I’ve sorted out how I will obtain all the things for cooking, I have most of a menu for Saturday night.

We begin, of course, with the ritual things. I have horseradish (it cost an arm and a leg, but I have some – it’s simply not in season in autumn) and matzah. I will serve the matzah with charoseth. My father’s charoseth recipe is wonderful: apples and almonds and sweet wine made from Concord grapes and enormous amounts of cinnamon.

After the charoseth, there will be the traditional eggs and potatoes, to be dipped in salt water. I have organic free range hen’s eggs from my local egg farmer ($25 for 60 large eggs, for those tracking the prices of eggs), and also a little packet of quail eggs. There will be no chopped liver – I have the ingredients (the liver is in the freezer) but intend to eat it on Friday week.

After that, of course, chicken soup with kneidlach (matzah dumplings) both of which I make according to old family recipes. The main course is roast chicken (with lemon and garlic) and vegetables. The roasted vegetables will be potato and lotus root. I haven’t decided all the side dishes yet, but there are two types of pickled cucumber, and the same kind of ancient olives that grew near Jerusalem around the time the Temple fell. There is a story behind why these olives grow in Australia, and that story has family connections.

I was going to make cakes (an orange-almond one and a choc-nut one) for dessert, but I think we’re skipping dessert and going straight to afters. The Passover meal I grew up with is far, far too large for modern Australia. A friend found me chocolate macaroons and I have dark chocolate, and the best organic dried muscatels from a local farm. I will have fresh figs with this, and maybe some other autumn fruit. I may make one of the cakes during the week… or I may not.

Tomorrow, to give me time away from my computer on such a busy day, I shall make bagels. That’s the last of the flour and yeast. Tomorrow lunch is the last of the rice and the last of the nori. Step by step I sort my world, and then I cook the big dinner on Saturday.

II live such a simple, slow life.

Real Problems and the Stupid Coup

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I finished reading Ed Yong’s An Immense World this week. It is a brilliant explanation of the myriad of senses of the animals on this planet. He has talked to so many great scientists doing deep work, and made what they’re doing clear to the rest of us.

But it left me with — once again — the understanding that we have real problems to address on this planet and instead we’re forced to deal with what Rebecca Solnit has taken to calling the “Stupid Coup,” a name that becomes more apt with each day.

In the last pages of the book, Yong talks about the problems posed by light pollution — which affects the senses of many insects, birds, and bats, not to mention human beings. But he also mentions such things as ships crossing the ocean affecting whales, the damage to the Great Coral Reef, and how such things create a cascade of damage.

About ten years ago, my partner and I backpacked in the Ventana Wilderness, in the northern part of the Los Padres National Forest here in California. I tell many stories about that trip — how we waded the Carmel River 25 times (not an exaggeration), how bad the trail was in spots — but one of the real glories of it was that, with the exception of a airplane or two overhead, we didn’t hear any human noises for three days except the ones we made.

And we could see the stars (through the trees and clouds, at least) because we were surrounded by enough mountains and trees to block light from the nearby cities. One of those nights — the one where we collapsed into our sleeping bags, completely exhausted — we heard frogs and crickets for hours. Nothing else.

Do you know how rare that is?

I doubt that humans, who have only been living in this overlit and noisy state for about a hundred years – somewhat longer for noise – have adapted, even though we know what’s going on. You can be damn sure that the other creatures on the planet have not.

Fortunately, a whole lot of scientists have ideas on what to do about that for the benefit of both people and all the other creatures.

Unfortunately, what they recommend will not even get discussed these days because of the Stupid Coup. People who aren’t willing to consider the effects of air pollution on human beings (“drill, baby, drill”) are certainly not going to worry about light pollution reducing the insect population. Continue reading “Real Problems and the Stupid Coup”…

For the Good of the Realm in Outcasts StoryBundle

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Covers of all the books in the Outcasts Storybundle.

My novel For the Good of the Realm is part of the Outcasts StoryBundle, curated by Danielle Ackley-McPhail.

As the description on the StoryBundle link says, “Outsiders. Rebels. Free-Thinkers. Who doesn’t love an underdog?” In all these books an outsider plays a key role even though they’re likely not appreciated.

As with all storybundles, you can get the whole package of ebooks for $20 or pay more if you’re so inclined.

Read more about the bundle on the eSpec Books blog.

In Troubled Times: Still Here, Still Holding on to Hope

personby Deborah J. Ross
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I first posted this in August, 2019. I’m still here, still holding on to hope. We aren’t all crazy or hopeless or overwhelmed on the same day. When events are too much, we can borrow a bit of courage from one another.

Following the 2016 election, I posted a series of essays called “In Troubled Times.” I wrote about despair, fear, anger, powerlessness, and determination. Then the initial fervor faded. Exhaustion set in for me as well as for so many others. Emotional exhaustion. Spiritual exhaustion. But the constant, increasingly vitriolic litany of hate and fear, as well as the assaults on democratic norms and civil liberties not only continued, it escalated.

What is to be done in the face of such viciousness, such disregard for human rights and dignity? Such an assault upon clean and air water, endangered species, and the climate of planet we depend on for our lives? How do we preserve what we value, so that in resisting we do not become the enemy?

I don’t know what the most effective strategy of resistance is. Social media abounds in calls to action. I do know that there are many possible paths forward and that not every one way is right for every person. Not everyone can organize a protest march (think of five million protesters in front of the White House; think of a national strike that brings the nation’s businesses to a halt). I find myself remembering activist times in my own past.

I came of age during the Civil Rights Movement and the Viet Nam war resistance (and, later, the women’s rights movement of the 1970s). I wore my hair long, donned love beads, and marched in a gazillion rallies. Those memories frequently rise to my mind now. In particular, I remember how frustrated I got about ending the Viet Nam war. In 1967, I joined the crowd of 100,000 protesters in San Francisco. I wrote letters, painted posters, and so forth. And for a time, it seemed nothing we did made any difference. My friends still got drafted and not all of them made it home, and those that did were wounded in ways I couldn’t understand. Others ended up as Canadians. I gave up hope that the senseless carnage would ever end.

But it did. And in retrospect, all that marching and chanting and singing and letter-writing turned out to be important. The enduring lesson for me is that I must do what I feel called to do at the moment, over and over again, different things at different times, never attempt to second-guess history, and especially never give in to despair. Enough tiny pebbles rolling down a slope create a landslide.

My first political memories date back to the 1950s, when I saw my union-organizer father marching in a picket line. The 1950s were a terrifying time for a lot of folks. For my family, it was because my parents were active in their respective unions, and both had been members of “the Party” in the 1930s. My father was fired from his job on a pretext and soon became the target of a formal Federal investigation. (He’d been under FBI surveillance since 1947.) The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit to take away his naturalized citizenship. It was a time of incredible fear: people committed suicide or “went underground” (now we call it “off the grid”) by living in safe houses and using only cash. Some of our relatives did that, and our home became one of those havens. The DoJ suit was dismissed in 1961, although the FBI continued secretly watching my father until his death in 1974. I should add that it is so odd to me to regard that bureau as protecting democracy in current times, after their 1984-like behavior in the 1950s and beyond.

The point of all this is not that my family had a hard time. Lots of families had a hard time. Lots more are having an unbelievably hard, terrifying, horrific time today. The point is that we got through it. Not unscarred — it’s still excruciatingly difficult for me to call attention to myself by political activism. My parents never stopped working for a better, more just and loving world. They never lost hope.

In college I used to have a hand-written quote from the mid-60s by Carl Oglesby (I think) on my door. I searched for it on the internet and couldn’t find it, but it said something along the lines of this not being a time to give in to fear but to drink lots of orange juice, to love one another, and to bring all our joy and gusto to creating a world of peace, justice, and equality. The same holds true today. Since we live in a time when fear, selfishness, racism, and violence are proclaimed from the very highest levels of government, then we need our own turbo-charged, heavy-duty, loud and joyous commitment to the values we hold. And drinking your orange juice isn’t a bad thing either: we of the people’s resistance need to take good care of ourselves.

This is what I tell young people today. I remember what my parents told me when I was wigging out about some minor incident or another during the Cold War:

Keep your eye on what you would like to bring about, not just what new outrage is filling the news. Persevere with unstoppable steadfastness. Nourish yourself as an antidote to exhaustion. Pace your efforts. Keep balance in your life. Make music. Dance. Drink orange juice. Love fiercely.

On the Eve of April Fools’

personby Gillian Polack
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Tomorrow is April Fools’ Day. I’m not reminding you of this. I’m trying to work out how to read the news tomorrow. You see, our next Federal election is on May 3.

Australia has a very different election cycle to the US – we’ve only known about the coming election for a few days. We’ve known for a while that the last possible day for the election was May 17 and our elections are always on a Saturday. We also know that the preferred date for the election for the current government was mid-April but that the Queensland cyclone rudely intervened. Now Queenslanders are upset because the election is on their long weekend. Queensland’s vote is critical this time round, and so many people are arguing about how upset Queenslanders will vote.

We have an unpopular party currently in power (Labor, which is our liberal), an unpopular coalition not currently in power (Liberal/National, which is our right wing, with a leader who is often described as a mini-Trump or “Mr Potato Head”), and a bunch of unpopular minor parties, one of whom is the Greens. The Greens are spectacularly good at calling for a shared society while they promote antisemitism.

This is the messiest election I’ve seen in fifty years of election watching. It’s also going to decide the nature of Australia in a fundamental way. We have a silent majority, you see, and we have the compulsory vote: the silent majority will speak. None of us know enough about that silent majority. All the pollsters are discovering new ways of finding out. Today, for instance, we found out the most likely voting pattern for under 30s in cities.

What has this to do with April Fools’? It’s simple. In a mad-crazy election lead-up, all the major and minor parties are jabbering as if the world will end if they fall silent for even a second. Very little of what they say makes sense. At least on April Fools’ Day we know for certain not to believe what they promise.

Who Gets to Be Strong?

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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When I speak to women about self defense and their ability to fight back, I sometimes get told “It’s different for you because you’re big.”

It’s true that I am larger than the average woman. I am, in fact, about the size of the average U.S. man – or was, at least, until I began some of the inevitable shrinking that comes from age. I also have a pretty classic mesomorph body – sturdy, broad-shouldered, and so forth.

I am, in fact, larger than Mitsugi Saotome Shihan, under whom I studied Aikido for years, and was, in fact, also somewhat larger than my karate teacher back in the 1980s, who I think was around 5’7” and weighed about 140. It should go without saying that both of them could kick my ass, and still can, even though they’re in their late 80s now.

Which is to say that one thing spending half my life in martial arts has taught me is that size doesn’t matter. In fact, part of the lore of martial arts is that training makes it possible for small people to fight effectively.

Size can be intimidating – I’ve had large male friends explain to me that they never got into fights because no one wanted to start trouble with them. Though come to think of it, that was guys who were basically good natured. Guys with a chip on their shoulder tended to get into trouble no matter what size they were.

I might be big enough to telegraph “not worth the trouble” but I’m certainly not big enough to be intimidating to troublesome guys. But I do also have an attitude.

You can be small and still have attitude. I still remember back in my early days of Aikido coming into the women’s dressing room and hearing one of my fellow students – who was maybe 5 feet tall – say, “I was training with this guy who didn’t think women could do this, so I threw him over there and then I threw him the other way.” She was demonstrating hand movements as she spoke and I recall thinking that I was going to be very careful when I trained with her.

Here’s another thing: no one ever takes me for a man. I mean, I’m large for a woman and my voice is relatively deep – I used to be an alto, but my singing range is more tenor these days, maybe almost baritone. Not to mention that I’m loud and I’m hard to shut up.

It might be the hair – I have lots of it. Or my hips. Anyway, something about me tells people I’m a woman, and no one ever assumes I might be trans. Continue reading “Who Gets to Be Strong?”…

An Academic Lens on What We Do, Plus Floaty Potatoes

personby Madeleine Robins
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This past week I braved the rigors of flying in America (spoiler: flights were thankfully uneventful) to go to Orlando, Florida for ICFA. That stands for the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, which is put on by IAFA (the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts). I have been going to ICFA for maybe a dozen years; it is one of my favorite conventions. A lot of that has to do with the writers and artists who attend, in addition to the academic professionals who come to deliver papers and be on panels. Possibly the most satisfactory programming–to me, anyway–is when you have academic and creative folk on a panel, sharing perspectives.

What kinds of things get talked about? Here are the titles of a handful of panels and discussions:

  • The Haunted House is a Fruiting Body: Fungus in Moreno-Garcia and Kingfisher
  • Devil’s In the Details: place and personhood in Horror
  • Monstrous Adaptations, Translations and Appropriations
  • A Wolf in the Fold: Werewolves in Modernity and Post-Modernity
  • Accepting, Resisting, and Complicating the Zombie
  • History is Written by…The Power of Alternative History in Fantasy

Plus, there are readings by the creative guests, and a performance of flash plays (disclaimer: I usually wind up performing in the flash plays. This year the plays were so flash they were one minute long, intermixed with improv. It was enormously fun). There are banquets and awards dinners which I usually don’t attend, and a ton of people to talk with.

Part of what I like about ICFA is that so much of the time my head is down and my attention is on my own paper, and I don’t think about what someone trained in reading and understanding text in a literary or philosophical sense might think of what I’m doing. And that’s a good thing: if I thought about that too much I very likely would not write anything ever again. But to see the kind of thoughtful critical treatment of fantastic literature that the participants at ICFA provide is heartening. I came up in a time when SF and fantasy were the decidedly junior members of the literary firm; that’s not the case any more.

Like most conventions, though, the very best time is sitting around the pool (Florida, right?) and talking with friends old and new, talking about writing and publishing and the world. Going out to dinner. Looking for the alligator who very occasionally used to waddle by the lake (I saw him once, years ago. Never since).

The convention runs Wednesday – Saturday night. Most participants leave on Sunday morning, but some of us stay an extra day and have an adventure: go to Gatorland or, as I did this year, head to the Blue Springs State Park to see manatees. There were so many manatees, and their calves! Apparently the local term for manatee is “floaty potato.” It is apt. I honestly wonder about the early European sailors who thought manatees were mermaids–that’s what a long time on a ship will do to your perception.

Anyway: ICFA. Highly recommended.

Witter-time and dissertations

personby Gillian Polack
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For the next few weeks everything’s going to be a bit rushed and my mind may be a tad wayward. I have, you see, put in my notice to submit my thesis. This is my least favourite part of doing a PhD, normally, and a bit worried because right now I am kinda enjoying it. What’s wrong with me? I don’t sleep at all well, and I want it finished, but right now, the revision and thought is rather fun. When it stops being fun, then I’ll know I’m nearly finished.

While our dissertations are not that different to US or UK or European dissertations, the Australian examination process is its own thing. This is because it was set up at a time when distance and cost prevented committees from meeting in person and before modern technology allowed online meetings. Because of this, most Australian PhD examinations are still done through three examiners evaluating the written text. That’s it. I’ve been an examiner, and you are sent the document (it used to be a printed and bound document, but these days printing and binding mostly happen later) and read it and fill in a form and that’s that.

I enjoy examining others’ theses, but do not at all enjoy mine being examined. You sit and wait and sit and wait and sit and wait. Mostly, everything is done within three months… except for my first PhD examination, which took three years. It was also fraught. It left emotional scars and also cost me my first career. It’s very hard to get job interviews when your PhD has been under examination for about as long as it would take to do a whole new PhD.

I have maybe two weeks to finish writing the thesis, then a few more weeks for all the various other stages to be complete. Ticking boxes and jumping hoops.

It’s very good training for fiction writers, actually. I am much pickier about sending manuscripts to publishers because of this training. I don’t wait for an editor to sort my grammar and check for typos and ensure that the house style is met: I do it myself. I’m not as good at these things as I used to be, however. I miss the days of more energy and better eyesight and being really annoyed at stray split infinitives or commas. My thesis still has to have all these things sorted, along with proper citations and formatting. Several of the weeks before I submit, then, are to allow a copy editor to take a look. It’s part of the system right now, and good for me… but I’m determined to see how little work I can leave for the copy edit: it’s a matter of pride.

This leads to some odd moments. I was supposed to rewrite a paragraph yesterday, and instead I spent ten minutes analysing the text and seeing if I really needed my second footnote. This is not a document with many footnotes, unlike my History PhD. Different disciplines have quite different requirements. I used to have so many footnotes that I wrote 103 footnotes into my first novel. The editor had me take some out…. But it is still a footnoted novel. Back then, we had to assess the space for footnotes on each page: it wasn’t automatic. It’s ironic that now the word processor does this, I only have very occasional footnotes.

My first PhD was formatted by me, myself and I on a MacSE. Two floppy drives and much blue screen of death. That machine cost me 25% of a year’s scholarship. It was that long ago. I would print my drafts out on a dot matrix printer, and took discs into the university printer to print the final and photocopy it. The printed copies were then bound and sent to examiners, one of whom was in Canada. My then-thesis contained a vast amount of Old French and a little Latin, which totally thwarted any spellcheck by anyone who was not me.

Everyone was so impressed I was working on the computer all by myself back then. That’s how long ago it was. Desktop computers were exciting and new and I was able to do all the things myself. I typed other people’s theses in the last year of my undergraduate life. Not many theses, but I was a fast typist and accurate and now… I’m neither.

I wish I could claim age for this loss of skill, since I was an undergraduate over forty years ago, but the sad reality is that when I joined the public service it was at a time when there was much mistreatment of young women with typing skills. So many of us developed RSI. In my case, my supervisor was really annoyed that I had a PhD and he didn’t, even though I was still waiting for the examination results. He would give me pages of typing at 5 pm. “It’s urgent,” he claimed, which is how he skipped sending it to the typing pool. I was a policy analyst, not a typist but he would give me the work and then go home. A small sliver of his personality helped make up the composite boss-from-hell in one of my novels. So, so many people who read that novel tell me that they had that boss.

I am wittering, aren’t I? This is avoidance. I need to finish editing the Introduction and Literature Review. By the end of today, I have to apply one set of comments to the whole thesis. Then I have marked up text to sort out. Then another set of notes. I have until the weekend to have done all of this and I am, right now, procrastinating. Most of my Monday was spent clearing urgent stuff so that I could immerse myself in sorting out the thesis. That was also procrastinating. I’m nervous of Chapters Two and Three and Four, you see. Very nervous.

Breathe, but Safely

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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During the pandemic I figured out that Covid and many other diseases spread through the air and could be minimized and contained with good indoor air quality methods. While I was far from alone in this understanding – I learned about it from some very smart people – those with the clout to make sure we improved air in every place from schools to public buildings to offices and other workplaces ignored or minimized the problem.

As a result, many of us still find it necessary to wear masks in a lot of indoor spaces, something that is not only annoying, but actually under attacks. Far too little has been done to improve indoor air quality despite the fact that the benefits go much farther than avoiding contagious diseases and include improved cognitive functioning and avoidance of health problems caused by chemicals trapped in poorly ventilated spaces.

So when I stumbled on Carl Zimmer’s book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe while browsing in a bookstore, I was intrigued. I knew Zimmer was a science writer for The New York Times, and the book seemed to have thorough reporting.

What convinced me to buy this thick book in hardback rather than wait until it was available in the library was the blurb from Ed Yong, who called Zimmer “one of the very best science writers” and noted that the book would leave readers “agog at the incredible world that floats unseen around us and outraged at the forces that stopped us from appreciating that world until, for many people, it was too late.”

I almost never buy books based on blurbs, but since Yong is a brilliant science writer and a man of fierce integrity when it comes to his profession, I had no doubt that he was giving his honest opinion.

And he was right. Air-Borne is a superb book that shows deep research into the history of the things that float in our air – much more than viruses – and of the people who have struggled to show us that we need to pay attention to what we’re breathing.

I was already outraged before I read it, but looking at the history increased my fervor. So many scientists came up with valuable clues to how viruses, bacteria, and fungi spread through the air only to be pushed aside or overlooked.

The book starts with a 2023 concert by the Skagit Valley Chorale, the choir in Washington state that experienced a super-spreader event that left two people dead after they met to rehearse during the early days of the pandemic. The number of people infected at that rehearsal was one of the things that made people realize this virus was air-borne.

Zimmer was at that concert with a CO2 meter in his pocket, trying to gauge if he needed a mask. As someone who often travels with a CO2 meter, since the amount of CO2 in the air gives you a good idea of the ventilation in a space, I recognized a kindred spirit. Continue reading “Breathe, but Safely”…