〰️〰️ IN 〰️

These are things I read, saw, ate, listened to, or just generally thought about in the last month that I want to share with you. It's an incomplete list (obviously) but it's the stuff I'm still thinking about.

galapagos

The big, cool thing I did this month was go to the Galapagos. Like many nature nerds, I've wanted to visit the islands since I was a kid. I'm still reeling a little bit from the reality of actually going there.

We were on the trip with a lot of birders, many of whom were wielding huge telephoto lenses and extremely nice cameras. (My friend Ed, who invited us on this trip, has an incredible blog post about the trip along with some absolutely unbelievable photographs.) All I had was my ancient iPhone and a dinky little underwater camera I bought for the trip. And so as we walked around the islands, I found myself frustrated by the photos I was taking. Not just because of my tools being a bit shit, but also because I found it quite hard to capture the things that made this place feel so special to me in a photograph.

One of the things they say about the Galapagos is that the animals aren't afraid of you. There are no large predators on the island, so they have no reason to think that humans will cause them any harm. And what that means is that they will simply walk right up to you. At one point I had to actually dodge out of the way, because a blue footed boobie took off a few feet away and I was in its flight path.

But it's not just that they'll walk up to you. It's also that they simply are not bothered more generally. Which means they go about their day, as if you are not there, watching. It's one thing to be able to see an animal, it's quite another to be able to watch and animal as it tends its chicks, hunts, squabbles with a neighbor.

And so I started taking videos. Videos of a blue footed boobie carefully removing rocks from the area around its egg. Videos of the way the frigate birds hover, endlessly. Videos of marine iguanas hunting and spitting. Videos of sharks and sea lions and penguins. Here's a compilation of the best ones - 10 minutes of Galapagos for you.

The trip also got me thinking a lot about attention, and paying attention. We saw so much, all the time. We were so lucky. We saw essentially every bird there is to see (and at least two birds we didn't expect to see at all), and a series of incredibly rare things — a Couvier's Beaked Whale jumping out of the water; mantas being pursued by sharks; an elusive reef octopus out of the water. And also, we were lucky because we were looking. Always. All the time, watching, paying attention, trying to see things. I woke up before dawn, and brought coffee out to the deck to see what was going on — sharks circled, a sea lion hauled up onto the back deck, pelicans perched on the railing, preening themselves. Soon, I'd be joined by several bird watchers.

One of our trip leaders, Michael O'Brian was out on the deck with his binoculars, looking, every hour of the day. After our final briefing each night, I would go out to the back of the boat to watch gulls hunt in the wave. One night, we shined a light out into the water and were met with thousands of tiny eyes shining back — the squid had come to the surface. Galapagos sharks glowed back too, like ghosts in the water.

The Couvier's Beaked Whale breached right next to our sister boat — the two travel the same path and share a combined crew, although we never met the tourists on that boat — but they didn't see it. They weren't looking, we were told. We were. Always.

Ed has also written about this in terms of birdwatching — about how it has made him more attuned to the world around him beyond just the birds:

When I step out my door in the morning, I take an aural census of the neighborhood, tuning in to the chatter of creatures that were always there and that I might previously have overlooked. The passing of the seasons feels more granular, marked by the arrival and disappearance of particular species instead of much slower changes in day length, temperature and greenery. I find myself noticing small shifts in the weather and small differences in habitat. I think about the tides.

It would be easy for this next paragraph to fall into a series of sentences about turning off your phone and the attention economy and while they'd probably be at least a little bit true they'd also be annoying. I'm resisting that (you're welcome) and trying to think about how to keep the kind of deep and constant looking alive in my life now. I can't move to the Galapagos. I can't even realistically log off entirely.

But I can continue looking. Not just at nature (although yes, of course, at nature) but at the world around me.

About a year ago I heard an interview on NPR. My memory of the actual author is fuzzy, but I think it was with Andrew Sean Greer, the author of many books including Less. I haven't read any of his books (sorry) but he said something in the interview that I think about all the time even though I'm likely about to butcher it in my retelling — he talked about how he's interested in people. In getting glimpses into their lives and stories all the time. He said that whenever he's in a bathroom, he takes extra time to read all the graffiti. To learn just a little bit about these strangers, and their lives, their handwriting, what they felt was worth writing on a wall.

I do this too now. Take that extra thirty seconds to read the silly, vulgar, mundane, and sometimes a little bit terrifying words on the bathroom wall. Looking. After hearing that interview I started a note on my phone called "noticing things." It's full of little snippets of things. The name of a dog. Photos of graffiti. A voice memo recording the specific sound that a teenage boy's shoes make when they’re untied, heels dragging along the ground with each step. The fact that caution tape looks different in different countries.

Looking. Noticing. Being not just interested in the world around you, but specifically trying to see it.

After our Galapagos trip we spent two days in Quito, which is a really beautiful city! I especially recommend the gondola. The city itself is already at about 9,000 feet, and the gondola takes you up to 13,000 feet. When we got on, the clouds were low and heavy and we commiserated with the other tourist in our car about how we might be wasting our time and not be able to see anything at all from the top.

Then, about halfway up, the car simply moved through the clouds. And suddenly, we were above them. Above the weather. Never before have I more keenly felt the phrase "on the top of the world."

travel music

One thing I do while traveling is compulsively Shazam all the music I'm hearing. I like to know what the soundtrack of a given place is, at any given time. I've done this for years, so I have playlists from trips to Namibia and Kazakhstan and Paris. In the last two months I've bounced between Tokyo, Taipei and Quito so I combined them into one playlist to capture what I heard on the road. Here's that playlist if you are curious.

reading

• I read The Work of Art on my phone and I really enjoyed it but let me tell you this is not a book to read on your phone. There are loads of images and scanned documents that are impossible to really appreciate at phone size.
• A fascinating look at the logistics behind a local institution, the Oakland Museum of California White Elephant Sale.
• "The paradox of imagination is that it's fundamentally self-centered: it happens in the privacy of your own mind. But your private, cloistered reveries turn out to be one of the best ways to create that shared, inclusive space that can shelter other people." 〰️ Charlie Jane Anders on imagination and fascism.
• "Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again." 〰️ Harrowing piece by Kyle Kingsbury about what it's like in Chicago right now
• "I can actually have these things now. I can actually get up and take a bath. I can actually get up to cook my food. I can actually go to my refrigerator anytime of day or night and get me something. I can watch TV, what I want to watch, not what the crowd wants to watch. Clean clothes." 〰️ my colleague Nuala Bishari has a series of pieces on what being housed does for folks
• "Because what this sort of reporting ultimately means is that if you have enough money to get somebody, anybody, to produce a white paper for you, which you can then put on some think-tank stationery? Then, my friend, you are ready to enter into the rushing current of elite reportage." 〰️ a brutal (but excellent) piece by Peter Coviello about why you probably shouldn't take the New York Times's reporting seriously (or give them an interview)

〰️ OUT 〰️〰️

This is stuff I wrote, created, or published.

I did very little in November in terms of output I can share with you. I wrote a tiny bit, but mostly I looked at birds and fish and lizards. Some months are just like that. I'll have more to share with you for December's report!