Good bye

I started this blog in my own words "to blog primarily about thoughts about my work and life out here". Well, both work and here are changing. Today is my last day at my small northeast ohio medical school, and my last day as a trainee. As of next week I will be fully fledged tenure track junior faculty, and back on the east coast. And so I feel this is a good time to end this blog.
I have enjoyed writing it immensely. It has helped me think my way through the past five and a half years. But it was written for a time, a place, and a version of me. And all those things have changed.
I do not use the internet as I once did as a trainee scientist, as a place to learn more about my chosen field and my career path through it. And indeed, the world has changed, especially online, since the heady days when I joined twitter and later started blogging. As the great unpleasantness of 2016 wore on, I began to become exhausted by the endless hot takes and rapid fire opinions of the internet. And so I began to question my own role in it. Is what I have to write so essential?
When I retreated from the internet, a friend of mine commented that that was loss of a young queer academic voice on the internet. Perhaps. But quitting the internet meant recommitting to where I was physically. To become a young queer academic voice in rural northeast ohio. Which is no less valuable.
The tension here is one I have always felt. I call it the Bolkonsky Bezhoukov dichotomy, after two of the main characters from Tolstoi's war and peace. Prince Bolkonsky, a sceptical materialist, gives up the opportnity to be a camp aid, convinced that he can do more good, indeed only do good, as a sergeant to his unit. Peter Bezhoukov in contrast, believes in the paths of providence, the possibility of great change, and moves from secret society to secret society to be part of that great change. These days, I am a Bolkonsky, but unlike Tolstoi, I think a Bolkonsky can indeed do thing.
So I am ending this blog. Thank you for reading. And watch where else I will speak, in new ways, about new challenges.
Good luck to you all.
Paleogould

A scientist in four dimensions

The past five years have been a wild ride intellectually and professionally. When I started this postdoc I was a year out of completing a PhD in paleontology. Specifically, I'd been looking at the relationship between bone morphology and mammal ecology in the fossil record of the North American Paleocene-Eocene (roughly the first 20 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs) to see if it could tell us anything about the role of locomotor specialization in the success of certain groups of mammals. I came to this lab to learn the techniques necessary to do biomechanical work necessary for testing the functional aspects of the correlations between morphology and ecology I based my paleontological work on. I thought, if I thought anything (I wasn't seeing particularly far into the future at that time, for a number of reasons) that I would spend a couple of years learning the techniques in a different system, then go back to my comparative functional morphology work with a little bit of biomechanics thrown in.
Fast forward five years later, and I'm leaving this lab with a completely different research focus. I'm off to start my own lab studying swallowing in the context of neurological disorders. I'm a Co-I on an NIH funded R01 I helped write. I'm increasingly interested in incorporating more explicit neuroscience into my work. I'm still interested in comparative question, but completely different ones based on the ontogeny of musculoskeletal systems and behaviors in mammal feeding. I haven't worked on anything paleontological in 4 years. I haven't touched a fossil since I finished my PhD.
This transition, or, more accurately, this complete change of track, is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about and coming to terms with. I had wanted to be a paleontologist since I was nine. How was it that after having come close to that goal, I was willing to move away from it all of a sudden? Did I really want to give up evolutionary biology and comparative zoology? Was I selling out?
Initially, my worries about this problem were acute, until I began to realise they were based on a false story I had been telling myself about myself. Yes, I'd wanted to be a paleontologist since I was nine, but that wasn't all I'd wanted to be. I'd also wanted to be a librarian, a policeman, and a doctor. More relevantly, I remembered that in my last year at Cambridge the three subjects that had really gripped me were paleontology, physiology, and neural mechanisms of behavior. I had even considered continuing with neuroscience, until I balked at the amount of animal work required (another change I've gone through since that time). So in some ways, the things that were drawing me into my new research direction, the problems and questions, were things that had always interested me as much as paleontology. One of my frustrations as a mammal paleontologist in fact had always been how little we discussed in any detail the unique physiological adaptations of mammals. I am first and foremost a mammal biologist, and that means that their physiology and behavior are interesting to me.
Yet my thinking has now matured even past that recognition into the realisation that what I do now doesn't erase what I have done. My five years working in paleontology, the fossils I collected, the museum collections I measured, the methods I used, the papers I published, the conversations I had, haven't been erased by my years working in mammal feeding physiology. Collapse the time dimension, and I am still a paleontologist, and a physiologist, and a neuroethologist, and a comparative zoologist.
I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was nine, and I am one. That doesn't mean I cannot be anything else as well.

A portrait of a job search

As some you may know, I recently signed an offer letter for a tenure track job starting this July. My time as a postdoctoral researcher in northeast Ohio, the time in which I started this blog, is coming to an end. Through my time learning the ropes of scientific careers in the past few years, I've always found information on the job searches of others important and interesting. So I decided to add my own. What I present here is a case study, specific, idiosyncratic, uncontrolled. It cannot be generalized. It is however, data. Add it to your sample, and consider your sample critically.

About me:
I started my postdoc in autumn 2013 with 1 paper in press. By my time on the job market last autumn I had 13 papers published or in press, so a bit more than 2 papers a year as an average. About half of those are first or last author. All of them are in society journals. I have no glam or baby glam pubs. I had no major grants of my own, though I had applied both for a K99 and an R15 and listed both on my CV (the R15 was pending for part of the job search season, not discussed for the later part). My teaching was limited, largely to my gross anatomy lab instruction I did in graduate school with a smattering of lectures in allied health anatomy courses over the past five years, as I was in a 100% research position. Another characteristic of note of my CV was a complete change in career direction between my PhD (in paleontology) and my postdoc (experimental physiology in an animal model of disease). I have about three times as many publications in the latter field than the former at this point.

About the jobs I applied for:
I applied for 45 jobs. Geographically (for personal reasons) these were located almost entirely in the northern Midwest and rust belt (Illinois, Michigan, Ohio), and the mid Atlantic region (New York to North Carolina). I applied only to full time, tenure track jobs. In terms of universities I applied to everything from Ivy leagues, to R1s, to Medical schools (osteopathic and allopathic), to regional four year teaching intensive universities to liberal arts colleges. In terms of area of specialty, I applied to jobs focused in Anatomy, Physiology, Neuroscience, Evolutionary and Comparative Biology. I had three versions of my research statement targeted at different levels of research support, and three cover letter templates. My teaching statement and diversity statement were almost identical for all universities that required them.

Results:
I got five phone/skype interviews, exclusively from job searches looking at least in part for someone who could teach gross anatomy. From those, I got three on campus interviews. 2 of these were at four year colleges looking to expand undergraduate anatomy instruction for nursing and premedical students. These two institutions were eye openingly different, one being a regional state campus, one being a very small private liberal arts college. I learnt many things I didn't know about the diversity of undergraduate education in the US. At both interviews, incidentally, my lack of teaching experience, particularly with undergraduates, was brought up as a concern. The third interview was at an osteopathic medical school with a growing research focus. The initial interview was very focused on my ability to teach gross anatomy, but after my research seminar there was growing enthusiasm  for my capabilities as a researcher, and a second campus visit resulted in a offer that maintained my involvement in teaching gross anatomy while giving me significant research support and percent effort allocation. The result was a position pretty close to my ideal. Which was fortunate, as this was ultimately the only offer I received.


I am loathe to draw any conclusions from this, so the only remarks I will make are the ones that occurred to me comparing my experience to what I had maybe expected from my own data collecting. Applying broadly helped me, but not in the ways I thought it would. On the one hand, I could have only applied for anatomy jobs. On the other, it was not obvious from the job posting, or even from my first interview, that the job I eventually got would be what it was. A narrower set of job criteria might have made me miss it. Ultimately there were too many unknowns to really make a very good filter. The second is that different parts of my CV mattered in different ways at different times. My standout characteristic I thought would be my research productivity, except what got me through the door of interview in every case is my ability to teach a specific subject, even if my teaching experience might not be what the university ideally would want. And yet again, it was the specifics of my research agenda, and my grant writing experience, that led to the second visit at the job I took. As someone once told me, all job searches are a compromise. I turned out to be that compromise in ways I couldn't have known. Finally, getting the right feedback was essential. I asked teaching faculty to review my job talks for teaching positions. I asked neuroscience faculty to sit on my practice chalk talk for a neuroscience department (which wanted me to teach gross anatomy. Medical schools are odd beasts). Every time, the specific things they pointed out and suggested were brought up as positives by the places I visited.

And yet, for all this, I can't help but feel that I was lucky. How can you generalize, learn anything from 1 job offer in 45 applications? I know I did as much as I could, and it worked out for the best. But some of this, more perhaps than I am comfortable with, was good fortune. The right place, the right time. The opening seems so narrow that I feel I barely squeaked through. A relief, yet also sometimes an uncomfortable feeling.

On fallibility, humility, and responsibility in science

It has been a rough seventy two hours in the lab. Things have gone very very wrong. We have lost a lot of animals to an unknown illness that is swift and lethal. All day we have felt powerless, and the day ended in a succession of necropsies. More dispiriting, this is the second attempt we have made at this particular experiment. It started out much more promising than the last, but very suddenly, we were once again confronted with how little power we have over biology.
We work on an animal model of infant physiology, which means we work on infant animals. Few people do. It is difficult and demanding work. Infants have care needs beyond what a university animal facilities can provide (though ours have accommodated ours to an astounding degree). So we must step in to feed animals and care for them. Our bigger problem is this: there is little data on infant mammalian physiology, particularly for large farm animals like we work on. I remember a few years ago when we were having problems with our anesthesia procedure. Every vet and textbook in the country swore by tylezol for inducing our animals. It may have worked in adults, but it was useless in infants.
For the past two years we have increased the complexity of our experiments. We now raise the animals from birth, when they are most vulnerable. With full term animals, we had good luck. We got all the data we needed, and felt confident we knew what we were doing.
The grant that was funded however, called for doing the project in premature animals.
There is a very good reason for this. Human premature babies have a host of complications, in particular with regard to feeding and respiration function, which is what we study. Yet it is almost impossible to do the type of research we do on human babies, because it requires X rays. This is doubly the case for premature babies. Crucially, only babies diagnosed with problems can be enrolled in research studies for what we do. As a result, we have no idea what non pathological physiology in this system looks like for newborns, either full term or premature. The work we do addresses a critical gap in pediatric physiology.
Nor did we rush into this blind. We have years experience caring for young animals. Before this project, my PI found a team of researchers who do research in our model on animals far more premature that we were planning. They have come to visit us and us them. We discuss our problems with them regularly. And, thanks to them, our care of full term animals was a resounding success. We were cautiously confident.
The first preterm litter was a disaster. Only a single individual survived past 48 hours. It was pretty much our worst case scenario. We sat back, took stock. We bought better incubators. We developed new protocols for cleanliness and care. We settled on a slightly less premature age for our animals, scaling back our ambition in the face of how much more delicate these preterm animals were.
Again, we thought we were ready.
The delivery of the litter went amazingly. Sixteen healthy newborns in two used medical incubators. For 48 hours, we felt good.
Then they started to fall ill. By Saturday evening, two were refusing food (a very bad sign). By sunday morning, they had started dying. Today was almost like being in a hospital during an outbreak. It was utterly heartbreaking, and sobering.
We pay for our experiments in effort. I have been working well over fifty hours since Wednesday, like everyone in the lab. And we care. Our animals are helpless. And so we try to marshal all our resources to help them when they are ill.
And today I was reminded that we too are helpless.
We are working on a animal model of an incredibly vulnerable patient population. That vulnerability is baked into the very experiments we proposed to undertake.
I understand a little what working in a neonatal ICU must be like now. I understand what realising how little you know, and how little you can do, must feel like now.
As scientists, we plan experiments. We anticipate contingencies. We think about physiology, experimental conditions, confounding factors. Yet when we create animal models of disease, we create, in effect, patients. And we are suddenly faced with the maddening, terrifying, awe full power of illness. The limits of medical science, laid bare in our own research labs.
Hopefully, the remaining animals will survive. We will get data. We will feel our bargain with our animal subjects has been at least partially fulfilled.
But today, I think, I confronted the limits of what I do. Today, I think, we all felt, perhaps, we were getting close to the point where the price of the bargain is too high.

On the vastness of friendship

We had nowhere to go.

We were on holiday in a part of France where we knew no one, in a decidedly less than glamourous rental cottage, 1000km from the nearest family, when the phone rang. It was my father, calling to say that he wouldn't meet us in Alsace later in the summer, that he wouldn't be at the house in London when we got back. Finally setting fire to a year and a half of hope and wishful thinking. Detonating, as my sister puts it, our too perfect party of five.

We were alone, and already the maelstrom of pain and incomprehension started spinning, so that we were alone even from each other. And we had nowhere to go.

My mother did not have much of a family. Partly as a result of being the very youngest, but mostly because her own mother, not being a very nice woman, had atomised the family, reduced it to constituent parts that repelled each other. As far as I can tell, from the age of roughly 18 to 29 when she married my father, my mother's contact with her own family was minimal, and strained. There was little pleasure in it. But my mother instead busily built herself an army of friends. To this day she maintains the ability to find kindred spirits and make friends with them, so that she has true friends, spanning multiple generations and multiple continents. But it is in the crucible of her twenties that she forged her deepest friendships. She sought out lifelong friends at bad concerts, yoga retreats, one off mountain activities, as well as in her university courses. My mother built herself an family of friends that probably helped her survive her twenties, in much the same way, I realise, that my brother's, my sister's, and my friends helped us survive the disintegration of the first version of our family.

One of my mother's best friends was a painter she met at a (apparently very bad) concert in Strasbourg as a student. This women was fifteen years older than my mother. A mother of two, a wife, a free spirit, and an exceptional, talented, thoughtful painter with no gift for self-promotion. By the time of that fateful summer she was a widow, and lived, in her own way, as bohemian a life as the middle class widow of a company doctor living in a rather stayed provincial town could. She had turned two whole rooms in the large, XIXth century apartment she rented into her studio. There was a magnificent winter garden filled with ancient houseplants in large cracked pots. She had, years ago, repainted a whole wall of the long hallway. As she had been in geometric phase at that point, it was in fact a mural of bold geometric shapes. And on every wall in the house hung her canvases. A rotating cast of her latest works (she painted prolifically). Abstract, unframed, untitled composition in rich textures of black and grey, with flecks of red paint and gold dust. Throughout her life she challenged herself as an artist, subtly but continuously so that year on year her paintings became an evolving text of her own thoughts about her art.

The only picture I have of one of her paintings. Uncharacteristically pink.

That summer, my mother called that friend. And she told us to come and stay with her. Not at the apartment, but at her other house. I had been to that house a few times as child, and remembered it as a remote and beautiful place. Returning there that summer, lonely, afraid, distraught, angry, I rediscovered it, and found it was a dream. The house was an old farm in one of the less beautiful valleys of the Vosges mountains, nestled up against the mountainside on a dirt road. But, in a fit of whimsy, a previous owner had had the meadow in front of the house landscaped into a magnificent garden centered around a lilly pad covered lake. There was a stone terrace by the like surround by intricately carved old topiaries. There was an island, accessed by a little wooden bridge on which stood a wisteria covered boathouse with an open air dining area attached. There were huge magnolias, yew trees, Japanese maples. The place was an effervescence of life and greenery.

The house itself was not grand to match the garden. But over the years my mother's friend had added there what was important. A well stocked kitchen. A large fireplace in the dining room. A bookcase full of an eclectic and thoughtful selection of books. She always said she did not paint at that house, because nature was too distracting there. But I also think that her art took a different form in that house: where her paintings explored her ideas about life and humanity in the abstract, in that house, she put her humanism into concrete action. Or at least, that is how it feels to me now. Because what happened that summer was simple, but immense: my mother's friend opened her house to us, and kept it open, so that we could grieve, forget, and eventually heal. There was no time limit to the gift. We went back summer after summer after summer, and she welcomed us with the warmth of her hearth and her heart.

Our society does not really know what to do with friendship. It is rarely the topic of any films other than war movies. It is not protected by any legal status. Would we classify friendship as an institution, like we do marriage or parenthood? Yet, its gift, when given, transfigures uur world. All the more so because it is compelled by nothing more than the friend's own love. My mother's friend, who became my friend, saved our family, for no other reason than she loved my mother.

I remember waking up in that house one summer. It had heavy french shutters so the room was pitch black until I opened the window, then the shutters, and let the bright sun of an Alsatian August burst into the room. In the distance was the blue sky between grey green mountainsides, a backdrop to the symphony of vibrant green coming from the garden. And below me, on the dew soaked lawn, I heard my mother and her friend, who had been up for hours, laughing and talking as they helped themselves to bread and honey from the beehives up the hill. I called down to them from the freshness of my well rested youth, and they called back to me from the freshness of their friendship, not needing me to join them but glad for me to come. It was art, a poem in the morning light, a gift beyond value.

In memoriam.

Professor PaleoGould's completely unvetted guide to surviving five day conferences

Five day conferences are fun, and intellectually stimulating, and will provide you with experiment and grant ideas for months. They are also an absolute physical and mental marathon, not to mention a financial black hole, that can leave you a drained zombie surviving on complimentary SouthWest peanuts by day three. I have been doing five day conferences since I started graduate school, and after ending up as said zombie one too many times, I have developed a few ideas to help. These ideas primarily work for a man travelling alone without children who is comfortable navigating big cities, and is a pretty extroverted and social person. I understand that there are challenges for others that I don't address. If there's anything you think I have missed that is important, please weigh in in the comments. The focus here is not on how to get the most out of the talks (though I touch on that), but how to manage your physical and mental energy to make it through tfive days without needing a holiday to recover.

1) Travel is exhausting, recognize this. If you're travelling more than two hours to get to the conference, you will be exhausted by the time you get there. Doubly so if you're flying through multiple time zones. Don't plan to go out or catch up with friends the day you arrive. Register, attend the plenary, shake a few hands, drink a lot of water and have a light quiet meal and get to bed. Start day one on the right foot.

2) Plan ahead. Both for the science, and the practicalities. Figure out how to get from the airport to the hotel. Does the public transit system run when your flight lands? How long does the journey take? Both before hand (google maps is your friend) and on the first day, do some quick reconnaissance. Find the nearest coffee place that is not in the conference hotel, the nearest chemist (for my UK friends) or drugstore (for my US friends), and the nearest grocery store. The aim here is to emancipate yourself from the conference hotel's amenities. That will save both your pocketbook, and your sanity when it comes to dealing with milling crowds of grumpy, jetlagged academics waiting to order theirs first coffee.
As for the science, go through the talk titles and circle the ones you are interested in. This is a great use of airplane time. Get a rough idea of what days are full of things that might be important, and what days less so. Identify conflicts between concurrent sessions in advance, and only read abstracts closely in that case. Write down clearly when your poster or talk is, and recognise the restrictions that places on what you can do. This will help you when dealing with the rush and panic of finding a talk to see among a dozen concurrent sessions.

3) Once you get to the meeting, accept serendipity. Talks will run over, you will miss sessions you wanted to see. You will oversleep. Lunch will take too long. You will run into a old friend/collaborator who is leaving that evening right as you're about to enter the most interesting session of the day but you haven't seen this person in two years. It's fine. The plan you did was to help guide you through the chaos of talks. It is not a map of your actions. Conferences are about serendipity and happy accidents that result from concentrating a bunch of people with shared interests in one space. There's actually research on this stuff.

4) Pace yourself, and take downtime. Don't force yourself to go to an entire afternoon if you only saw one talk you were interested all afternoon (in my case, invariably, because it was Fish and Dinosaur day at SVP). Go up to your room, sit, read a book, call a loved one, take a nap.

5) Exercise, but differently. The hotel will have amenities but not the ones you're used to. And your body is not in the state you're used to. Now is not the time to try to break your rep max on deadlifts. Pick an easy half hour workout. A good body resistance circuit if the hotel has a fitness center. A three mile run if weather permits. Swimming if there is a pool. A simplified vinyasa if all you have is your room. The aim here is to exercise and stretch your body, and take your mind out of the crowd and conference space.

6) Don't party every night. Conference parties are fun. Hanging out with old friends at the hotel bar until 2am is fun. But do not do it every night. That way lies missing out on the conference. And even if you stay up until 2am, stop drinking alcohol much earlier. Go to bed tired, sober, and well hydrated.

7) Vary your diet. Don't eat at the nearest sandwich place every day. Find the food trucks. Explore. Your body will thank you.

8) Say yes to random invitations, but learn to eat alone. If you're chatting enthusiastically with someone you've just met, and their friends turn up, and they invite you to join them for lunch, say yes. Good things may come of it and you'll have more friendly faces in the crowd. On the other hand, learn to eat on your own. Sometimes you won't find anyone to go with. And sometimes you'll want to be as far away from people as possible. Take a chance: pick a restaurant you like the sound of, go there, sit at the bar with a good book and order a meal by yourself. It is a very calming experience in the middle of a meeting.

9) take time off. Remember that afternoon with almost no relevant talks? Take it off. Go to a museum, or exploring, or to a slightly further away but well regarded restaurant. Some meetings include afternoons off in their schedule. If your meeting doesn't, schedule your own.

10) If your hotel has a 39th floor bar with panoramic views of the city, go there. Part of meetings is embracing what the moment brings.

What goes into a paper

I'm currently analysing data on what will probably be the final paper from the project I joined the lab to work on four years ago. This project was to look at the effect of a specific nerve lesion on behavior and function at multiple levels. We've looked at performance (how well the function is achieved), kinematics (how the structures which perform the function move), and neuromuscular physiology (when the muscles which perform the function are active). For this last paper I'm attempting to synthesize these different strands of data to understand something about mechanisms, and if they could potentially be targets for intervention.
On my end, the synthesis has taken months of lining up different data sets, verifying they are properly synchronized, figuring out discrepancies. It's been painstaking. Most days I've had between two or four spreadsheets open, generally half of which are metadata telling me how two different data sources line up. As I was reaching the end of this process, finally getting close to the dataset I needed for my analysis, it struck me that this was data we'd gathered two years ago. I'd been working on it for over a year. Furthermore, the datasets I was working with weren't raw data, they were themselves measurements of muscle activity and performance that former techs and summer students had also spent months to years working on. Cumulatively, the person hours spent on the data set I was assembling was staggering.
There is a paper in review from our lab right now whose entire results section is summarized in one very simple, very elegant graph. Six means with error bars. Those six means with error bars represent two months of caring for over twenty baby animals. Hours of understanding what our measurements meant. Hours of students and techs pouring over videos and chart recordings. Cross checks and visualizations and arguments and sick animals and broken equipment, all distilled down to one figure, six points.
My dissertation papers are the result of four years of work. I know this because I'm the only person that worked on them, and they took me four years. But if that is true, then this paper, that has in some ways also taken me four years, yet builds on the work of close to half a dozen people, is the result of two or three times that many years. And it will be maybe eight pages long, at most?
Academic papers, with their brevity and elisions, their straightforward narratives, are poor monuments to the sheer time consuming, physical work that goes into their production. The only clue in an academic paper of how many hours have been spent on it lies in the length of the author list. Those unsung middle authors are the only monument we allow to the effort that goes into our sleek, polished productions. And maybe, that is not good enough.

Stravinksy and inspiration

Yesterday evening, I went to do something I love and have not done in a long time. I went to the orchestra. The performance was of one of my favorite pieces of music: Stravinsky's the Rite of Spring. It was a piece so controversial in its day it managed to start both a riot (at its first performance in conjunction with Diaghilev's ballet), and a standing ovation (when performed as a standalone piece a few years later). Even now, after nearly one hundred years, there are few repertoire pieces like it. It is a stew of ideas that would influence all the major currents of classical music in the 20th century (minimalist composition, dissonance, even elements of serialism). And it inspired one of the greatest, strangest meetings of high art, popular culture, and science: the magnificent Rite of Spring sequence from (of all people) Walt Disney's bizarre flawed masterpiece Fantasia:

That sequence is, for obvious reasons, close to my heart. And in its daring combination of science, imagination, and revolutionary music, let it be my inspiration for the coming months.

Continental drift of the heart

The Mistress of the Animals has a new series of posts up, on dealing with less than ideal job situations. Go read them, they are useful, and make good points. And, as is Potnia's wont, a very important meta-point: what, at any given point in your life, is important to you, and what, at any point in your life, is worth putting up with?

The twist is that what matters, what is important, what you need, want and value, does not remain constant, nor is it always clear to oneself. Some of our values and priorities are like the Hawaiian volcanic hotspot, arising straight from our core and remaining fixed even as immense changes pass over our surface. Yet these hotspots are few. More often, things we think are massive and perennial are like the summit of Everest: superficially imposing, but in actuality a temporary wrinkle on the surface of our ever changing selves. We often change without knowing it, only recognising much later that things we once valued, were once utmost priorities, have shifted to peripheral importance and we are in fact organising our lives and decisions around new mountains.

Ten years ago this month, I moved to America for the first time. What did I want ten years ago? What was important? So important that to pursue a PhD I could have pursued at home in less time, I traveled to America, willingly moving to a city I had never even visited to start a PhD with an advisor I had never met? I remember why I did it: a desire for adventure, and a fear of getting bogged down. I lived in central London. I had good degrees and a good job and I could easily see myself never moving far from where I had grown up, devoting all my efforts to keeping a toe hold in the immensely comfortable, yet predictable life I had in London. I looked at the life my mother had led, which, while far from easy, had involved travels around the world by the time she was thirty, who had lived in three countries, and I balked at how stayed the profile of my own twenties was becoming. The furthest I had moved from home was Cambridge, a 45 minute train journey from King's Cross. In my master's degree, I met a diverse cohort of people from all over the United Kingdom and further, whose path to that masters, while more winding, and perhaps less easy than mine, still had given them a host of life experiences that made me stop and think. So, I resolved to have my own adventure, and to go pursue all my dreams at once: America, a fresh start, and a Ph.D. I applied to four programs, was interviewed at two, got into one, and with the blessings of my friends and family, boarded a plane and landed in Baltimore airport on August 20th 2007, with two suitcases, an address, and the name of a person I'd never met who was going to pick me up and take me to my first apartment I had rented without seeing.

And what a fresh start it was. For the first week I slept on an air mattress on the floor, and had only my laptop perched on my suitcase as furniture. The very first day I had my first encounter with how little London had prepared me for an American city. I left my apartment in Mount Vernon in search of food and some basic housewares. Despite walking from North Avenue, to Lexington Market, to the inner Harbour, I could not find a home ware store, and returned home with four cheap glasses, and a an overpriced saucepan from the convenience store down the road. It wasn't until the middle of the week when my new fellow graduate students took me to the Target on the outskirts of the city I was actually able to buy what I needed. The first five years I lived in America were the  adventure I hadwanted. I lived in and discovered a whole new city. I made many new friends. I did field work in India and Wyoming, and travelled all over the United States collecting data, spending weeks in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, New York city. And yet, by the time the adventure ended, already, subtly, the need for adventure had been replaced by other priorities. The desire for some stability, to be able to build a life with my partner, and the growing realisation that my increasing desire to be back home with my old friends and family was getting less and less likely to be easily combined with my desire for a fulfilling personal and professional life.

Ten years later, America is no longer an adventure, even though I have moved away once, and moved back to a new part of the country. America is a reality in my life, a part of it far more profoundly than I ever thought, at twenty three, it would be. It looms like mount Everest, or like the width of the Atlantic Ocean, in my decision making. My priorities now do not feature America, they must accommodate it. My desire to see my husband happy and fulfilled professionally means we are likely here at least another six year, probably more. My desire to be a good son, brother, and uncle, means I must continue to find ways to fly home often. My desire to have a successful career in academics mean I must continue to work hard, travel, be flexible and take opportunities. America is the geographic and political chess board on which I try to make my moves. And I know it now, I know it well. But whereas once, the fact I lived in America was a goal in itself, that time is long gone.

Why your society should have an LBGT+ science event

I don't normally blog in direct response to twitter, but this thread from the wonderful Alex Bond invites a response from personal experience.

I am Sick. And. Tired. Of writing letters to call out professional orgs who treat their LGBTQ+ members like nothing.

— Alex Bond (@TheLabAndField) August 22, 2017

Please read this thread to learn what not to do when approached by LBGT+ scientists asking for greater representation in the societies they are members of. Specifically, I want to address this point with a personal story to illustrate how wrong headed an attitude this is.

This tirade brought to you by an org who wrote “I don't think any of [our members] are LGBT so I don't see why we should put time into this”

— Alex Bond (@TheLabAndField) August 22, 2017

As I've mentioned elsewhere in this blog, I had only recently come out when I started graduate school. From the beginning, navigating outness in my career and navigating the world of science were intertwined. When I came to Johns Hopkins, the LBGT association at the school of medicine was more or less moribund (a good friend of mine who came along a few years later has since kickstarted it and then some). And my department, while I had an out colleague, did not really discuss these things. For my first year in graduate school, I was out to my fellow graduate students, and that was it.
So, when in the fall of my second year I went to my first meeting of my society, I associated being professional in science with being in the closet. But I was uncomfortable with this. Such feelings put a distance between you and fellow attendees, particularly at a conference where out of hours socialising is important (and enjoyable). Being professionally closeted involves eliding a lot of questions.
On the second night of the conference, I noticed a little sign on the noticeboard: "LBGT members dinner will be tomorrow evening at this location, at this time". And suddenly I knew I was not alone. I knew there were others like me in this place, in this society, and that they were welcome.
Ironically, I didn't go to the LBGT dinner that year. I wasn't ready for it. Wasn't ready to be identified as a gay scientist. But even without going, it mattered. And when I went back two years later, I definitely went, and have gone every year since. Each time, a new grad student, or indeed someone more senior, turns up slightly sheepishly, and they are welcome, and they are made a little more comfortable.
But even then, the LBGT dinner (which has been running for years) has always been held at a distance. It was the initiative of one or two people, who have organised it for over a decade, and maintain the mailing list. Getting it listed on the website as an official society event has been a struggle. And every so often you hear someone grumble when they notice the sign "why do they need one?". Which is really the answer to that question.
There is, among a certain generation of scientists, a belief that things were better when we didn't discuss these things. And they'll often say: "well everyone knew X was gay, he (it is invariably a he) just didn't make a fuss about it". If you believe this, I urge to ask X how they felt. You will probably hear a different story, of getting invited to considerably fewer social events, and never with a partner. Of being passed up for promotions and committees, of advisors suddenly becoming frosty and distant. Not talking about it was not about decorum, it was about protection, and being resigned to lesser treatment.
Every time an LBGT person enters a new space, they look for clues as to how out they can be. The older and more establishment a crowd (so most scientific conferences), the more they will assume they have to be reserved. This is difficult, isolating, and honestly just damned unpleasant. And all it takes to start to make it better is a sign on a noticeboard. Is that really so much?*

*No, it isn't and you should do more, but start with that.

Let's talk about my science

Let's talk about our lab's science. We're wrapping up experiments for the summer. Long, tiring experiments that have gone pretty well I think. I'm just finishing up the last part of the data collection which may form the preliminary data for a grant proposal.
(Good thing I have that spousal green card. Shit that's up for renewal this year. Didn't the DOJ just come out with a thing about federal protection for LBGT persons? I need to check up on that. Better get that re application started)
... Sorry got side tracked. As I was saying preliminary data for a grant
(Wait, what are NIH paylines now? And isn't the federal budget going to be slashed?)
... Which is good because scientifically I'm feeling ready to spread my wings as I've mentioned before. I have a couple of papers in review, two more about to be submitted and will probably get at least one more out to review by fall. One of the ones in review is entirely my side project, and the one I aim to submit is my own devising even if it's out of my PIs project. So I'm ready to start looking for paths out of the postdoc.
(In the context of a university sector in financial crisis and a flooded job market).
Of course, it's a bit tricky because the husband got into a pre med masters program locally
(So that's six years of education. What is tuition these days? How much do residents make? I wonder what medicine as a profession will look like in six years).
So I need to stay local for a bit longer
(All the local universities are in crisis because of a massively reduced state subsidy, a new funding formula, tuition caps, and debts accrued from unsustainable growth policies).
But I would like to remain professionally competitive enough to have the possibility of being back home in the UK with my family one day.
(I wonder where the UK will be in six years? OH GOD NO DO NOT THINK ABOUT THAT)
But yeah, I would really like to talk about my science.

Reflections on outness 2: a game of you

When I wrote the first Pride month post, I had vaguely planned on writing a series of them. But life got in the way and to be honest, I couldn't really come up with anything around which to crystallize another post. Then yesterday the following picture popped up on facebook:

It is the cross-stitch sampler my aunt made as a wedding gift for my husband and mine's wedding. And, with my aunt's recent passing, and Pride month, I was once again struck by its singular power as a cultural artefact.
For that cross-stitch sampler is undeniably, unequivocally from one place: Alsace, the region of France my mother comes from. The motifs, the use of red thread on white cloth, the costumes worn by the two figures are found on hundreds of such similar wedding gifts made throughout Alsace over the centuries. My brother and sister each have one. My aunt herself had one. And she would have learnt how to do this from her mother and aunts, who would have learnt it from their mother and aunts.
My aunt always claimed she had no creativity: she just researched and reproduced Alsatian motifs from books and museum exhibits. And yet in this, she must have created. For as much as this object is undeniably, clearly Alsatian, yet in another I am almost certain there are no two like it. In the simple, radical gesture of putting two male figures in the center, my aunt changed the pattern. In doing so, she did two things: reaffirmed my identity as an Alsatian man, and expanded the iconography, and indeed to some entire scope of Alsatian identity. She argued, through this, that traditions could be expanded, that identities were compatible.
A similar thing happened at the London wedding we held a few months after our wedding in West Virginia for those friends and family who couldn't make it to America. That wedding was held in my old church. The church my siblings and I were all confirmed in. The church on whose council my mother sits. It is an old church, with a complex history: founded by French protestants (Huguenots) fleeing persecution under Louis the XIVth four hundred and fifty years ago, it has survived in London's Soho, serving a complex community of recent French expats, and old Huguenots families tied together primarily by a shared history. It is not exactly the most active, or radical of churches.
After a debate, the church agreed to celebrate our marriage. It was a full wedding ceremony. And, suddenly, our gay marriage was also, well, the marriage in my family's church, with all the trappings and politics that entails. As I joked, I am the only one my mother's three children to have had a good French protestant wedding. And it was true. Even as it was also an expansion of what a good French protestant wedding can be.
There is a lot of discussion at every Pride about identity, and assimilation, and passing. Much of it is important, and sad. And some of it reflects false dichotomies. There is no a priori reason that traditional identities of culture, religion, and family cannot be expanded to include new identities of gender, and sexuality. Yet that requires a transformation, an expansion of the old culture. And that comes through the willingness of individuals to expand their definitions, to invent new iconographies and languages and symbols, to say "You are gay, and you belong, and you are welcome".
Identities are complex things. We all have many, and they exist in tension. But, as I have known since someone first asked me "which are you more, French or English?" those tensions derive primarily from the boundary policing of identity by others. My aunt's cross stitch sampler is a reminder we always have the power to go another way: not to police the borders of identity and community, but to open them with gifts of welcome.

Reflections on outness 1: ten years

As I sit down to write a post on this pride month, the realisation suddenly strikes me: I've been out for ten years. The coincidence seems too unlikely, too easy, so I reach for my diary. Volume III. Tuesday March 26 2007. The day I told her.

I told my mother first. It is not a path I recommend if it can be avoided. But coming out narratives are personal, and shaped by factor beyond the sexuality of the individuals involved. My own family history had made secrets a dangerous, toxic, poisonous thing. If I wanted to be able to rebuild from this, I could not keep this a secret from her. Not once I'd decided to act on it. And meeting a boy will suddenly make the insurmountable seem inevitable.

It was not an easy conversation... and it did not end for many many years. It was mostly, other than on a few fateful occasions, had in things unsaid. Silences on the phone. Requests made in passing. Awkwardly formal lunches. It was not, by any outside standards, a difficult coming out. But it required finding a language to speak about things we had never spoken about. And it coincided, I think, with an emancipation of mine. I could not put my life on hold forever, on so many fronts. Eventually, sooner perhaps than either of us expected, she caught up with me. And, as is her wont, has more than kept pace. She has broken down doors for me and my husband now. How little I thought, in that awkward, tense, angry conversation ten years ago, when so much was not said, that might be the case.

It is a difficult balance, working with people who you love who are coming to terms with something they have never really bothered to think about. You come, the son, the brother, the friend, that they think they know so well, and you tell them that you are not what they have assumed. And yet, on the other hand, you remind them, over and over and over, that you are who they know. To comfort them yes, but also because it is true. I was the classic good gay boy: I built a defence from my goodness. My good grades, my kindness, the fact I didn't get in trouble. But those things pre dated my emergent sexual anxiety. They were there to be used as weapons and defences and bargaining chips once the revelation of my differentness came, but those were exapted functions.

To me, coming out was not a clean break with my previous self. Psychologically, it was a long and complex process, rooted in a complex relationship with men, women, and masculinity. You cannot be raised with two very different concepts of masculinity and femininity (the French and the British) and not interrogate those concepts and what they mean, how they function, how they affect you as a person. And my father's abandonment of us in my early teens did not simplify matters. And so to this day, that brief version of me who existed from 2001 to 2006, who called himself "straight, but took a while to get there", I consider authentic and valid. He was doing the best he could with a psychology that was complex, in an environment that demanded simplicity. An environment that reduced attraction to sex.

A few months after I came out, I moved to America. To this day I do not know if the two events are linked. Was my burgeoning awareness of my differentness a hidden motive behind my resolve to leave? Did the realisation I was leaving precipitate an awakening, a coming to terms? All I know is that I have never felt so lost and rootless as a person as I did my first year in America, despite the intellectual satisfaction of grad school. I remember writing that I felt like a mist, less and less certain of what I was or who I was. In the end, I rooted myself again not through a new found identity, but through a project of going through all my papers and scraps of life since high school and scrapbooking my own life. Rebuilding the continuity I felt I had broken by being different, and by leaving.

I am fortunate now. That break is barely visible. All the friends and family I knew before I came out are fully woven into the new life, mingling with the new ones. My out self, my closeted self, my not gay self, almost seamlessly woven together again. If there is perhaps a slight unevenness in the tapestry, where things had to be woven together after the fact to hide a tear, well, no one notices.

A mes compatriotes alsaciens qui votent FN

Je connais une petite fille qui, à cinq ans, a été obligé par sa maitresse de classe maternelles à se tenir dans la cour d'école devant tout le monde. Cette même maîtresse lui a ensuite dis, à elle et ses camarades comme elle, qu'ils étaient responsables d'un massacre commis quelques années auparavant.*
Je connais une petite fille à laquelle on a interdit de parler la langue de sa grand mère et de ses parents avec ses camarades dans la cour d'école. Elle s'en est tiré, mais beaucoup des enfants de sa génération n'en ont jamais pu parler à leurs grands-parents, faute de maîtrise de cette langue.
Je connais une jeune fille qui a appris à effacer le gros accent de son pays, car il lui faisait tord dans sa carrière.
Je connais une jeune femme qui, lorsqu'elle appelait le rectorat à Paris, entendait toujours​ malmener son nom. Jamais d'excuse par ailleurs, car "ce n'était pas français, un nom comme ça".
Je connais une femme qui a été soupçonnée toute sa vie, et toute sa carrière au service de l'état, de ne pas être assez française. À cause d'où elle venait, mais surtout, parce qu'elle refusait de ne pas en venir.
Cette fillette, cette fille, cette femme, c'est mère, née dans le bas Rhin en 1944. Ma mère, qui parle le dialecte, dont le nom de jeune fille est inévitablement germanique, qui aime la musique allemande autant que la littérature française.
L'histoire de ma mère, c'est l'histoire de tout Alsaciens né entre 1918 et 1950. C'est l'histoire de tout une génération qu'on a soupçonné à cause de leur accent, de leur nom, de leur dialecte, de leur religion (trop protestant, trop fier du régime concordataire) de ne pas être assez français. Ça vous dit quelque chose?
Les gens, comme Marine Le Pen et son parti, qui prétendent pouvoir définir ce que sont la France et les Français, ne serons jamais les amis de l'Alsace, avec son gros accent, sa cuisine bizarre, ses noms imprononçable comme Breuschwickersheim ou Hammerschwir. Et j'ose suggéré même que les Alsaciens devraient être solidaire avec tous les Français ou pas encore français que l'on réprouve parce qu'ils​ ne ressemblent pas assez à ceux représentés dans une histoire de France de 1950. Les Français d'origine turques, les Français d'origine algérienne, les Français d'origine malienne, ainsi que les Français gay, lesbiennes, et transgenres, luttent pour ce pour quoi ma mère a luttée, et ce pour quoi moi, franco-alsaco-britannique homosexuel je lutte aussi: le droit d'être reconnu Français à part entière sans abandonner qui je suis, le droit d'être français et de parler "wie der Schnawwel-ne gewochsn isch".
Je pourrais rappeler d'autre faits: qu'un tiers des Alsaciens travaillent outre Rhin. Ou que le petit village où ont habité mon arrière grand mère, ma grand mère et ma tante fut entièrement rasé en 1918 lors de la bataille du col de la Schlucht, et que la génération de mes grands parents se sont toujours attendu à ce que cela se répète. Si ça n'a pas eu lieu, si l'Alsace a cessé être terre de convoitise identitaire, si, enfin, le monde lui a foutu la paix, c'est à cause de l'Europe, que rejette maintenant Marine Le Pen.
La définition étroite de ce que c'est qu'être français a toujours fait tord à l'Alsace, et à la France. Défiez là en renonçant au front national, et en embrassant l'ouverture et l'espoir de quelques chose de nouveau.

*Le massacre, c'est Oradour sur Glane.

Independence and maturity

I didn't get the job.

It wasn't quite the Dream Job, but it had many attributes of it. I thought I did well in the interview. In fact, based on feedback, I'm pretty sure I did do well in the interview. But someone else did better, or had funding, or was a better fit. I'm a postdoc for another year.

I was disappointed not to get the job, but not crushed. Even getting a drink to drown my sorrows felt perfunctory, unnecessary. I was OK. And I realised, that, more and more, when it comes to my career, that equanimity about where I've been, where I am, and where I'm going has come to dominate.

When I finished my PhD, then spent a year unemployed, and then started my postdoc, I was all Sturm und Drang about my career. I oscillated between being terrified I'd never make it, angry I hadn't published more, frustrated at people's failure to recognise my amazing capabilities, irritated at advice that seemed cruel, glib and out of touch. And while I still think there are problems for graduate students and postdocs, that internalization of the problems is gone. The clear, tangible work I have done over the past three and a half years in the wonderful lab I've had the good fortune to do my postdoc in has eliminated much of the bad feelings from the end of my PhD. What has replaced them is a certain degree of confidence I didn't have before, one that is rooted in a certain equanimity about my career and my future. I'm good at what I do, and I've had a blast doing it. I hope I'll get to do it for longer, but if I don't... Well it was a good innings.

Associated with this disappearance of the violent emotions with which I started this postdoc has been a quiet maturation of other skills. We recently had a change of staff in the lab which means I am now the second most senior person here. And, somewhat to my surprise, I found I've stepped up to the plate of managing people with more confidence and willingness then I thought I would. I don't have to remind myself to check in with the new trainees and discuss plans for data collection, I'm just ... doing it.

With my PI, we've reached a stage that is intellectually exciting. She's no longer primarily in the business of training me, we're now collaborators, bouncing ideas off each other about new analyses and projects. The projects are in some ways more collaborative, and yet in others I am more independent then ever: if we decide a certain paper is mine, then she trusts me to carry the project. I'm currently in charge of helping our graduate student write his first paper for publication. It's been a great learning experience, in part because I've discovered how much I now know about the arcana of publication and manuscript preparation.Of course, the independence isn't there in my own grants yet (but maybe, NIH gods permitting, by years end?), but I can feel a shift in how I approach my work, and in how other people in the lab and the university respond to me.  The trick here, one that she and I both acknowledge, is to recognize this dangerously fun dynamic is a sign I should plan to leave, not that I should stay.

Perhaps the word that best describes my mindset about what I do and why I do it now is maturity (yes, you can laugh. I'm 33, i have a lot more maturing to do I'm sure). Part of that is also the recognition that unlike my 20s, I cannot make my career the entire center of my being quite like I did in graduate school (even as I take on more responsibility). I have a husband who is making his own major career decisions. I have a mother who will not be young forever. I will not be young forever.

There will always be choices, there will always be jobs I do not get. But wherever I go from here, there are almost no regrets to be had about what I've done on the way here, either professionally, or personally. And that knowledge is I think the source of my current mindset. And it is a good place to be.

And with that, I am signing off for two weeks. My husband and I are taking our long delayed honeymoon to Spain. Some things should not be put off forever.

Hosting the Moirai

A few weeks ago, my aunt died. She was my mother's elder sister and, owing to my family's complicated history, one of the few members of the extended family to which we were all genuinely close. Like my mother, she was a proud, force of nature of a women. Based, in part, on the fact that like my mother, she was more or less on her own from a young age.
My mother's mother was born in 1900. She died six months after my birth. My mother was the youngest of all her cousins (on her father's side, she had six aunts and uncles, so there were many cousins). And I, born 83 years after my grandmother, am the youngest of her grandchildren. My eldest cousin is more than 20 years older than me. My mother's cousins (those she was still close with) were grandparent aged to me. I saw them once a year, and though our relationship was pleasant, it was never close. They were part of the holidays. And besides, when they got together with their youngest cousin, they talked of family mostly long dead, and memories long past. I learnt a lot from them about how the world had changed, and about my history, but mostly through listening to the stories they told each other.
My aunt was different. She never missed a birthday or Christmas to call us. None of us would consider going to Paris without visiting her. My mother and she did not have the easiest relationship, but they have never waivered in the affection they have shown each other's children. Perhaps sometimes, that was easier than speaking directly.
I miss my aunt dearly. And beyond her, with her passing I have lost the closest thing I ever had to a physical home in France, her holiday house in the Alsatian Vosges mountains, to which my mother always had a key. Now that I will no longer take the train to her little Paris suburb for dinner or lunch when I visit that city, it will become a little less friendly to me. I am thankful my husband got to meet her twice. I am thankful she adored him (despite the language barrier). I am thankful for the beautiful cross stitch sample she made for us, despite cancer and chemo and caring for her husband as dementia and ill health weakened him. She survived him by less than six months.

But as hard as loosing my aunt is for me, for my mother the sense of loneliness is vast. In the past years so many of her old friends have become weak and frail, have started one by one to take their leave of us. When they started weakening, my mother, who has the energy and physical fitness of a woman twenty years younger then she is, was irritated at them for not going on walks with her anymore, for no longer staying up until 2am to talk. Now she understands; she is resigned; and talks with her old friends, though more important, no longer bring levity and joy to her. She returns from trips to France drained, and needs time with her younger friends, her children and grandchildren to regain her energy.
With the loss of my aunt, only one person, a friend from Kindergarten, is left who remembers my mother's childhood. And the first five years (which for my mother were defining to her life story) are now remembered only by her. She has entered a period where, increasingly, more and more of her life can be confirmed by no one. And, as my brother points out, there is now almost no one left with whom she can speak the dialect her own grandmother (born in 1870) taught her. Strands are being cut, and my mother feels it.
Of late, she has begun to speak more of her own passing. Not in a morbid way, but in a pragmatic way. She is counting down. She knows she can no longer count on an endless bounty of more time. She senses both the urgency of doing what can still be done, and the knowledge that less is possible. In part, this is because of what is happening around her. In part, and I know my mother enough to know this, it is because of what she has read. She is preparing herself, training herself for a new phase of life. I know this because the same thought that is animating her has returned to me: the French philosopher Montaigne's famous aphorism:
"que philosopher, c'est apprendre a mourir"
"Doing philosophy, is learning to die"
To which I would add, it is also learning that others die.
With my aunt's passing, and my mother's words and stories, a new presence enters my life: the Moirai, the three sisters of Greek mythology. In the past, they have visited suddenly, and departed. But now I see they are here to stay. They are in my house, and it does not do to deny the Gods. Clotho is spinning thread more slowly, and Lachesis casts a more judicious eye on how much she draws out. And Atropos, having just used her scissors, has put them down. But they hang from her belt, always within hand's reach.

The Moirai are here, and their presence is a warning, but also a gift, in the manner of Greek gods. They are here to tell me I can no longer ignore them, and I must act accordingly in what I do.

I am not a "good immigrant"

"We will continue to attract the best and brightest" says Prime Minister Teresa May, as she makes limiting migration the centre of her policy plans for the next five years. Her Brexit speech made clear she is willing to sacrifice everything (the economy, international cooperation, the UK's moral standing) in order to prevent those dratted foreigners from entering the country. Then yesterday happened. The American president passed an executive order blocking all entry to the country, regardless of paperwork, for all refugees and nationals from seven countries. They detained even green card holders *. And Mrs May, who'd been in Washington earlier that day to curry favor with the president, has issued only the most tepid of repudiations.
I am an immigrant to the US. For reasons of history and geography and luck of birth, I am a fortunate immigrant. I am not routinely stopped at the border. I have never had extra burdens placed on me to get either my visa or my green card. But I have never once re-entered the US without some trepidation since I first got my F1 student visa. After yesterday, that trepidation is increased.
As the events at airports around the country have reminded people overnight, in the US it is the border agency that has final say about who can and cannot enter the country. The visa you spent money and time obtaining (every time I had to get my visa renewed or issued was a day off work, and I was fortunate that I lived in London) is only part of the evidence. It is the person at the desk at immigration, at the end of the line labelled "aliens", who has final say.
One of the criteria by which a border agent can deny you entry is if they have a suspicion you carry any of a certain number of infectious diseases. When I first moved to America, HIV/AIDS was on that list. Border protection need no proof you have the disease, a suspicion is sufficient. As a gay man, you see where I'm going with this. Yes, guidebooks and immigration manuals warned me that "looking too gay" could, feasibly, get my entry denied.
When I left America at the end of my Ph.D., leaving my then partner of four years behind, I could not return to America based on that relationship. DOMA was still in force. So I found a job. Luckily, as an academic, visas for jobs are easier to come by. But the easiest one (the J1) is a non immigrant visa with a firm requirement you leave the country after two years for at least a further year. It is difficult to get an exemption from that. The H1-B (skilled workers) visa doesn't have that limitation. But some universities will not sponsor postdocs for H1-Bs, and they cost PIs money. I was lucky, I got one. But even the H1-B has catches. It is non transferable, tied to your employment, and unlike the F1 visa has no grace period: as soon as your employment ends, your H1-B expires and you are automatically residing in the country illegally. Yes, that is correct. If you're on a H1-B and you get fired, you can technically be reported for overstaying your visa that evening. This is why H1-B visa holders tend to be quiet about problems at work.
Through good fortune, a progressive presidential administration, and a liberal supreme court, I became eligible for a spousal green card while on my H1-B. None of those things were guaranteed. Under the Bush Administration, they would have been unthinkable. Under a Trump administration? Well, we can guess how likely anything that makes immigration easier will be at this point. But even then, the green card is not guaranteed (unlike what my in laws thought). It costs $1500 to apply, and the process is complex, opaque, and open ended. I was hugely fortunate in that we had extensive documentation of our relationship, and a very friendly interviewer for the final interview in Cleveland. Will that still be likely in the coming years? Will be guidance be issued? If the so called "first amendment defense act" passes, same sex couples may end up in limbo when faced with unhelpful UCSIS employees. And it may not even take that much to suddenly make spousal green cards much harder to obtain. And mine must be renewed in two years. In the UK, for example, Teresa May now only allows  British citizen to bring a non EU foreign born spouse into the country if they are earning above a certain threshold. Nothing is safe in the pursuit of reducing immigration.
So, no. I don't feel safe or OK after yesterday, despite being from the "right" sort of country, having the "right" skin colour, and being among "the best and brightest". Regardless of claims to the contrary, I know my supposed usefulness to people like May and Trump is secondary to the political capital they get from being "tough on immigration". If you doubt it, watch May's willingness to bargain with the life of my mother, who has lived in the UK legally for 40 years, but has the misfortune of being a French citizen after Brexit.
To be an immigrant, even a fortunate immigrant, is, if you keep your eyes even slightly open, to know you live at the good will of your host nation. And when that good will appears to be running short, no one, not even "good immigrants", is safe. It was not so long ago that the very permanent resident status I have now was explicitly denied to me by federal law. It is not so long ago my sexuality would make me suspect at the border. And, as a former H1-B holder paid out of a federal grant, "American Jobs for American People" is a chilling phrase. Permanent residency is usually treated much like citizenship for job eligibility purposes. Now, with this administration, I begin to wonder how safe that is.
People's lives were ruined yesterday, make no mistake. Some people will die as a direct consequence of that decision. But every green card or visa holder in the country woke up this morning, and wondered just how much the little bits of card we carry in our wallets are worth, and what might have them become as worthless as those held by Iranian, Syrian, Iraqi, Libyan, Sudanese, Yemeni, and Somali citizens who called America home.
I am an immigrant, I am angry, and I am more afraid than I was before.

* I'm aware that as of today, Priebus has claimed to walk that back. But I'll believe it when I see it.

And Whither then? I cannot say

I started writing this blog over two and a half years ago. I'd been toying with the idea of starting a blog for a long time. It was a response to a growing frustration at my lack of engagement with the world, my lack, for want of a better word, of production. I had felt that throughout my twenties I had read, watched, listened to so much. I had consumed voraciously. And I pondered and digested my consumption. Yet nothing came of it. I left no mark.
So, eventually, restless, I resolved to start writing about something, anything. It is a small outlet. I am not so presumptuous as to think any of these private thoughts are actually unique or insightful. Yet I wished to return something. And I needed an outlet for those disquisitions and diatribes I would compose in my head at two in the morning, distilling a day's worth of information overload.
In many ways, this blog surprised me. It lasted longer than I thought. It wandered more then I thought. One constant was remains that I cannot predict which posts will resonate and which won't. I guess I still don't know my audience. Some posts I considered very niche have gone far. Some of the posts of which I remain proudest linger unloved.
From the beginning, this blog has been tied to my twitter presence. And in light of what has happened with the world lately, my twitter presence has dwindled. I have had to preserve myself, control my engagement. Initially, I felt guilty, like I was abandoning the fight. But I've made my peace now. I can fight better if I can control my energy. And leaving twitter lets me do that.
I had learnt that lesson earlier with this blog. I realised reasonably soon that posts that were reactions to what was going on on twitter were not always my best. And so I started deliberately not writing blog posts in response to twitter issues. Or entwining them with thoughts I had for a long time. So my blog remained slightly esoteric, detached, the results, I hope, of my idiosyncratic observation of world. After all, I'd staked a claim in the lineage of Montaigne, and I decided to stay there.
But now that I have withdrawn from twitter, can the blog exist separately? In one sense, no. Traffic to my blog is almost entirely from twitter. Without my twitter presence, my readership will dwindle. But in another sense, yes. I am proud of this blog. I find I am attached to some of this writing. That I want to be associated with it. It has been suggested to me more than once that I should take it down as a junior academic, and I have found I cannot, no, I do not want to do it. There are things here that I feel are of value.
On the other hand, no one can deny I've been writing less here of lately. Why? In part, because when it comes to our current unpleasantness, I don't know that anything I have to say is of any value. I've become self conscious in the sea of verbiage of broadly varying quality that has accompanied the turbulence of these months. Does my writing help? Does my voice improve? Or is it yet more half baked, superficially convincing ramblings of an over educated person with an exaggerated sense of his own intellect and importance?
All this to say, I have not written much of late. But the more I think of it, the more I want to write here again. Perhaps write less, perhaps write better, but I cannot leave this place, not yet.
So, if you still know it exists, watch this space. Because here, still, my voice will be heard.

Thankfulness

I am thankful for my health, mental and physical.
I am thankful for my husband, his unwavering love, his patience, his endless zest for adventure.
I am thankful for my mother, her wisdom, her strength, her clear eyed intelligence, the model she sets for me to remain excited and optmistic and engaged with the world throughout your life.
I am thankful for my brother, his support for all I do, his sense of joy, his commitment to the small pleasures of life.
I am thankful for my sister, her energy, her love, her willingness to challenge me.
I am thankful for my in laws, their generosity, the fact they give me a home away from home.
I am thankful for all my friends, old and new, near and far, for all I learn from them, for all they give me.
I am thankful for my mentor, her commitment to my training as a researcher, her respect for my experience as a scientist, her friendship.
I am thankful for the career successes of the past year, and for people's recognition of them.
I am thankful that a decade of progress on gay civil rights means I can look at the next four years with some confidence our life will withstand them.
I am thankful to have been able, regardless of what happens next, to do what I wanted with my career for ten years. That's not a bad innings.
I am thankful for my dual citizenship, and my three languages.
I am thankful to have grown up in a city of 8 million people, to have gone to a school where students came from seventy countries, to have grown up immersed in two cultures.
I am thankful to have lived five years in Baltimore, to have learnt that America was both like and unlike what I knew from the movies.
I am thankful for three years in Ohio, and summers in Michigan, and all that has taught me about a life other than that I grew up to enjoy and expect.
I am thankful for the beautiful autumn we have had.
I am thankful for dinner surrounded by loved ones.

My thoughts have been dark of late, but I still have much to be thankful for. More than many, less than others, but by any standard, enough. Tomorrow I will be frightened, and angry again. But not all the time, and not today.

Happy Thanksgiving

On not falling over

Once, when I was on a skiing holiday with a friend, we got to talking about our week so far. I said that I was glad I hadn't fallen over yet. My friend responded "If you haven't fallen over, it means you're not trying hard enough". I was surprised by this. I'd just done the hardest run in the resort that day. To my mind, not falling over meant, simply, that I was good at skiing.
I have a feeling similar to this every time people discuss grades at school and university, and, more specifically, the importance of failure as a learning tool. I don't doubt that recovering from failure shows determination (though when we praise those who overcome failure, we should be careful of survivor bias). And I don't doubt that evaluating someone solely based on grades, without looking at grade progression, background, research experience and so on is foolish. But the description of straight A students, therefore of me, that tends to accompany these debates, sticks in my craw somewhat. Because, like my friend's assessment of my skiing ability, the fact that I'm good at what I do is taken as prima facie evidence that it's all effortless and, somehow, a scam.
Being a straight A student is not effortless. It takes work. In my case, it took discipline, a lot of it. Furthermore, the idea that just because the grades don't show a progression, there is no wrestling with concepts, ideas, no struggles, is erroneous. Those things happen. It's just that, for some reason, with the straight A student, the breakthrough happens before the test, so there is never any evidence of it. The illusion of effortlessness is just that: the straight A student is the swan, gliding gracefully across the mirror like lake, legs paddling furiously underneath.
The other idea that attaches to straight A students, which characterizes me even less, is that somehow, we do not learn the material, we merely learn to take tests. I won't deny that good grades can act as a motivator (and, more tellingly, that bad grades act as a discouragement). But the relationship is more subtle. For me in particular, the good grades worked in combination with my genuine interest in the subjects to create a virtuous circle, one where the external rewards of effort combined with the internal drive of interest to make working for school fun. Yes, fun. As much as exams stressed me, there were times when being given 3 hours to write essays on topics I loved (looking at you general paper from part II zoology) was actually almost a pleasure. 
There are limitations to being a straight A student. Most obviously with me, the fact that I started out good and became excellent in most academic subjects meant that it took me a long time to learn how to deal with those things I wasn't good at from the start (sports comes to mind, but also the violin).  But that doesn't mean that I wasn't good at the things I was good at. It just means that I didn't devote much energy to things I wasn't good at. Then again, many not straight A students do this too (we all do, in fact). The other issue is that straight A students have trouble differentiating adequate performance from actually bad performance. It also took me a long time to recognise that, when hard work yields a reward (a good grade), it is easier to do then when it doesn't. I have immense respect for the C and B students of this world who work their arses off consistently, despite never seeing a consistent A.
As for the question of failure, I have mixed feelings on this. I never failed academically by any measure. Perhaps my first true failure was failing to secure employment straight after my PhD. I overcame that failure, but I'm not sure what I learnt from it. That I was tenacious? I think I learnt that from teaching myself linear algebra in grad school just as much. And besides, my failure would have been impossible to overcome without the successes that came before it. When we focus on failure, we deny people the joy of success that comes from practiced skill.
When we overly lionise the educational importance of failure, and fail to recognise the effort that goes into sustained success, we undermine a lot of hard work. And when we suggest that all straight A students are intellectual frauds, we deny them the joy of their achievement, and the value of their work. These messages reach straight A students early: I think I was nine or ten when my teachers first started telling me to expect to start failing at some point, some as a warning, others, somewhat more gleefully. No one likes a tall poppy. I can understand teachers not focusing on straight A students. I have more trouble with teachers undermining them. It happens more often than you might think.
It is possible to critique the narrowness of our systems of evaluation, and the flaws inherent in our educational systems, without casting aspersions on the efforts and joys of those individuals who do well in them. There is pleasure in racing down skillfully from mountaintop to village, carving into the snow with practiced ease knowing that this, you are good at.