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This heron carefully places a tiny piece of bread in the water, then grabs the fish that comes to eat it.
Basically, the very human activity of Fishing.
Green heron using a piece of bread as bait to catch a fish.
We are off today and tomorrow for the US Independence Day holiday. Also included, a song that hews carefully to archaic rules about prepositions at the end of sentences.
The post Off for the US Holiday — More Grammar appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail program.
Erica Berry is a writer and teacher based in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. Her nonfiction debut, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, was published by Flatiron and Canongate in early 2023. Other essays appear in Outside, The Yale Review, The Guardian, Literary Hub, The New York Times Magazine, Gulf Coast, and Guernica, among others. Winner of the Steinberg Essay Prize, she has received grants and fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and Tin House.
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Erica Berry: I recently read Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born, which was just longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and which I bought while teaching in the U.K. last summer, in part because I am just always drawn to what is hiding behind the stark white and blue of Fitzcarraldo Editions covers. I found it a totally propulsive novel, lyrically exploring the contradictions and societal pressures of motherhood, womanhood, etc. I was also stunned by The Story of a Brief Marriage, by Anuk Arudpragasam, which unfolds over just a few days in a Sri Lankan refugee camp amidst the civil war, with a granularity that was so gorgeously, delicately rendered in a very short book, while also raising larger questions of how we love amidst crisis. What does it mean, really, to tie ourselves to another body? I’d also be remiss not to mention a few wonderful nonfiction books: I was awed by the intellectual inquiry in Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex, and am currently loving Doreen Cunningham’s researched memoir Soundings, about whales and migrations and family more broadly.
Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Berry: I think of one day in middle school, when I was dreading a camping trip required for my whole class from school, and my father—he was in the driver’s seat—told me that it would be okay if it wasn’t all fun. In those moments, he said, I could think of myself like an anthropologist or a journalist, and thereby create a little distance from living the drama, I could be observing it instead. He told me he was looking forward for me coming back to tell him the stories I had learned. I already knew writing as a form of self-expression, but until then I had not understood that storytelling was also a way of making the world more bearable. Even things that were challenging to bear IRL could be made palatable—or at least a bit more legible—by wrestling them into story. I suppose I grew up feeling like I was always a bit too curious and too sensitive, and writing let me see both those things as assets. I was hooked.
Rumpus: What’s a piece of good advice or insight you received in a letter or note?
Berry: My best friend from college and I have a very close, joke-y relationship, but our senior year, she slipped a note under my door explaining that the way I’d told a story about her at dinner had rubbed the wrong way, and she felt a bit hurt. I felt horrible, truly like the worst person, but, at the same time, overcome with gratitude—she knew our relationship could bear the honesty. I struggle with confrontation, and I was awestruck by how gracefully she’d pulled it off. For years I saved her note. It was a reminder of who I wanted to be as a friend—the sort of person who expected more from the people around me, and was always working to strengthen those ties.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Berry: Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear is a weave of memoir, history, science, psychology, folklore and cultural criticism, telling three central stories: my own coming-of-age encounters with fear, the story of real wolves coming back into Oregon, and the legacy of ’symbolic wolves’ across time and space. When I started the book, I didn’t even consider myself an ‘animal person,’ and a part of me wanted to try and write a wolf book that made space for readers who might not think they would have any reason to read one. Whatever a reader’s preexisting relationship with wolves, I hope the larger life questions resonate: How do we evaluate our fears, and at what cost both to ourselves and to the world? How can we best share the world with one another, human and animal?
Henriette Lazaridis’ novel Terra Nova (Pegasus Books, 2022) was called “ingenious” and “provocative” by the New York Times. Her debut novel The Clover House was a Boston Globe bestseller and a Target Emerging Authors pick. Her short work has appeared in publications including Elle, Forge, Narrative Magazine, The New York Times, New England Review, The Millions, and more, and has earned her a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant. Henriette earned degrees in English literature from Middlebury College, Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Pennsylvania. Having taught English at Harvard, she now teaches at GrubStreet in Boston and runs the Krouna Writing Workshop in Greece. She writes the Substack newsletter The Entropy Hotel, at henriettelazaridis.substack.
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Henriette Lazaridis: I still have my copy of James Ramsay Ullman’s Banner in the Sky, and you can tell from how beat up it is that I read it and over and over. I loved that book. I imagined myself as Rudi, the main character who climbs a mountain that’s a lot like the Matterhorn to succeed on the climb that killed his father. I loved to hike, and this mountain climbing adventure captured my imagination and got me into reading all sorts of other adventure books, like Treasure Island and Kidnapped.
Among the many recent wonderful books I’ve read, I keep going back to Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson. It’s not my favorite of hers, but it’s her latest, and it filled my need to be in the presence of her narrator once again–a narrator who does things I don’t think I’ve seen any other narrator quite do. Reading Atkinson is almost painful, she’s so good. It’s like speaking a language you know you can communicate in but whose real meaning keeps eluding you.
Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Lazaridis: I talked the talk starting in middle school, and wrote for the school magazines and all that. I left my career in academia after fifteen years to return to fiction writing. But I didn’t really understand that that was what I wanted to do until I’d gotten yet one more letter in a stream of rejections and decided to burn all my manuscripts (Really. I looked up the regulations for a bonfire in your backyard and I was good to go.). I got some excellent advice from those who best knew me, and I didn’t light that bonfire. I realized I had to go all in, no hedging bets, no self-sabotage, no easy way out, if I wanted to really call myself a writer.
Rumpus: What’s a piece of good advice or insight you received in a letter or note?
Lazaridis: I can quote it by heart. It was one of the pieces of excellent advice I got, from my then husband, when I was trying to figure out if I should just quit this whole writing thing. “You can’t burn to reach a dream while seeking to protect yourself in case of failure.” Dammit, he was right.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Lazaridis: Terra Nova is about two Antarctic explorers in 1910 and the woman back in London who loves them both. While the men are racing to be first to the South Pole, Viola aims at new achievements of her own, as a photographer and artist involved in the suffrage movement. The book explores questions of ambition and rivalry and kinds of love. I would hope readers would come away from the novel asking themselves how far would they go to achieve their own ambitions? How much would they be willing to sacrifice–and to ask others to sacrifice–in order to reach their goals?
Rumpus: What is your best/worst/most interesting story that involves the mail/post office/mailbox?
Lazaridis: During my childhood summers visiting my family in Greece, I’d go to the local kiosk and buy that week’s edition of the Mickey Mouse comic, in Greek. My grandmother and I would read it together, with the images helping me figure out the words. When I went back to the States for the school year, my grandmother would send me those comics from Athens every week, to help me keep up with my reading. (Greek was my first spoken language but the second one I learned to read.) Those comics came like clockwork, delivered in brown wrapping paper to my mailbox in New England, decorated with an array of Greek stamps, week after week. I loved the stamps, I loved the comics, but most of all, I loved having mail addressed to me–just me–every single week.
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Japanese police have arrested three people for "sushi terrorism." The three suspects, a 19-year-old man, a 15-year-old girl, and a 21-year-old man were apparently in cahoots in a viral video prank at a sushi restaurant during which they chugged from a bottle of communal soy sauce and touched or snatched sushi on other diners' plates before it made its way to their table. — Read the rest
Seamen believe in luck, because they never know what the vast sea has in store for them, what blessings or disasters wait for them.
Few entities in the world’s literature are as written about as the sea. From the works of Homer to Robert Louis Stevenson to Annie Proulx, the mystery and might of the sea invites narratives about people with salt-hardened palms and the strange, iridescent beauty that lurks just beyond the depths of human senses. The obscurity of the sea’s downward expanse reflects the murky nature of human complexity, draws questions about what lies beneath, and pushes human beings to their physical and mental limits. Like life itself, the sea is a turbulent, fickle mistress that rewards those who learn to swim between its unstable waves. It is in these liminal crashes of seawater that Zülfü Livaneli’s novel The Fisherman and His Son homes in on the measured devastations and triumphs that come with sea life on the Aegean, bringing to earth the romanticism of Western writers who tend to forget that the sea, while a stunning component of natural aestheticism, is also a border—a border with all the complications of contemporary sociopolitical tensions.
The Fisherman and the Sea begins by inviting comparison to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, from the title to its opening with a short memoir detailing Livaneli’s intimate relationship with that novel. It was through reading Hemingway’s Nobel Prize-winning book that Livaneli learned about how to push the limits of human endurance on the page, and through reading the novel for a radio adaptation that he learned to write dialogue. It was Hemingway whose work Livaneli read as a child, hiding under his bed with a flashlight to escape the punishing eye of his father. But this is where Hemingway ends and Livaneli begins.
In the opening moments of the novel, when a tourist relates the plot of The Old Man and the Sea, the narrator reminds us that the fisherman of Livaneli’s novel is young and that the titular old man of Hemingway’s novel was stupid for holding onto the fish. The fisherman remarks to the tourist that he believes the massive marlin of Hemingway’s novel should have been granted the opportunity to remain free:
If that fish was so wonderful, if it struggled for its life for days, he should have cut the line and said, Go, my lion, you deserve to live, may the sea bless you. Sometimes you catch a huge fish, sir, you come eye to eye with it as you pull it into the boat, and it looks at you so pitifully you can’t bear to kill it, so you throw it back into the sea.
Creatures who fight so hard for their freedom should be permitted to remain free. The novel then proceeds to place distance between itself and Hemingway’s work in order to present a story bathed in Aegean saltwater and soaked in Aegean concerns.
The novel centers around a couple living on a Turkish coastal village in the Aegean Sea. The wife, Mesude, of Cretan descent, and the husband Mustafa, a Turkish fisherman, represent both sides of a porous border. They lose their only son, Deniz, to the sea when the boy is only seven, and their relationship has soured as a result. When Mustafa finds a baby, pushed to him by a dolphin, amongst the floating bodies of refugees who had been on a capsized boat during their flight to Greece, he seizes on the opportunity to fill in the space of his marriage that had been lost upon Deniz’s death. The sea had taken his son from him, but now it supplies him with a new child. The rest of the novel follows the relationship between Mesude and Mustafa as authorities grow suspicious about a child reported missing from the boat’s wreckage. The child’s mother, it seems, has survived. In order to retain possession of the child they have nursed back to health, they hatch a plan to fool the authorities, one that involves Mustafa’s pregnant sister.
The backdrop of this narrative is one of modernization, gentrification, and international political upheaval. Of industrialism disrupting an agrarian working class. Of nature corrupted by an intrusive capitalism. Mining and fish farms have changed the landscape quite literally, resorts have brought in the bustle of tourists who fetishize local fishermen, and poisonous, invasive fish species eat through fishing nets and devour the local fish populations. The government sends a university scholar to explain how to combat these invasive species, but his advice only serves to contextualize a destruction that seems inevitable. Further, a refugee crisis has arisen, and more than sixteen thousand refugees—from Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, and other places—have drowned during transport across the Aegean. International governments and corporations, just as invasive as the fish species, have poisoned Mustafa’s coastal village and its people by rejecting human decency in favor of bureaucratic brutality and corporate profit.
This is a novel in conversation with Hemingway, one that grounds Hemingway’s seagoing theme of resilience with threads of pragmatism and an understanding of the larger consequences of conflict on individuals. Mustafa and Mesude represent both sides of a maritime border that blends with multicultural concerns instead of dividing along constructed definitions of national identity. The surge in refugees fleeing across the Aegean from Turkey to Greece has only grown since the 2016 deployment of a NATO fleet to the region to address the crisis and has led to the building of fences across the land border between the two nations, and even threats of war. Livaneli touches on this tension and the bureaucratic tension created by water crossings throughout the novel.
Livaneli’s inclusion of the true story of a British-built Greek destroyer, the Adrias, arriving half-obliterated in the harbor during World War II highlights the bureaucratic failures of Western administration in the Aegean. The British military returns the mauled destroyer to Greece, leaving behind one very distraught Greek sailor. While the Turkish residents of the World War II-era port community took in the Greek sailor as one of their own, the contemporary Turkish population feels this same mercy is not given to refugees attempting to enter Europe through Crete and the Aegean. Instead of caring for refugees whose boats are disintegrating in the high waves, Turkey and Greece have decided to return these refugees to countries where they face penalties for attempting to flee. The flashback acts as a historical referent to demonstrate the kindness inherent in a Turkish culture that embraces hospitality, even when acting as a neutral power uninvolved in the conflicts of other countries. The refugees of the contemporary Aegean Sea are people fleeing conflicts in countries such Syria and Afghanistan, yet they are not often afforded the same sort of asylum that even Western belligerents were given during World War II.
When Mesude meets the baby’s mother, she is forced into a dilemma echoing that of the port community and the Greek ship during World War II—should she provide a safe home for the baby or will the baby be left wailing in a cemetery (like the Greek sailor after the ship leaves) when the mother is punished for the abandonment of their Afghan home? Mustafa and Mesude must make a choice to carry on in the ill-fated pursuit of replacing their drowned son with the baby gifted them by the ocean—a pursuit that will surely land them in prison—or hand the baby over in an act that will likely result in the baby’s demise. In the process of making this choice, they realize people do not fight their battles in isolation between mountains of seawater or in a vacuum of hypermasculine idealism; they suffer together and sometimes apart with a thin connective tissue strung between them.
At his core, Livaneli is an activist. Through a career that spans twenty books, several literary awards, forty music albums, and a term in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, he has elevated issues that impact the Turkish people. This novel carries on that trend by focusing on the deaths of refugees crossing into Greece from Turkey through the Aegean, refugees who have come from Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. It seeks to explore and amplify the impact on the border that is the Aegean Sea as it struggles with a refugee crisis, one brought on by international conflict and not by anything the local population has done. As the narrator points out, “the villagers could nothing but watch their sea die a slow death.”
The translator is Brendan Freely, a Turkish resident who previously translated Two Girls by Perihan Mağden, The Gaze by Elif Şafak, and Like a Sword Wound by Ahmet Altan. Here, he has translated the spirit of Livaneli’s activism into a smooth prose unafraid of the complicated metaphors contained within the novel. In reference to the rumors surrounding the temporary separation of Mustafa and Mesude, the village is compared to “the sponges that divers brought up from the depths. It absorbed and digested pain, sorrow, delight, and disaster,” giving readers a gateway into the culture of small-town Turkish maritime communities. When Mustafa enters into a deep depression and considers fleeing his home, the narrator asks, “Could someone who knew how to swim succeed at drowning himself? Even if he made the decision, would his body obey?” In Mustafa’s pain and brief desire to share in his birth son’s death, Freely translates the emotional response present in the prose that reminds us that Mustafa has the resilience and competence to move beyond his agony. While at times these metaphors become a touch heavy-handed, I believe such metaphors help to direct readers to the urgency of the matters touched on in the work.
As a whole, The Fisherman and His Son tackles a big subject—the braiding of international conflict with familial desire—and lands in a moment of optimism for Mustafa and his wife, despite larger systemic pressures that threaten their livelihood. This is a novel in line with the sort of compassionate revolution that Livaneli himself espouses: one in which love and solidarity lays the groundwork for survival in the tumult of modern life. The focus on working-class characters caught in a larger sea of international discord juxtaposed with a backdrop of the corporate consolidation of local life helps highlight why human compassion is so revolutionary in the contemporary world. In the face of an encroaching capitalism that threatens the livelihoods of fisherman navigating the Aegean in small boats, even as his friends look to sabotage the corporate fish farms taking on what was once their economic contribution, Mustafa remembers that human life is what remains most sacred to him and to his culture. It is in the sea-soaked bundle of a child’s life that the sustainability of his village truly lies, where the refusal to succumb to autocratic dictates of who lives and who dies generates resistance. When Mustafa is told that the future of the village is “something that concerns us all,” and chooses to care for the child he has found, we, as readers, are reminded of our own individual calls to compassion and activism. This novel further proves Livaneli is an artist, one who understands how a single compassionate act by one or two people can resist the grinding wheels of international politics and invasive capitalism. And it is in this resistance, in this struggle, that Livaneli’s fisherman finds a way to help a child lost among the waves become free.
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| BENU Euphoria Forest Pond fountain pen, an online store exclusive. |
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| The Forest Pond fountain pen features hand-painted goldfish and white water lilies. |
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| BENU Euphoria fountain pens can be filled with ink using cartridges or converters. |
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| Euphoria fountain pens have the standard BENU stainless steel clip which adds gloss and shine to the pen. Note that the BENU logo in the hand-painted Euphoria pens is painted white. Logos in regular Euphoria pens are not painted. |
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| These are the hand-painted goldfish and white water lilies in the Forest Pond's barrel. The depth and color in these hand-painted details are amazing! |
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| BENU Euphoria fountain pens' long sections help a lot in writing comfortably. |
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| BENU has continuously used Schmidt nibs on their pens. I love that they are consistently smooth, wet, and trouble-free. They write so well out the box! For a while now, I have shifted to using Medium and Fine nibs from Broad and stubs. BENU's Fine nibs are smooth writers! |
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| Some of my BENU fountain pens. From top: Tattoo, Tessera, Euphoria, and Talisman. |
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| I'm a proud owner of three BENU Euphoria fountain pens. From top: Forest Pond, Scent of Irises (now sold out), and the 2021 Limited Edition Halloween Orange. |
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| From the top: TWSBI ECO-T Blue, Leonardo Momento Zero Positano Blue, BENU Euphoria Forest Pond, On A Whim Woodworks Peacock Springs, and Lamy Safari Blue. |
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| Uncapped, Euphoria is still the longest pen in this group. Note this pen's long section. |
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| The Fine Schmidt nib wrote smooth and wet out of the box. This pen is going to my pen case of daily writers! |
In this video, Atlas Obscura digs out an ancient, giant fish from the archives of the Wet Specimen Collection at Chicago's Field Museum. The Coelacanth species of fish has been around for over 400 million years and is incredibly oily, and slightly stinky. — Read the rest
We came, we saw, and we talked. A lot. Seeing the newest products and innovations at KBIS 2023 did not fail to impress, and we’re already looking forward to what’s to come in 2024. Our DMM Talks Lounge, put on in partnership with Modenus Media, was packed every day. Attendees enjoyed panels on everything from creative collaboration to the rise of generational living. If you weren’t able to attend the show, or too busy to sit in on the discussions, you can now listen to all of the conversations on the KBIS website.
We also want to thank the sponsors that helped make the DMM Talks Lounge possible:
Signature Kitchen Suite
Wellborn Cabinet
Fisher & Paykel
nobilia
Moen
I wrote the first sentences that appear in Wolfish almost ten years ago, during the summer of 2013. I was about to be a senior in college, and I was doing my best to blink away the pending maw of where-to-go, of what-comes-next.
I had left my family in Oregon to attend a college in Maine. It was there that I learned who Joan Didion was, and about how it had taken her living in New York City to turn her gaze back home. “I sat on one of my apartment’s two chairs . . . and wrote myself a California river,” Didion later said about Run River. Her words seemed like a decent writing prompt: to write about the place I had left, a place I was not sure I would ever live again. I remember sitting beneath the peeling wallpaper of my summer sublet, listening to the rumble of the tenant below, a man who, we later learned, was breeding pythons. Oregon, I wrote at the top of a new document. A place, like so many others, where white settlers had killed all the wolves. A place, as I was researching for my Environmental Studies thesis, where wolves were coming back.
“Visit someplace you have ‘roots’ and it is easy to encounter the landscape as a strata of story,” I write in Wolfish. Beneath the crust of one’s lived, sensory experience sits the fossilized lore of family arrival. The thickest part, that bedrock of environmental and social history, underlies everything but is too rarely glimpsed. The best writers on this subject dirty their fingernails as they move between the layers. I am interested in place because I am provoked by the experience of being a body in the current of time. What does it mean to be me, here, now? One node in an ecosystem of not only species but stories, mythologies of belonging and fear and love. My favorite writing about place moves kaleidoscopically between art and science, past and present, humans and non-humans, internal and external lives. The author’s relationship with place is not always the explicit subject of the following books—nor is it in Wolfish—but it’s a thread that runs through the pages. A stitch that sews both self and world into being.
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Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala
Deraniyagala’s memoir is one of the most haunting books I’ve ever read, about the author’s unfathomable grief of surviving Sri Lanka’s 2004 tsunami while losing her husband, children and parents. I’ve returned again and again to the book for how lyrically Deraniyagala writes emotion into landscape, calling attention to the ways we project ourselves into the natural world, and vice versa. “I spurn its paltry picture-postcardness,” she writes at one point about Sri Lanka, where she was born. “Those beaches and bays are too pretty and tame to stand up to my pain, to hold it, even a little.” How to write about an ocean full of beauty, which has taken so much beauty from you? It is both “our killer” and a place of sunset calm, a sea coated in “crushed crimson glass.”
The Second Body, by Daisy Hildyard
In this book-length essay, Hildyard posits that we have two bodies: one contained by skin, the other the sprawl of one’s biological life as it overlaps with other species. “Your body is not inviolable,” she writes. “Your body is infecting the world—you leak.” She strives to understand this ‘second body’ by probing how humans define and interact with animal life, interviewing both a Yorkshire butcher and a criminologist who speaks to silver foxes kept as pets. This book put language to feelings I’d sensed but never been able to articulate, redefining the ways I think about intersections of human and non-human lives.
Small Bodies of Water, by Nina Mingya Powles
Powles’ mother was born in Borneo, where the author learned to swim, but Powles herself was born in New Zealand, and grew up partially in China, then moved to London. Moving between modes of memoir, art criticism, and nature writing, Small Bodies of Water is like swimming through a dream populated with the crystalline detail of both “the Atlas moth with white eyes on its wings” and a viral Twitter clip of “flame being whipped into spirals by the wind.” She writes beautifully about migration and belonging and girlhood, and as a writer, I felt particularly attuned to how carefully she pins her world to the page: “Our language for colours shifts according to our own experiences and memories: the blue of a giant Borneo butterfly’s wings pinned in a glass case; the yellow at the centre of a custard tart.”
Cold Pastoral, by Rebecca Dunham
Weaving elegy, lyric, documentary, and investigation, this poetry collection holds at its center the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, confronting the question of how to witness a world that is both natural and unnatural, simultaneously mangled and tended by our touch. After the explosion, workers jump off the rig into a “sea stirred to wildfire,” while miles away, in her own yard, “lilies / startle [the] garden pink / and gold.”
Bright Unbearable Reality, by Anna Badkhen
I bought this book on the perfection of its cover alone, then swiftly fell for the roaming logic of Badkhen’s essays, which unspool themes of communion and human migration, often while the author herself is on the road, in Ethiopia or Oklahoma or Chihuahua City. “The travel I witness often happens under duress,” she writes. “I have spent my life documenting the world’s iniquities, and my own panopticon of brokenness comprises genocide and mass starvation, loved ones I have lost to war, friends’ children who died of preventable diseases.” So much heartache in these pages, but I was persistently buoyed by the tenderness she brings to the world and its inhabitants. Even a pronghorn on the horizon, Badkhen tells us, is related to a giraffe.
In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, by Etel Adnan
Made up of lyrical vignettes, this genre-crossing memoir is testament to Adnan’s transcultural and nomadic self, as the text moves between Lebanon, France, Greece, Syria, and the U.S. Her translingual research and progressive activism underlie her observations about self and world. “I reside in cafes: they are my real homes,” she writes. “In Beirut my favorite one has been destroyed. In Paris, Café de Flore is regularly invaded by tourists.” I’m perhaps most compelled by how she writes about rootlessness: “feeling at ease, or rather identifying with drafts of air, dispersing dry leaves and balloons, taking taxis just because they were staring at me.”
Groundglass: An Essay, by Kathryn Savage
Full disclosure: because I overlapped with Savage in my MFA program, I’ve been admiring this hybrid project and her lyrical research process for years, but this book would have jumped off the shelf at me regardless. “Could there be something humbling and revolutionary in understanding myself as a site of contamination?” writes Savage. It’s a book about illness and grief and motherhood and U.S. Superfund sites (they appear like “confetti flecks” on the map), but also, implicitly, about the act of trying to understand pollution while, “Upstairs, Henry laughs, playing video games.” The book made me think not only of the porousness between earth and self, but between elegy and ode.
White Magic, by Elissa Washuta
“When I felt myself shredded, I used to wade into Lake Washington…The land put me back together,” writes Washuta, a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe indigenous to the region. She now lives in Ohio, where “the land and I talk like strangers,” and tensions around place animate this hypnotic memoir. “I love living in Ohio, I love my forever house, but my missing of Seattle feels almost violent inside of me sometimes, and that is probably the real heartbreak the book is about,” Washuta said in an interview. Moving from the colonial history of Columbia River land treaties to Twin Peaks and the Oregon Trail II video game, Washuta makes visible that which is too often unseen: the modes by which place is created, inherited, metabolized.
River, by Esther Kinsky
Translated from German by Iain Galbraith, Kinsky’s novel constellates the life of a woman who, for unknown reasons, moves outside London near the River Lea (“small…populated by swans”), reminiscing about other rivers from her past while she goes for long solitary walks. The novel moves essayistically, which is to say, like a river, “constantly brushing with the city and with the tales told along its banks,” ebbing with ecological observation and memory.
Borealis, by Aisha Sabatini Sloan
An expansive collage encompassing soundtracks, flashbacks to past lovers, conceptual art, and snippets from nature documentaries and overheard dialogues, Borealis is a constellation of observations about queer relationships, blackness, and Sabatini Sloan’s life in a small Alaskan town. The animating pulse of the book could be the quote Sabatini Sloan includes by Renee Gladman: “You had to think about where you were in a defined space and what your purpose was for being there.”
Of course, you’ll also want to scoop up a copy of Erica Berry’s Wolfish—preorders are like gifts to your future self <3
— The Eds.
“This is one of those stories that begins with a female body. Hers was crumpled, roadside, in the ash-colored slush between asphalt and snowbank.”
So begins Erica Berry’s kaleidoscopic exploration of wolves, both real and symbolic. At the center of this lyrical inquiry is the legendary OR-7, who roams away from his familial pack in northeastern Oregon. While charting OR-7’s record-breaking journey out of the Wallowa Mountains, Erica simultaneously details her own coming-of-age as she moves away from home and wrestles with inherited beliefs about fear, danger, femininity, and the body.
As Erica chronicles her own migration—from crying wolf as a child on her grandfather’s sheep farm to accidentally eating mandrake in Sicily—she searches for new expressions for how to be a brave woman, human, and animal in our warming world. What do stories so long told about wolves tell us about our relationship to fear? How can our society peel back the layers of what scares us? By strategically unspooling the strands of our cultural constructions of predator and prey, and what it means to navigate a world in which we can be both, Erica bridges the gap between human fear and grief through the lens of a wrongfully misunderstood species.
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Article tags
A 319-million-year-old fossilized fish skull holds the oldest example of a well-preserved vertebrate brain.
Scientists pulled the skull from a coal mine in England more than a century ago. The brain and its cranial nerves are roughly an inch long and belong to an extinct bluegill-size fish. The discovery opens a window into the neural anatomy and early evolution of the major group of fishes alive today, the ray-finned fishes, according to the study in Nature.
The serendipitous find also provides insights into the preservation of soft parts in fossils of backboned animals. Most of the animal fossils in museum collections were formed from hard body parts such as bones, teeth, and shells.
The CT-scanned brain analyzed for the new study belongs to Coccocephalus wildi, an early ray-finned fish that swam in an estuary and likely dined on small crustaceans, aquatic insects, and cephalopods, a group that today includes squid, octopuses, and cuttlefish. Ray-finned fishes have backbones and fins supported by bony rods called rays.
When the fish died, the soft tissues of its brain and cranial nerves were replaced during the fossilization process with a dense mineral that preserved, in exquisite detail, their three-dimensional structure.
“An important conclusion is that these kinds of soft parts can be preserved, and they may be preserved in fossils that we’ve had for a long time—this is a fossil that’s been known for over 100 years,” says senior author Matt Friedman, a paleontologist and director of the Museum of Paleontology at the University of Michigan.
“Not only does this superficially unimpressive and small fossil show us the oldest example of a fossilized vertebrate brain, but it also shows that much of what we thought about brain evolution from living species alone will need reworking,” says lead author Rodrigo Figueroa, a doctoral student who did the work as part of his dissertation, under Friedman, in the earth and environmental sciences department.
“With the widespread availability of modern imaging techniques, I would not be surprised if we find that fossil brains and other soft parts are much more common than we previously thought. From now on, our research group and others will look at fossil fish heads with a new and different perspective.”
The skull fossil from England is the only known specimen of its species, so only nondestructive techniques could be used during the study.
The work on Coccocephalus is part of a broader effort by Friedman, Figueroa, and colleagues that uses computed tomography (CT) scanning to peer inside the skulls of early ray-finned fishes. The goal of the larger study is to obtain internal anatomical details that provide insights about evolutionary relationships.
In the case of C. wildi, Friedman wasn’t looking for a brain when he fired up his micro-CT scanner and examined the skull fossil.
“I scanned it, then I loaded the data into the software we use to visualize these scans and noticed that there was an unusual, distinct object inside the skull,” he says.
The unidentified blob was brighter on the CT image—and therefore likely denser—than the bones of the skull or the surrounding rock.
“It is common to see amorphous mineral growths in fossils, but this object had a clearly defined structure,” Friedman says.
The mystery object displayed several features found in vertebrate brains: It was bilaterally symmetrical, it contained hollow spaces similar in appearance to ventricles, and it had multiple filaments extending toward openings in the braincase, similar in appearance to cranial nerves, which travel through such canals in living species.
“It had all these features, and I said to myself, ‘Is this really a brain that I’m looking at?'” Friedman says. “So I zoomed in on that region of the skull to make a second, higher-resolution scan, and it was very clear that that’s exactly what it had to be. And it was only because this was such an unambiguous example that we decided to take it further.”
Though preserved brain tissue has rarely been found in vertebrate fossils, scientists have had better success with invertebrates. For example, the intact brain of a 310-million-year-old horseshoe crab was reported in 2021, and scans of amber-encased insects have revealed brains and other organs. There is even evidence of brains and other parts of the nervous system recorded in flattened specimens more than 500 million years old.
The preserved brain of a 300-million-year-old shark relative was reported in 2009. But sharks, rays, and skates are cartilaginous fishes, which today hold relatively few species compared to the ray-finned fish lineage containing Coccocephalus.
Early ray-finned fishes like Coccocephalus can tell scientists about the initial evolutionary phases of today’s most diverse fish group, which includes everything from trout to tuna, seahorses to flounder.
There are roughly 30,000 ray-finned fish species, and they account for about half of all backboned animal species. The other half is split between land vertebrates—birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians—and less diverse fish groups like jawless fishes and cartilaginous fishes.
The Coccocephalus skull fossil is on loan to Friedman from England’s Manchester Museum. It was recovered from the roof of the Mountain Fourfoot coal mine in Lancashire and was first scientifically described in 1925. The fossil was found in a layer of soapstone adjacent to a coal seam in the mine.
Though only its skull was recovered, scientists believe that C. wildi would have been 6 to 8 inches long. Judging from its jaw shape and its teeth, it was probably a carnivore, Figueroa says.
When the fish died, scientists suspect it was quickly buried in sediments with little oxygen present. Such environments can slow the decomposition of soft body parts.
In addition, a chemical micro-environment inside the skull’s braincase may have helped to preserve the delicate brain tissues and to replace them with a dense mineral, possibly pyrite, Figueroa says.
Evidence supporting this idea comes from the cranial nerves, which send electrical signals between the brain and the sensory organs. In the Coccocephalus fossil, the cranial nerves are intact inside the braincase but disappear as they exit the skull.
“There seems to be, inside this tightly enclosed void in the skull, a little micro-environment that is conducive to the replacement of those soft parts with some kind of mineral phase, capturing the shape of tissues that would otherwise simply decay away,” Friedman says.
Detailed analysis of the fossil, along with comparisons to the brains of modern-fish specimens from the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology collection, revealed that the brain of Coccocephalus has a raisin-size central body with three main regions that roughly correspond to the forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain in living fishes.
Cranial nerves project from both sides of the central body. Viewed as a single unit, the central body and the cranial nerves resemble a tiny crustacean, such as a lobster or a crab, with projecting arms, legs and claws.
Notably, the brain structure of Coccocephalus indicates a more complicated pattern of fish-brain evolution than is suggested by living species alone, according to the authors.
“These features give the fossil real value in understanding patterns of brain evolution, rather than simply being a curiosity of unexpected preservation,” Figueroa says.
For example, all living ray-finned fishes have an everted brain, meaning that the brains of embryonic fish develop by folding tissues from the inside of the embryo outward, like a sock turned inside out.
All other vertebrates have evaginated brains, meaning that neural tissue in developing brains folds inward.
“Unlike all living ray-finned fishes, the brain of Coccocephalus folds inward,” Friedman says. “So, this fossil is capturing a time before that signature feature of ray-finned fish brains evolved. This provides us with some constraints on when this trait evolved—something that we did not have a good handle on before the new data on Coccocephalus.”
Comparisons to living fishes showed that the brain of Coccocephalus is most similar to the brains of sturgeons and paddlefish, which are often called “primitive” fishes because they diverged from all other living ray-finned fishes more than 300 million years ago.
Friedman and Figueroa are continuing to CT scan the skulls of ray-finned fish fossils, including several specimens that Figueroa brought to Ann Arbor on loan from institutions in his home country, Brazil. Figueroa says his doctoral dissertation was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic but is expected to be completed in summer 2024.
Friedman and Figueroa says the discovery highlights the importance of preserving specimens in paleontology and zoology museums.
“Here we’ve found remarkable preservation in a fossil examined several times before by multiple people over the past century,” Friedman says. “But because we have these new tools for looking inside of fossils, it reveals another layer of information to us.
“That’s why holding onto the physical specimens is so important. Because who knows, in 100 years, what people might be able to do with the fossils in our collections now.”
The study includes data produced at University of Michigan’s Computed Tomography in Earth and Environmental Science facility, which is supported by the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.
Sam Giles of London’s Natural History Museum and the University of Birmingham is a senior author of the study. Additional coauthors are from the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology.
Source: University of Michigan
The post Super ancient fish skull holds oldest backboned animal brain fossil appeared first on Futurity.
As January draws to a close, our favorite stories this week included a stirring critical essay, a paean to the world’s greatest boxed meal, a rethinking of psychedelics’ impact on the planet, a profile of a craftsperson at his peak, and an eye-opener about how humpback whales use air in some unexpected ways.
Ken Chen | n+1 | 11,542 words | January 25, 2023
After Corky Lee passed last year, the photographer and community organizer was memorialized in his hometown’s most conventionally prestigious outlets: The Times offered a sizable obituary, as did Hua Hsu in The New Yorker. This week, on the first anniversary of Lee’s death, Ken Chen rendered an altogether different kind of portrait in n+1. Much of the same biographical information is included, as are a number of Lee’s iconic photographs of Asian Americans in New York throughout the last six decades. Yet, when Chen writes about his encounters with Lee, and about the 14 photographs he selects to represent Lee’s work, the grief that suffuses his words isn’t solely about Lee, but about the many atrocities visited upon the Asian American community, up to and after Lee’s death. Chen’s critical acumen here is reason enough to read: “His images lack a charismatic subject,” he writes of Lee. “Those whom capital dismissed as surplus, he saw as beautiful. He commemorated the multitude, the striking waiters and seamstresses whose unruly abundance crowded away any beatific composition.” But he brings a similar understated poetry to the social conditions Lee’s work served to illuminate — and with violence against Asian American elders and others seemingly unending (including a horrifying recent attack in my own hometown), that juxtaposition makes Chen’s piece nearly as indelible as the images it contains. —PR
Ivana Rihter | Catapult | January 19, 2023 | 2,261 words
I only discovered Kraft dinners later in life after moving to North America revealed the cult of Kraft to me. A stable lurking in every cupboard; I admired the respect that something so impossibly orange had managed to garner. When Ivana Rihter finds KDs, though, they are much more; cooked for her by her baba, they are inextricably linked to her immigration story. She describes the process of boiling the pasta and adding the sauce with reverence, the memory mixed in with her love for her baba and appreciation for the economic hardships her family struggled through to start their new life. Her baba teaches her to put feta on top, and with this “secret little piece of the home country mixed in with all-American shelf-stable cheese” it remains a food for life, and — consistently sitting at about a dollar a box — one that carries on seeing her through hard times. I found this an unexpectedly beautiful essay, more about memory and belonging than cheesy pasta. Food can transport you back in time, especially if, as Rihter describes it, it “is soaked with memories of [an] origin story.” —CW
Amber X. Chen | Atmos | January 16, 2023 | 3,196 words
In this piece, Chen explores what the current psychedelic renaissance means for environmental activism, and how synthetic drugs like LSD and MDMA and psychoactive plants like ayahuasca and peyote can stir change within individuals — and ultimately galvanize social movements. This all sounds incredibly positive on the surface, but not everyone who dabbles in such mind-altering journeys is transformed for the better; psychedelics also fuel right-wing movements, too. (See: “QAnon Shaman.“) The decriminalization of psychedelics is a step toward making their therapeutic benefits accessible to more people, yes, but as Chen notes, it increases the threat of deforestation, and — with today’s psychedelic movement being largely white — it also takes power away from Indigenous people, who have harnessed the healing power of these sacred plants for thousands of years. (See also a Top 5 essay I picked last year: “The Gentrification of Consciousness.”) I appreciate Chen’s exploration here, and the questions posed that I haven’t stopped thinking about, like: “How broken is Western society that we think we need drugs in order to facilitate mass climate action?” —CLR
Elly Fishman | Chicago Magazine | January 17, 2023 | 4,177 words
Recently, in his late 60s, my dad decided to learn how to play the violin. I respect the choice to try the impossible, especially something as delicate and timeless as bowing a stringed instrument. (My parents’ cats, who endure the scratching out of notes from beneath the couch or bed, seem to have a different opinion.) After reading this lovely profile, I think perhaps my dad, a skilled carpenter, should also try apprenticing as a luthier. I, someone with zero skills at playing an instrument besides an egg shaker, who curses putting IKEA furniture together, was mesmerized by the descriptions of how John Becker, perhaps the best violin restorer on earth, practices his craft. Elly Fishman’s profile has a musical quality: It sweeps readers through chapters of Becker’s personal story and dwells in long, lyrical moments when, with the surest of hands, Becker repairs some of the most revered instruments on the planet — namely, Stradivari. There are just 650 of the violins left. What makes them so extraordinary? Musicians and scientists may puzzle over that question forever. In the meantime, Becker works — quietly, meticulously, instinctively. “We are caretakers of these instruments,” one of his clients tells him. “We move on, but these instruments continue to the next generation.” —SD
Doug Perrine | Hakai Magazine | December 20, 2022 | 1,500 words
It’s well known that many animals use tools to aid feeding and other tasks of life. Think: otters floating on their backs, cracking shells with rocks. You’d think it would be hard for whales to use tools, but as Doug Perrine reports at Hakai Magazine, humpbacks use what’s available to them — air and water — to form bubbles for a variety of activities. “I’m tempted to describe the air in a humpback’s lungs as a Swiss army knife because I’ve seen whales do so many different things with it,” he wrote. “It is not actually a tool collection though, but a storehouse of raw construction material with which the whale can fashion a variety of tools. Lacking free fingers and opposable thumbs, whales are unable to create and use tools in the same way as humans, but reveal their intelligence through the manner in which they utilize other body parts for tool production and use.” —KS
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There are about 650 Stradivarius violins left in existence today. If one of them needs repair or restoration, their owners — wealthy collectors and world-class performers, mostly — call John Becker, a master luthier with a shop in downtown Chicago. How did a man who doesn’t play the instrument become the finest violin technician in the world? Elly Fishman explains:
He was drawn to the idea of working on rare violins — “I could see it was a craft” — and applied for a position at the prestigious violin dealer and restoration shop Bein & Fushi in 1979. Also located in the Fine Arts Building, Bein & Fushi ran a cutthroat apprentice program, but Becker’s talent was obvious from the start. “They said I was the best person they’d ever had,” he says.
When the top restorer left in 1982, Becker was tapped to fill his shoes. His first repair? The Adam, a 1714 Stradivarius violin named for a former collector. The business’s co-owner Robert Bein had given his employee The Secrets of Stradivari, a book by the acclaimed Italian luthier Simone Sacconi outlining the author’s best practices, and Becker absorbed them all. “I did some great work on that instrument,” he says.
In 1989, Becker took over as head of the entire workshop. Already renowned, Bein & Fushi became one of the world’s most prominent violin shops during Becker’s time there, thanks in large part to his work. “He was brilliant,” recalls Drew Lecher, who worked alongside him. “I guess you could say he had a Midas finger. If a violin didn’t sound right, he’d make it sound right. And if it didn’t look quite right, he’d make it look right. He was the standard-bearer.”
The Design Milk X Modenus Talks Lounge, also known as the #dmmtalks Lounge, is back at KBIS with a schedule that’s jam-packed full of presentations and conversations covering design business, social media, and trends. Also returning are the popular BrandTalks that give exhibitors an opportunity to speak about the vision and mission behind their brands, as well as introduce audiences to new products and innovations. We’re excited to dig into these hot topics at the Kitchen & Bath Design Show January 31st to February 2nd, 2023 in Las Vegas with our partner, Modenus. If you’re not already signed up to attend the show, you can register here. Check out what’s in store for the Lounge located in the North Hall at N1577 below!
9:15 AM
KBIS Newbie Kickoff: What Not To Miss at KBIS 2023 – RSVP HERE
KBIS 2023 is a big show, and we invite you to start your experience in the #dmmtalks lounge to learn about major show highlights, cool new pavilions and exhibits, and VIP opportunities for you to benefit from as influencers.
Presenters: Modenus Media CEO, Veronika Miller + Principal at White Good, Sherry Qualls
Sponsored by Signature Kitchen Suite
10:30 AM
The Design – Build Collaboration: Pitfalls, Processes, and Profits – RSVP HERE
The relationship between the designer, builder, and the client is critical to the success of every design build project and communication is at the heart of every successful relationship. Join LuAnn Nigara as she moderates a rock star line up to discuss best practices between designers and builders.
Moderator: LuAnn Nigara, Keynote Speaker, Author + Podcast Host at The Well Designed Business
Panelists: Brad Leavitt, President AFT Construction, Susan + Paul Kadilak, Owners Kadilak Homes + Hosts Renovation Rekindle
Sponsored by Signature Kitchen Suite
12:00 PM
Efficiency is Beautiful: Essential Automation for Design Firms – RSVP for Lunch
If you’re saying or doing anything repeatedly, there’s a potential opportunity for automation. Learn how to implement key automation – for marketing, sales, and operations – and sleep well knowing the work is getting done.
• 3 categories of automation that are useful to almost any design firm
• What can be automated… and what can’t? How to quickly tell the difference
• How to actually make it happen – from tech to internal process
Presenter: Nicole Heymer, Owner + Creative Director Glory and Brand
Sponsored by Signature Kitchen Suite
1:30 PM
BrandTalks: Wellborn – Meet The Brand
Each 15 minute presentation is followed by an opportunity to ask your most pressing questions and meet company leadership face-to-face.
Sponsored + Presented by Wellborn Cabinet
2:00 PM
BrandTalks – Fisher & Paykel: Kitchen Perfection – RSVP HERE
Learn about Fisher & Paykel’s design philosophy and their latest initiatives around sustainability, the connected home, and Kitchen Perfection. Each 15 minute presentation is followed by an opportunity to ask your most pressing questions and meet company leadership face-to-face.
Sponsored + Presented by Fisher & Paykel
3:00 PM
Behind the Curtain with Claire Jefford: Pricing Projects: Disclosing Design Fees & Deliverables – RSVP HERE
Posting a pretty picture on Instagram is one thing, but the actual process and documentation created for implementing a client project is something no one really shows you. And whether designers are charging an hourly or a flat fee to their clients, how do they come up with these numbers? Here you’ll get a rare peek ‘Behind the Curtain’ of Kitchen and Bathroom projects by well-established designers. We’ll be reviewing three custom projects, sharing details of the scope of work, design proposals, presentation slides, and fee structure.
Moderator: Principal at Claire Jefford Inc. and Interior Design Business Coach
Panelists: Jennifer Stoner, Principal Jennifer Stoner Interiors, Sheri Bruneau, Principal Sheri Bruneau Interior Design
9:15 AM
Influencer Breakfast: Top Tips For Maximizing New Ideal Client Acquisition While Avoiding Social Media Burnout – RSVP HERE
Do you find yourself feeling burnt out being on social media? Attend this one hour talk with Leslie Carothers, founder of Savour Partnership and the #designwealthcommunity on Facebook, and get her top tips on proven strategies for new ideal client acquisition – while minimizing the time you spend online.
Presenter: Leslie Carothers, Principal Savour Partnership
Sponsored by nobilia
10:30 AM
Diversifying Income Streams by Creating New Profit Centers – RSVP HERE
Increase the bottom line with new profit centers found within your existing business infrastructure. Diversifying your services, adding new products, and finding hidden revenue is the best way to hedge against any downturns in the marketplace. We are creatives folks! Let’s get creative with not only what we can offer our existing clients but appeal to new prospects too by getting them engaged with your brand even if they are not currently in the market for a larger ticket sale. Success these days is often defined one client at a time.
Presenter: Cheryl Clendenon, Principal In Detail Creative Group
Sponsored by nobilia
12:00 PM
Creative Collaboration for Diversifying Your Design Business – RSVP for Lunch
Navigate today’s working challenges by creating collaborations to diversify your design business. We’ll discuss how aligning with kitchen and bath retailers and skilled tradespeople can build powerful relationships that could create significant revenue streams.
Presenter: Wendy Glaister, Principal Wendy Glaister Interiors
Sponsored by nobilia
1:30 PM
BOSS Academy Roundtable with Claire Jefford – Establishing Trust with Clients: Solid Relationships are Everything – RSVP HERE
When clients aren’t fully invested in you and your design ideas, it’s because there is a lack of trust. The best clients are the ones who fully trust you, don’t push back on your fees and design ideas, nor do they demand changes to your contract. The sooner you can successfully establish trust, the more enjoyable the design experience is for everybody – including your trades and staff. Here we’ll share actionable items, starting with a well-thought-out website and various touch points throughout the working relationship to ensure you only work with clients who value you as a respected Interior Design BOSS.
Moderator: Claire Jefford, Principal at Claire Jefford Inc. + Interior Design Business Coach
Panelists: Nicole Heymer, Owner + Creative Director Glory, Ariana Lovato, Owner + Principal Honeycomb Home Design
3:00 PM
BrandTalks – Moen: Around the Globe to Your Kitchen – RSVP HERE
Go behind-the-scenes with Principal Industrial Designer Jessica Birchfield to explore how firsthand trendspotting and research informs the design of Moen products. Uncover the style inspiration that led to their latest kitchen faucets, including the use of unique materials and industrial-inspired elements.
Sponsored + Presented by Moen
3:30 PM
Happy Hour – The Rise of Multi-Generational Living – RSVP HERE
Between the pandemic and anxieties of inflation and an uncertain economy, many are making the practical choice to combine households. But what does this mean for home design? Join us to learn more about how flexibility, accessibility, and a balance of private and common spaces must be considered to support the well-being of all who occupy a home – and how to support these needs in a way that still allows for beautiful design.
Moderator: Pamela McNally, SVP Marketing + Digital NKBA
Panelists: Sydney Marshman, Occupational Therapist and CEO Happy At Home Consulting, Patti Carpenter, Trend Forecaster + Principal Carpenter + Company, Danielle DeBoe Harper, Senior Creative Style Manager Moen,
Jessica Birchfield, Principal Industrial Designer Fortune Brands
Sponsored by Moen
9:15 AM
BrandTalks : NKBA Design Bites – Behind the Scenes
10:30 AM
Designhounds Influencer Meetup – RSVP HERE
You see them everywhere at KBIS, Modenus Media’s Designhounds have been scouring trade shows around the world in search of best in class design trends and innovations since 2011. Join us for Donuts + Coffee to learn what it takes to be a Designhound and what’s next for the network of over 700 design influencers that have joined the ranks of the most successful design influencer program in our industry.
If you’d like to attend the show, you can register here.
Campbell Keenan, 12, of Boston, was visiting Fort Lauderdale, Florida when his family went out on a charter fishing boat. Keenan had fished before—his best catch was a 25-inch striper. On this trip though, he almost needed… a bigger boat.
"Well, it was a pretty slow day, we were just catching some fish, and then all of sudden, when they starting reeling it in, it took out drag, and I was like, 'Is this thing going to pull me in?' — Read the rest
A YouTuber sets up a system where the swimming patterns of his fish let them "play" Pokemon online. What could possibly go wrong?
The post The Dangers of Automation: Keep Your Pokemon-playing Fish Away from Your Credit Cards appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
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