Wild Things Redux
An eclectic selection of our stories and pictures on science, art, politics, language, photography, medicine, and personal history.
Editor’s Note: I write and edit Wild Things with my wife, Barbara Ramsey, who had open heart surgery on March 7. She is recovering, but her care has left us little time for anything else. This week, I’m linking stories from past issues that you may have missed. And I hope we’ll be back with more soon. -Kerry
BIRDS
SCIENCE
Parsing skin color. How the ability to sweat and fatty fish have shaped our history.
Swiss goiters. Heroes and villains in a massive public health crisis.
Deep danger. Revisiting the deadliest tsunami in history and what it portends for the Cascadia Fault off our coast.
Rescuing Fermi. The mathematician’s famous paradox isn’t a paradox at all.
TALES FROM THE CLINIC
My heart surgery. What Aztec priests and modern surgeons evoke now.
Counting sponges. The problem was in the patient’s gut, not his head.
Lotte’s story. How one patient escaped the Nazis on a raft and lived to bake cookies.
Learning my lesson. A patient teaches the doctor not to give up.
POLITICS
Bayard’s bravery. Obama’s new film on a civil rights hero dances around his controversial politics.
Appreciating Slow Horses. How a spy show reveals the petty politics of our time.
Celebrating Hamas. The “progressive” response to the attacks echoed the moral lapses of the historic Left.
Violence on the Left. How the SLA and other murderers shaped my experiences in the 1970s.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Remembering Peter Magubane. The lighter side of the photographer who documented apartheid.
A photographic Dickens. Viktor Kolář has spent his life documenting a Czech city communism left behind.
The tenderness of boxers. An homage to photographer Larry Fink.
Defending humanism. Was a famous critique of the Family of Man photography exhibit based on a bad faith lie?
PERSONAL HISTORY
My grandfather’s funeral. An Alabama memorial shaped my mother’s views on race.
The Hobbit Hole. On starting a head shop deep in the Kansas Bible Belt.
The death of Lat Conerly. A case of mistaken identity ended my grandfather’s life.
Confessions. Berkeley’s Radical Therapy group struggled to slay my inner pig.
Favorite fiction. Ten of Barbara’s all-time best, from My Father’s Dragon to Love Medicine.
Favorite nonfiction. Science writing from Sacks, Sen, and Gould, and a book of manners.
ART & CULTURE
Abusing Joan Baez. A new documentary indulges the insanity of recovered memory.
Still here. The Chemakum had been declared extinct. Then I met some.
Alive with color. Senegal’s remarkable admixture of the sacred and the secular.
A genius in color. Northwest artist Linda Okazaki’s retrospective employs vivid watercolor to tell dream-stories.
LANGUAGE
Learning the words. What Sequoya, the Cherokee genius, teaches us about how we acquire language.
Troublesome pairs. Why do we confuse similar words?
Writing in beauty. Two boys invented an alphabet for 40 million people; a calligrapher helped them make it beautiful.
REGULAR FEATURES in Wild Things include For the Love of Type, Exhibitions of note, and Snippets of the Week, a culling of philosophical, humorous, and startling bits we’ve run across.
Speedy recovery, Barbara.