Ultracold
A newsletter reintroduction
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ULTRACOLD
In July of 2017, I wrote an essay about a visit to a bioenergy healer that my mom had orchestrated while I was visiting home years prior and sent it to a dozen or so friends and acquaintances through TinyLetter. This was the first issue of Ultracold, 131 letters and more than 7 years ago. Almost everything about me and my life has changed since, but this project kept going. Consider this a formal reintroduction.
When I wrote that first essay, I was living in Urbana, Illinois and finishing the third year of a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, holding my third consecutive student visa and feeling somewhat at home in the American Midwest. I was in a committed relationship with a man who I had met in Illinois, but who had since followed his research advisor to a different university, a place on the East Coast that was very prestigious and very far away from me. I knew I was queer, but had not grown into the word “nonbinary” yet and most of my identity was shaped by the notion that I was a physicist.
I had wanted to be a physicist since the 7th grade. I moved to the United States from Croatia by myself at 16 to attend better schools so I could then become a better physicist. I attended a really demanding college because of the reputation of its physics program and graduate school was the last leg of a decades-long dream. The name of this project betrays this - the focus of my Ph. D. was studying atoms almost as cold as the ultimate temperature limit that we call absolute zero. But “ultracold” was meant to have two other meanings too.
First was a reference to the frigid Illinois winters that always remained foreign to me, largely because I spent my childhood soaking up the sun on an island in the Adriatic. The second was more personal, both a jab at and a reclamation of the fact that I had always been told that I am if not unfriendly then at least seemingly very cold. So, Ultracold was never a science communication project and it had never not been personal. Over the years, I developed my voice, my tools for making sense of the world, and a stronger sense of self, by exploring the intersection of the scientific and the personal through writing Ultracold.
Today, I am a news reporter at New Scientist where I write about physics, materials science, quantum technology and chemistry. I married that man and we moved to New York City where we still live. My first book, Entangled States: A Life According to Physics, forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2025, is one chapter short of being done, and if you were to look me up you would find out that I am a nonbinary science writer before you would find the nearly dozen peer-reviewed papers I had produced as a scientist. In 2107, I started writing because I needed, as I wrote, “an exercise in honesty, an excuse for self-examination, and an incentive to keep in touch,” but today writing is one of the biggest forces that drive my life.
Though this shift, from physics to writing, may seem abrupt and unexpected, that impression is largely a function of how I have chosen to tell my story. There is an alternative version. Here, I start by telling you that I was a writer as a child, that my mom bound blank booklets for me to write in, that I won reading awards at my local library, that I wanted to be the next Agatha Christie, then, later, the next William Gibson, that I went to journalism summer camp in middle school, had short stories published in Croatian anthologies in high school, and started then abandoned several blogs in college.
Having spent most of my adult life in academia has dissuaded me from telling this story because it was ultimately my interest in science that led to institutional recognition, my moving across the world, and several degrees. The capitalist world that I have always lived in also seems to abhor a generalist, in part because intersectional, system-level knowledge is a danger to it, in part because it is more easy to monetize and exploit specialization. What I’m saying is, when I got the message that not only do you have to be exceptional and rebellious to be, and do, several things at once, but also that that mode of work is hard to live off, I almost always listened. In that sense, Ultracold has been my small but consistent rebellion, a space where I could not just take myself seriously as both a physicist and a writer, but also whoever else I wanted, whether that be a vegan baker or an avid consumer of Star Wars cartoons and a boxing class aficionado.
But the biggest thing that I learned from writing Ultracold, and the thing that has kept it going even through some of the most difficult and tumultuous periods of my life, is that my seemingly battling desires to be a scientist and to be a writer actually always had the same origin. Both are fundamentally about making meaning of the world, and about telling its story. Science may use the highly codified language of mathematics and you may have to turn to rigid institutions to be trained in the rules and practices of this language, but at its heart it’s all just another mode of storytelling. I feel extremely lucky to have had a chance to learn the ins and outs of this type of engagement with our physical reality, but have also long recognized that its bid for being deemed the only correct game in town, and its claims for being such because the subjective, human influences are presumably removed from it, can and do fall short.
In my essays for Ultracold, I am inevitably writing as someone who has been trained to analyze the world in the tradition of Western science, to chunk it up, disassemble it and focus on its rote mechanics. But I am also writing as someone who has experienced that world as interconnected and full of love, who has made many irrational decisions while fully knowing my “analytic brain” should have led me elsewhere, who has seen science be fallible because scientists are, who has seen beauty and joy emerge from the most unexpected places, who has after years of study still only understood the force of gravity once it pulled on their body and the nature of light when they basked in it.
I struggle to find words that could describe Ultracold as a project that could be sold or marketed, because it is not necessarily “theory” or “memoir,” but simply a record of what reality looks like from the specific intersection of ways of being that goes under the shorthand of my name. And, as I wrote a few years ago when I moved Ultracold to its current publishing platform, “queer, non-binary, immigrant physicist writer,” is not a flavor of person I meet very often, even in my New York bubble which is filled with writers, scientists, and queer people. So, I hope you stick around for all future installments of Ultracold for more of this perspective - and I hope it can give you some new twists, turns and textures to weave into your own story of our shared physical reality.
Ultracold publishes monthly, on the last Monday of each month. It has always included a longform essay followed by a links-and-recommendations section titled “About Me Lately,” but going forward I will be sending that latter part, a sort of media diet and actual diet roundup, separately, mid-month. The essays will continue to publish on the last Monday schedule. All content will remain free, but if you would like to support me financially, you can also become a paid subscriber.
Below, I’ve rounded up some recent essays that fall under themes that I tend to return to the most (science, food, identity, writing) as well as a few of the “love letters” that I write every February. It would mean a great deal to me if you shared this newsletter with a friend or posted about it on social media.
Thank you for being a reader,
Karmela
P. S. I was partly inspired to finally write a letter like this after I attended Alicia Kennedy’s Newsletter Workshop, which I would very much recommend.
This reintroduction is such a good idea, and so helpful for me as a relatively new reader of your newsletter. Congrats on your upcoming book! Looking forward to it.