Serious Face by Jon Mooallem

Serious Face by Jon Mooallem is an excellent book of essays by someone whose writing I enjoy quite a bit. Mooallem wrote Wild Ones and This is Chance and provides in his latest book thirteen different pieces of writing that he's done, some of which I had some before and some new to me.

Mooallem's writing strikes me as interesting and profound, with his stories often providing unexpected twists and a different look at things than expected. In Serious Face, stories he tells include the following...

"We Have Fire Everywhere" about the fire in Paradise, CA and people fleeing it.

"Why These Instead of Others?" about a twenty-something Mooallem being in Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska and his friend needing Coast Guard rescue after a tree fell on him, causing near-fatal injuries.

"A House at the End of the World" about B.J. Miller, who started in San Francisco the Zen Hospice Project for people with terminal illnesses.

"The Outsiders" about two men helping people as they leave prison, picking them up as part of the Ride Home Program of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition and easing their transition from jail. 

This is Chance by Jon Mooallem

This is Chance by Jon Mooallem is an interesting book about the 1964 Good Friday earthquake in Anchorage, AK, with focus on Genie Chance, a part-time local news reporter who valiantly served as the the focal point for reporting, coordination, and communication in the period right after the quake.

Chance had moved to Alaska from Texas with her husband and three children five years prior and was downtown on March 27 with her thirteen-year-old son when the quake struck at 5:36PM, lasting four and a half minutes. It had a magnitude of 9.2 on the Richter scale, the most powerful quake recorded at the time and still the second most powerful. Felt far outside of the Alaskan epicenter, it shook water in wells around the world and triggered a tsunami that killed eleven in Crescent City, OR.

Chance was near the Fourth Avenue Theatre headquarters of her KENI station when the quake struck and saw the devastation that occurred, taking down the year-old JCPenny department store and causing a large section of road to drop some ten feet. She then took her son back home, saw her family safe, and went back downtown and worked. Chance started broadcasting from a VHF shortwave radio while in the Public Safety Building, as she later said, talking pretty much constantly for the next thirty hours. The power was out, but KENI able to put out a radio broadcast and Fire and Police Chiefs turned down her offer for them to speak directly via the airwaves, rather they had her serve as the voice to the people.

She served as a hub of both recovery efforts and connection, letting people know when and here help needed, and giving notice of people that were safe. Additionally, phones were out in Anchorage, but the broadcast was going to Fairbanks, and people there communicating with the lower 48 to pass along word that the city did need help, but hadn't been completely destroyed. A big part of the book was also the tales of how just like Chance did, many people stepped up with kindness and heroism, getting things done. The latter third of Mooallem's effort covers some different territory, including a local production of the play Our Town, the remainder of Chance's life, and disaster experts who visited Anchorage in the aftermath of the quake and saw the brave and orderly behavior of people that they'd witness after disasters elsewhere.

Pieces to make you smile - by Mooallem, Frias & Posnanski

Three pieces of writing from over the past few weeks struck me as really well done and smile-inducing, with one from the New York Times Magazine, one from a blog, and one a newspaper.

The NYT Magazine feature was "The Amateur Cloud Society That (Sort Of) Rattled the Scientific Community" by Jon Mooallem and it was a very cool look at Gavin Pretor-Pinney, a Brit who started a Cloud Appreciation Society and spearheaded the successful effort to get a cloud formation official status recognition. Mooallem's writing feels to lean towards the lovely and almost mystical, with his great book Wild Ones (that I wrote about in 2013) an example, and this piece definitely fit the same bill with the conclusion just making the reader feel good.

Another writer whose work can be particularly emotional and thought-provoking is Joe Posnanski and he recently did an awesome blog post that was then posted on the site of his employer, NBC Sports. "Hamilton" is about taking his 14-year-old daughter Elizabeth to see the Lin-Manuel Miranda play in New York and the post is really lovely, and then made all the more so by the story Posnanski tells in the postscript added on.

The final piece to note here is the shortest with "How a firefighter’s dying wish helped start one of Miami’s best pie shops" by Carlos Frias for the Miami Herald and it's a great story of love, friendship, remembrance, and accomplishment.

Great New York Times writing - by Cook, McFadden, Dove, Mooallem, and Weiner

There's been some remarkable writing for the the New York Times I've seen over the past few weeks, including four recently done stories and one from 2012 that I not long ago saw linked to on Twitter.

The first story to note here was written by Gareth Cook with "The Singular Mind of Terry Tao," an interesting account of a math genius who also happens to be very normal and grounded.

The three other recent Times pieces share the common bond of being about people doing great things for others. "Nicolas Winton, Rescuer of 669 Children from Holocaust, Dies at 106" was an obituary written by Robert McFadden, "Black South Carolina Trooper Explains Why He Helped a White Supremacist" a piece by Robert Dove and for the New York Times Magazine was "You Just Got Out of Prison.Now What" by Jon Mooallem. This last piece has the subtitle "Carlos and Ruby are two ex-convicts with a simple mission: picking up inmates on the day they're released from prison and guiding them through a changed world" and is just a very cool read.

The last piece to mention was by Eric Weiner from 2012 with "Where Heaven and Earth Come Closer," a piece about "thin places," those that as Weiner writes "transform us - or, more accurately, unmask us. In thin places, we become our more essential selves."

Mooallem & Titus pieces - on end of life decisions & dealing with depression

It's really not with the intent of closely linking them together, but two great pieces of writing I've seen recently were "Death, Redesigned" by Jon Mooallem for California Sunday Magazine and a post to reddit that Mark Titus did about overcoming depression.

The Mooallem piece brought to mind the great Atul Gawande book Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (which I wrote about here) and Mooallem wrote of many of the same concepts around end of life directives and palliative care, but for much of the piece with a business-focused approach. Covered in the story was entrepreneur Paul Gaffney and his idea for an app around planning for one's death, with brainstorming sessions led by Paul Bennett from Ideo. Mooallem in his story also wrote of Ideo partnering with BJ Miller, executive director of San Francisco’s Zen Hospice Project dedicated to the field of palliative care, and Miller last week did a TED Talk, that once available online, likely can be viewed from either the TED or Zen Hospice websites.

The Titus piece is his first-person take on what he did to deal with his depression and the writing from him can probably can be generalized to just doing things, and then keeping up the momentum of doing things. It's solid stuff from him that brought to mind for me a post I did in 2011 on mental health writing in Esquire, with pieces by Chris Jones and Mike Sager.

American Hippopotamus by Jon Mooallem

American Hippopotamus by Jon Mooallem was an entertaining Kindle single (estimated by Amazon at 71 printed pages) about the seemingly fictional effort at the start of the 20th century to import hippos to live in the American South and become a cattle substitute.

The story has been optioned to be made into a film and features the larger than life characters of Frederick Russell Burnham, the inspiration for Indiana Jones and model for the Boy Scouts, and Fritz Duquesne, a spy and constant schemer.

The story was written about in a Q&A with Mooallem for Wired and as a Kindle single, it's definitely a short read, but an interesting and true one nonetheless.

Writing I liked - with pieces by Moallem, Schur and Hampikian

Three excellent pieces of non-sports writing from the past few weeks which I haven't posted on yet included pieces from Grantland and the New York Times.

For Grantland, Michael Schur wrote "A Particular Kind of Genius: Remembering Harold Ramis" on the Hollywood actor, writer and director and there were two Times pieces I found of note including a Jon Moallem written feature "A Journey to the Center of the World" on Jacques-André Istel and the strange town of Felicity, Arizona he built near Yuma.

The other piece of really good writing from the Times was the op-ed column "When may I shoot a student?" by Greg Hampikian on the state of Idaho considering a bill that would allow guns on college and university campuses.

"Wild Ones" by Jon Mooallem

Wild Ones by Jon Mooallem was an interesting book with the equally interesting and long subtitle A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America.

Mooallem wrote early on of his four year-old daughter who possesses untold numbers of animal themed items and apparel and how when she's an adult, her exposure to animals as an adult may be different than ours with many species on the road to extinction. Mooallem in the introduction described Wild Ones as being about "finding yourself straddling those two animal worlds- a little kid's and the actual one- and trying to understand both." 

There were three main sections to the book with each focusing on efforts to save a particular species:

1. Bears - This was specific to polar bears, particularly the population of polar bears around Churchill, Manitoba and interesting from Mooallem was his description of how the polar bear became more of a symbol than anything else.

2. Butterflies - Also covered were conservation efforts around the Lange's metalmark butterfly which lives only in the Antioch Dunes National Wildlife Refuge in California. It was fascinating reading here of the efforts to preserve the species and how cause and effect often has led to unintended consequences for the Lange's metalmark.

3. Birds - The last section was on the whooping crane and an annual human-led migration from Wisconsin to Florida. It's in this section that Mooallem provides the most hopeful writing, but it's not really because the whooping crane will likely thrive (whatever the definition of thrive is) in the future, it's because of the efforts that Mooallem saw put in towards saving the birds. Quoted in the section was Brooke Pennypacker, a trike pilot (with this being an interesting part of the story) who told Mooallem “you can’t take humanity out of the equation. Humanity caused the problem to begin with, and so it’s very hard for humanity to solve the problem. Because it’s humanity! You know what I mean? We bring to the table all the same crap that was brought to the table to create this nightmare in the first place!” Mooallem wrote of being reassured by seeing these “achingly imperfect people, working to achieve something more moral than they are” and then quoted Pennypacker again with his statement “it’s not a bird project. It’s a people project. The birds are an excuse for doing something good.” 

Along these same lines of profiling efforts where many species are staying alive only due to our herculean efforts, Mooallem towards the end of the book told the story of Phil Pister, who in 1969 saved the Owen’s pupfish species from extinction (true, almost nobody has heard of the thing, but it was compelling reading on one guy saving a species from extinction).

The quotes from Pennypacker and story on Pister illustrate a point from the book about how it not a question of whether we're playing God in animal conservation efforts, but how far we want to go in playing God in relation to our intervention. Closely related to this is another key point (this the quasi-optimistic one) about how even if our efforts ultimately futile, there's something to be said for just doing something and trying to help.


Two additional things from Mooallem in the book that stood out to me as particularly interesting were around our perception of animal counts and young kids in relation to animals.

In relation to how many animals there should be of a particular species, Mooallem wrote about the concept of shifting baselines syndrome- basically creating a "new normal". In animal species count terms, you don't see many for a while, then you see a few so you feel that you've seen... a lot. His point is that especially when it's considered what things were like in the past, it's tough to say what the count of a species actually "should be."

Mooallem early on in the book wrote of his young daughter and makes the point that we as adults want to view kids as like animals, free and innocent, but one trait shared by kids and animals is that of self-interest. Referenced by Mooallem and quoted in the book was a social ecologist from Yale, Stephen Kellert, who wrote of how young kids aren't born with a relationship with the natural world and desire to preserve it. That mentality would have to develop over time and until it does, kids will see the natural world as simply something that provides, rather than has to be nurtured. It's a fairly brief and interesting part of the book that makes me think of how kids want what they want, we as parents don't have to give it to them, but we can't fault them for wanting or asking.


All in all, it's a solid book that Mooallem noted as coming out of his New York Times Magazine 2009 story "Rescue Flight" on the group featured in the whooping crane section, Operation Migration. Additionally, Mooallem wrote of first visiting Churchill, Manitoba in 2005 while at the UC Berkeley Journalism School and the back jacket of the book mentions him working with the tremendously interesting sounding San Francisco based Pop-Up Magazine, which has creative types putting together a 100-minute live magazine performance on stage for an audience.

Excellent feature writing - by Pressler, Paterniti & Mooallem

There's been three feature articles I've seen lately that struck me as outstanding, with two from GQ Magazine and one the New York Times Magazine.

From the April issue of GQ was "The King of Oontz Oontz Oontz" by Jessica Pressler and it's a well done profile on Electronic Dance Music DJ Tim Bergling, better know as Avicii. While Avicii not a well known name outside dance music circles, he's gotten probably the most acclaim for his song Levels and Pressler notes him commanding $100,000+ for some of his gigs. Within the profile there's some content not particularly flattering to Avicii (and which he took offense to as detailed in an LA Time story) but it seemed a probably pretty accurate look at a 23-year-old kid whose career is within the party scene.

The May edition of GQ had another excellent story with "The Luckiest Village in the World" by Michael Paterniti. It's written about the Spanish village of Sodeto and experiences of the townspeople with many of them splitting a lottery win one year ago. I've twice posted on GQ writing from Paterniti and both find him to be a really good writer and looking forward to his book The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese coming out July 30th.

In the same vein of a really good feature story by someone with a forthcoming book was the Jon Mooallem piece "Who Would Kill a Monk Seal?" for the New York Times Magazine. The story is about a endangered species that lives around the Hawaiian Islands and has a lot of great material around the conflicting viewpoints between people wanted to protect the seals and those whose lives are negatively impacted by protection efforts. Terribly interesting piece and makes me even more interested to read Mooallem's book coming out the 16th of this month, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America.