@asherelbein
Freelance writing about the wild, old and dead. Bylines in NatGeo, SciAm, The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and many other places. Repped by @desir.ee at Looking Glass Literary (fiction) and @benglishhh.bsky.social at Transatlantic (nonfiction)
Whenever there's a voice in my head about this book that says "but why aren't you covering--" another voice puts its paw on it and says, more loudly, "because it's *my* book and I don't want to. Someone else can write theirs"
I've been thinking about this a lot recently
My long review of the 2025 edition of Dougal Dixon's The New Dinosaurs has just been published in Historical Biology. What is the 'use' of Speculative Zoology and how does this book connect to the history of dinosaur research? www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YTPSK... #SpecZoo #SpecBio
"It would be easy, and not wholly incorrect, to call me a diamondback partisan. If I am, it’s because I like rattlesnakes as they are."
For @texasobserver.org, I wrote about the rattlesnakes I've known, including the one I (accidentally!) almost grabbed upon first moving back to Austin
I truly genuinely want everyone to enjoy the privilege of not having to pay attention to the idiotic whims of the malignant tyrant because they can trust The System to protect them to a reasonable enough degree that they can focus on something more fucking interesting that survival.
God bless America, this America
My latest! In this month's cover story for the @texasobserver.org, I wrote an expansive, oddly philosophical deep dive into the western diamonback rattlesnake, a much-maligned animal I've come to have a lot of respect and affection for
Size chart of Tyrannosauroid dinosaurs
#Sciart #Paleoart #Dinosaur Collaborative work: Tyrannosauroid dinosaurs
I'm still thinking about something @paleeoguy.bsky.social said at PaleoFest that I hadn't heard articulated quite that way before:
A fossil and its matrix are both parts of an ancient ecosystem. Preparing out the fossil means destroying one part to access the other.
Lovely animal
Rattlesnakes are the coolest. Time to leave them alone.
This is really lovely
A personal rattlesnake story:
For my undergrad degree in geology, I had to go to field camp. It was a six week long excursion in the Wyoming and Colorado Rockies to learn how to map, identify rocks, and generally function as a geologist in the field.
Well… quoting Dobie seems apt right now: “Fellow citizen, you belong to the ground; you have never pretended to belong anywhere else. … I prefer being in your company to being in that of the governor of the state of Texas. Go about your business, and I’ll go about mine.”
So glad you enjoyed it!
I want to be clear that what Ogles said is as bad or worse as anything said by a national figure in the height of the war on terror, and really is unusually bad. It's not worse than what was said about Haitian immigrants, though, which is sort of what I'm getting at
Ogles has been called out, too. Not by Republicans, notably, which is its own problem, but I don't recall too many of them going on the record about MTG either
It is somewhat amusing to me, as someone who is a member of both communities, how utterly convinced some Jews and Muslims are that people attack them in ways they simply *never* would consider attacking the other. When, in actual fact, there are a vocal contingent of people happy to attack us both
Which is sort of my point, in a way
Yeah, that one will be gone in a few years, if not by the end of the year
It is certainly true that some minority groups are usually more in the crosshairs at any given time than others, and abuse against them somewhat more normalized. But this is not a difference in category, it is a difference in the ebbs and flows of bigotry. And those currents can change very fast.
This is a very common problem between minority communities: people often try and demonstrate how bad an attack is on theirs by saying some variation of "Imagine if they said this about [x other minority]." But, of course, they *do* say that about [x minority!] Fairly often!
I'm certain it feels the exact same way!
Anyway as the old joke goes, if you can performa authenticity you've got it made, but it's easier to perform it if it's rooted in something real. Ideally really good as opposed to really bad
(This is, weirdly enough, sort of Trump's secret: he lies all the time, but he has so much of the conman's absolute, unbreakable self-belief in himself, and obvious disinterest in what people want him to say, that it comes off as authenticity)
speaking from your actual beliefs is a political superpower
Some days it just ain't happening
The answer is, thankfully, yes
Great! I was hoping there would be such a thing
Have any non-Muslim Democrats condemned this, yet? If not, I would, really, really like them to do so, post-haste