Category Archives: writing

How to make the Smitten Kitchen Purple Plum Torte in March, 2025

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The first step towards making the Smitten Kitchen Purple Plum Torte is to remember that you can make the Smitten Kitchen Purple Plum Torte. Say, midway through Sunday brunch, when you remember that you’ve accepted a dinner invitation for that evening and really should bring something, but nothing too complicated. You think of the recipe as the Smitten Kitchen Purple Plum Torte even though it was first published in The New York Times because you cancelled your Times subscription when they hired Bret Stephens.

For all the good that seems to have done.

Anyway the Smitten Kitchen Purple Plum Torte is perfect for a last-minute dessert because its ingredient list is so simple, you can run it down almost in your head and compare against what you know you have back in the kitchen at home. You’ll just have to make a detour on the way back from brunch to pick up some plums.

Oh, well, and eggs. Dammit.

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Local boy makes op-ed

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Chicory, Cichorium intybus, which always makes me think of Mr. Longenecker’s biology class wildflower walks (Flickr, jby)

Cross-posted from The Molecular Ecologist.

Here’s a new one for my publications list: the Op-Ed pages of my hometown newspaper. I’ve spent the last weeks calling my congressional reps, and hassling other people to do the same, over the Trump administration’s vandalism of research funding (alongside its vandalism of just about every other function of the federal government), but it’s hardly felt like enough. One new option presented when I happened across Science Homecoming, a project to recruit scientists to speak out in support of federal research agencies in the newspapers of towns where they grew up. As Science Homecoming points out, local newspapers continue to have a huge audience across the country, and that’s an opportunity to reach people where they live, with stories that show how the current crisis impacts their local communities.

So I looked up the opinion section editor at LNP/LancasterOnline, the modern incarnation of the paper my parents have subscribed to since I was old enough to read it, which serves central Pennsylvania. I emailed her a pitch that I’d put together following Science Homecoming’s suggestions, and she wrote back to ask for a full column almost immediately. (The topic was already very much on the editorial staff’s radar.) A bit more than a week later, my column is online and in print, alongside a parallel piece from two geoscientists with local roots, on the front page of the Sunday Perspectives section.

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The morning after

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When I planned out the schedule for my fall semester graduate statistics course back in August, I remember pausing, for a moment, over today’s date. Did I want to plan for a regular meeting the day after this election? In many of the best-case scenarios, the students and I would be thinking more about an ongoing vote count than whatever topic I slotted in for the day. But I had hope, and only so many days for the class, and I figured I could always make a call based on what actually happened.

It turns out my hope was misplaced, and we knew it before I finally went to bed last night.

So this morning, before I could bring myself to eat breakfast, I composed an email to the class. It’s turned out to be most of what I have to say this morning, so I’m posting it here for posterity, or maybe for other faculty who are still trying to figure out how to say some of this:

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The week Chase let go

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(Flickr, Michael Levine-Clark)

May, here in the Upper Midwest, is when spring finally starts. The trees are budding out all over Median Lake, crocuses are poking up from flowerbeds, and that pile of snow in the parking lot behind City Hall is melted down to its stubborn, pyramidal core of gravel and ice. Gardeners have been putting in all the tomatoes they started on their kitchen windowsills back in April — Mother’s Day weekend, that’s the date to get them in the ground, and spend the next two months dreaming of big, juicy slices of heirloom beefsteaks for caprese and BLTs, brilliant red Romas to can for sauce.

It’s also time for Median Lake Pride, second to last weekend of May. Yes, Pride is traditionally in June. But when you’re planning Pride in a town midway between Des Moines and Minneapolis, and within road-trip distance of Milwaukee and Chicago, you have to make some accommodation. We know better than to try to compete with the big cities, even if we do know how to put on a show in Median Lake.

And, honey, it has not been a quiet Pride Week in Median Lake.

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Oh, hon, let me tell you. It has not been a quiet week in Median Lake

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(jby)

Median Lake got another foot of snow this week. The sun came out and warmed us up above freezing for maybe an hour, at high noon on Tuesday. That mostly served to re-establish the glaze of ice on the sidewalks — best we can do in February, on the prairie.

In weather like this, I expect you think we spend all our time huddled indoors. And you’d be right! But diners are indoors. Church fellowship halls are indoors. Coffee shops are indoors. The Rainbow Garland Tavern, the only gay bar between Des Moines and the Twin Cities, just a block off of Main Street on Third Avenue, by the Larsson Brothers Hardware? That’s as indoors as you get. And whatever else you might say about folks getting together in diners and fellowship halls and coffee shops and bars, it usually doesn’t make for a quiet week.

Steven Kramer, who tends bar at the Garland most nights? Well, he’s more or less the only person in town you might call an events promoter, and he’s been running ragged.

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What was Twitter?

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(Flickr: Buzz)

The science fiction novel Ender’s Game is best remembered for its primary plot, about a genius child who leads Earth’s forces to genocidal victory against aliens; but it also has a secondary plot line that seems, in retrospect, terrifyingly prescient. While the protagonist Ender is learning to become the greatest space-general in history, his near-equally-gifted pre-teen brother and sister, left behind on Earth, take up politics. Peter and Valentine set up pseudonyms on a global online message board and spar theatrically, building competing followings and eventually real-world political influence. By the novel’s end Peter has leveraged his online clout into the leadership of a worldwide government.

I read Ender’s Game in the mid-1990s, when it was truly science fictional to imagine the whole world connected in a single messaging system, much less using devices portable enough to carry in a backpack. By 2004, my final year of undergrad, I acquired a bulky Dell laptop which was, most excitingly, capable of using the wifi network that had just been installed in my campus apartment complex — and I’d already gone from a hand-coded HTML personal website to a series of blogs hosted on the most obvious choice, Blogger.com. Multiple of those blogs were social affairs, shared with friends, but their connection to people elsewhere on the Internet was entirely mediated by individual “<a href=” hyperlinks. Midway through graduate school, I accepted responsibility for building a website for a conference to be hosted by my home department, and decided to try embedding a new messaging platform I’d heard about: Twitter.

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Denali diary III. Alpine

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The final pinnacle before the descent from the Savage Alpine trail (jby)

Notes from a trip to Alaska.

We had allotted ourselves one full day in Denali, and given the alterations to our lodging plans and the persistently rainy weather, it seemed best to spend the time on the longest stretch of established trail offered in the park, the Savage Alpine trail and the adjoining Savage River trail. These were as deep into the park as we could go without paying for guided tours, and they covered what looked like a pretty good sample of the available terrain.

We shuttled to the park visitor center to catch a park-managed bus — an actual school bus, painted NPS green — to the trailhead. The previous night’s sun break was truly over, with misty rain and clouds hiding the ridge lines to north and south as we left the visitor center campus and followed the park road west. There was, still, no sign of the big mountain. The park road climbs from the visitor center through boreal forest, which got patchier as we went higher. After a stop at park headquarters, we disembarked at a joint trailhead for a short loop, Mountain Vista, and the longer climb into the hills, Savage Alpine.

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Denali diary II. Lodging

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View out the bus window, crossing the Knik River (jby)

Notes from a trip to Alaska.

You can get from Anchorage to Denali National Park by rental car, Alaska Railway passenger train, or chartered flight — but we took the bus. A regular service runs from the convention center in downtown Anchorage to multiple stops in and around Denali, about four hours’ drive north on State Highway 3, and it leaves early. C and I hiked our luggage through a light morning drizzle to join a small crowd of fellow-passengers huddled under the convention center portico, and by 7:30 am we were driving north.

We took the highway — the only highway — east out of town and then west towards Wasila, with views of mountains through the cloud banks. Eventually the rain got too heavy, mist rolled in, and the highway headed north and left more developed territory, running between walls of forest that looked, to eyes raised on eastern temperate-deciduous woods, distinctly scraggly. The trees were aspen, spruce, none more than 40 feet tall, rising out of thick undergrowth like bathers wading in the shallow end of a crowded swimming pool. Large swathes of the spruce were dead-looking, gray-brown ghost groves — killed by spruce beetles, apparently.

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Denali diary I. Anchorage

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A view east from downtown Anchorage, toward the Chugach Mountains. (Flickr, jby)

Notes on a trip to Alaska.

We landed in Anchorage at eight o’clock in the evening, but it might have been any time from dawn to almost midnight. High-latitude summer light is uncanny enough to a southerner such as me (flying in from Los Angeles via a long stopover in Seattle) when it’s still fully light out at nine o’clock in the evening; but then also a mid-July weather system had swathed the city in low clouds and persistent drizzle, filtering the sunlight down to a high-twilit grey.

C and I took a taxi to a rental apartment we’d planned to use as a base of operations for the trip. I had an academic conference in Anchorage, and we’d taken that as an excuse to fly up a week early and see some sights — Denali National Park, then the vicinity of Kenai Fjords. First, though, we had a day in town to settle in and get our bearings. The rental-apartment host and her husband met us and our heap of luggage on the doorstep of their house — which, in addition to having our apartment in the basement, appeared to operate both as a multi-unit bed-and-breakfast and as the local consulate of the Netherlands. Our host was, it developed, a Dutch transplant. She showed us around: kitchen, living space, bedroom, washing machine and dryer, sofa bed in the living room (I suspect she didn’t realize C and I were a couple), and an orientation to the city via a tourist map on the kitchen table. Downtown was a dozen blocks north, on the other side of a long east-west strip of parkland. We thanked her out the door, unpacked a bit, and then hiked into downtown to the nearest late-night food we could find, by-the-slice pizza with, it turned out, reindeer sausage — how local!

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Tree property is tree theft

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Mist-shrouded coast redwoods along Highway 101 in northern California (jby)

My review of Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America’s Woods, a not-unsympathetic exploration of timber poaching on the margins of Redwood National and State Parks, is online (and in print) in this week’s Science.

It’s a good book, following a small group of “outlaws” in the depressed logging community of Orick and the park rangers trying to prevent and prosecute their thefts of valuable old-growth coast redwood from park property. The author, Lyndsie Bourgon, blends that true-crime narrative with bigger-picture perspective on the history of forest management and the global trade in illegally harvested timber. Maybe not surprisingly, it ends up being more a critique of global capitalism than an indictment of the tree thieves, and my review follows it all the way to Full Space Communist:

The book’s unavoidable conclusion is that the problem manifest in timber poaching is not the destruction of a particular tree or the failure of a conservation plan but rather a social and economic system that roots personal identity in wage-earning work (or lack thereof) and that describes a tree by its value as board feet in a lumberyard. Tree Thieves thus suggests that the theft of a tree may be a category error … so pervasive that we don’t know we’re standing in its shade.