Thanks for reading my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay, a round up of my writing, then some thoughts on media I am consuming and some vegan food and recipe recommendations. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own. I’d love it if you shared this letter with a friend.
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.
NEON AND ARGON*
Emotional cowboy
With no hat and no boots
He stayed up all night
Trying to beat up the moon
At the tail end of the first week of March, I am on a packed Sunday morning flight to Las Vegas.
The person on my right is watching Pulp Fiction on their iPad and the person on my left just stopped working on a presentation about strange metals to negotiate a turkey sandwich order with the flight attendant. The attendant eventually relinquishes the last of the sandwiches, but warns my seatmate to not tell anyone about it. The airline is now officially out of all sandwiches and I have gained an excuse to start a conversation with the other passenger instead of just taking peaks at the red and blue color-coded plots on her laptop’s screen. We’re traveling to Vegas for the same reason, to attend American Physical Society’s March Meeting, a who’s who of condensed matter physics, materials science, biophysics and a few other subgenres of the science that has now dominated my life for more than a decade.
“Funny that she thought you’d start a riot by telling someone about this sandwich,” I joke to my seatmate and soon we’re talking about spectroscopy experiments, divisions between applied and pure physics, and whether it is worth it to pursue positions in academia after graduate school. She is doing good work at a good school, but does not seem fully sold on braving the uncertainties of the academic job market. I’ve been there too - and ultimately failed.
When she asks about my own career path, I try to succinctly describe how I ended up in science journalism and cautiously advocate for exploring all her future options. It’s not my place to say more, And it’s just fine to chase academic physics as a life quest, you just must have the stomach and the passion for it.
I make a mental note to stop by her talk at the March Meeting, but when we touch down in Las Vegas ground, I am too overwhelmed by it to even begin to remember her name.
My last March Meeting was in Boston in 2019 and I presented some original research on atoms arranged in a line and connected to each other to make a special configuration called the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger chain. I don’t remember giving my talk, but I hear the phrase “Majorana zero mode”, a type of particle-like entity that can pop up within some parts of the chain of atoms, throughout my time in Vegas and it gives me flashbacks of handwriting sequences of little c’s with the subscript k that mean particle creation and annihilation on the page, but only if you read them with the eyes of a physicist. Mostly, I remember commuting from the room I rented for the week to the faraway conference center every day, listening to Sleep’s The Sciences on the train then walking through uncomfortably snowy Boston streets and getting ready to listen to some physicists next.
This time around, I am staying at a resort, though not a very nice one, thanks to my employer. The Las Vegas Strip is certainly not snowy, but I would not call it comfortable either. On that first Sunday, it takes me three times longer than I expect to find the conference center because I fail to realize that the quickest way to any location is almost always through a smoky casino.
If I were still a physicist, this March Meeting would be something of a homecoming for me, a chance to be with my people in person again and to get to practice my craft with all the vibrancy you get from sitting with them at the same table and writing lines of math on the same sheet of paper. Because I have left physics since that Boston trip, I am now positioned just right to observe other people’s homecomings instead.
Former colleagues and classmates do still recognize me. The hallways in the Ceasar’s Forum conference centers seem designed to facilitate nothing but foot traffic jams, and while caught in a few of those I hear someone calling my name. A college acquaintance who remembers my help in a difficult general relativity class, a once dear friend whom I’ve taught lots of quantum mechanics before we drifted apart, a teaching assistant from a statistical mechanics class that I remember fondly, a friend of a friend who took over leadership of diversity organizing at our college when we graduated, an acquaintances from a national equity and mentoring network I used to work with, some graduate school colleagues that are still practicing physicists. The list goes on and each new entry shocks me.
I spent most of my 20s fully devoted to the world of physics, but it's hard to fathom that I may have left a tiny imprint on it. Maybe it’s just that my lazily coiffed short hair and heavy eyeliner still stand out in this crowd. I know that I am not the first person that always looked a little out of place and then eventually stepped away from it altogether. Now, however, I have reappeared.
***
Back in New York, a few days before that sandwich-poor flight, the editor that doubles as my manager encouraged me to shake as many hands as I can and introduce myself to anyone that will listen. I am attending the March Meeting to gather information and make connections after all. So, in all the impromptu catch-up sessions, I imagine myself being more slick than I really am and ask “what is the best talk you’ve seen so far?” and “what are you most excited to see this week?” then listen carefully. Everyone tries to tell me that they’re really here just to follow their own narrow strain of research which leads them to slipping into the kind of jargon that I am still somewhat conversant in though I am really spending all of my days now on trying to translate it into plain English. I nod and smile and interject when something rings a bell, whether it be old, from my own research, or new, from reporting on hundreds of experiments and calculations since.
There is one big controversy at the Meeting, a contentious talk based on a contentious paper that gets published while we are all in Vegas together, and everyone has an opinion on it that they want to share with me but not in any formal capacity. I am familiar with it because the press had access to the controversial paper early so I can participate in conversations even when tensions rise or someone starts rehashing details. Thinking about a colleague that was assigned to write about this makes me second-hand anxious, but some of my conversation partners are clearly enjoying outlining the drama. I try to remember if this is what chit-chat felt like in graduate school, but that was too long ago, too many worldwide tragedies and too many professional heartbreaks ago, to be a palatable point of comparison.
***
The only Vegas show I see all week is a physics-themed circus co-developed by a physicist I know very well. To see it, I wear a gaudy outfit of green pants, a pink blazer with padded shoulders and big graphic earrings. Vegas scared me the second I stepped off the plane and saw the orange and yellow glow of slot machines at my gate so I am dressing up to hide that I am nervous to be here, like a tiny insect trying to appear poisonous to save itself from predators.
The circus performers are all young, some barely entering their teenage years, and they love my outfit when we all, press and those the press is after, linger by the small stage after the show. I’m curious about how much physics they actually had to learn to perform the piece and they are curious about me. I split the difference and tell them that I used to be a physicist so I know a little about the ideas they enacted. A performer decked out in sequins, feathers and no laughable amount of spandex tells me they had read up on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. They ask whether I think it’s real. It’s my turn to hedge now and I quickly pivot to the more dramatic statement about the Schrodinger cat that was also featured in the show. I tell the group that has now huddled around me that physicists have made real “cat” states out of atoms and molecules in the lab and the claim is, luckily for me, a hit.
Before another adult makes us disperse, we all agree that physics is kind of crazy.
***
For the first three nights I am in my Treasure Island room by myself. At night, I barely take up any space in the king bed, huddled up over my computer and some semblance of takeout. When it gets really late and my eyes start to close against my will, I put on Food Network and do my best to peel oranges from the hotel’s CVS, which is open all night, while also texting my partner back in New York. “Fresh fruits and salads” advertises the 24/7 Walgreens across the street from the 24/7 CVS. A grocery store on the Strip seems to be too much to ask for. I am bitter about it as Guy Fieri makes amateur chefs run across the large TV screen while holding on to shopping carts for dear life.
I pass the slot machines, blackjack tables and an unreasonable amount of other digital card games every morning and then again ten or twelve hours later when I’m finally making my way back to the king bed. During those four days I am not brave enough to join the relentlessly optimistic and the relentlessly desperate gamblers that keep the casino busy during every hour of night and day. Many of them smoke inside and it takes about two days for the back of my throat to catch a slight but sustained burn. I buy some rapid tests for COVID-19 along with my oranges and a small chocolate bar at the CVS, quietly panicking as the cashier tells me my health insurance may be able to reimburse those. After a few negative results, I convince myself that my immune system is just no match for the overstimulation of both Vegas and a giant conference at once. Did I used to get colds at conferences? Maybe I was more resilient to all this worldly, bodily distraction while I was still an ardent believer in my future as an academic.
Treasure Island feels less fancy than the Venetian, which is on the other side of the street, and Caesar’s Palace, which is down the block. For a brief time in its history, in the 1990s, the two ships flanking the resort’s entrance hosted troupes of actors that put on a family-friendly pirate show a few times a day, sword duels, dramatic dives into the water, a preponderance of eyepatches and all. The shows, however, did not bring in a lot of money so Treasure Island management gave up on the Disney-esque approach and supposedly refashioned the boats into stages for skimpily dressed dancers instead.
Now, the attraction closest to the two ships is Senor Frog, a bar that features loud parties with Spanish-language music most nights and, according to the coupon I am given at check-in, has cheap brightly colored drinks served strictly in tall, thin plastic containers. When my partner arrives, he explains to me that they are called “yard drinks” because of their size and not because you can take them outside and I feel silly. I feel equally silly when barely dressed men and women approach us on the street and offer to pose for pictures for a small fee, even far away from the ex-pirate ships. My credentials as a bisexual are quickly eroding here, I tell my partner, because I am not compelled by any of their smooth abs or fishnet-ed backsides. Neither of us reaches for a single yard drink throughout our stay either.
***
The big difference between science communication and science journalism is that the second has to be objective and can be critical when appropriate. So, I am not in Vegas to write about every talk I see or to tout every talk I write about as a revolutionary. I am, however, there to try and write one article every day so I immerse myself in all the science more feverishly than I ever felt like I needed to do at conferences in the past. My phone and my watch keep buzzing with calendar reminders as I am rushing to illogically numbered rooms with increasing amounts of muscle memory. It feels different to be here and interact with science in a way that is more embodied than reading countless preprints at my desk. A phrase I am fond of saying to non-scientists rings loudly in my mind - science is a human endeavor.
When I taught high school, I tasked my students with many discussions about who science is for and who gets to decide what counts as science. During my week in Vegas, I see science spill out of many different smiling faces, but I also hear stories about scholars that could not make their own presentations because of denied visas. My “they/them” tag, affixed close to where my badge says “PRESS” in thick gold letters, goes largely ignored except by a few other openly queer people that are attending the conference.
So, who science is for here this week, who is here to call things science, and who here can bring their full selves to the role of being a scientist is a complicated issue and a more nuanced one than anything that I bring back to my editors in New York will reflect, if at all. This makes it all that much more meaningful to be here in person, unable to escape the notion that science is a living and breathing thing because I am literally enmeshed in it.
In almost every article I write for my job, I refer to “the researchers” or “the team”, but I can never be sure who the reader is imagining when they see those words. Do they look like they would be sitting on the floor, near a precious outlet, working on one last slide in-between sessions, here at the Caesar’s Forum? I worry that some of my power as “PRESS” is being wasted whenever I do not confront this question head on.
***
On the second night that my partner is in town, we splurge on a late meal at the Bacchanal Buffet. At more than 100$ per person, it reminds me of stories of lavish, sprawling hotel breakfasts at resorts my family and friends sometimes got to attend during Yugoslavia’s peak. I recall those stories, multiply the memory by a hundred and find myself at the Bacchanal. Uncannily, our host’s name is Dragica and we almost immediately start speaking a language that she remembers as Serbo-Croatian, but I only know it as my mother tongue. Mixing in some English, she gives us a short tour of all the stations where we can indulge. There is a separate line for warm seafood and cold seafood. They’re making crepes to order at the dessert station. You can get pasta made to order too and don’t forget the Chinese and Korean stations around the corner. It really is amazing here at the Bacchanal. Prijatno.
It is beyond corny here and not the Brooklyn kind of corny where everyone is self-aware and we all kind of wink at each other every time when we like something cringey. It’s just plain corny here, but this is also a buffet on the Las Vegas Strip so it would be odd for it to be any other way. My partner leans into it by bringing a large stack of snow crab legs to the table after finishing a generous slice of prime rib. I manage two and a half plates of vegan options, a big pile of melon and pineapple cubes and two tiny slices of strawberry cake. My stomach begs that I quit before making my way to the gelato and sorbetto station and I, already feeling heavy, don’t have it in me to fight it.
There is not much glamor to be seen around us, or in our greasy hands and full stomachs, but we’re among the last people to leave so our server insists on taking our picture. I protest by saying that we eat dinner together almost every night so the occasion is barely picture-worthy, but he’s already grabbed my partner’s phone and is testing out different angles. We both hold on to our glasses of mediocre Riesling a little too much like we are kids who just learned what drinking is and attempt a small smile.
“It’s not every night that you dine at the Bacchanal,” the server says. I have to give it to him - it really is not.
***
The next night we eat at a fully plant-based restaurant in one of the more new resorts. The food is quite good and the Riesling noticeably better. We spot a pair of influencers vlogging their dinner a few tables down from us, speaking into a phone camera positioned close to the ‘calamari’ appetizer that we ordered as well. This place is trying to not be corny a lot harder than the Bacchanal, but the effect is sort of sanitized, a lack of character that comes with the price point and the location, a sort of inoffensiveness that you have to pay for. It’s the kind of place where you would bring a rich aunt who is skeptical of veganism, or a partner’s parents, and not challenge their food sensibilities too much, or make them feel like they are doing something radical at all. Looking past the influencers, I am pretty sure that this is exactly what is happening at a few of the other tables. We share a really good plate of vegan cheese made by culturing and fermenting nuts, both of our mains are riffs on very safe and standard European dishes, and the cubes of brownie in my sundae are gluten free.
“There must be a neighborhood where vegan restaurants are crunchier and more punk than this,” my partner wonders aloud, his fork sliding into a tiny baked pineapple alaska.
Of course, we don’t really know how to find it as my work has us confined to the Strip in its full, crowded and brightly lit artifice. We are just here for a few days, paying to experience a life that is probably quite unlike how the citizens of Las Vegas actually live so we feel both unfairly entitled to pass judgment and oddly mournful about being unable to do better.
When I post some pictures on Instagram, my mom comments that everything looks plastic, like set design for a play with a limited budget. Maybe it’s the gondola ride at the Venetian or all the malls that project a video of the sky on their ceilings that get her. But she’s not wrong. Walking through some of these spaces every day makes me feel like I am caught in a flattened, simplified version of a world that probably is somewhere out there, but in this form only really looks good on movie film.
A few days later, in the Mob Museum, we spot a whole wall dedicated to movie depictions of both fictional and real criminals from Las Vegas.
At lunch with my past research group, we are again talking about that one controversy that has been unraveling the whole week. Again, I mention I have seen the paper in advance because journalists get sent papers before they are published in high profile journals by the journals themselves and am surprised to see some stumped faces at the table. I try to follow it all up with a short explanation of how press releases fill my inbox often and how I am often dealing with embargoed papers that I’m meant to keep secret until a certain time and date. As we talk, I wonder how it can be that some scientists are so good at taking advantage of the public relations machinery attached to journals, and some are still such genuine believers in the idea that everything, from what research gets published to what publications kick-off a media frenzy, is a matter of meritocracy. It feels odd to know more about this one thing than many people at the table, some of whom have been successful scientists for decades and many of whom I learned how to think about all of physics from.
Having to explain what science journalism is and how it works at the top of almost every conversation that was meant to be a warm instance of reconnection and seeing my interlocutors listening intently eventually reminds me of how much I hated the imperfect infrastructure within which academic science happens when I worked inside it. How can institutions fail to explain to some of these great researchers not only that they can advertise their work, but that some journals will do it for them, without anyone even asking? This is a poignant reminder that the academic world really does play by its own rules, where marketing is still a somewhat dirty word, but having a high public profile is also seen as an asset. Often, young scientists are made to believe that the best work will just naturally rise to the top, that everyone will organically hear about it through some very sincere word of mouth, and that that will be enough for people outside of academia to take note as well. I still believe that to some extent, but I also do read an awful lot of press releases.
One night, a past colleague asks me why no-one out there is writing more about condensed matter physics for newspapers and magazines like mine and this sparks a big conversation at the dinner we are sharing with other recent alumni from our graduate program. Only one of them had interacted with science media before and it happened to be me that interviewed them. Another later sends me a bunch of ideas about how to write a story on Moire materials and I quickly find a New Scientist feature about it that all my acquaintances have missed because they do not actually consume science journalism beyond what pops up in national newspapers, or maybe even just the New York Times. We all have passionate things to say, but we are all also just talking past each other.
“This conversation almost convinced me that condensed matter physics isn’t interesting unless you want it to be. Almost,” someone says while picking at a salad before we disperse among different resorts.
In these conversations, surprisingly many people assume that my role as a science journalist is to just write down my opinions on research that is similar to what I used to do. The idea of reporting out a story, consulting sources or focusing on something I never studied before, like soft robots or antineutrinos, seems very foreign to academics and this too is a function of how much academia can isolate you from most other modes of doing work. In academic circles the opinion of a senior person, a person deemed to be a luminary or just someone in good standing within the community just matters and that is enough. My former colleagues have all at some point read a book by another physicist or an opinion piece that someone in their department wrote about some paper they found meaningful or maybe had to write a popular summary of their own work for an outreach event. So, I can’t blame them when they assume that my work falls into one of these categories, but I still find it dispiriting.
The academic world is a little like the Las Vegas Strip that many physicists tell me they’ve come to hate just a few days after the conference started - both are mostly isolated worlds that allow you in as long as you can let yourself think that the set design is all there is to reality sufficiently often. Someone like me who did actually leave this world, but still cannot stay away from its edges is then something like an indecisive tourist, maybe even an interloper or a distant cousin that stays at your house too long every time.
On day five, I am touched when an older physicist comes up to me in a session on Rydberg atoms and exclaims that he knows me. I wrote about his work once and he is grateful. We shake hands, but I don’t really know what to say other than to thank him back profusely. When a similar thing happens with someone younger, I manage more of a conversation, and more smiling. The next handshake is with the head of a lab whose work I had written about in the past too and the conversation that follows it is really fun. He shows me some videos and I let myself slip into some physicists-like thinking and mention papers I read for work that what I am seeing reminds me of. That’s the right connection, he says.
That’s the thing about having given a decade of my life to academic science - even though I was a bad physicist, even though I ended up in a very different profession, some part of my brain is still hooked on physics and that is, in part, what must be keeping me in all the spaces where physics also makes a splashy appearance.
***
We do gamble for a night, but it goes badly and we both lose most of our chips at roulette and blackjack tables. Before we came to Vegas, my partner taught me the rules of blackjack by fanning cards in front of me on the dinner table in-between my clearing out the dishes and bringing out our evening coffees. I had better luck then than at Treasure Island or the Venetian though our kitchen is way less decked out for nightlife. My partner is the kind of person that is universally beloved by friends, colleagues and odd conversation partners at bars alike, but here in Vegas people at the tables are either too tense or too loose for his charm to really hit. We have a fun time commenting on each other’s performance and people-watching, but we pay a hefty price for this in units of both money and pride.
I grew up on James Bond movies where baccarat and curvy bombshells are always prominently featured and this imagery was in the back of my mind when I packed for Vegas. I bring my only pair of going-out heels and a dress that reminds me of the one my mom bought to go celebrate New Year’s Eve at a Croatian resort decades ago. I promise myself a night of Bond girl cosplay, of leaning into the fantasy of opulence and a femininity so performative that it can be fun instead of being a chore.
And the performance of femininity is so heightened here. Matching outfits heavy on sequins and tight dresses paired with high heels and lots of skin are abundant, all vivid signifiers of a type of femininity that is not challenging or complicated, but does promise some naughtiness that hits for the lizard brain. It is a preponderance of cheap glamor because the really rich are not just milling about in front of the Balenciaga and Margiela stores in the mall attached to Ceasar’s Palace, they are hiding in some stratum of Vegas where the fashions of the casino floor open to the rest of us just would not fly. I’m sure their sequins look like each was carefully made and laid down by hand, instead of producing a trail of shiny debris by the end of the night.
I am not rich and I do not own any sequins but I tell myself that putting on something traditionally feminine that will ring as bright and artificial as the neon signs that are everywhere around us could be fun. I am trying to check my East-coast-elite bias, my class bias and my academic-adjacent haughtiness. What is even wrong about some tall shoes and a tiny dress? After all, I’ve met femmes that excel at gathering power from these items exactly.
And then I just can’t do it. When I confront the dress in the mirror, my body feels even more wrong than it does in New York, even more like a roadmap of imperfections, bad choices and utter confusion. I quit Bond girl night before we manage to leave our hotel room.
Maybe I’m worried that here I could be mistaken for a woman that is doing whatever it is that women are supposed to do, but badly. Maybe this is just a place where loving your imperfections is hard because you’ve already spent it all on fighting to rise above the constant sensory overwhelm.
Maybe what does me in is seeing two women squeezed into fishnets and covered-up very scarcely otherwise offering passersby a chance to take a photo with the two of them and a giant “blue lives matters” flag with the words “fuck Biden”painted on top. This odd sight makes me think that anything that would call attention to myself here may not actually be safe. Can people in the crowd that surrounds them as we walk by tell that there is something queer about me? Would that make them angry? I know hateful people are not everywhere, but you only have to see a few for your heartbeat to start doubting that knowledge.
I can’t quite parse the source of my bad feeling, but I spend the night losing money in pants and sneakers.
***
Many of my past colleagues and people I studied alongside that I run into during the conference now work in the burgeoning quantum industry. When most of us started our respective doctoral degrees ten or more years ago, the promise of “going into industry” afterwards did not necessarily include all of their current jobs. There was talk of quantum divisions at giants of the computer industry and a few small quantum computing startups back then, but to most of us industry still meant a chip manufacturer, an optics company or truly selling out and going to work as some sort of a modeler at a bank. Now, there are more start ups with oddly placed q’s in their names than I can sometimes keep track of, even if that is increasingly becoming a big part of my job. IBM and Google are both charging ahead towards what they claim will be useful quantum computers with a relentlessness and propped up by a true abundance of intellectual force they caught as it was leaking out of the less and less easy to navigate academic job market. Overblown claims and unsubstantiated hype have gotten their fair share of space in mainstream, not-just-science media and many quantum industry types are rightfully weary of leaning into that, but the fact that a quantum computer made the cover of Time last January does indicate how far this research that escaped university labs actually made it.
All of my acquaintances think their commercial quantum computing outfit is the best and one to bet on and so does the founder of a quantum startup that wants to have lunch with me in a Mexican restaurant. I am not a business reporter nor have I ever studied the economics of startups, but what I am hearing from all sides is that even startups and well-established companies still have to play the publishing game and kowtow to journal editors. Here too, investors and CEOs turn to opinions of reputable sources and those reputable sources just happen to be similar to people who can make or break your career as a young scholar. All these industry types are still caught up in the academic web just like I am, or maybe even more.
When someone I knew years ago pitches me on a piece of software that you would only need if you were running experiments on quantum computers but that still seems to be selling really well, I think of once sitting in a press conference where two United States senators and one mayor stumbled over the word quantum and what it actually means while trying to convince us reporters that their jurisdiction will became the American capital of exactly that thing. It’s not that I am impressed by the research and innovation that commercial quantum ventures are able to produce as much as it worries me that they exist at the intersection of a flawed academic system of awarding laurels and a flawed economics system of allotting success. Certainly this has happened in the past, from the invention of the transistor to CRISPR, but there is something unsettling about watching it from my vantage point as an interloper in all of the worlds involved.
Someone tells me they’ll be throwing a big party for their staff on World Quantum Day in April and I am too embarrassed to admit that I had no idea that it even existed.
On our last full day in Nevada, we go to the desert.
Our tour guide, Max, is a somewhat recent transplant to the city. “A few years ago my English was not good enough to go beyond saying ‘one, two, three’ but now I can go all the way to ‘six’,” he jokes and no one in his small van laughs. Not the German that is in town for a different conference nor the French couple that seem either very jet lagged or mildly hangover nor the one quiet solo passenger nor the group of Southern octogenarians here in Vegas to celebrate one of their round birthdays. They’re all consumed by their own lines of inquiry, whether about the city, the desert or each other’s in-laws and vacation itineraries. Max is fully undeterred and charges forward in good spirits to the tune of a radio station that seems to exclusively play 90s hip hop.
We are visiting the Valley of Fire State Park which is about an hour northeast of Las Vegas and a part of the Mojave Desert. To the great disappointment of some of the other passengers, there are no sand dunes in this part of the desert and what greets us instead is vast planes, hills and cliffs made of red and yellow rocks. Millions of years ago this was all underwater, Max explains, and the rocks have different colors because their chemical makeup includes different metals and minerals. Later, in a small visitor’s center, I read about petrified wood, shimmery quartz and imprints of oceanic creatures that can be found among the soft yellow rocks and the blazingly orange ones.
Our first stop is called Elephant Rock and when we walk up the road towards the eponymous attraction I can certainly see the resemblance but the color awes me a lot more. It’s not that the rocks really look like the place is on fire as much as wherever I look I see what could be giant embers, stacked upon each other, strewn about with very little interruption except for the road and the occasional stocky shrub. I feel like I am absorbing a very different glow than that on the Strip.
For a long time, I’ve had an irrational desire to go to the desert. When people ask me about it I say that I want to experience something overwhelmingly larger than me and visibly impossible to tame. Sometimes I say I want to feel the way one might feel on the surface of the moon where the world of the barren rocks, ridges and craters is truly other-worldly. To friends, I joke about wanting to quit my job to bake bread and cakes in some small town at the edge of some large desert and only write when I really feel like it. I’m not sure where within me this need originated, but it has now been there long enough that it doesn't really matter.
Sometimes you live out a fantasy, find a path to the place you have mythologized for yourself, and discover that getting there is tough enough for the original appeal to fade away. You put in the work, you grit your teeth through the odd customs of the place, you mold yourself into the person that you think deserves to live there and then, when there is a moment of quiet, you feel tired more than you feel triumphant. You come down the mountain that you spent years ferociously scaling at a slow pace, with your head down. You look at yourself and instead of the replica of people you used to idolize you see a shadow of the self you sacrificed. Fantasies are dangerous in this way, especially when they turn into yearlong quests. Mythical places, be they gambling oases or the halls of some university, that spawn them are too,
The desert, however, did not disappoint me. Even chunked up into the beats of a 3-hour tour, with its gettings in and out of the van and growing amount of crumbs from complimentary but stale snacks, the place made me feel a kind of awe that I didn’t have to be trained to understand and the kind of gratitude that I did not have to have a job to deserve. In contrast to what I expected, the desert did not make me feel small, just calm and supported by the magical-looking rocks underneath my feet. It politely taught me that in my own fantasies I can allow everything, including myself, to not be small.
On top of a long rock near another that is covered in petroglyphs, I shed two layers of shirts and let the sun touch me. My throat briefly stops burning. My partner gives me squinty smiles from underneath his sunglasses. About an hour later, we have to return back to the Strip, but not until after Max corrals us all into a group picture as proof for his employers that it all went well.
In the van, I eat a terrible-tasting sour candy and start to worry about having to venture into yet another casino to find dinner.
***
My flight back to New York is delayed and when I do make it to a familiar airport the rain is relentlessly pouring down all its windows, new, old and those still in scaffolding as a part of yet another renovation. It’s almost two in the morning when my partner and I sit at our kitchen table, barely unpacked and already disoriented by the three hours of time difference, and share half a container of hummus and some pita chips from the bottom of the bag. I need to be up in four hours to be presentable and functional at work tomorrow, but I am almost too tired to sleep.
In the morning, I take a COVID test, shower, make breakfast, put on makeup, document one of my formulaic slacks-and-button-down outfits and head into the office wrapped in a coat and a scarf that would have been way too warm in Nevada. The crowd I move through on my way from Brooklyn and into Manhattan is almost as dense as on the Strip, but moves faster and I can disappear into it more seamlessly. I get to the office a little early so I can make myself another cup of coffee, reinstall my computer at my desk and check the state of snacks I previously stashed in one of the fridges. As they trickle in, my coworkers are politely asking about my trip. I do my best to put on a smile and I share some images of the desert in our Slack channel while re-reading a long list of notes I took at the March Meeting.
“It’s great that you went, you brought so much stuff back,” my editor says during our formal check-in later. I nod approvingly, but none of the stuff that will stay with me is actually in the color-coded Google Doc we are both looking at.
Best,
Karmela
*Though they are commonly referred to as neon signs, many signs in Las Vegas are actually filled with argon gas - neon produces reddish colors while all blues and greens come from a combination of argon and special coating on the inside of the signs. In both cases, the signs work the same: glass tubes filled with a gas, like argon or neon, glow because electricity passess through them and turns them into plasmas. Plasma is a state of matter which is not quite a gas and not quite a liquid but rather a “soup” of every energetic, charged particles and occurs all over the place in space, like inside of stars.
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ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING
Probably the most exciting news article I wrote recently was this one about an experiment where scientists used living brain cells as a part of a computer. The device can only really do one very specific and somewhat artificial thing, but machines that use living muscle tissues have been built before and the brain is a fantastic computer so this early step towards what could be building actual cyborgs is not necessarily something to scoff at. I was also quite stunned by this high-speed camera footage of tiny parasitic worms using electrostatic attraction, the kind that gives you little shocks when you pull a wool sweater out of the dryer, to launch themselves onto fruit flies that they then feed off of.
READING
This piece in the MIT Technology Review about how algorithms can take something that starts as a useful coping mechanism, like the writer of the piece seeking content about grief when confronted with a family member’s serious illness, and turn it into a self-reinforcing obsession with something negative and harmful. Poignantly, Tate Ryan-Mosley writes
“I started, intentionally and unintentionally, consuming people’s experiences of grief and tragedy through Instagram videos, various newsfeeds, and Twitter testimonials. It was as if the internet secretly teamed up with my compulsions and started indulging my own worst fantasies; the algorithms were a sort of priest, offering confession and communion.
Yet with every search and click, I inadvertently created a sticky web of digital grief. Ultimately, it would prove nearly impossible to untangle myself. My mournful digital life was preserved in amber by the pernicious personalized algorithms that had deftly observed my mental preoccupations and offered me ever more cancer and loss.”
An old Electric Literature compilation of some feelings Las Vegas residents have about Hunter S. Thompson’s infamous book about their city. I thought about this bit, by the performer and author Dayvid Figler, while I was in Vegas
“I like to write about my hometown, but I also know Las Vegas as two cities. One is ours and one is theirs, and they outnumber us manyfold. The visitors have every right to their take on a city that invites, lures and challenges them to find an experience worth their cash and repeat business—but their idea of what the city means or represents is necessarily very different from the one those of us who live here experience. Since we encourage it all to fuel our economy and repeat business, though, we are rightly stuck with the consequences, literary or otherwise.”
LISTENING
A few days before I took off for Vegas, we saw Weyes Blood perform live at Brooklyn Steel and I was so terribly taken by her music that I spent most of my trip listening to And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow on repeat. The thing about Weyes Blood is that she’s like a reincarnation of Dusty Springfield but also the fifth Beatle you never knew you needed, but also sounds like Phil Specter produced her decades ago, but also has the affect of a brighter Meatloaf, but also probably would’ve been a fantastic ironic astrology friend in mid-2000s Brooklyn, and also ethereally beautiful. I was more moved by sharing a room with her than I expected and it felt like such a treat to get to feel music like that. Blood’s opening act was the whistler Molly Lewis whose incredible skill and Mulholland Drive-esque appearance also really added to the experience.
I also spent a lot of time listening to Allie Crow Buckley’s So Romantic, another deviously mournful record by another female artist who comes off as a cross between a heartbroken lover and a somewhat devious fae. Buckley is less retro than Blood, and a little less theatrical, but the two are not a bad pairing.
I binged the whole season of Mother Country Radicals, a podcast chronicling the rise and demise of the radical antiwar group the Weather Underground as told by Zayd Dohrn whose mother was a longtime leader of the organization. I heard Dohrn discuss the show on another podcast that I like, Some of My Best Friends Are (their episode on the AP curriculum bans in Florida and their conversation with Ewe Ewing about writing superhero comics are also great), and got super curious about the bigger context of his story. Mother Country Radicals complicates the narratives about 1970s extremism, among Black and white activists, and gives a really singular insight into how personal and political just cannot ever be truly disentangled.
WATCHING
We saw Infinity Pool in a movie theater and though it was certainly too long and could have used a much tighter edit, I liked it a lot. Directed by Brandon Cronenberg, this is a film about wealth, boredom and excess. It is gross and disturbing, but it sort of would not deliver any of its punches if it was not, and if its style were not so fine-tuned and intense some viewers would probably find its punchlines a bit predictable. It’s sort of the season of eat-the-rich movies and movies tinged with ideas that remind me of reading Marx as a freshman in college and the younger Cronnenberg is just a really good match for this. Part of the movie was filmed in Croatia which for sure made a difference for how I watched it, especially because it is a story about rich tourists behaving badly and I am from a very tourist-dependent part of Croatia, but Cronenberg gives you odd people as much as he gives you an odd place. Alexander Skarsgard is fantastic and Mia Goth is the kind of demonic that I have not seen, and been seduced by, in a long time. I would have liked one less oversaturated hallucination sequence and a more tight third act, but I am still excited to see what these actors and the director do next.
Also in the movie theater, we saw the 4th installment of John Wick a few days after it premiered and though these movies are essentially nonsensical I had a great time watching it. At this point in the franchise’s evolution, watching a John Wick movie is like watching an episode of Trigun or Cowboy Bebop or some similar impeccably stylized anime with very flash monster-of-the-week villains that can sustain almost all injuries as if they were a mosquito bite. The stunts in these movies continue to be incredible and the diversity in terms of body type and ability among the various assassins that Keane Reeves, mostly grunting throughout the titular roles, somehow still transcends more much more serious films. Donnie Yen was incredible and I think I’m in love with Rina Sawayama now. A very lazy Internet search told me that a 5th movie is already in the works and I do hope it picks up with some of the characters that were introduced here, even though I am certain it too will also be mostly nonsense that excellent fight choreographers just manage to make look fantastic.
Like seemingly everyone else in our cultural bubble, we have been keeping up with The Last of Us and The Mandalorian and enjoying both in very different ways. For me, The Last of Us peaked with its second to last episode, a masterfully done tight hour of horror, and the ending did not so much fall flat for me as the heartbreak that it packed left me unsurprised. This is a show chock full of pain and the characters don’t seem to know what to do with it other than spread it around through either physical violence or lies. I continue to be impressed with this show and the conversations around it, online or among my friends, have been rich enough to be a testament to its quality.
The Mandalorian, on the other hand, is increasingly starting to feel like the same kind of nerd-y indulgence that kept me committed season upon season of the Clone Wars animated series and I wonder whether this may be the last days of its status as a broad cultural phenomenon. I don’t necessarily miss the monster-of-the-week format, but I do find myself theorizing more about what will happen next than being consumed by what is actually happening in the show. Do I want Dave Filoni to fill in every gap in the sprawling lore and world building of every era of Star Wars while also giving me Katee Sackhoff and Pedro Pascal being muscular next to each other? Absolutely. But that is unlikely to be a show that can hold its own in the age of prestige TV competition among various streamers.
Finally, we made it through a few uncomfortable but incredibly engaging episodes of Kindred, an FX on Hulu adaption of the Octavia Butler novel. This show is so incredibly well done, in terms of production and actors’ performances, which only goes on to underscore how much evil and human badness its characters encounter within a time-travel plot that is, by the virtue of taking a Black character back to her ancestors, all but a fanciful romp through a romanticized past. This is a show that deals with America’s fraught history of slavery more directly than most white Americans really ever want to deal with it but still manages to not be didactic or preachy, just human. I spent too much of this show yelling “no, don’t do that” at the TV but I am still so excited to see more.
EATING
More than a few big salads because traveling made me crave crunchy produce. My current favorite is cold steamed beets with olive oil, salt and balsamic mixed with pretty much anything from supreme oranges and cucumbers to arugula and chickpeas with a touch of lemon juice.
Kung Pao mushrooms at a vegan Szechuan restaurant near my office because a friend really likes them and I will never say no to a lunch date.
A vegan version of these gochujang caramel cookies that another friend surprised me with on a random Tuesday night. A pistachio lemon cake I surprised yet another friend with for their glorious 30th birthday party.
A simple root vegetable soup inspired by Amy Chaplin’s Whole Food Cooking Every Day.