There were, of course, other ways to feel connected with humanity on a plane. You could notice a slight indentation left in the seat from the person before you, or the length to which they had extended (or shortened) their seatbelt, which would now become yours. You didn’t have to turn to the back of the in-flight magazine to see some stranger’s—or, more likely, strangers’—handiwork on the crossword, or wonder what flavor of sticky substance someone had spilled across its pages. Nor was it required to retrace the doodles drawn on the ads for UNTUCKit shirts, It’s Just Lunch, Hard Rock Café, Wellendorff jewelry, companies selling gold coins, and Big Green Eggs. But it’s clear that with the last print issue of Hemispheres, the in-flight magazine of United Airlines, and the last such magazine connected to a major US carrier (with the exception of Hana Hou!, for Hawaiian Airlines), it is the end of an era.
Male hysteria was not the only concern of the early suffragists. They also needed money to run their campaigns and publish their newspapers and organize their marches. Fortunately, a model for women’s fundraising already existed. During the Civil War, women eager to do their patriotic duty for the war effort took a good, hard look at their own practical skills. They couldn’t fight or hold public office and many of them didn’t have money of their own, but they knew how to cook. They could bake cakes. They could make pickles and jam. They could compile their best recipes into cookbooks. And then they could sell these things for money that they wouldn’t have to turn over to their husbands.
For suffragists, selling food and community cookbooks served another purpose: This very public focus on food proved that they were not neglecting their womanly duties. Far from it! Even though many of the contributors to these cookbooks were prominent teachers, physicians, writers, and ministers, they still knew the proper way to run a home and, what’s more, they had professional training. As Hattie A. Burr, the editor of The Woman Suffrage Cook Book, notes in her introduction, “A book with so unique and notable a list of contributors, vouched for by such undoubted authority, has never before been given to the public.”
Eventually, I would learn that stories are not just a way of communicating science; they are intrinsic to science, actually part of doing science. My own story of merging these Two Cultures – for me, literary writing and particle physics – was complicated by a Third Culture, religion.
I’ve learned that cemeteries, too, aren’t really for the dead. They’re for the living. They give us a chance to remember people as we wish, maybe to wash away some of the bitterness or hurt feelings we might have felt when they were alive. Our cemetery has been like that for me. But it’s also been a reminder that all things broken and complicated deserve a home and to be loved. For the first time in my life, I’ve started believing that I do, too.
The story of this excellent book is in one sense familiar: a narrator, experiencing a rupture or crisis, is transformed through a magical encounter with a “wild” creature, a hare. But there is much more going on here. As hare and narrator enter into conversation, their strange dialogue begins to shed light on our relationship with our non-human neighbours, bringing into question assumptions about control, consent, boundaries and autonomy.
In detailed behind-the-scenes case studies, Makary, a surgeon and public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University, reveals how and why physicians often salute bad science and baseless opinions at the peril of their patients.