Archive • SCALES • Buttondown

Hello! ▢ ▢ ▢ PAINLESS, the new Nilüfer Yanya album, came out earlier this month. Digging in beyond the advance singles, I’ve been enjoying how “trouble”...

SCALES #79: results from the geophys

January 8, 2022

Hello! It’s 2022 and it is still a lot of things, least of which it is still [checks notes] Season 5 of SCALES. And that’s… okay! The publishing schedule,...

SCALES #78: Versailles as in quails

November 14, 2021

Hello! One all-too-endless rabbit hole is learning why places are named as they are. Did you know in Ketchikan, Alaska, there are adjoining streets named...

SCALES #77: helmet on tight

October 23, 2021

Hello! “You want drama? I’ll give you a reality show” kicks off a verse on “Drama”, the opening song on Erika de Casier’s Sensational, one album I’ve gotten...

SCALES #76: jump ahead

July 31, 2021

Hello! I’ve been doing some escapist sci-fi reading: Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers series and Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries. Both use the affordances of...

SCALES #75: planted by the water

July 5, 2021

Hello! It’s been a while, sorry I haven’t posted, &c., &c. ▢ ▢ ▢ In the spirit of the extended holiday weekend, some thoughtful reads about American history...

SCALES #74: scientific cryptogram

February 22, 2021

Hello! I read some recent local coverage of a self-published family history of the Prior family, who in 1802 were the first white settlers of an area north...

SCALES #73: orange magenta and blue

February 6, 2021

Hello! Just pulling together some threads, in three blocks: ▢ ▢ ▢ Views on animal migration A recent dispatch from Jer Thorp’s upstream//data on the Brooklyn...

SCALES #72: mail truck queue

January 30, 2021

Hello! One of the best, most soul-nourishing types of activities I’ve done over the past year? Watching different “live” musical performances over the...

SCALES #71: precise enmity

January 9, 2021

Hello! I hope you’ve been doing all right. This week has been a prime example of what I identified in those innocent days of… one week ago: “I feel neither...

SCALES #70: over & over

January 2, 2021

Hello! SCALES is back for a third fourth (*checks the archive, raises eyebrows*) fifth season. In the spirit of hyper-specific television Wikipedia pages, a...

SCALES #69

June 2, 2020

Hello all, In this tough time, one tiny thing I thought I could do with this newsletter is share some organizations in the Twin Cities that could use...

SCALES #68: Ĳsheiligen

May 16, 2020

Hello! I finished reading The Bone and Sinew of the Land by Anna-Lisa Cox. Subtitled “America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality”,...

SCALES #67: overtone green

May 1, 2020

Hello! I hope you’re all staying safe and healthy. This is a Very Special podcast-heavy edition of SCALES. So I was listening to a podcast… …though maybe not...

SCALES #66: porcelaneous

April 24, 2020

Hello! For me, wandering around an art museum is a great way to relax. In grad school moseying over to one museum or another over lunch was always a helpful...

SCALES #65: took me years

April 10, 2020

Hello! Before a self-indulgent science explainer I want to lead off with Lili Loofbourow rightfully focusing on the core moral issue in a blistering piece:...

SCALES #64: float-glass

April 3, 2020

Hello! I hope you’re all able to be looking out for your health and the health of those around you. For the past few nights, my mind in all its wisdom has...

SCALES #63: cue fake drums

March 27, 2020

Hello! Just a short check-in this time around. I hope you’re all staying healthy, looking out for those around you, and keeping cabin fever at bay. ▢ ▢ ▢...

SCALES #62: projected locality

March 13, 2020

Hello! I hope you are all staying safe and healthy. Around here, as I think across many parts of the US, the last few days have been when the reality of the...

SCALES #61: devilberries

February 28, 2020

Hello! This here newsletter has wandered a bit from the original goal of assembling a series of small, imperfect dispatches into the wilds of perpetually...

SCALES #60: "seam in the year"

January 2, 2020

Hello! Happy 2020! SCALES is back for a new run. Months of patchy silence over this channel hasn’t meant I haven’t been stewing about potential SCALES...

SCALES #59: real, lived-out difference

October 18, 2019

Hello! There’s been a lot of excellent concert-going recently. (And more to come!) Last night Apollo’s Fire, the baroque orchestra, performed its first night...

SCALES #58: enter entirely

September 26, 2019

Hello! I’m back. Different town, different job, same newsletter. Easing back into it. I was beat to the newsletter punch in recommending Robyn talking about...

SCALES #57: plantain handoff

May 16, 2019

Hello! I defended last week! The defense itself was pretty painless but its reality hasn’t quite sunk in. My life has been structured around my PhD research...

SCALES #56: grand under-sweep

May 7, 2019

Hello! A lot of thinking about geologic time recently. (And no, not just as I look back at the length of my Ph.D., amiright?? *embarrassed rimshot*) Recently...

SCALES #55: concordance

April 25, 2019

Hello! Brain is still ringing from seeing poet Susan Howe speak last night. The title of the evening was CONCORDANCE, the title of a new poem and book she...

SCALES #54: fixed point

April 15, 2019

Hello! Well, hi. It’s been a while. There has been… a lot that’s happened. The feeling of having journeyed through some passageway, emerging out the other...

SCALES #53: small silver wreath

January 12, 2019

Hello! Welcome to the extremely aughts coffeeshop playlist edition of SCALES. Definitely haven’t heard this warbly Bright Eyes song (feat. Emmylou Harris!)...

SCALES #52: spiderlings

January 3, 2019

Hello! And happy new year. I’m writing from an outpost of what I guess is the new ~cool St. Paul~, a converted industrial space coffeeshop with its internal...

SCALES #51: cube rule

December 29, 2018

Hello! Time today for an end-of-year check-in with my “go-to 2018” playlist. A reminder of the ground rules: music released this year, ordered by when I...

SCALES #50: other weaves

November 15, 2018

Hello! Against all odds, I’ve made it to issue #50 (fifty!) of this here newsletter. I’ve found it to be a rewarding project throughout, so thank you, dear...

SCALES #49: (catuerreotype?)

October 18, 2018

Hello! It’s been busy in these parts—and, you know, just a little eventful in the world—but this newsletter has awoken from its slumber. There have just been...

SCALES #48: polymorphic chocolate

August 23, 2018

Hello! A bit of an inadvertent relaxed summertime funtime schedule for this here newsletter, with a break that just kept going and going. But I’m here now...

SCALES #47: chameleonic laser

July 12, 2018

Hello! I read Wait, Blink by Gunnhild Øyehaug, an ingenious short novel written in 2008 and just translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson. Some of the...

SCALES #46: kind & burrowing creature

July 5, 2018

Hello! There’s been some honest-to-goodness chemistry happening in lab. Setting up reactions, running TLC plates, rotovapping, the whole lot. Honestly, it’s...

SCALES #45: albedo & flavedo

June 28, 2018

Hello! Things in droplet-land are circling back to the setup from last summer. Turns out, despite previous hopes, cutting out a paper triangle, wetting it...

SCALES #44: full of holes

June 21, 2018

Hello! Particularly upsetting week to be living here in the U S of A. (Throat clearing: of course the current historical moment doesn’t have a monopoly on...

SCALES #43: respective metal boxes

June 7, 2018

Hello! I read Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi, a story about a relationship between two young people in Austin. The book happens to fall in a Certain...

SCALES #42: stinted pasture

May 31, 2018

Hello! A little piece of hyper-local research: it seems possible “Mistick fields” was not in fact a name once given to Medford south of the Mystic, despite...

SCALES #41: smellscape survey

May 24, 2018

Hello! I’m back! I couldn’t resist the numerological coincidence that I sent out #14 exactly a year ago, and now today, as if through a mirror, #41 falls...

SCALES #40: entr'acte, deux

April 5, 2018

Hello! First, a quick note: This newsletter took a break after the 20th issue, and I’ve decided to do the same after this, the 40th (!). No plans to shut the...

SCALES #39: duck authorities

March 29, 2018

Hello! Lab work has been crunching up serious time as of late. Right now we’ve been stuck on a problem that’s following the classic contours of what can be...

SCALES #38: "wormwood, harvested rye and buckwheat"

March 15, 2018

Hello! So as threatened, I brushed up on my Turgenev, namely the Richard Freeborn translation of Sketches from a Hunter’s Album. To rehash some learning...

SCALES #37: paper spray

March 7, 2018

Hello! In lab I’ve been trying to get up and running (hopefully quickly!) a new set of systems to collect (hopefully quickly!) a good set of levitated...

SCALES #36: "Pip among Pleiads"

March 1, 2018

Hello! I think last time around I didn’t quite capture the feeling I wanted to convey from my mini immersion into Somerville/Medford history with Electric...

SCALES #35: bears in the streets

February 22, 2018

Hello! Previously on SCALES: The author wonders, why is there a short residential street in West Somerville called Electric Avenue? Was it the site of some...

SCALES #34: utility imperialism

February 15, 2018

Hello! Recently I noticed a street in West Somerville called Electric Avenue: a fairly short residential street, terminating near where at least the map...

SCALES #33: zareba

February 8, 2018

Hello! It’s a laying-down-foundations week for this here newsletter, taking some time to do some research for a future issue. Also working on switching over...