Colloid

On feeling proud under smoke-filled skies

Thanks for reading my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay, some of my recent writing, then some thoughts on the media that I am consuming and finally some vegan food and recipe recommendations. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own. 

If you are here because you like my writing about science or my Instagrams about cooking, you may not be interested in every essay in this space, but please do stick around until I loop back to whatever it is that we have in common.

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COLLOID*

The sky had turned orange well before noon, but we all kept typing on our computers. 

In my line of sight: my screen, my second screen, a printer, my colleague who reports on the environment bobbing his head to something that was coming through his company-issued noise-canceling headphones.

In the corner of my eye: my colleague who reports on health wearing a mask out of fear of microparticles making it in through the large glass windows of our office, my colleague who reports on technology wearing a mask out of fear of a now very familiar virus, orange glow seeping through the floor-to-ceiling window.

On Twitter: my editor sharing images of how dusty New York had become for our international audience, arguments about whether the media only cares for environmental disasters when they happen in New York, images of New Yorkers taking a yoga class on a smoky rooftop in a misguided pursuit of something like health.

When I went to boxing class after work, one of my favorite instructors joked about how we might as well break a sweat “while the world is ending”. When I called a researcher in South Carolina to ask about best practices for modeling crowds of people, the smoke and the dust and the orange glow never came up. When I got really close to the window and tried to take a picture for my mom who was incredulously following the situation from the other side of the world, my outdated iPhone color corrected the sky so much that I almost gave up.

On my way home, sweat turning the swath of skin near my right eye into a salt flat, I could taste the smoke through my mask, a faint burn at the back of my throat, like walking into my grandfather’s basement during meat-smoking season except that now no-one was there to shoo me away.

***

At the Museum of Modern Art, an animated tour guide is telling us about when photography transitioned from being a tool for documentation to being a full-fledged creative art. She is sporting an accent, a big smile and a dress with pockets, standing next to an installation piece made of black-and-white photographs in tiny frames, strung up with string so that they overlap in a circular shape, like a mosaic that would sway if you touched it with your hand or if a gust of wind snuck into the gallery. In My Vows by Annette Messager, every photograph was a close-up of a body part, like a foot or a nose or a breast. 

“Only one penis,” my companion slyly commented as the guide offered a compelling interpretation of the piece - a body is not just a sum of its parts though we sometimes perceive it as such. 

We moved on to a series of portraits of lesbians wearing fake facial hair and staring directly at the camera, their stark eyes and both round and narrow faces set against a bright yellow background, Catherine Opie’s Being and Having. The guide asks our tour group about what captures them about the piece and the few older people who are moseying right in front of it seem a little uncomfortable. The two of us, on the other hand, lean in closer to each other, conspiratorially. 

Maybe it’s the eyes, ventures one man. The guide is delighted to speak about the emotional charge of the images and how its role can be to engage viewers and give them an excuse to question why they think they are seeing what they are seeing. My mind, personally, is rather engaged, racing with ideas of whether a caricature of masculinity still passes as masculinity and whether one has to claim markers of gender to add validity and visibility to their sexuality. I run my hands through my hair, which is in dire need of being cut.

The next piece was a triptych of photographs titled Half Indian/Half Mexican by James Luna, which showed the artist’s two profiles and one head-on photograph. It was meant to capture his two intersecting identities in two separate stylings on each side of his face, long hair meeting short, a shaved left lip meeting a mustachioed right. 

“It is so interesting how all these artists are using photography to explore identity,” the guide said. You think that a photograph objectively captures facts, but it is so much more complicated, she implied, excitedly. I thought about titling my head a certain way in selfies, so that you only see my good side, and the occasional skimpy image of my backside on Instagram, disconnected from the rest of my body and the mind that is never actually brave enough to be promiscuous. 

The last piece we see is Richard Serra’s Equal, an installation made of four large forged steel boxes stacked into columns two at a time. They are towering over us as we pool into the open space between them. “Ohhh, this guy,” I whisper, remembering walking into his even larger installation at Dia: Beacon. That time the imposingly large pieces were cylindrical instead of rectangular, each hollow in the middle so that you could really feel the full effect of Serra’s artificial landscape, like a cave that is trying to tell you something but you are not quite sure what. Equal is less enveloping, but equally arresting and the room around it feels so empty, blank white walls a stark contrast to the dark, almost rusty sculptures. 

Once, a couple’s therapist came in and said the different orientations between the pairs of boxes, some perfectly aligned edge-to-edge and some not, remind them of work, the guide says. We all sort of chuckle, but I think I get part of what is happening here, the big punchline about how everything, no matter how simple and abstract, is still somehow deeply relational.

***

In 2020, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s annual National Preparedness Report used the words “lesbian,” “gay,” “bisexual” and “transgender” for the first time. It used them to say that these people are “more likely than others to be severely impacted by disasters” and may need extra assistance. In 2023, as if nature had taken note, the sky in New York turned orange because fires were ravaging Canada just as Pride month was getting started. 

“Smoke from hundreds of wildfires burning in Canada has triggered air quality alerts for millions of people across the northern US and Canada as the smoke drifts south.

Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated in Canada due to the fires, which have so far burned more than 4 million hectares this year. The resulting smoke has created a grey haze over many cities, including New York, and in some places it has blotted out the sun.

The fires have also released a record amount of carbon into the atmosphere for May, which is still early in the North American fire season. Hotter and drier conditions due to climate change are expected to make such fires bigger and more intense,” one of my colleagues reported for New Scientist. 

By the first Sunday in June about 3.3 million hectares had burned or about 13 times the 10-year average, according to Reuters. For a few days the air quality in New York was worse than anywhere in the world and city officials were cautioning everyone to stay inside because the air itself had become “very unhealthy” for all residents. 

Instead of posting about Pride events, most of my queer friends were inundating their social media feeds with information on air purifier brands, where to pick up free masks, and how to advocate for workers that had to keep doing their jobs on the now unsafe streets of our neighborhoods. Jokes about the similarity between the color-coded air quality index and the Pride flag abounded, but people that I consider to be my community were mostly worried about their friends, loved ones and whoever may be getting forgotten. There was nothing surprising about this - this was not the first crisis we had faced in recent years and not the first where many queer people had decided that the only way through it is together. 

Two nights after the smoke had enveloped the glass-encased office where I do most of my reporting, my partner and I were having dinner and playing Wingspan with some friends in their home. We shared gorgeous spring rolls and vegan onigiri and slices of mango and lime cake after having all taken rapid tests for COVID-19  first. Taking a test is not a perfect guarantee of avoiding illness just like not every case of COVID-19 leads to severe symptoms or long-term complications. But it is a kindness and an affirmation that we care enough to do at least something to keep each other a little more safe.  It’s been a very long time since I have been asked to test before coming into work. When I flew internationally to host a work event in London last year or when I reported from a crowded conference in Las Vegas in March even discussions of testing and masking were very sparse. 

I don’t have illusions about how capitalism works nor is my view of how the pandemic has changed since the early years overly catastrophic (it did get better). Yet, I find myself being really grateful for people who are my community and have adjusted our community’s “new” or “next” normal to include more precautions. Sometimes when I speak to biotechnology researchers about future devices that may allow us to screen our health thoroughly and quickly at home, I think about friends I have who’d be happy to test for any virus that may eventually make it from their hands into yours, whether it be by sharing sticky cake or a sweet hug. I would party with those people if the world really was ending.

***

A few days after the smoke clears, my partner and I are at a boygenius show watching three queer women tackle and hug each other on stage, guitars still blaring, in front of a fully filled stadium of ecstatic fans. You know that old line about how punk is dead? I have never seen anything more punk than how they are holding each other. 

***

In a post titled “Queering Disasters In Light Of the Climate Crisis'' on the Gender in Geopolitics Institute website, the author argues that queer people’s tendency to form networks rather than discrete units is part of why they are at times more affected by disasters. Because “home is neither that sensory emotion nor the material shelter, but the relation amidst the two” for queer people, the argument goes, and because “queer solidarities of amicability are formed in community networks rather than bloodline ancestry” it is not just the destruction of physical homes that puts queer people in peril. 

“The displacement of the social infrastructure that supports their existence such as queer community forums, networks and public spaces is associated with the phenomenon ‘queer domicide’,” the author of the post, Vani Bhardwaj, writes before turning to a discussion of more practical issues like the conditions in post-disaster shelters or the inclusion of gender in how refugees and others impacted by disasters are kept track off. 

Certainly, a big factor is also that queer people, and especially those in rural communities and those with intersecting identities such as being both trans and of color, are already more likely to live in uncertain economic conditions which are then only made worse by disasters, especially as climate change has made cascading disasters, rather than isolated events, more common. But the notion that because to be queer often means to be in community any disaster that disrupts the possibility of maintaining those connections is that much more disruptive stuck with me as I was texting various friends, not about getting drinks or stealing time in our work days for a lunch date, but about rescheduling outdoor plans and making sure everyone has access to a stack of KN95s.

What will it mean to be queer as dusty and polluted air becomes a more common reason for all of us to stay indoors? What will it mean as respiratory viruses become a more common reason for all of us to keep a distance from each other? What will it mean when temperatures become high and coasts flooded by water? Will there still be loud and busy beach days at the one stretch of sand and coast where skimpy bottoms and top surgery scars are equally common? Will there be marching or dancing or meeting a friend at the patio of a local bar to hear about their latest breakup? Will there be any chance left to see each other as more than just a body fragment framed by a phone screen?

***

After the Museum of Modern Art and a somewhat misguided choice of a golden hour gin and tonic on an empty stomach, we settle on going to an Indian restaurant. It is a fairly unfancy affair on the second floor of a Manhattan building, in a space laid out in that long rectangle shape that betrays its past as an apartment. It smells fantastic and the second we step into the space we are both suddenly ravenous. We both opt for a four-course meal instead of just ordering whatever would actually be appropriate for a Tuesday night. For my fourth course, the dessert, a staff member offers to throw in a Diet Coke instead of the choices listed on the menu - I recognize their names and they all sound wonderful, but none of them are vegan. 

It is relatively easy to be vegan in New York City. Or at least it feels that way when you have a steady paycheck, live in a hip neighborhood and befriend people who are comfortable with sharing marinated tofu or a bean salad semi-regularly. I am aware of how good I have it here, so when I am faced with the prospect of no dessert, I happily take the soda and focus on the fragrant rice and steamy chickpeas that are already laid out before me. I was not exactly born an optimist, but years of eating vegan have taught me to look past the constraints of the diet. Instead, I look towards the abundance of possibilities that those constraints never had anything to do with anyway. And many of those possibilities are marked by a real richness, even when they are really simple, like a really plump bean braised with just the right spices.

I am seemingly always writing about how being vegan has, for me, for the last 7 or 8 years, been an act of kindness and the type of kindness that is nourishing beyond just keeping my body operational. But my relative position of privilege sometimes allows me to forget that one does have to choose to be kind over and over again or otherwise it doesn’t matter. And in the face of a world-wide disaster, choosing kindness becomes nothing short of existential.

Objectively, my choosing to not eat a dessert made with milk and eggs will not single-handedly stop any natural catastrophes. Even in a society that is laser-focused on consumerism, as a single consumer I have very little actual power. But my choice stems not so much from wanting to be an activist consumer as much as it stems from wanting to be in community with everyone and everything that will get degraded and hurt if I eat a spoonful of yogurt and not think of the calf, and the cow, and the refrigerator truck and the slaughterhouse employee. And though veganism itself can perpetuate harmful power structures and has certainly done its share in promoting racist, classist and eugenic thinking by getting in bed with movements for “clean eating” and similar notions (as Alicia Kennedy writes “One person’s anarchist diet is another person’s fascist way of eating”), I think it also has lots of potential to be queer in that political sense that goes beyond just who you want to sleep with.

After all, is it not queer to reject the scarcity that the constraints of a vegan diet seem to impose and find pleasure and beauty and abundance in everything? Is it not queer to erase the boundaries between us and the environment or between us and those designated as food? Is willingness to live a non-normative life because it could help us reach a future marked by things other than a fight for resources not queer?

Because food carries so much sociological meaning, it is easy to argue that rejecting meat-eating is a rejection of a certain traditional notion of masculinity or that not forcing chickens to lay 20 times the amount of eggs they naturally do so that we can eat them is respecting a kind of non-human right to not be forced into motherhood. Metaphorical and theoretical readings of food practices are both plentiful and interesting. But beyond this kind of theorizing lies the fact of what world you are eating for when you dig into dinner every day, no frills, just trying to taste the future. 

Telling the story of  a queer farmer who co-founded a food hub for their community and beyond for them, my friend Leah Kirts writes

“Food offered more than a job and quick cash. The plants themselves unlocked a clearer understanding of queer identity. Rodríguez Besosa took local food medicine classes and learned about permaculture as Indigenous practice and the history of plant biodiversity in Puerto Rico. “I just started making connections and recognizing the nonbinary in all of these systems,” they explain. “We can recognize that ecosystems don't work in the binary, so why can’t we see that monoculture is something that happens within our family and community?” they ask. “Why am I having more in common with a fucking papaya plant than I'm having with some fellow human being?”

I grew up running around a small vineyard, picking tiny peaches and apricots from two struggling trees, eating sweet carrots and juicy tomatoes covered in dirt from my grandmothers’ hands. My younger brother got to grow up that way too, but after a certain age he was also asked to contribute labor to my grandparents’ crops. He had to pour sweat into the land in a way I was never given a chance to do because someone had at some point decided that I was a girl. So I have not met my papaya plant yet, but I want to imagine a future where a plant can be part of my community too.

I am not just trying to eat for a world with less murder and environmental destruction, I am trying to find a world where I feel as close to nature and its creatures as I do to the friends I want to share my food with. And I want us all to feel free to blur the lines of who we are and how we relate to each other, sort of like when you give up on seeing a mushroom as meaty and give it a chance to show you what it can actually taste like by just being mushroomy and it blows you away by inherently having so much to share.

***

When I get a Monday off from work in the middle of June, my best friend comes over and brings two large slices of cake. They are all banged up from sliding around the glass container while they rode the bus to my home and taste overwhelmingly of strawberries, interrupted only briefly by an occasional piece of fragrant and spicy bush basil. 

“I never knew about bush basil until I smelled it at the farmer’s market,” my friend says. “I think I am going to make this with every other fruit that is about to be in season.” 

The thought of a sticky peach laying atop a tender dough that my friend mixed by hand makes me feel like we are about to have our best summer yet.

***

There is no physics metaphor for this essay because when it comes to the environment science is far from metaphorical. I could probably read some papers about flames and what causes them to be turbulent or steady. Or I could tell you about a problem I used to assign in my classes where students would model the heat absorbed and reflected by the Earth in a naive way that does not account for how we have polluted the atmosphere and they would find that its temperature in thermal equilibrium should be much lower than it is right now. Or I could spin some complex story about the richness of developing a mathematical framework that fully captures the Earth’s climate and how there’s both determinism and chaos in there. 

But I am not a climate scientist and the climate is not an exotic phenomenon you can just read about once for fun or out of curiosity, digging through the jargon to find something intriguing or inspiring for your own lived experience. Being part of the climate, contributing to how it is changing and experiencing how it has changed already is part of our lived experiences, even for those of us who are sheltered and privileged enough to only be reminded of it sporadically and with as much drama as the sky changing color.

A metaphor, a clever or elegant tool for making sense of it all by comparing it to something else, would really do the issue a disservice. An unfiltered, raw, challenging experience may do a better job shaking us up here. You feel a lot more responsible for the future when the back of your throat is coated with smoke.

***

“Wasn’t, like, the key year 2035 or something like that the point of no return? It seems we’re already there,” my mom says in a message when I do share some images of the obscured New York sky, taken by a professional photographer. 

She is saying that the future is now but not in the way of the technology optimist of the 1950s and 1960s that popularized the phrase as we use it today, but in the way of expressing fear, like when you put off a doctor’s appointment for when you feel really awful and then the awfulness hits sooner than you had hoped.

In the often quoted Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity José Esteban Muñoz wrote that “The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present…. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romance of the negative and toiling in the present.” Here, it is the now that may be awful but the future is nowhere near here and nowhere near decided. 

Muñoz says that we may feel queerness as “the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” and it takes some discipline to remember that this horizon is not a physical place that can be shrunk, flooded or burnt and that this potentiality is not subject to some restrictive conservation law. Queer people have been subject to violence, to legal persecution, to disease and organized abandonment in the past and still carried that future with them. That future is our now, and our now has its own disaster and persecutions, but just like elders before us we can, together, imagine what lies beyond that now. And then we can act on it.

***

On the second to last weekend of Pride month, I was at The People's Beach at Jacob Riis Park with friends and we saw dolphins. A group of at least four got close enough to the shore that all swimmers that braved the cold ocean water ran out, lined up at its edge and watched the spindly animals jump in and out of the waves. Having been spoiled by the warmth of the Adriatic for most of my beach-going years, I was nowhere near the water when the dolphins first showed up but ran to join a trio friends, each holding another around the waist, and my partner at that spot where the ocean barely touche your feet to squint at them and feel giddy. After a whole day of trying to shove the great day we were having into the confines of my iPhone screen, I finally left the phone behind. The moment just felt too big, and too bright, to capture.

Reading about dolphins later, I learned that these sightings are becoming more common in New York City because the environmental factors they need to thrive, like not overfishing the species they feed on, are improving. You let nature have a little more of what it needs and it folds your beach into itself, gives you dolphins to swim with, I think as a silly image pops into my mind. I imagine a  bright drawing in the style of Lisa Frank filled with dolphins leaping into the air and people swimming among them, maybe holding hands or grinning at the viewer, inviting them into the rainbow-colored scene. 

I can’t decide if I am imagining the future or still processing the present. But it’s June and I am queer so the distinction barely matters anyway.

Happy Pride,

Karmela

*A colloid is a material made of tiny particles of one substance spread through and suspended within another substance. Whipped cream, where air is suspended in liquid cream, is one example and smoky air and smog, where particles of dust and dirt are suspended in air, are another.

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ABOUT ME LATELY

WRITING

In one of my most hard-to-parse stories yet, I wrote about an industry giant reporting on a discovery that may be a milestone for a quickly emerging technology that has been garnering both lots of buzz and lots of funding, except that most people I called to ask about this particular discovery offered me mostly skepticism and doubts in the scientific process. My role as a physics news reporter is not such that I often find myself writing about scientific controversies, but it felt meaningful, albeit fairly nerve-wracking, to try and see what was actually happening with this one.

On a lighter note, I loved reporting this very old-school ultracold physics story about levitating a droplet of very cold helium forever.

READING

I have been slogging through the first few chapters of Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion by Harry Sword, a book about drone music that takes the broadest possible definition of both words. I quite like Sword’s insistence that everything from ritual chanting to sounds we hear in the womb to Sun O))) falls under the umbrella of drone, but the introduction to the subject matter left me absolutely fatigued with flowery language and unnecessarily clever turns of phrase. Once the book actually started presenting reported and researched content, it became easier to read and, as a long-time fan of drone, sludge and stoner metal I am now finally looking forward to reading more.

LISTENING

It cannot be understated how much I loved seeing boygenius a few weeks ago, and seeing them in a stadium setting where the crowd really felt enthusiastic and unified like I remember crowds being like at metal shows I attended in high school and college. When I was younger, I defined myself very narrowly and rigidly as a music fan, and a fan of only a few subgenres of music. Ultimately, I abandoned that identity building project because most metalheads I wanted to run with and idolize in my teens and twenties were actually nothing like me as people. Since I never really had an emo or an indie phase and generally chose dissonance, drone and blast-beats as my way to express something like emotion but without allowing myself real vulnerability, it feels sort of restorative to give myself a softer and more personal fandom now that I am an adult. Which is not to say that boygenius did not put on a really musically strong show. They definitely brought all the trappings of a band that knows how over the top being a rockstar is and is willing to laugh at themselves about it without fully rejecting it. I like that this is an earnest band and hearing their songs live made me choke up a few times, something I would have never allowed myself years ago when I was mostly preoccupied with being the most devoted Iron Maiden or Metallica fan around.

In my background-music, easy-listening work rotation recently I have been listening to LAHS by Allah-Las and Texas Sun by Khruangbin and Leon Bridges, both acts that borrow from psychedelic rock as much as a kind of groovy, atmospheric, inoffensive pop that just so happens to feature guitars. You can play board games to this music and you can write about quantum light to it and you could probably sway over a grill to it if that was an option too.

On a relatedly psychedelic note, I also liked Visuals by Kunzite, a record that feels like it is begging for a movie about a drug-fueled cross-country journey to be set to it. This is a sound for dancing as much as it is for staring at the Sun when your brain gets, intentionally or unintentionally, foggy. I did not love every single track, but the stretch of songs from Saturn to Supreme Beam really works and will add energy to your day.

WATCHING

My partner, my best friend and I saw Spider Man: Across the Spider-Verse on the big movie theater screen and I was nothing short of in awe the whole time. The film leverages all the facets of being an animated project it can to pay homage to comics without being just an imitation and its centering of the idea of canon pays off as a driver of action and emotion despite being, at its core, a sort of nerdy meta idea that you could encounter on a fan message board. In the most simple sense, Across the Spider-Verse is about universal themes like seeking belonging and taking charge of your own story which are certainly not novel ideas in fiction, but the film’s frantic pace, incredible attention to detail and masterful artwork make it worth staying at the edge of your seat the whole time anyway. I can’t remember the last time, save for maybe John Wick 4 where I knew that was what I was signing up for, where a film barraged me with so much action and I did not mind, which is a real testament to how poignant Into the Spider-Verse’s emotional moments are and how fully-fledged its characters feel even when they are a part of a never-ending chase sequence. This movie ends on a cliffhanger, in true comic book fashion, and I am already eager for the next one.

We finished watching Kindred and the show stayed intense and complex until its last minute. It does not seem to have been picked up for another season so its own cliffhanger ending may not get resolved, but I felt like the season 1 finale delivered on the overwhelming sense of dread that permeated through the show. This is a time-travel show about generational trauma and American culture’s inability to deal with its history of slavery so it was never going to be upbeat, but what I came to most appreciate about it is that it is also utterly complicated. All characters, Black, white, contemporary or historical, seem to constantly make bad choices and I believe that the series’ point is in part that it is impossible to make truly good choices within a system, like racism and slavery, that is inherently evil. I do hope Kindred eventually comes back because it was not just emotionally and ideologically impactful, but also really well made and the leads, Mallori Johnson and Micah Stock, were both fantastic.

We are still watching Star Wars: Rebels and I still quite like it. Because it is more continuous and has more of a fixed set of characters than Star Wars: Clone Wars, it also feels more coherent in the themes it is exploring. At the same time, it has not taken as many deep swings into exploring just how dark righteous wars and rigid rules for living can be. In light of this, it has also been interesting to track how much more of a traditional cartoon format it follows, almost certainly as a consequence of Disney having taken over the production of animated Star Wars properties by the time it was made, while still calling back to well-known past characters and trying to slowly continue their stories. About two and a half seasons in, Rebels is capitalizing on past strands of fans’ emotional attachments to characters and storylines rather well and I hope it will continue to do so. But I also hope it will not fall into any more cartoon moralizing than it has to and not make it any more clear-cut who in the crew it follows, and among their adversaries, is actually uncontestedly doing the right thing. 

EATING

Large vegan sandwiches at Mission Sandwich Social in Williamsburg and surprisingly good Crunchwrap Supremes at that one Taco Bell on 36th street that is currently making them vegan. Nostalgic soft serve at Orchard Grocer and the best jackfruit of my life in a vegan biryani at Veeray da Dhaba on the lower East side (I am pretty certain that I never actually cared for jackfruit before).

Deeply flavorful tempeh that I marinated for three nights then braised alongside roasted asparagus and potatoes. I based the marinade, very loosely, on this recipe.

Chocolate chip cinnamon rolls based on one of my old recipes for a craft night with friends and a mango cake (based on this recipe) topped with a fully by-the-seat-of-my-pants lime buttercream for another lovely night with some besties.