New personal essay

My latest, After the Fourth, is available starting today at Curator magazine. An excerpt:

The days surrounding July 4^th normally trumpet the ease of summer, but this year’s music is different. It was Tuesday, the fifth of July, when the horns gave way to the unrelenting beat of the future.

A careful listener would have heard the cues sooner. On Friday, my oldest went away with a buddy and his family. We packed my boy’s things and wrote down all the phone numbers. His dad and I spoke out of both sides of our mouths, reminding him to call if anything made him uncomfortable and assuring him that everything would be fine.

Thump, thump.

Saturday the wind and rain washed the rhythm away, but it returned on Sunday, pulsing as I came up the stairs and saw Connor in combat boots and camouflage...

Read the whole story here.

Sci-Nonfi: RoboRoaches

On an otherwise unremarkable day in May, I spent time with high school students and neuroscientists and their remote-controlled cockroaches.

Two live RoboRoaches on a lab table

My essay appears in The Curator today. An excerpt:

The students finish the SpikerBoxes; the cockroach experience begins. A few Blaberus discoidalis cockroaches will have a limb surgically removed. The legs, the scientists explain, have neurons firing in them, even after they are amputated, and will remain alive for up to two days.

Volunteers take on the roles of anesthesiologist and surgeon. Marzullo guides them through the procedure. The cockroaches are removed from their habitat and submerged in ice water. Using small, curved scissors, the leg is quickly and carefully cut and pinned to a SpikerBox. Students huddle around it, waiting to hear the spikes. It sounds like static. Gage and Marzullo then connect the box to an iPad, and students can see a visual representation of the sounds.

They discuss possible responses of the leg to stimuli, and reveal what will be one of the student’s favorite experiments: How will a cockroach leg respond to the sound vibrations of hip-hop, specifically the song “Love the Way You Lie?”

Read the entire story here.

You can read The Oakland Press article, learn more about Backyard Brains, or prepare for the coming RoboRoach invasion.

Beyond self-expression

It is a privilege to be on staff with Curator Magazine, a web publication of International Arts Movement (IAM). Today, I feel this more strongly than ever before. This post moved me. Written by IAM founder and visual artist Makoto Fujimura, it powerfully expresses a way to think about and respond to global catastrophe. A quote:

Artists are generative by nature, but our current obsession with self-expression truncates the experience of our full humanity. We need to listen to what our hands, our eyes and our ears are detecting. Through intuition, the artistic process often reveals surprises that not even the artist anticipates.

As I implore artists to go beyond self-expression, I implore the church to do likewise. For example, rescue efforts are not about our self-expression but about pouring the incarnate love of God into the lives of those suffering. We need to weep with them and 'waste' time by being there with them; we need a long-term commitment to befriend and follow up, rather than perform a 'hit and run' rescue effort. However, I am not dismissing the importance of people that provide for the basic needs of those in crisis.

The key to communicating our core message of generative work is to operate out of sheer love for people ...

Read the full post from Fujimura here. How will you be generous, move beyond self-expression, and impact the next generation?

Literary scenes

I'm excited to share my new piece at The Curator, To Tame A Friend.

An illustration from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

A little bonus information:

1) We named the untamed feral cat "Deck Kitty". DK is still around, watching us and taking small risks of getting closer, particularly when there's a patch of sun in which to rest.
2) When I first read "The Little Prince", it was as a third-year French student. I wonder if my memory of the scene was intensified by reading the story in a second language.

I'd love to hear about a scene from a book that's stuck with you. Feel free to share in the comment section below. Merci!