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Periodical Cicadas

(Cover image is from Katja Schulz via Xerces) Our first crowd-sourced creature rec comes from @Caitlin Kotula, haver of a beautiful cicada tattoo. I decided to focus on periodical cicadas, because that’s usually what we’re thinking about, and they’re just really cool. There are also annual cicadas and protoperiodical cicadas, according to my new favorite website, cicadamania.com. Let’s all get cicada mania together!  So periodical cicadas are very unusual in that they have these special periodical life cycles. They live 13 or 17 years underground (depending on the species), and then, at the very end of their lives, they come up above ground to, as Deborah Landau (writing for The Nature Conservancy) puts it, “transform, reproduce and ultimately die over the space of just a few days.” They come up out of the ground as nymphs, and then they molt, shedding their shells and growing wings. Landau says they are “most vulnerable right after shedding their shells,” but after 30 minutes they harden up. (Reminds me of this amazing Mitski song).  Here’s a video from the Nature Conservancy and Deborah Landau, my new favorite ecologist. Landau is very clear that the cicadas are NOT hibernating during their time underground. They are living full little (actually quite long) cicada lives. While underground, they’re drinking from the roots of deciduous trees, the same trees they will later lay their eggs on and fertilize with their bodies. They’re also harmless and good for the planet: they aerate the soil with their exit holes, and their bodies decompose and fertilize the soil around their trees, ultimately feeding the next generation. The National Wildlife Federation also points out that they “prune mature trees.” Lots of creatures eat them (including dogs and cats and sometimes people). But as Landau points out, they emerge in such large numbers (“the great emergence”) that predators can’t really make a dent. They have “no natural inclination” to escape predators, which also explains why they aren’t afraid of humans.  A 2024 blog entry from Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation by Sebastian Echeverri (partially titled “Loud Bug Summer,” bc obviously) points out that 2024 was a big summer for cicadas because two different broods (one 13-year, one 17-year) emerged at the same time. Echeverri writes, “This incredible spectacle only happens every 221 years!”, which makes it sound like some kind of eclipse. The blog entry includes a picture breaking down various cicada broods, which are labeled using Roman numerals, as well as a fascinating image of them molting.  (From USDA Forest Service) (From G. Edward Johnson) Echeverri also explains that the organ male cicadas use to make sound is called a tymbal. It produces a click, but “cicadas make this sound over and over so rapidly that we hear it as a constant hum.” Female cicadas don’t have this organ, but they do click their wings. The Xerces blog ends with cicada haikus by Xerces staff, in case you thought we weren’t doing poetry anymore.  Cicadamania.com also mentions that you can use iNaturalist (recently recommended on Rec League by @Gabriela Wilson) to report stragglers from past broods in 2026. There are no full cicada broods this year, but Landau/the Nature Conservancy say the next ones are due in 2027 in Louisiana and Mississipi.  Yet another source from Purdue (which focuses on Indiana cicadas, naturally), suggests “making a cicada friend.” Basically, if you snap your fingers, you can mimic female cicada wing clicks and seduce a male cicada into following you around. They link to this video from Rec League favorite David Attenborough, which is typically wonderful and also includes Attenborough snapping at a cicada until it lands on his face, during which he remains dignified. Finally (whoops these are getting successively longer), I remembered reading a 2024 NPR story about a zombie cicada sex fungus (that also makes them high?) and had to refresh my memory. Fair warning, it’s gross/sad.  Metaphor corner: There isn’t a famous poem for every creature, but I figure we can always find some symbolism. There are so many life lessons we can get from these little guys! There’s the fact that they spend the vast majority of their lives underground, active but invisible those of us up above. Nice to remember that maybe hyper-visible productivity isn’t the only way to live a meaningful life. And then, at the very end of their lives, they go through this remarkable emergence and transition — they literally grow wings! I think that’s a useful lesson for a culture that treats aging like the absolute end of the world. They also protect themselves by syncing up and emerging in large numbers — very community-oriented, very “we keep us safe.” Smart guys! Thank you Caitlin!

Pop-up Market for Gaza

Since I’ve mentioned my fundraising a couple times I wanted to recommend our little collective, Pop-up Market for Gaza. A group of friends and I have been trying to consistently fundraise for the same 5 Palestinian families for about a year and a half now (and longer in past iterations). This work always feels incomplete, and I often feel like I’m falling short, but all I can do is keep trying and uphold my responsibility to families I care deeply about who are going through unimaginable suffering. Mostly events local to New York (and sometimes Boston), but we’ve talked about trying to sell stuff online too, and it’s generally where we uplift the fundraisers/urgent needs. Ily ❤️

dying in the club (thesis pending)

There’s clearly much more work to be done, but this is what I’ve got so far. There are a couple edge cases, like “Fire Burning,” which is more you’re so hot than apocalypse, and “Teenage Dream,” which has “We can dance until we die/ You and I/ We’ll be young forever” but doesn’t quite have the club. I need to talk to both Pitbull and Kesha who were major contributors to the genre (I feel weird including the Kesha songs at all, bc they’re from when she had to work with Dr. Luke, and I don’t know how she feels about her music from that period, but I didn’t want to leave her out either.) Thank you to @April, @Steven Weill, that person at the party, @grace murray, @Amy and @rory, @Spines, Flicks, and Wax, and a man I once talked to on a dating app. Also enormous thank you to @Samantha Culp, whose songs I can’t include but have opened up important research avenues (same to @Nicole and @Ross Chait). Why did I write about this playlist like I was doing the acknowledgements to a book? edit: thank you to @Dylan for two new songs! And to my friend Tabitha who is a huge contributor to my dying in the club thesis (@Jessie suggested calling it YOLO theory).

moving forward <3

In OCD therapy (I’m always talking about OCD therapy bc it’s my main experience but I think this applies to a lot of people), there’s this whole thing where they talk about healthy versus unhealthy guilt, and I’ve always struggled with that a bit, because I don’t know if I’m capable of feeling guilt in a healthy way. Like even when my guilt is warranted, it becomes so huge and consumes me and makes me hate myself. So I really empathize with what you’re talking about and know how much that voice can absolutely overpower you. I think ultimately what resonates most for me is the question of what the guilt is facilitating. Like humans are social animals who evolved to feel guilt so we could live in community/ treat each other well/ repair when we need to. But sometimes guilt works the opposite way, where it just makes us want to turn inward and hide and stops us from acting at all. So what I try to do is ask myself, have I done what I need to do/ tried to repair/ is there nothing to do? And then it’s usually about just moving forward. Self-flagellation doesn’t really help anyone else, and ultimately just turns me inward and away from the things and people I care about. The world is a confusing place and relationships are hard and messing up is extremely part of that. Like there’s no way to live without messing up. So if I want to live in the world, I have to make peace with sometimes messing up, do what I can to repair or just learn from the experience, and then move forward. Idk, so much of life to me is just about moving forward, and making peace with imperfection. And usually that punishing voice you’re talking about is really just to hurt you, not to help anyone else. There’s a kind of basic question: how would I respond to a friend who had messed up? And usually the answer is like, encourage them to do what they need to do to move forward and also be SO much nicer to them than they’re being to themself. Sending you a hug <3 

Periodical Cicadas

(Cover image is from Katja Schulz via Xerces) Our first crowd-sourced creature rec comes from @Caitlin Kotula, haver of a beautiful cicada tattoo. I decided to focus on periodical cicadas, because that’s usually what we’re thinking about, and they’re just really cool. There are also annual cicadas and protoperiodical cicadas, according to my new favorite website, cicadamania.com. Let’s all get cicada mania together!  So periodical cicadas are very unusual in that they have these special periodical life cycles. They live 13 or 17 years underground (depending on the species), and then, at the very end of their lives, they come up above ground to, as Deborah Landau (writing for The Nature Conservancy) puts it, “transform, reproduce and ultimately die over the space of just a few days.” They come up out of the ground as nymphs, and then they molt, shedding their shells and growing wings. Landau says they are “most vulnerable right after shedding their shells,” but after 30 minutes they harden up. (Reminds me of this amazing Mitski song).  Here’s a video from the Nature Conservancy and Deborah Landau, my new favorite ecologist. Landau is very clear that the cicadas are NOT hibernating during their time underground. They are living full little (actually quite long) cicada lives. While underground, they’re drinking from the roots of deciduous trees, the same trees they will later lay their eggs on and fertilize with their bodies. They’re also harmless and good for the planet: they aerate the soil with their exit holes, and their bodies decompose and fertilize the soil around their trees, ultimately feeding the next generation. The National Wildlife Federation also points out that they “prune mature trees.” Lots of creatures eat them (including dogs and cats and sometimes people). But as Landau points out, they emerge in such large numbers (“the great emergence”) that predators can’t really make a dent. They have “no natural inclination” to escape predators, which also explains why they aren’t afraid of humans.  A 2024 blog entry from Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation by Sebastian Echeverri (partially titled “Loud Bug Summer,” bc obviously) points out that 2024 was a big summer for cicadas because two different broods (one 13-year, one 17-year) emerged at the same time. Echeverri writes, “This incredible spectacle only happens every 221 years!”, which makes it sound like some kind of eclipse. The blog entry includes a picture breaking down various cicada broods, which are labeled using Roman numerals, as well as a fascinating image of them molting.  (From USDA Forest Service) (From G. Edward Johnson) Echeverri also explains that the organ male cicadas use to make sound is called a tymbal. It produces a click, but “cicadas make this sound over and over so rapidly that we hear it as a constant hum.” Female cicadas don’t have this organ, but they do click their wings. The Xerces blog ends with cicada haikus by Xerces staff, in case you thought we weren’t doing poetry anymore.  Cicadamania.com also mentions that you can use iNaturalist (recently recommended on Rec League by @Gabriela Wilson) to report stragglers from past broods in 2026. There are no full cicada broods this year, but Landau/the Nature Conservancy say the next ones are due in 2027 in Louisiana and Mississipi.  Yet another source from Purdue (which focuses on Indiana cicadas, naturally), suggests “making a cicada friend.” Basically, if you snap your fingers, you can mimic female cicada wing clicks and seduce a male cicada into following you around. They link to this video from Rec League favorite David Attenborough, which is typically wonderful and also includes Attenborough snapping at a cicada until it lands on his face, during which he remains dignified. Finally (whoops these are getting successively longer), I remembered reading a 2024 NPR story about a zombie cicada sex fungus (that also makes them high?) and had to refresh my memory. Fair warning, it’s gross/sad.  Metaphor corner: There isn’t a famous poem for every creature, but I figure we can always find some symbolism. There are so many life lessons we can get from these little guys! There’s the fact that they spend the vast majority of their lives underground, active but invisible those of us up above. Nice to remember that maybe hyper-visible productivity isn’t the only way to live a meaningful life. And then, at the very end of their lives, they go through this remarkable emergence and transition — they literally grow wings! I think that’s a useful lesson for a culture that treats aging like the absolute end of the world. They also protect themselves by syncing up and emerging in large numbers — very community-oriented, very “we keep us safe.” Smart guys! Thank you Caitlin!

Pop-up Market for Gaza

Since I’ve mentioned my fundraising a couple times I wanted to recommend our little collective, Pop-up Market for Gaza. A group of friends and I have been trying to consistently fundraise for the same 5 Palestinian families for about a year and a half now (and longer in past iterations). This work always feels incomplete, and I often feel like I’m falling short, but all I can do is keep trying and uphold my responsibility to families I care deeply about who are going through unimaginable suffering. Mostly events local to New York (and sometimes Boston), but we’ve talked about trying to sell stuff online too, and it’s generally where we uplift the fundraisers/urgent needs. Ily ❤️

dying in the club (thesis pending)

There’s clearly much more work to be done, but this is what I’ve got so far. There are a couple edge cases, like “Fire Burning,” which is more you’re so hot than apocalypse, and “Teenage Dream,” which has “We can dance until we die/ You and I/ We’ll be young forever” but doesn’t quite have the club. I need to talk to both Pitbull and Kesha who were major contributors to the genre (I feel weird including the Kesha songs at all, bc they’re from when she had to work with Dr. Luke, and I don’t know how she feels about her music from that period, but I didn’t want to leave her out either.) Thank you to @April, @Steven Weill, that person at the party, @grace murray, @Amy and @rory, @Spines, Flicks, and Wax, and a man I once talked to on a dating app. Also enormous thank you to @Samantha Culp, whose songs I can’t include but have opened up important research avenues (same to @Nicole and @Ross Chait). Why did I write about this playlist like I was doing the acknowledgements to a book? edit: thank you to @Dylan for two new songs! And to my friend Tabitha who is a huge contributor to my dying in the club thesis (@Jessie suggested calling it YOLO theory).

moving forward <3

In OCD therapy (I’m always talking about OCD therapy bc it’s my main experience but I think this applies to a lot of people), there’s this whole thing where they talk about healthy versus unhealthy guilt, and I’ve always struggled with that a bit, because I don’t know if I’m capable of feeling guilt in a healthy way. Like even when my guilt is warranted, it becomes so huge and consumes me and makes me hate myself. So I really empathize with what you’re talking about and know how much that voice can absolutely overpower you. I think ultimately what resonates most for me is the question of what the guilt is facilitating. Like humans are social animals who evolved to feel guilt so we could live in community/ treat each other well/ repair when we need to. But sometimes guilt works the opposite way, where it just makes us want to turn inward and hide and stops us from acting at all. So what I try to do is ask myself, have I done what I need to do/ tried to repair/ is there nothing to do? And then it’s usually about just moving forward. Self-flagellation doesn’t really help anyone else, and ultimately just turns me inward and away from the things and people I care about. The world is a confusing place and relationships are hard and messing up is extremely part of that. Like there’s no way to live without messing up. So if I want to live in the world, I have to make peace with sometimes messing up, do what I can to repair or just learn from the experience, and then move forward. Idk, so much of life to me is just about moving forward, and making peace with imperfection. And usually that punishing voice you’re talking about is really just to hurt you, not to help anyone else. There’s a kind of basic question: how would I respond to a friend who had messed up? And usually the answer is like, encourage them to do what they need to do to move forward and also be SO much nicer to them than they’re being to themself. Sending you a hug <3