Profiles are hard. Too often they're drenched in the writer's attempts to make the subject seem larger than life. But good profiles have the opposite effect: Through their honesty and attention to perhaps mundane detail — and, as Outside Magazine contributing editor Chris Solomon notes, the "small ridiculousnesses of situations" — they show us an ordinary person peeling away at life's extraordinary circumstances.

For veterinary pathologist Kathy Burek, death is one of those extraordinary circumstances (the kind that requires a playful stoicism). The subject of Solomon's recent Outside piece, "The Detective of North Oddities," spends her days "slicing open furry dead animals"; she's a character in a mystery novel that features climate change as the primary suspect. But climate change is rarely the obvious, solo culprit.

Beautiful language aside, Solomon's story has two major merits I'd like to highlight before I dive into the interview and annotation. First, it gives voice to a vibrant personality using very little dialogue. Second, it folds climate change into an environmental story in a way that is nuanced, thorough and responsible. Keep those two points in mind as you read.

A former reporter at the Seattle Times who's now a freelancer, Solomon is a contract writer for Outside, where he is a contributing editor. His freelance work has been anthologized twice in "The Best American Travel Writing" and also has appeared in "The Best American Sports Writing." I talked to him by email in Seattle, where he lives; the answers have been slightly edited for flow.

How did you hear about this story, and what was the reporting process like? Across how many days/months did you "shadow" Burek? 

 I had come across Kathy Burek’s name several years ago while reporting a story on sickness in a warming Arctic for Scientific American. Burek never called me back. I forgot about her. That first piece was straight news, and it was dry as toast. I wanted to revisit the topic. A few years later a good friend and very gifted journalist for National Geographic named Craig Welch had dinner with Burek and other scientists while reporting his own story about the Blob. “You’ve got to do a story on this woman,” he said.

It actually took Burek some time to warm up to me. As often happens with scientists, she had had some bad experiences with reporters in the past; as a result, she’d kept a very low profile in the media for years, almost never appearing in the news. She wasn’t keen to have a story done about her. At the same time, and as with many scientists, she wanted people to pay attention to what is going on up there. She had a message to get out. Finally, perhaps two months after we’d first talked, and there seemed a little bit of rapport built, I asked her, “Can I come up for two weeks and shadow you?”

“Three would be better,” she said. The reason, she said, was that Death isn’t always accommodating, and she never knew when she’d be doing her necropsies, or going out into the field.

Once I got to know Burek, she turned out to be an amazing person: warm, smart, funny, passionate about her work, quirky and extremely quotable. Basically a writer’s dream. This is often the way it works, isn’t it? Once we knock down the initial barriers between reporter and subject, some fun and meaningful stuff can happen.

Reporting on climate change is tough nowadays, and I'm sure this assignment was no exception. What's interesting to me is that you very deftly wove uncertainty into the piece, explaining that in recent years, Burek has encountered animal deaths that are "more intriguing and odder and more frustrating for their open-endedness." What role did you want uncertainty to play in this piece? Do you have a personal philosophy regarding climate change reporting that informs how you approach your work?

This is a great question. A story like this could easily be too sensational if it ignored the uncertainty. The frustrating truth is that scientists just don’t know the answers to why so many things are happening up there. As a result, uncertainty had to be a major presence in the story.

At the same time, we’ve watched over the years as “merchants of doubt” have exploited this kind of uncertainty to paralyze our decision-making processes about climate change. That’s dangerous. Just because scientists aren’t certain why some things are happening doesn’t mean they don’t have educated guesses about what’s causing problems—and those guesses frequently finger climate change. So I wanted to be true to the stubborn question marks that are out there while also showing that there are increasing amounts of circumstantial evidence. And even circumstantial evidence adds up.

How did you choose to make otter 13 the central (animal) figure of the lede? 

Readers care about animals, but they like living animals. And there was so much dead stuff in this story. I worried, frankly, that readers wouldn’t feel a connection to the work Burek is doing. How do you establish that empathy?

Another friend happened to mention that he always liked the introductory minutes of the former HBO show “Six Feet Under.” Every episode of that show began the same way: The camera would follow one person as he or she moved through her day, doing whatever. Just as we begin to connect with that person—BAM!—she gets hit by a car, or drops the hair dryer into her bathtub. Whatever. And the next scene begins with the person now dead and laid out on a slab at the family’s mortuary. The rest of the episode takes off from there, with the main characters’ stories spinning off from there. That first person—alive, then dead—is a bit of an entry to, and a framing device for, the episode.

Once I knew I wanted to try this, I worked backwards, excavating details of the sea otter’s life—which, in this case, I knew existed because the otter had been radio-tagged and there were fun details about its life.

It seems like a lot of research was involved in putting this together. Where did you begin, and how did your digging evolve?

The nugget of this story began from that 2014 Scientific American story. There were several anecdotes of sickness in a warming north that got left on the cutting-room floor that I felt were too good to throw away. So I was able to start there. (Save those old notes!)

During the time I had been writing that first story, these Unusual Mortality Events involving seal and walrus had been going on. True to their name, they were odd and unexplained. At the time, they were too open-ended to mention. Years later, I realized that the uncertainty wasn’t an inconvenience; the uncertainty was part of the story itself. So I knew I needed to dive in and understand the UMEs. So that gave me another chunk of the story.

The Blob—this huge warming event—seemed to exacerbate the oddity up in Alaska, with a bunch of deaths of birds but also whales in the summer of 2015. As it lingered, summer 2016 promised to be busy for Burek as well, with the promise of lots of dead stuff. That’s when I knew I needed to get up there and spend some time in person, with the possibility of seeing her at work.

How did you figure out how to structure the piece?

I like writing sentences, but structure gives me fits. I currently have about four books on structure sitting around the house, in various states of half-read-ness. For this profile, I knew I wanted the story generally to contain these elements:

• An opening scene with Burek
• A nut section: climate and the oddities she’s dealing with
• A visit to her house
• A dive into the Unusual Mortality Events
• A detailed section watching Burek at work
• Backgrounder on Burek

For a while I tried hard to make Burek’s background appear late in the story, as The New Yorker sometimes does and which I find is often effective. But this wasn’t an 8,000-word piece; there wasn’t room to let the story unspool so leisurely. The solution to that, alas, was to cut several hundred words of Burek’s background/house and move all of that higher in the story.

One thing I do try to work on a lot is pacing: keeping the narrative moving, especially in a piece with a lot of science, where boggy spots lurk everywhere. I think a background as a newspaper reporter has helped a lot in this regard. A long story really needs to maintain a nice rhythm and momentum; readers can feel when the story loses its sense of the music, its forward progress. That’s the point they put down the magazine. But pacing is something I think too much “longform” writing doesn’t work hard enough at.

I was able to get the structure figured out, so it had pretty clear sailing once the got onto the desk of my editor (the patient and frequently forbearing Alex Heard).

In short, the story did go through several drafts before I handed it in, with feedback from fellow writers who I trust. I have met writers who don’t have anyone read their work before they hand it in. This seems to me unwise. Getting the work before a trusted writer, who can see the story with fresh eyes, is a crucial part of my process. Though I know others who disagree on this, I try to hand in a story that’s bombproof. What’s the downside?

My questions are in red, his responses in blue.

The Detective of Northern Oddities

By Christopher Solomon

Outside magazine, January 2017

When they captured her off Cohen Island in the summer of 2007, she weighed 58 pounds and was the size of a collie. The growth rings in a tooth they pulled revealed her age—eight years, a mature female sea otter.

They anesthetized her and placed tags on her flippers. They assigned her a number: LCI013, or 13 for short. They installed a transmitter in her belly and gave her a VHF radio frequency: 165.155 megahertz. Then they released her. The otter was now, in effect, her own small-wattage Alaskan radio station. If you had the right kind of antenna and a receiver, you could launch a skiff into Kachemak Bay, lift the antenna, and hunt the air for the music of her existence: an occasional ping in high C that was both solitary and reassuring amid the static of the wide world.

Otter 13, they soon learned, preferred the sheltered waters on the south side of Kachemak Bay. In Kasitsna Bay and Jakolof Bay, she whelped pups and clutched clams in her strong paws. She chewed off her tags. Some days, if you stood on the sand in Homer, you could glimpse her just beyond Bishop’s Beach, her head as slick as a greaser’s ducktail, wrapped in the bull kelp with other females and their pups.

“They’re so cute, aren’t they?” said the woman in the gold-rimmed eyeglasses. She was leaning over 13 as she said this, measuring a right forepaw with a small ruler. The otter’s paw was raised to her head as if in greeting, or perhaps surrender. “They’re one of the few animals that are cute even when they’re dead.” [annotation q="Oof, “cute even when they’re dead.” This is a bit jarring, in a good way! Tell me more about this quote—did Burek laugh when she said it? Did you laugh? Was Burek pretty open about her playful attitude toward the bleakness of her job?" a="I liked the jarring-ness, too—the juxtaposition of the soft fur and Burek’s kind voice and the idea of the cute animal before here, with the undeniable fact that she was about to yank out one of its teeth and then eviscerate it. The whole scene, I’d come to see, was sort of a mini-metaphor for the different worlds she so easily straddles. This is one of those quotes when, as soon as you get it, you have a good feeling about the day ahead. We were standing in the necropsy room, talking about the otter and where it came from, when she began to measure it, and said this. (She didn’t laugh at all when she said this, though she smiled sympathetically. I think I was too stunned to laugh. I was often too stunned by what I saw to react much.) What is really interesting about Burek is that because she’s done her job for so long, she doesn’t see anything unusual about it, anymore. What is weird to others is a Tuesday to her. That casualness repeatedly surprised me. What’s more, since this was just her life, she’d say, offhand, the most fun, weird, interesting things. And I wanted to capture those."]

Two weeks earlier, salmon set-netters had found the otter on the beach on the far side of Barbara Point. The dying creature was too weak to remove a stone lodged in her jaws. Local officials gathered her up, and a quick look inside revealed the transmitter: 13 was a wild animal with a history. This made her rare. She was placed on a fast ferry and then put in cold storage to await the attention of veterinary pathologist Kathy Burek, who now paused over her with a sympathetic voice and a scalpel of the size usually seen in human morgues.

Burek worked with short, sure draws of the knife. The otter opened. “Wow, that’s pretty interesting,” Burek said. “Very marked edema over the right tarsus. But I don’t see any fractures.” The room filled with the smell of low tide on a hot day, of past-expiration sirloin. A visiting observer wobbled in his rubber clamming boots. “The only shame is if you pass out where we can’t find you,” Burek said without looking up. She continued her exploration. “This animal has such dense fur. You can really miss something.” She made several confident strokes until the pelt came away in her hands, as if she were a host gently helping a dinner guest out of her coat. The only fur left on 13 was a small pair of mittens and the cap on her head, resembling a Russian trooper’s flap-eared ushanka.

It had been nearly a year since Burek’s inbox pinged with notice of a different dead sea otter. Then her e-mail sounded again, and again after that. In 2015, 304 otters would be found dead or dying, mostly around Homer and Kachemak Bay, on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. The number was nearly five times higher than in recent years. On one day alone, four otters arrived for necropsy. Burek had to drag an extra table into her lab so that she and a colleague could keep pace—slicing open furry dead animals, two at a time, for hours on end.

As they worked, an enormous patch of unusually warm water sat stubbornly in the eastern North Pacific. The patch was so persistent that scientists christened it the Blob. Researchers caught sunfish off Icy Point. An unprecedented toxic algal bloom, fueled by the Blob, reached from Southern California to Alaska. Whales had begun to die in worrisome numbers off the coast of Alaska and British Columbia—45 whales that year in the western Gulf of Alaska alone, mostly humpbacks and fins. Federal officials had labeled this, with an abstruseness that would please Don DeLillo, an Unusual Mortality Event. [annotation q="I like how you’re sort of poking fun at scientists here—it actually makes the terminology more accessible, because you’re pointing out the silliness of the label as opposed to ignoring it. Was this your intent, or were you mostly just writing in your own voice/commenting on your own impressions? In other words, I'm curious how much overlap you think there is between what you've written and your inner thoughts/outward speech." a="A writer friend mentioned to me recently that in my stories I seem to enjoy pointing out the small ridiculousnesses of situations. I didn’t mean to make fun of the scientists here so much as enjoy the stiffness of government for something so sad, and also how life imitates art. I also thought it strange how no one ever commented on the chilly oddity of the words “Unusual Mortality Event.” (Great band name, by the way.) This is maybe beside the point… but I write all this stuff down when I’m out reporting. I come back with 3, 4, 5 notebooks. Most of it goes unused, of course. Still, I try to write down everything, including my own impressions—not just the quotes that other people say. It took me years to “unlearn” my training as a newspaper reporter and start giving myself the freedom believe that my own observations have a validity of their own. Some of the “narrative journalism” I have enjoyed the most (Jonathan Raban’s work, for instance, or Tim Cahill’s) lingers on the writer’s impression of a person/place/thing, and not solely a dispassionate observation of the thing itself."]By winter, dead murres lay thick on beaches. The Blob would eventually dissipate, but scientists feared that the warming and its effects were a glimpse into the future under climate change.

What, if anything, did all this have to do with the death of 13? Burek wasn’t sure yet. When sea otters first began perishing in large numbers around Homer several years ago, she identified a culprit: a strain of streptococcus bacteria that was also an emerging pathogen affecting humans. But lately things hadn’t been quite so simple. While the infection again killed otters during the Blob’s appearance, Burek found other problems as well. Many of the otters that died of strep also had low levels of toxins from the Blob’s massive algal bloom, a clue that the animals possibly had even more of the quick-moving poison in their systems before researchers got to them. They must be somehow interacting. Perhaps several problems now were gang-tackling the animals, each landing its own enervating blow.

Burek’s lilac surgical gloves grew red. She noted that the otter had a lung that looked “weird.” She measured a raspberry-size clot on a heart valve using a piece of dental floss. She started working in the abdomen.

“Huh,” she said. She’d noticed that the lower part of the otter was filled with brown matter and bits of shell: the nearly digested remains of the animal’s last meals had spilled into its pelvis and down into a leg wound. This could have caused an infection and also led to blood poisoning. But where was the injury?

“The colon got perforated. I have no idea how,” Burek said. She probed further until she found a pocket of something like pus at the top of the femur. She eventually separated the femur from the body, and her assistant placed the bone in a Ziploc bag.

By now it was past lunchtime. Burek had been at the necropsy table for more than three hours without pause. She looked a little weary. What caused the otter’s death would remain, for the moment, unresolved. The not knowing seemed to displease her, though Burek was accustomed to mystery. The frozen north was always shifting; you took it as you found it.[annotation q="I love this sentence. Is “you took it as you found it” a sentiment that Burek expressed, even if not in those exact words?" a="Oh yes. She knows as well as anyone that they are just seeing a fraction what’s happening out there. So it keeps her humble."]

Burek straightened stiffly. “I’m hungry,” she said across the bloody table. She removed the otter’s head and reached for the bone saw. “Who likes Indian?” [annotation q="The longest quote from Burek in this section is five words. I love the effect this has. Often journalists over-quote their main characters. But here, you manage to paint a vivid picture of Burek with just a few utterances. Can you share your thought process behind this?" a="That’s interesting; I hadn’t noticed that! I think I might have done that subconsciously, though, and here’s why: At the start of a piece, there’s a lot going on, and there’s a lot that needs to happen. Bluntly put, the author needs to be the one in control, not Burek. This isn’t a time for long explanations by Burek. Not yet. Those will come later in the piece. I also was trying to keep the sentences simpler, shorter, a little more clipped. I liked the effect of that."]

Burek often spends her days cutting up the wildest, largest, smallest, most charismatic, and most ferocious creatures in Alaska, looking for what killed them. She’s been on the job for more than 20 years, self-employed and working with just about every organization that oversees wildlife in Alaska. Until recently, she was the only board-certified anatomic pathologist in a state that’s more than twice the size of Texas. (There’s now one other, at the University of Alaska.) She’s still the only one who regularly heads into the field with her flensing knives and vials, harvesting samples that she’ll later squint at under a microscope.

Nowhere in North America is this work more important than in the wilds of Alaska. The year 2015 was the planet’s hottest on record; 2016 is expected to have been hotter still. As human-generated greenhouse gases continue to trap heat in the world’s oceans, air, and ice at the rate of four Hiroshima bomb explosions every second, and carbon dioxide reaches its greatest atmospheric concentration in 800,000 years, the highest latitudes are warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe. [annotation q="These are highly effective stats. Was this section about global warming always this length, or was it originally placed elsewhere in the story?" a="Over the course of about 10 months, I read a lot of climate stories. Even an environmental writer, faced with all the sober stats, finds his eyes rolling back in his head. When people are both inundated and overwhelmed by news of climate catastrophe, how do you jar them into seeing the problem anew? I tried to use just a few sentences that really grab the reader by the lapels. The reason I really like them, though, is that they’re not sentences weighed down with stats about CO2 concentrations. People understand images and analogies. Give them something more visceral."] Alaska was so warm last winter that organizers of the Iditarod had to haul in snow from Fairbanks, 360 miles to the north, for the traditional start in Anchorage. The waters of the high Arctic may be nearly free of summertime ice in little more than two decades, something human eyes have never seen.

If Americans think about the defrosting northern icebox, they picture dog-paddling polar bears. This obscures much bigger changes at work. A great unraveling is underway as nature gropes for a new equilibrium. Some species are finding that their traditional homes are disappearing, even while the north becomes more hospitable to new arrivals. On both sides of the Brooks Range—the spine of peaks that runs 600 miles east to west across northern Alaska—the land is greening but also browning as tundra becomes shrubland and trees die off. With these shifts in climate and vegetation, birds, rodents, and other animals are on the march. Parasites and pathogens are hitching rides with these newcomers.

“The old saying was that our cold kept away the riffraff,” one scientist told me. “That’s not so true anymore.”

During this epic reshuffle, strange events are the new normal. In Alaska’s Arctic in summertime, tens of thousands of walruses haul out on shore, their usual ice floes gone. North of Canada, where the fabled Northwest Passage now melts out every year, satellite-tagged bowhead whales from the Atlantic and Pacific recently met for the first time since the start of the Holocene.

These changes are openings for contagion. “Anytime you get an introduction of a new species to a new area, we always think of disease,” Burek told me. “Is there going to be new disease that comes because there’s new species there?”

A lot of research worldwide has focused on how climate change will increase disease transmission in tropical and even temperate climates, as with dengue fever in the American South. Far less attention has been paid to what will happen—indeed, is already happening—in the world’s highest latitudes, and to the people who live there.

Put another way: The north isn’t just warming. It has a fever.

This matters to you and me even if we live thousands of miles away, because what happens in the north won’t stay there. Birds migrate. Disease spreads. The changes in Alaska are harbingers for what humans and animals may see elsewhere. It’s the front line in climate change’s transformation of the planet. [annotation q="I like how direct you are here. Was it your decision to be blunt about why this stuff matters? Do you feel you could have gotten the point across without being so straightforward, or no?" a="In the first solid draft I completed for myself, it was clear that a few points weren’t hitting squarely; they weren’t making the right impression. One of them was the all-important question: Why Should We Care? So I tried again, trying to hit the point as plainly as possible. This didn’t seem like a time to be coy, for two reasons: 1) You want to make an impact, and 2) pacing, again. This could be a quicksand moment if not careful. Keep this rambling wreck moving! We’ll stop and idle and take a longer look at this stuff at a later time. But not now."]

This is where Burek comes in. Fundamentally, a veterinary pathologist is a detective. Burek’s city streets are the tissues of wild animals, her crime scenes the discolored and distended organs of tide-washed seals and emaciated wood bison. “She’s the one who’s going to see changes,” says Kathi Lefebvre, a lead research biologist at Seattle’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “She’s the one who’s going to see epidemics come along. And she’s the one with the skills to diagnose things.”

As the planet enters new waters, Burek’s work has made her one of the lonely few at the bow, calling out the oddness she sees in the hope that we can dodge some of the melting icebergs in our path. It’s a career that long ago ceased to strike  Burek as unusual, and she moves without flinching through a world tinged with blood and irony. [annotation q="“…tinged with blood and irony.” What a great image." a="Well, thanks. This actually survived from the story proposal from a year prior. I actually have found to my surprise that some of the most clear (if brief) moments I’ve done about story subjects has come in initial story proposals to editors. After all, that’s where a writer has to explain and sell his subject. (Save those proposals and refer back to them!)"]

The first time we spoke on the phone, Burek offhandedly said of herself and a colleague, “We’ve probably cut up more sea otters than anybody else on the planet.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

“We all got to brag about something,” she replied.

Summer is the season when Alaskans at play under the undying sun tend to come across dead or stranded animals and place a call to a wildlife hotline. The call starts a chain of events that often ends at Burek’s  family home, which is made of honey-colored logs and sits on an acre and a half in Eagle River, about 20 miles north of downtown Anchorage. This is where the asphalt yields to Alaska. The rough peaks of the Chugach Mountains, still piebald with snow in midsummer, lean overhead. Moose occasionally carry off the backyard badminton net in their antlers. [annotation q="This is a fantastic detail. It reminds me of an earlier sentence, “Researchers caught sunfish off Icy Point.” They’re similar in that they’re only marginally related to what goes on in the rest of the paragraph, and yet they influence the mood of the surrounding sentences." a="At one point I had entire paragraphs about Burek’s big log home and all the stuff in it. Most of those grafs got cut, in favor of just a few fun sentences. Details likes these can paint a picture and give the reader everything he needs to know while also being entertaining. “Icy Point” tells the reader it’s a cold place on the map, and “sunfish” is a warm-sounding species; it shouldn’t be there. Boom—you’re done. Move on. Keep propelling the reader forward."]

In July, I headed north from Seattle to spend a month with Burek as she worked. She’s 54 but looks a decade younger, with long brown hair and appled cheeks that give her the appearance of having just come in from the icicled outdoors. Her voice has an approachable Great Plains flatness, the vestige of her Wisconsin birth and an upbringing in the suburbs of Ohio. Burek ends many sentences with a short, sharp laugh—a punctuative caboose that can signal either amusement or bemusement, depending. Growing up in the Midwest, she didn’t see the ocean until high school. “But I was always fascinated by whales,” she told me. “And I always wanted to be a vet or a wildlife biologist—Jane Goodall or something.” She laughed. “Lots of kids wanted to be vets. They outgrow it.”

Burek was intrigued by the biology—how bodies worked and how, sometimes, they didn’t. After college she went to veterinary school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, later moving to Alaska to see how she would like working in a typical vet practice. One year she lived outside Soldotna, in a one-room “dry” cabin, with no running water, while writing her thesis for a master’s degree in wildlife disease virology. Alaska agreed with her. “I like the seasons. I like the wilderness. I like the animals,” she said.

Burek met her future husband, Henry Huntington, on the coast of the Chukchi Sea in the high Arctic, during the Inupiat’s annual spring bowhead whale hunt, when breezes pushed the ice pack together and forced a pause in the whaling. They now have two teenage sons. “I tell the boys they’re the product of persistent west winds in May of 1992,” said Henry, a respected researcher and scientist with the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Arctic conservation campaigns.

Surprisingly little is known about the diseases of wildlife. As a result, many veterinary pathologists end up focusing on a few species. Thanks to Burek’s curiosity and her gifts, and to a necessary embrace of the Alaskan virtue of do-it-yourself, her expertise is broad. “Anyone who gets into this kind of thing, you like a puzzle,” she told me. “You have to pull together all kinds of little pieces of information to try to figure it out, and it’s very, very challenging.”

Over the years, Burek has peered inside just about every mammal that shows up in Alaskan field guides. One morning, as we drank coffee at her kitchen table, she rattled off a few dozen examples. Coyotes. Polar bears. Dall sheep. Five species of seals. As many whales, including rare Stejneger’s beaked whales.

As we talked, I wandered into the living room. On a wall not far from the wedding photos hung feathery baleen from the mouths of bowhead whales and the white scimitars of walrus tusks. Upstairs in a loft lay an oosik—the baculum, or penis bone, of another walrus. It was as long as a basketball player’s tibia. Atop the fireplace mantel, where other families might display pictures of wattled grandparents, grinned a row of skulls: brown bear, lynx, wood bison. Burek tapped one of the skulls in a spot that looked honeycombed. “Abscessed tooth,” she said. “Wolf. One of my cases.”

Working on wild animals, often in situ, routinely presents her with job hazards that simply aren’t found in the lower 48. Anchorage sits at the confluence of two long inlets. When Burek performs necropsies on whales on Turnagain Arm, she has to keep a sentry’s eye on the horizon for its infamous bore tide, when tidal flow comes in as a standing wave, fast enough that it has outrun a galloping moose. Knik Arm is underlain in places by a fine glacial silt that, when wet, liquefies into a lethal quicksand. Burek’s rule of thumb in the field is never to sink below her ankles. Not long ago, while taking samples from a deceased beluga, she kept slipping deeper. Exasperated, she finally climbed inside the whale and resumed cutting.

Then there’s the problem of the whales themselves. “Whales are just like Crock-Pots,” Burek said. “They’re kind of encased in this thick layer of blubber that’s designed to keep them warm. They might look OK on the outside, but inside everything is mush.”

Decay is the nemesis of the pathologist. Decay erodes evidence. “Fresher is always better,” Burek said, sounding like a discerning sushi chef. It isn’t possible every time. Colleagues told me about a trip with Burek to a remote beach outside Yakutat, to do a postmortem on a humpback. There were several in the group, including a government man with a shotgun to keep away the brown bears that sometimes try to dine on Burek’s specimens. It was raining and cold, and the whale had been dead for a while. Inside, the organs were soup. The pilot who retrieved them had to wear a respirator.

“My wife,” Henry told me, “has a high threshold for discomfort.”

One morning in Anchorage, my phone buzzed. To get a text from Burek is to gain new appreciation for the cliché mixed emotions. Often it’s a chirpy message notifying you that another of God’s creatures has expired and would you like to come see the carcass? [annotation q="This reminds me of the quote near the beginning, about how otters are cute even when they’re dead. Can you tell me more about your experience emotionally while following Burek's work?" a="Perhaps surprisingly, I didn’t find spending time at Burek’s shoulder emotionally draining—mainly because her work was too interesting to be upsetting. And frankly, she made it fun. She talked constantly as she dismembered the animals. What I did try to constantly remember, though, was that the things I was witnessing were wonderfully bizarre. In the middle of a necropsy, I would sometimes step away from the table and just take it all in, as if I was someone else, just stumbling into the room. This was not a normal scene, and the things Burek said weren’t the kinds of things you heard every day. I tried not to lose that sense of “holy crap, this is just not normal.” Some of the writers I admire most, from John Graves up through John McPhee and Ian Frazier and others, have this sort of bemused/admiring/wry approach to the people they write about. I like that voice. That voice acts a bit dim while also being occasionally quite trenchant—willing to be a curious bystander and grant their subject the status of an authority, but also smart enough to have done its homework and be willing and able to point out the occasional absurdity of what they see."]

Burek picked me up at a coffee shop on Northern Lights Avenue, driving the family’s Dodge Grand Caravan with a cracked windshield. Outside it was sunny and warm; just two days earlier, it hit 85 in Deadhorse, the highest temperature ever recorded on the North Slope. Burek’s eyeglasses were covered by sun blockers of the type sold on late-night television. She was wearing summer sandals, her toenails painted what a saleswoman would call “aubergine.” Her foot pressed the gas. We were going to pick up a dead baby moose.

“Fish and Game wants to know why it died, if it’s a possible management issue,” Burek said. Last year an adenovirus, which is more commonly seen in deer in California, had killed two moose in Alaska. Officials wanted to know how common adenovirus was in the state.

As work went, it was an unremarkable day for Burek. The past several years had presented her with a string of cases that were altogether more intriguing and odder and more frustrating for their open-endedness. In 2012, Burek and others observed polar bears that had suffered a curious alopecia, or hair loss, but they were unable to pinpoint the reason. In 2014, Burek described a sea otter that had died of histoplasmosis, an infection caused by a fungus that’s usually found in the droppings of midwestern bats. The infection will sometimes afflict spelunkers, which is where it gets its common name: cave disease. The finding was a dubious first, both for a marine mammal and for Alaska. But, again, why? What was a midwestern fungus doing inside an otter plashing off the coast of Alaska?

Then there was the strange case of the ringed seals. In the spring of 2011, native hunters in Barrow, the northernmost town in the U.S., started finding ringed seals that didn’t look right. The animals had lesions around their mouths and eyes, and ulcers along their flippers. Some had gone bald. A handful died.

Soon, down the coast at the major walrus rookery at Point Lay, ulcers started turning up on walruses both living and dead. The number of sightings on spotted and bearded seals increased and spread south into the Bering Strait as the summer progressed. In time, a few ribbon seals were also affected. Federal officials labeled it another Unusual Mortality Event, a signal of concern and a call for more study. Burek led the postmortems, opening up dozens of animals. Researchers sent samples as far away as Columbia University, in New York, for molecular work. They tested many ideas, but the cause eluded them.

Was climate change a factor in the events? The evidence intrigued Burek and her colleagues. Seals molt during a brief span of time in the spring. According to Peter Boreng, the polar ecosystems program leader at NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center, the longer days and warming temperatures likely cue the animals to climb onto the sea ice, so their skin can warm up and start the process of dropping old hairs and growing new ones. Having ice present is probably crucial for this molting process to happen, Boveng and others believe.

But what if a warming north meant less ice for the seals to use, interfering with their molt? That would explain why the animals showed lesions in the same places on their bodies where the molt begins—the face, the rear end. And when the skin is unprotected by fur, Burek told me, “it may be susceptible to secondary inflections” from bacteria and fungi in the environment.

Nature, alas, is messy and confusing. Though the reasoning seemed plausible, there was no widespread lack of spring ice in 2011 in the areas where the diseased seals were found. Deepening the mystery, lesions in walruses all but vanished in subsequent years, even as some seals continue to have them. “It’s very frustrating—very frustrating,” Burek said of trying to tease out an answer. A lot of her work remains unresolved. Burek knows that this is the reality of doing her job in the 49th state. It is a vast place, expensive to do research; scientists often haven’t been able to do enough baseline studies to know what’s normal and expected, versus new and worrisome, in a given population. Still, it chews at her, the inability to give answers to concerned native peoples. “I have enough self-doubt that it’s like, well, maybe it’s because I’m not working hard enough, or I haven’t done the right thing to figure it out.”

To be sure, the far north isn’t collapsing under contagion caused by climate change. And Burek is careful about drawing connections. Still, a good detective doesn’t need a smoking gun to know when a crime has been committed. Circumstantial evidence, if there’s enough of it, and the right kinds, can tell the story. “It seems hard to believe,” Burek told me, “that a lot of these changes aren’t related to what’s going on in the environment. The problem is proving it.”

There’s a larger question, too, about what these developments augur for humans. The answer, researchers are finding, is that it’s already starting to matter.

Time was, the cold and remoteness of the far north kept its freezer door closed to a lot of contagion. Now the north is neither so cold nor so remote. About four million people live in the circumpolar north, sometimes in sizable cities (Murmansk and Norilsk, Russia; Tromso, Norway). Oil rigs drill. Tourist ships cruise the Northwest Passage. And as new animals and pathogens arrive and thrive in the warmer, more crowded north, some human sickness is on the rise, too. Sweden saw a record number of tick-borne encephalitis cases in 2011, and again in 2012, as roe deer expanded their range northward with ticks in tow. Researchers think the virus the ticks carry may increase its concentrations in warmer weather. The bacterium Francisella tularensis, which at its worst is so lethal that both the U.S. and the USSR weaponized it during the Cold War, is also on the increase in Sweden. Spread by mosquitoes there, the milder form can cause months of flu-like symptoms. Last summer in Russia’s far north, anthrax reportedly killed a grandmother and a boy after melting permafrost released spores from epidemic-killed deer that had been buried for decades in the once frozen ground.

Alaska hasn’t been immune to such changes. A few months ago, researchers reported that five species of nonnative ticks, probably aided by climate change, may now be established in the state. One is the American dog tick, which can transmit the bacterium that causes Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which can lead to paralysis in both canines and humans. In 2004, a bad case of food poisoning sent dozens of cruise-ship passengers running to their cabins. The culprit was Vibrio parahaemolyticus, a leading source of seafood-related food poisoning.

V. parahaemolyticus is typically tied to eating raw oysters taken from the warm waters of places like Louisiana. Why was it infecting people 600 miles north of the most northerly recorded incident? Health officials later teased out the reason: summer water temperatures in Prince William Sound, where the oysters are farmed, now gets warm enough to activate the bacterium.

Earlier in 2016, Burek and NOAA’s Lefebvre coauthored a paper about their discovery of domoic acid in all 13 species of Alaskan marine mammals they examined, from Steller sea lions to humpback whales, in waters as far north as the Arctic Ocean. Domoic acid is naturally produced by some species of algae, and it moves through the food web as it accumulates in the filter-feeding animals that dine on it—anchovies, sardines, crabs, clams, and oysters. Scientists knew the algae that makes domoic acid were present, but they never had a report of a bloom that far north before 2015. The hunch is that warming waters may be increasing the toxin’s presence in Alaska.

“What’s going to happen to these 100-year-old whales when they get hit by these neurotoxins three years in a row?” Lefebvre said. “And it’s not just mortality. It’s sub-lethal neurological effects.”

A study published in 2015 in the journal Science found that harmful algal blooms off the California coast have caused enough brain damage to California sea lions that they lose their way and have trouble hunting. “This is a shot across the bow,” Lefebvre said of the algal blooms. “It’s the type of thing that could happen and become more common.”

Here’s the broader lesson: if the animals can get sick, we can get sick, whether it’s from invigorated pathogens in the environment or from ailing animals themselves. Three in four emerging infectious diseases in humans today are zoonotic diseases—illnesses passed from animals to humans.

This is one reason Burek has a soft spot for sea otters like 13: they are excellent sentinels for what’s happening in the world. Otters splash in the same waters where humans live, work, and play. They eat the same seafood humans do. “I call them a pathologist’s wonderland, because they get all the fantastic, extreme infectious diseases—not to sound too unpleasant,” Burek said.

There are other reasons to pay attention to animals like otters. Mike Brubaker, director of community environment and health at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, points out that traditional foods—everything from salmonberries to moose meat—still make up 80 percent of the native diet in some remote Alaskan communities. If animals suffer, then traditional diets suffer, and so do the cultures that revolve around hunting, fishing, and foraging.

Making Burek's job even more complicated, animals frequently die from mysterious causes that may have nothing at all to do with climate change. As she pokes through the bones, her constant challenge is to discern what’s notably weird from what’s simply everyday and unfortunate. [annotation q="Much like a mystery, you’re describing Burek’s task as mostly discerning crime from coincidence. However, you don't overdo the detective/mystery metaphor, which I think was wise. On a meta level, there's no real “solution” or “conclusion” to Burek's storyline in this piece, either. It's open-ended." a="I do love that Burek—like many scientists, really—is a detective. “Veterinary pathologist”? That’s confusing. But “detective”? Readers can grasp that, and so can I. Suddenly she’s Sam Spade, but with a flensing knife. This brings up another thing that I think about a lot, these days: Even though I’ve long been interested in science and environmental issues, I used to think I had no business writing about these topics because my lack of science education is, frankly, appalling. I don’t have the background of a Carl Zimmer or an Ed Yong.  Now I see it’s almost an advantage to come from a place of ignorance. Sure, it takes me twice as long to understand things (slow learner!). I have to learn this stuff from the ground up, almost every time. The upside of ignorance is that I have to understand things well enough to explain them to myself before I can explain them to others. I have nowhere to hide. Since I’m a language guy, analogies and metaphors really work for me to understand things. So I find that I end up being drawn to interesting ways to describe things. I don’t think that would necessarily happen if I already possessed, say, a PhD in wildlife virology, or physics. The struggle yields new ways of looking at things. I think readers appreciate the dilettante’s take because think they’re a lot like me—curious, reasonably smart folks who perhaps don’t have a lot of background in the topic."]

Near the airport, Burek turned into Alaska Air Cargo, backed up to a loading dock, and parked the van. “It’s surprising how often they can’t find the carcass,” she said. We went inside. Burek handed a tracking number to an agent behind the counter. A man driving a forklift soon appeared at the loading dock. The forklift was freighted with a 31-gallon blue Rubbermaid Roughneck Tote labeled unknown shipper. Burek opened the hatchback of the minivan and pushed aside pairs of Xtratuf rubber boots. The tote weighed a lot, but not so much that one man couldn’t lift it.

We drove east through the sunny noonday traffic of Anchorage with a dead baby moose in the rear of the minivan. Burek was in a good mood, as she usually was. Years of working in close proximity to death had resulted in a sort of over-the-fence neighborliness with the macabre. She told me how area hospitals occasionally helped her determine cause of death by performing CT scans of dead baby orcas or by putting the heads of juvenile beaked whales into their MRI machines to look for acoustic injuries from Navy sonar or energy exploration. “I’m surprised this car doesn’t smell worse for all the things that have been in it,” she said. “I had a bison calf delivered to me, and it was in a tote like that, but it didn’t fit—so these four legs were sticking out.”

We arrived at a lab at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where Burek is an adjunct professor. The room was small, with white walls, a steel table at the center, and a drain in the floor. Burek pulled on a pair of rubber Grundens crabbing bibs the color of traffic cones, stepped into the tall boots from the minivan, and pulled her hair back. She could have been headed for a day of dip-netting for sockeye on the Kenai. An assistant laid out tools.

A big pair of garden shears sat on the counter, as foreboding as Chekhov’s gun on the mantel. [annotation q="Do you normally have a penchant for literary references, or do you conjure these types of comparisons in your mind relatively easily?" a="Before becoming a journalist I got a master’s degree in literature (then spent years paying it off…) so there may be some subconscious need to put that MA to good use. I don’t like stories that rub their learning in a reader’s face, but I do like stories in which the author is willing to assume that the reader is a peer who gets references and that she doesn’t need to be talked down to. (That said, I was pleasantly surprised my editor kept this.)"]

“You’re probably gonna want to put on gloves for this,” she said.

Turned out of the tote onto the steel table, the moose calf was the size of a full-grown Labrador. It lay with its legs folded, as if it was just bedding down in soft lettuce. Burek flipped the calf onto its left side, which was how she liked to work on her ruminants. Then she began, calling out information. Sex: female. Weight: 74 pounds. Death: July 13. Length: 116 centimeters. Axillary girth: 76 centimeters. She swabbed an obvious abscess, open and draining, on the right shoulder. She noted the pale mucus membranes. She inserted a syringe into an eyeball to sample the aqueous humor. She returned to the shoulder, to the painful-looking abscess, and removed a piece of it for later examination on a glass slide under a microscope. Then Burek pressed her fingers into the wound. [annotation q="What’s your strategy for taking down notes about all these surgical processes? You pack in a lot of rich information in these scenes." a="McPhee has been a huge influence. I think often of his line about “the poetry of fact”—the beauty of the right bit of information, plainly said. I knew that I wanted to have one long scene of Burek in her element, in which I documented every single thing that she did; there’s a real beauty in work of all kinds, expertly done—including the taking-apart of animals. So for a few necropsies (I wasn’t sure which one would make it in the piece) I wrote down everything that happened. I’m not a great note-taker in terms of speed. Luckily, the necropsies unspool at a reasonable pace. As she worked I peppered Burek with questions: “What are you doing now?” “What is that organ?” “Why are you sampling that?” “OK, what’s that next thing?” “Eeew—what’s that?” I used to be a pretty shy reporter. Not anymore. I ask tons of questions and make them explain things, over and over. The more they explain things—they dumber they think you are— the better the quotes (McPhee’s advice, again). Don’t worry that you might look like you’re a dumbass; they already think that you’re a dumbass. The finished product will look all the smarter for your questions. And the truth is, most subjects want to talk. Burek was one of those profile subjects—like most people—who is proud of what she does, and wants people to understand her work, and why it matters. She’s also a natural teacher. In short, she was happy to explain and explain some more. People want to be understood. Later, at the computer, I just tried to write down what she did, plainly. To embroider it much would have been to complicate it. Plus, I wanted the scene to move quickly for the reader (pacing!)."]

“Oh, that’s kind of gross,” she said. “There’s a comminuted fracture in there.” When not using a scalpel and forceps, Burek often uses her fingers. After years of practice, her touch serves almost as a caliper and gauge. She will bread-loaf a liver and pinch the sections, probing for hardness. She will run her fingers along a wet trachea in search of abnormalities. “Oh, feel that,” she will say to anyone willing to feel that.

Burek cut deeper to expose the wound. “Oh. Oh. Poor thing. It probably got nailed,” she said. The detective was hitting her stride now. Searching the exterior of the calf, Burek quickly found what she was looking for a second puncture wound, this one also badly infected. She measured the distance between the wounds: 5.5 centimeters, or the approximate distance, she estimated, between a bear’s canines. “So that’s cool.”

In an interesting coincidence, Burek later would tell me she suspected that, for all the other abnormalities she found inside 13—the clot, the weird-looking lung—perhaps the otter, too, was ultimately done in by something as mundane as a predator. Blunt-toothed young killer whales will sometimes grab otters but not kill them, she explained; they sort of play with their food. Burek had seen it before. Intrigued, she telephoned the Museum of the North in Fairbanks and asked colleagues to measure the skull of a juvenile orca for an estimate of the diameter of its bite. The measurement perfectly fit the damage. “Of course, we’ll never know for sure,” she said. Still, there was a trace of satisfaction in her voice.

Now, using a No. 20 scalpel, Burek quickly skinned the moose calf and opened the stubborn clamshell of the rib cage. An unwelcome visitor wafted into the room. Burek, however, no longer seemed to notice odors that, were they canistered and lobbed across international borders, would swiftly be outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. [annotation q="OK, how the heck did you come up with this great hypothetical? And what do you like about using hypotheticals? I've noticed them a few times in this piece, and they have a slightly different effect than a standard metaphor—a bit more extreme, fantastical." a="I really enjoy describing things. To me it’s the most fun part of magazine writing. This, too, was something that I felt like I had to give myself permission to do, after years of being a newspaper reporter: “I’m allowed to do this!” Sometimes the image floats to mind right in that moment. More often, it comes later—Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility.” When I notice something striking I write it down, of course—but I also do this: I tell myself, Stop. Remember this. I take a moment and stare at it/listen to it/smell it/think about the thing for a few seconds, right in the moment. I can’t guarantee that this helps. But for me, this pause seems to help freeze the memory in the noggin, and I’m able to revisit it later, and decide how I want to describe it.The smells in those necropsies were otherworldly—the kinds of smells that would drop you to your knees even several days after the fact, when suddenly one jarred loose from some remote nasal cavity….  I was trying to think of some way to describe them, and adjectives kept failing. And I kept noodling around for some other way to catch the reader’s attention. I don’t have a good explanation for that description, except that I was thinking a lot about McPhee when writing this piece, and other New Yorker writers, and I enjoy the way they sometimes don’t simply reach for an adjective to describe something. Instead, they surprise the reader with something a little more thoughtful, even a bit elliptical, that sticks with the reader long afterward. (Of course, this can go sideways if it’s done too often, or done badly.)"] As she worked, the gore took on a practiced orchestration. Burek cut triangles of beet-colored liver and dropped them into prelabeled bags with a pair of medical tweezers. She took samples of lung and lymph node and gall bladder. She squeezed the descending colon and collected the pellets. She filled vials and syringes. Some of the bits she did not even bother to label; after decades, Burek could recognize them by sight. With a few slices, she opened the firm dark knot of the heart like a chapbook and removed what resembled red chicken fat. At home Burek would spin the stuff in a centrifuge. Stripped of its red blood cells, the clear blood serum was an excellent way to see which infectious agents the animal had been exposed to in the past. “Diagnostic gold,” Burek called it.

The table took on the appearance of a Francis Bacon canvas: A smear of blood. An ear divorced from a head. The sprung cage of the moose’s body exposing its soft, translucent clockworks. The open mouth mutely horrified. Burek noted a hemorrhage on the surface of the pancreas and fibrin on the peritoneal cavity, and she moved on. The door of the lab stood open to the smiling July afternoon. Sunlight caught on aspen leaves. One of the two young women who were assisting Burek had just returned from her first year of veterinary school. Burek was her inspiration, she said. As the women laughed and worked, Burek quizzed her on biology and she told stories.

“I had a horse head in my freezer one time.”

“Bears smell absolutely horrible. I did a bear necropsy in our garage once, and my son Thomas said I could never do that again.”

“Can I get some muscle?”

“Those large whales? Holy cow. It’s so confusing: Where the heck is the urinary bladder?”

“For a while, I had a big colony in my garage of those flesh-eating beetles that museums use to clean skulls. But a couple of the beetles got out. That’s when Henry put his foot down.”

“Where’d my duodenum tag go? Anyone seen it?”

“I don’t think rumens smell that bad. But I went to vet school in Wisconsin.”

The steel table slowly emptied. The blue Rubbermaid bin filled. In went a foreleg.

Intestines. The ear.

Now another assistant lifted the garden shears. She squeezed and sliced through the ball joint of the calf’s femur, which is one of the best places on a young animal for Burek to see evidence of troubles, such as rickets, that would affect its growth plates. Burek, meanwhile, opened the skull to sample the brain.

“It’s a bit of a mystery,” she said as she worked, meaning the cause of the moose’s death. Her initial guess: the bite led to septicemia, which led to encephalitis. “It’s a story that kind of makes sense,” she said. “I’d like to see more pus.” Later she added: “But in this job you have to be willing to look dumb and be wrong and change your story.”

Burek asked for the time. When I told her it was after four o’clock already, her good humor slipped. “I’ve got to get to the dump.” What was the hurry?

There was a new movie she wanted to see at seven, she said. She would have to race home to shower—to wash off the day, to wash off the smell, the blood, the moose.

“It’s a Disney movie, I think,” Burek said.

A film about animals run amok. “It’s called The Secret Life of Pets.” She loaded the moose in the back of the minivan and reached for the bleach. “It looks cute.” [annotation q="This says so much about Burek’s personality, and it’s a great way to end the piece. Did you know from the beginning that this line would close out the story? What kind of message did you want to send to readers here?" a="Endings terrify me. I’m wildly grateful when I come across one that’s pre-packaged and doesn’t feel too forced. This seemed a keeper the moment she said she was headed to the movies. I did worry about making Burek seem just a tad flippant, or shallow or something. But I kept it, because by the end of the piece I think the reader has an understanding of this woman, her deep compassion and dedication. I like it, too, because it ends the story with one last juxtaposition: this caring woman riding off into the sunset with the dismembered calf in a bin, on her way to the dump as if some serial killer or something."]

The post Annotation Tuesday! Christopher Solomon and “The Detective of Northern Oddities” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

In our Brave New Distributed World, journalists suffer from a disorienting lack of control.

Lack of control over audiences, over time spent on page, over clicks… the list goes on. The most any digital reporter can do is hope that experimenting with form actually pays off.

The New York Times famously blazed the trail with its Pulitzer-winning “Snowfall” series, which provoked an avalanche of possibilities for the genre of multimedia longform. Since that story grabbed readers four years ago with its continuous scroll and groundbreaking graphics, countless other publications have followed suit, improvising along the way. Just a few examples include “The Waypoint” from The Washington Post, “Love For My Enemies” from the Atavist, and “Greenland is Melting Away,” also from The New York Times.

It’s a relatively new species undergoing a gradual but fierce evolution—and everyone’s trying to figure out how it works. “A New Age of Walls,” a three-part multimedia series by The Washington Post chronicling the global migrant crisis, pushes this species a step further, taking cues from audience behavior and using those lessons to the story’s advantage.

For this project, the Post opted for a middle ground between text-heavy longform—sought after by editors but consumed only by those disciplined enough to ward off distraction—and full-on multimedia storytelling that flows from one scene to another. On the surface, the latter sounds preferable. But stories like these typically don’t allow for skimming, because developers don’t build many controls into the navigation.

So the Post team decided to give their readers a bit more control by making the story scrollable. While experiencing “A New Age of Walls,” you can click through to different sections of the story, or backtrack to rewatch previous portions of an “episode,” or chapter.

What sets this project apart is that even though the entire story is scrollable, its tempo varies depending on where you are in the story and how much time you take. For instance, many of the video components play at first without signaling to the reader how to click through to the next bit; then, after an initial run, a “scroll” icon pops up at the bottom of the screen as the video plays again.

It’s a subtle but brilliant strategy: I found that it gave me the freedom to watch each video and listen to its sounds over and over if I wanted to (I could go at my own pace) OR I could scroll through to other parts of the story at any time—but it also stopped me from submitting to the temptation to speed through and rush the storytelling.

The effect reminded me of ’90s computer games I used to play as a kid. There’d be a video sequence, and once the sequence was over, your character would stand in the midst of whatever environment he or she had landed in—but now you were in control of the story’s destiny. This passing of the baton made advancing the game’s plot even more exciting; in “A New Age of Walls,” it’s a hat-tip to your own control—it gives you the chance to decide when the story is ready to move forward.

For example, in the first episode of “A New Age of Walls,” titled Raising Barriers, we are introduced to Dinks Café in Del Rio, Texas—a small town near the border with Mexico. Lights on the sign out front blink (the “e” on “café” is notably slanted). A Texas flag billows softly in the breeze. A lone car cruises by. These moments are interesting the first time they’re played; the second time, they’re almost subversive—as if the story is insisting to the reader that yes, this place is real, the people who gather at Dinks live and breathe border conflict. It hangs in the air.

In fact, so much of what “A New Age of Walls” does well has to do with the senses, especially sound. Throughout the story’s three episodes, birds chirp near border fences, footsteps pass in the brush, children shout from the centers of migrant camps. Sound can take time to absorb, and this is what makes “A New Age of Walls” so great: It treats sound as its own story.

Of course, you don’t need the audio to comprehend the overall message. But the presence of these sounds—an ostinato against the bleakness of struggle—changes the meaning of the words, and gives readers the opportunity to pause and think.

One of the successes of “A New Age of Walls” is the way it deals with information (beyond just graphs and charts).

First, the creators begin with a sweeping overview of the situation in the U.S. today—after our stop at Dinks Café, we meet a Honduran migrant who is waiting for his chance to cross the Rio Grande. Then we cross the ocean to Europe, a continent that has long been dealing with these issues. We meet an Algerian migrant who wants to reach Germany—if he can make it alive. After that, we zoom into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (perhaps the most heated of them all).

In the second episode, Fenced Out, we get a closer look at Europe’s humanitarian crisis at crowded border control posts, and through longer journeys, like that of a Syrian refugee named Mamo. She and her four sisters managed to make it all the way from Aleppo to Vienna. The third episode, Concrete Divisions, brings us back to the U.S. with a newfound understanding of the complexity of the situation: We hear what Mexicans think of Donald Trump, we become familiar with the rugged border terrain, we meet people whose lives are affected by the construction of fences.

But the most obvious thing that distinguishes “A New Age of Walls” is that’s rendered entirely in black-and-white. In Raising Barriers, we watch a grayscale montage of recent speeches by world political figures from Trump to Boris Johnson to Marine Le Pen. This makes it feel like a documentary, and strikes a retrospective chord—as though we were analyzing these events from a moment in the future, looking back on today. Just as the story plays with time through its creative use of video and audio, it also reminds us that the events of today will be interpreted differently tomorrow. This is a story that reports not on the past, but on the present—with an eye toward the judgmental, reflective lens of history.

The post The Washington Post crosses a storytelling frontier with “A New Age of Walls” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

One day this spring, New York Times reporter Deborah Acosta left her reporting up to serendipity.

She’d followed a trail of Kodachrome slides to a huge bag full of striking images, seemingly abandoned in a trash bin in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. Acosta, who had been assigned to focus on Facebook Live reporting projects, acted on intuition — she quickly sent her editor a video of herself rummaging through these lost treasures.

“When I encountered the slides that Sunday, I thought for a moment that it might be a great video project to work on in my own time, and then thought, ‘Well, maybe it would work well as a Facebook Live experiment instead,’” Acosta told me.

Her editor, Louise Story, was game. So Acosta immediately went live on the New York Times’ Facebook page (with its fairly jaw-dropping 12 million followers). In real time, she revealed the discarded contents of a life: yellowed envelopes, images of planes, frigid terrains -- and a woman.

This was a mystery, but not your typical whodunit: No one had been hurt, no one was seeking revenge, no one was trying to expose a criminal. But who would ditch such beautiful slides? And why so deliberately?

What ensued was a series (here’s part 2 and part 3) of Facebook Live videos that followed Acosta as she tried to solve the mystery. Because she wanted to involve The New York Times audience throughout, Acosta didn’t conduct any research outside of her live broadcasts.

That’s what makes “Fragments of a Life” so powerful and moving: The story is entirely about the audience’s participation in and reaction to Acosta’s discoveries.

In her second live broadcast, Acosta went so far as to showcase blown-up versions of some Facebook comments from the first broadcast. She spread them across a table and called out the individual commenters (just a small handful among thousands) by name, giving voice to their hunches and embedding them in the story’s train. This tactic makes the experience feel more alive—as though viewers share ownership of its outcome.

A few other qualities made this experiment work extraordinarily well, beyond what most people have come to expect of this still-infantile medium. As one Facebook commenter wrote:

Jennifer, let me try to unpack this for you.

1. The “Unboxing” Effect

The rhythm of this series, which relies on quiet, static observation, reminds me of the Internet “unboxing” phenomenon. Much like watching someone open a package and discover what’s inside, this feels hypnotic. Acosta angles her camera toward the ground, picks up the slides one by one, and holds them to the sky. Meanwhile, she chats with her audience casually and with genuine curiosity. Most Facebook Live videos these days feature no shortage of talking heads, but Acosta’s videos make use of space, time and silence; she lets her audience ponder each slide and jot down names written on the envelopes that she digs out of the garbage bag. She doesn’t speak at times, the city noise coming into the acoustic foreground. Watching these videos is strangely therapeutic. Nothing really happens, which is something of a relief.

2. Voice Recordings

Acosta asked many of her commenters to send her recordings of themselves reading their comments. It’s similar to what WNYC’s Note to Self radio show has done with user-generated content: They routinely ask fans to send voice memos in response to a prompt, question or challenge. The intimacy of the task is what makes it so novel. When was the last time you sent a spoken “letter” to someone? In this case, Acosta wanted to translate Facebook comments into real-life speech for the project’s final video, “Fragments of a Life.” Journalism doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and interactive experiments like this show us that actual people—not just names and profile pictures—care deeply about the city and world they live in.

3. Public Empathy

A lovely thread in this series was viewers’ empathy for whoever had dumped the slides in the trash—and admiration for the journalist who fished them out. Acosta turned a seemingly mundane subject into something worthy of public examination. She tapped into her audience’s humanity to help tell the story.

4. Everyone’s an Expert

One of the main tenets of so-called citizen journalism is that everyone is an expert in something and that journalists should tap into readers’ collective intelligence rather than turn their noses up at them. By simply asking her viewers to help solve the mystery, Acosta shows how easy it is to coax audiences into providing tips and details based on life experience. Of course, any information needs to be verified. But Acosta’s project is a lesson in empowering people and entrusting them with the journalistic enterprise. Acosta told me, “I think crowdsourced reporting can help you get at deeper truths that you wouldn’t necessarily get by going at it alone.”

5. Case Closed

While following Acosta’s reporting, New York Times readers were able to complete something tangible, to fill in the pieces of an unsolved puzzle, and to find resolution in the age of the scroll. We discover that the woman in the photos is the late journalist Mariana Gosnell, and we learn why the slides were dumped there (a very poignant moment).

It’s a bit like a detective novel. Whereas a published investigative piece gives you the answers right away, an investigative story produced live (whether on Facebook or a different platform) has the narrative effect of a true detective story—as long as the reporter (the narrator) ties up enough knots. Literary critic James Schiffer wrote:

In general, the plot of detective fiction provides the gratifying reassurance of knowing that, if life is crowded with too much information and too many options, the intimate intellectual contact between the individual audience and the author/detective will unveil a single, right “interpretation,” a “thread of logic.”

Of course, in a detective novel, the actual author of the story knows what happened, and is the master of those details. But the readers are authoring what it’s like to find out, and this is exactly what Times viewers and Deborah Acosta were doing—together.

The post Old meets new: The power of a Facebook Live experiment with Kodachrome appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Every once in a while you read a story that feels so authentic and true, you wish you’d written it. That’s how I felt reading Jon Mooallem’s New York Times Magazine piece about a self-professed “idler” named Gavin Pretor-Pinney and the Cloud Appreciation Society he founded.

It’s an unlikely topic—what could possibly be so important about a tribe of intellectual wanderers obsessed with clouds? But Mooallem’s tale reveals what happens when ordinary people follow the little things that inexplicably pique their interest and give them joy. In Pretor-Pinney’s case, he pursued a random interest and, as a result, started a scientific movement in its own right.

What struck me while reading this piece is that the characters embody the emotional and temperamental traits we’ve assigned to clouds over thousands of years of human history. They’re aimless, ambiguous, edgeless—and yet they have purpose. For Pretor-Pinney and his tribe, the enjoyment of clouds isn’t antithetical to understanding them scientifically (and vice versa).

I think that’s what makes this story spectacular: It celebrates one of those fleeting moments in which science ennobles people and they become better humans. In exchange, those humans have a serendipitous impact on the course of science.

I talked to Mooallem over the course of a few phone calls and email exchanges. Below is an edited version of our conversation.

How did this story come about?

In 2009, in the first round of asperatus media attention, I read a news article about the cloud—with a big, spectacular photo of it by Jane Wiggins—and it wasn’t about Gavin and the cloud society, but it certainly mentioned him somewhere in the story. I remember sending it to the writer Jack Hitt, a sort of mentor to me, because he was working on a book about amateurs. He basically dissuaded me from writing about it, saying it would pop up in the Times section or something. But I think I did reach out to Gavin shortly after that, and it was a very brief conversation where he said that nothing’s really happening, conceding that press attention was a little out of scale for the actual event. And then I would check in with him every now and again.

After it was exposed to me as sort of a non-story, then I got a little annoyed because every so often I would see, out of nowhere, there’d be a post on Slate about it, or wherever. The Internet would sort of burble up with “news” about the new cloud. And then something actually happened in the real world, which was the W.M.O. [World Meteorological Organization] announcing it had expanded its atlas, and there were a lot of similar posts about that. There was a really good one on The Verge that got picked up a lot. Then I reached out to Gavin after all this happened and said, “Is it finally time to do this story?” And so then I pitched the story—this was in November of 2014. I pitched the story because he was going to have the anniversary event, and he was going to do it sometime early the following year. In the end, he didn’t do the event until fall of 2015, so I basically got the assignment but did nothing for a full year until I waited for some things to happen.

Were you ever concerned that you didn’t have a legitimate enough reason to report on this?

When I first pitched it, I can’t say I was too worried about it, because the W.M.O. had just started this incredibly long process. In the end, though, they accepted the cloud—but it wasn’t in any way dramatic. I didn’t feel like that gave me enough of a reason to do all this.

For a long time, I thought the story was about the Internet. In other words, to me, the weakness of the story was actually what I found most compelling. We’re constantly served up these novelties every day; you can open Twitter and there’s this traffic of exciting new discovery. But Gavin has found a way to both benefit from that and also critique it. His association itself was one of these novelties of the Internet; every time it stumbled upon it, it couldn’t help getting excited about it—and then it would forget about it, and get excited again. Somehow that coalesced into scientific leverage: that enough people had been fascinated with him enough times that they could now have influence over the scientific naming of clouds. So I spent a few days interviewing Internet people like Robin Sloan and Alexis Madrigal—people who I thought were Internet-fluent in a way that I’m not. But that ended up not making it in at all.

The story includes a lot of themes like appreciation vs. analysis, and wandering vs. work. Did your relationship to these themes change in the course of reporting this story?

Yeah. In all honesty, that’s one regret that I have about this story is that in the end, I think it came out a little bit more black and white than I actually feel. At least one guy in the W.M.O. who I talked to is a member of the cloud appreciation society, and I mentioned that in an earlier draft. Some of those gray areas got whittled down when it was edited, and that happens. So I don’t think I have any personal convictions about this, but in this particular case, one mindset was getting in the way of the other.

One of the things I loved about the piece was its very unique voice. You sort of took on Gavin’s thoughts, in a way. It almost read at times like Gavin was a fictional character you were describing. What was he like in person?

Well, first, he’s an incredibly thoughtful person. He considers everything very deeply, and I think he resists easy opposition. Even as he’s been portrayed as a challenger of scientific authority, he also really appreciates scientific authority. And he has a fun outlook on life in that he likes to just see where things go.

Was there anything you learned from this experience, as a writer?

I don’t mean this in a self-effacing way, but I didn’t anticipate that the story would do so well online. My sense of the story was completely off—I just thought it was kind of fine. What I learned was not to trust my gauge of this kind of stuff as much, and I also learned the perils of not letting a story sit around for so long. It starts to feel less real and less connected to the people you’re actually talking about. So I was really surprised that it got as good of a response as it did.

My questions are in red, his responses in blue. To read the story without annotations first, click the ‘Hide all annotations’ button.

The Amateur Cloud Society That (Sort Of) Rattled the Scientific Community

By Jon Mooallem

Originally published in the New York Times Magazine on May 4, 2016

Gavin Pretor-Pinney decided to take a sabbatical. [annotation q="Tell me about this lede. Why start with the sabbatical?" a="I wanted to talk about the way Gavin operates, and the way he is rewarded for being open to interesting things in life—and pursuing them with a weird seriousness. It’s almost a little lesson on how to live—to kind of bounce along in your interests and see where they take you. I didn’t want to start with the society; I wanted to start with why the society’s there… and it was sort of natural to do that through his eyes. It shows that this approach kept paying off for him, in an almost unbelievable way. That seemed really important to set at the beginning. The whole time I was writing toward the last bit at the conference, which was the ultimate indication that he was doing something right—because he had created this moment of beauty, and he’d done it by not being too self-critical and throwing himself in what seemed to be the most interesting direction. It was the summer of 2003, and for the last 10 years, as a sideline to his graphic-design business in London, he and a friend had been running a magazine called The Idler. The Idler was devoted to the “literature for loafers.”"] [annotation q="From Storyboard editor Kari Howard: I had the Idler’s Manifesto on my wall at work for years, and then kind of took the manifesto plunge and moved to the country. So your lede has resonated deeply with me. Did you hear from readers about how the story connected with them? It could just be a quirky story, but it seems much more existential than that." a="I was very surprised by the volume and intensity of reactions I got. There were a lot of people who seemed bent on noticing the sky more, or who seemed to feel like appreciating clouds could be part of unlocking a different way of being in the world."]It argued against busyness and careerism and for the ineffable value of aimlessness, of letting the imagination quietly coast. Pretor-Pinney anticipated all the jokes: that he’d burned out running a magazine devoted to doing nothing, and so on. But it was true. Getting the magazine out was taxing, and after a decade, it seemed appropriate to stop for a while and live without a plan — to be an idler himself and shake free space for fresh ideas. So he swapped his flat in London for one in Rome, where everything would be new and anything could happen.

Pretor-Pinney is 47, towering and warm, with a sandy beard and pale blue eyes. His face is often totally lit up, as if he’s being told a story and can feel some terrific surprise coming. [annotation q="This description of his face being lit up is really vivid, and at the same time very simple. Did you have to work on that?" a="I am insecure about my ability to describe people physically. It's so hard, and I end up falling back on the same pallet of bland adjectives and Mr. Potato Head parts. Like, if you've got a beard, you better believe I'm going to say you have a beard, because what the fuck else is hanging all over your face for me to talk about. The problem starts with the fact that physical appearance is not something I'm often thinking about or making an effort to notice when I'm reporting face-to-face with a person—if I'm lucky, I'll remind myself to jot a few notes down during an interview. That's an obvious and enormous disadvantage; I often have to go find pictures of the person, after the fact, just to remember basics, like if he/she is tall, hair color, etc. But on the other hand, when you close your eyes weeks later, when you're writing, and try to picture the person, what you see is often something more specific, more holistically characterizing. Like this line about his face being totally lit up: to me, that's the most salient detail about Gavin's physical appearance, but I don't think it's something I would have put my finger on over coffee with him; it's an aspect of his appearance that I remembered about him, much later. To me, that staying power suggests its power."] He stayed in Rome for seven months and loved it, especially all the religious art. One thing he noticed: The paintings and frescoes he encountered were crowded with clouds. They were everywhere, he told me recently, “these voluptuous clouds, like the sofas of the saints.” But outside, when Pretor-Pinney looked up, the real Roman sky was usually devoid of clouds. He wasn’t accustomed to such endless, blue emptiness. He was an Englishman; he was accustomed to clouds. He remembered, as a child, being enchanted by them and deciding that people must climb long ladders to harvest cotton from them. Now, in Rome, he couldn’t stop thinking about clouds. “I found myself missing them,” he told me.

Clouds. It was a bizarre preoccupation, perhaps even a frivolous one, but he didn’t resist it. He went with it, as he often does, despite not having a specific goal or even a general direction in mind; he likes to see where things go. When Pretor-Pinney returned to London, he talked about clouds constantly. He walked around admiring them, learned their scientific names and the meteorological conditions that shape them and argued with friends who complained they were oppressive or drab. He was realizing, as he later put it, that “clouds are not something to moan about. They are, in fact, the most dynamic, evocative and poetic aspect of nature.”

Slowing down to appreciate clouds enriched his life and sharpened his ability to appreciate other pockets of beauty hiding in plain sight. At the same time, Pretor-Pinney couldn’t help noting, we were entering an era in which miraculousness was losing its meaning. Novel, purportedly amazing things ricocheted around the Internet so quickly that, as he put it, we can now all walk around with an attitude like, “Well, I’ve just seen a panda doing something unusual online, what’s going to amaze me now?” His fascination with clouds was teaching him that “it’s much better for our souls to realize we can be amazed and delighted by what’s around us.”

At the end of 2004, a friend invited Pretor-Pinney to give a talk about clouds at a small literary festival in Cornwall. The previous year, there were more speakers than attendees, so Pretor-Pinney wanted an alluring title for his talk, to draw a crowd. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” he thought, “to have a society that defends clouds against the bad rap they get — that stands up for clouds?” So he called it “The Inaugural Lecture of the Cloud Appreciation Society.” And it worked. Standing room only! Afterward, people came up to him and asked for more information about the Cloud Appreciation Society. They wanted to join the society. “And I had to tell them, well, I haven’t really got a society,” Pretor-Pinney said.

He set up a website. It was simple. There was a gallery for posting photographs of clouds, a membership form and a florid manifesto. (“We believe that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them,” it began.) Pretor-Pinney wasn’t offering members of his new Cloud Appreciation Society any perks or activities, but to keep it all from feeling ephemeral or imaginary, as many things on the Internet do, he eventually decided that membership should cost $15 and that members would receive a badge and certificate in the mail. He recognized that joining an online Cloud Appreciation Society that only nominally existed might appear ridiculous, but it was important to him that it not feel meaningless.

Within a couple of months, the society had 2,000 paying members. Pretor-Pinney was surprised and ecstatic. Then, Yahoo placed the Cloud Appreciation Society first on its 2005 list of Britain’s “Weird and Wonderful websites.” People kept clicking on that clickbait, which wasn’t necessarily surprising, but thousands of them also clicked through to Pretor-Pinney’s own website, then paid for memberships. Other news sites noticed. They did their own articles about the Cloud Appreciation Society, and people followed the links in those articles too. Previously, Pretor-Pinney proposed writing a book about clouds and was rejected by 28 editors. Now he was a viral sensation with a vibrant online constituency; he got a deal to write a book about clouds.

The writing process was agonizing. On top of not actually being a writer, he was a brutal perfectionist. But “The Cloudspotter’s Guide,” published in 2006, was full of glee and wonder. Pretor-Pinney relays, for example, the story of the United States Marine pilot who, in 1959, ejected from his fighter jet over Virginia and during the 40 minutes it took him to reach the ground was blown up and down through a cumulonimbus cloud about as high as Mount Everest. He surveys clouds in art history and Romantic poetry and compares one exceptionally majestic formation in Australia to “Cher in the brass armor bikini and gold Viking helmet outfit she wore on the sleeve of her 1979 album ‘Take Me Home.’ ” In the middle of the book, there’s a cloud quiz. Question No. 5 asks of a particular photograph, “What is it that’s so pleasing about this layer of stratocumulus?” The answer Pretor-Pinney supplies is “It is pleasing for whatever reason you find it to be.”

The book became a best seller. There were more write-ups, more clicks, more Cloud Appreciation Society members. And that cycle would keep repeating, sporadically, for years, whenever an editor or blogger happened to discover the society and set it off again. (There are now more than 40,000 paid members.) The media tended to present it as one more amusing curiosity, worth delighting over and sharing before moving on. That is, Pretor-Pinney’s organization was being tossed like a pebble, again and again, into the same bottomless pool of interchangeable online content that he was trying to coax people away from by lifting their gaze skyward. But that was O.K. with him; he understood that it’s just how the Internet works. He wasn’t cynical about it, and he didn’t feel his message was being cheapened either. It felt as if he were observing the whole thing from afar, and he tried to appreciate it.

Then Pretor-Pinney noticed something odd.

“The way I felt when I first saw it was: Armageddon,” Jane Wiggins said. Wiggins was a paralegal, working in downtown Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in June 2006, when she looked out her office window and saw an impenetrable shroud of dark clouds looming over town. Everyone in the office stood up, Wiggins told me, and some drifted to the window. The cloud was so enormous, so terrible and strange, that it made the evening news. Wiggins, who had recently taken up photography, took out her camera.

Soon after that, Wiggins discovered the Cloud Appreciation Society website and posted one of her pictures in its gallery. But the anomaly Wiggins thought she had captured wasn’t actually anomalous. Similar photos turned up in the Cloud Appreciation Society’s gallery from Texas, Norway, Ontario, Scotland, France and Massachusetts. [annotation q="This has the feeling of a spooky moment in a sci-fi movie—like the clouds are UFOs or something. Intentional?" a="Yes, totally. I loved the idea of dozens of people looking up into the sky and seeing the same, inexplicable thing, and I wouldn't be surprised if I was thinking about science fiction movies consciously. But, if I have to go back and analyze that impulse, I don't think it was about creating spookiness but a kind of disjointed togetherness: that Spielbergian trope of everyone's face independently turning toward the sky. All of these people are absolutely alone, but having the same collective experience: And, just now, I realized that's exactly the feeling at the end of the piece. So maybe I am only retroactively loading this line with artsiness and meaning. Strange things happen when you're made to think about what you wrote this much!"]Pretor-Pinney assumed that this phenomenon was so rare that, until now, no one had recognized it as a repeating form and given it a name. “As the hub of this network, a network of people who are sky-aware,” he said, “it’s easier to spot patterns that, perhaps, weren’t so easy to spot in the past.”

In fact, many aspects of meteorology already rely on a global network of individual weather observers to identify cloud types with the naked eye, filing them into a long-established scientific framework: not just as cumulus, cirrus, stratus or cumulonimbus clouds, as schoolchildren learn, but within a recondite system for describing variations. Atypical clouds are either fitted into that existing map of the sky or set aside as irrelevant. Pretor-Pinney liked classifying clouds using these names; he was thankful to have that structure in place. And yet, it seemed a shame to repress the glaring, deviant beauty recorded in Wiggins’s photograph by assigning it a name that didn’t sufficiently describe it. He supposed, if you had to, you could call this thing an undulatus — the standard classification for a broad, wavy cloud. But that seemed to be selling the cloud tragically short, stubbornly ignoring what made it so sublime. This was “undulatus turned up to 11,” he said. So he came up with his own name for the cloud: asperatus. (The word “asperatus” came from a passage in Virgil describing a roughened sea; Pretor-Pinney had asked his cousin, a high-school Latin teacher, for help.) He wondered how to go about making such a name official.

In 2008, while shooting a documentary for the BBC about clouds, Pretor-Pinney pitched his new cloud to a panel of four meteorologists at the Royal Meteorological Society. The scientists sat in a line behind a table; Pretor-Pinney stood, holding blown-up photos of asperatus for them to consider. “It was a lot like ‘The X Factor,’ ” he said, referring to the TV talent show. The scientists were encouraging but diplomatic. A new cloud name, they explained, could be designated only by the World Meteorological Organization, an agency within the United Nations, based in Geneva, which has published scientific names and descriptions of all known cloud types in its International Cloud Atlas since 1896. The W.M.O. is exceptionally discerning; for starters, Pretor-Pinney was told, he would need more carefully cataloged incidences of these clouds, as well as a scientific understanding of their surrounding “synoptic situation.” The process would take years. And even then, the chances of inclusion in the atlas were slim. The W.M.O. hadn’t added a new cloud type to the International Cloud Atlas since 1953. “We don’t expect to see new cloud types popping up every week,” a W.M.O. official named Roger Atkinson told me. When I asked why, Atkinson said, “Because 50 or 60 years ago, we got it right.”

A cloud is only water, but arranged like no other water on earth. Billions of minuscule droplets are packed into every cubic foot of cloud, throwing reflected light off their disordered surfaces in all directions, collectively making the cloud opaque. In a way, each cloud is an illusion, a conspiracy of liquid masquerading as a floating, solid object.

But for most of human history, what a cloud was, physically, hardly mattered; instead, we understood clouds as psychic refuges from the mundane, grist for our imaginations, feelings fodder. Clouds both influenced our emotions and hung above us like washed-out mirrors, reflecting them. The English painter John Constable called the sky the “chief organ of sentiment” in his landscapes. And our instinct, as children, to recognize shapes in the clouds is arguably one early spark of all the higher forms of creative thinking that make us human and make us fun. Frankly, a person too dull to look up at the sky and see a parade of tortoises or a huge pair of mittens or a ghost holding a samurai sword is not a person worth lying in a meadow with. [annotation q="This is one of those moments that made me smile. Did you aim for a whimsical tone, or is the slight sense of humor that’s evident in this piece just a natural part of your writing process?" a="This whole section about clouds came late in the process. It was sort of a direct reaction to my editors’ reminder that the story was actually about clouds… so I think I was trying to adopt the perspective of someone who is much more fascinated in clouds than I am."] In “Hamlet,” Polonius’s despicable spinelessness is never clearer than when Hamlet gets him to enthusiastically agree that a particular cloud looks like a camel, then not a camel at all, but a weasel. Then, not a weasel but a whale. Polonius will see whatever Hamlet wants him to; he is a man completely without his own vision.

We look for meaning — portents — in the clouds as well, the more grown-up version of picking out puffy animals. “There’s a long history of people finding signs in the sky,” Pretor-Pinney told me, from Constantine seeing the cross over the Milvian Bridge to the often-belligerent protesters outside Pretor-Pinney’s talks, who are convinced that the contrails behind commercial airplanes are evidence of a toxic, secret government scheme and are outraged that Pretor-Pinney — the righteous Lorax of clouds — refuses to expose it. In short, clouds exist in a realm where the physical and metaphysical touch. “We look up for answers,” Pretor-Pinney says. And yet, we often don’t want empirical answers. There has always been a romantic impulse to protect clouds from our own stubbornly rational intellects, to keep knowledge from trampling their magic. Thoreau preferred to understand clouds as something that “stirs my blood, makes my thought flow” and not as a mass of water. “What sort of science,” he wrote, “is that which enriches the understanding but robs the imagination.” [annotation q="Tell me about your decision to include some of these lines from various philosophers and historical figures." a="History is always my favorite part to write, and typically to read, too. It tends to feel so crisp, with a clear momentum that the sloppy narrative you're cobbling together from your shaggy real-time interviews and contemporary reality never does. What a relief when everyone's long dead! It renders them somewhat less three-dimensional, which is a relief because the most excruciating part about writing about reality, for me, is how damn complicated and slippery and contradictory everyone is, and you're expected to squeeze all that into some kind of intelligible, linear narrative. The fun of telling the history or backstory in a piece of journalism is framing it as a story that has led, with a great feeling of inevitability, to one specific place: whatever present predicament you are writing about. I suspect that approach would make me a terrible and irresponsible historian, and apologies to all historians everywhere for saying that."]

The scientific study of clouds grew out of a collection of madly appreciating amateurs who struggled with this same tension. The field’s foundational treatise was first presented to a small scientific debating society in London one evening in 1802 by a shy Quaker pharmacist named Luke Howard. Howard, then 30, was not a professional meteorologist but a devoted cloud-spotter with a perceptive, if wandering, mind. His interest in clouds started early. His biographer, Richard Hamblyn, explains that as a young student in Oxfordshire, Howard seems to have found school magnificently boring. He couldn’t bring himself to pay attention, except to his Latin teacher, who punished daydreaming with beatings. Today Howard might covertly pull out his phone and read a link a friend shared about, say, an eccentric society in England that appreciates clouds. But poor Howard’s boredom was analog: all he could do was look out the classroom window at the actual clouds rolling by.

Howard’s intention that night in London was to bring clouds down to earth without depleting their loftiness. After years of closely observing clouds, his appreciation of them had hardened into analysis. He now insisted that, though clouds may appear to be blown around in random, ever-changing shapes, they actually take consistent forms, forms that can be distinguished from one another and whose changes correspond to changes in the atmosphere. Clouds can be used to read what Howard called “the countenance of the sky”; they are an expression of its moods, not just in a poetic way, as Constable meant, but meteorologically.

Howard’s lecture was eventually published as “On the Modifications of Clouds, and on the Principles of Their Production, Suspension and Destruction.” It stands as the ur-text of nephology, the branch of meteorology devoted to clouds. Howard divided clouds into three major types and many intermittent varieties of each, all similarly affixed with Latin names or compounds. (He had learned his Latin well.) Like Linnaeus, who used Latin to sort the fluidity of life into genera and species, Howard used his new cloud taxonomy to wrest our understanding of the world’s diversity from superstition and religion. His signature assertion that “the sky, too, belongs to the Landscape” can be read as a call for empiricism — a conviction that science can, in fact, measure out the mystical.

Nearly a century later, Howard’s work would be picked up by another energetic amateur, the Honorable Ralph Abercromby. Abercromby was the bookish great- grandson of a celebrated English war hero. He was apparently so meek and frail (“never robust, even as a boy,” one tribute read after his death) that he was forced to drop out of school and was rarely able to hold a job. He served briefly in the military but seemed completely unsuited to soldiering; deployed to Newfoundland in 1864, Abercromby began theorizing about how the fog there was produced. Later, stationed in Montreal, he scrutinized the wind. It would have been tempting for his superiors to label him “absent-minded” or “unfocused” but, in retrospect, it was just another case of a young man intensely focused on something few people considered worthy of attention — another case of a young man in love with clouds. [annotation q="Abercromby is an interesting character, perhaps even more so than Howard. What compelled you to include him? How did you decide these two would be the “main characters” of this section?" a="Well, Luke Howard is without question the founder of the study of clouds. A meteorologist would probably say I overemphasized Abercromby, but he was just a really fun person to write about. I also wanted to get into this guy Harold Humes, who was one of the founders of the Paris Review. He was very eccentric, and he got interested in lenticular clouds—these clouds that don’t move. He had these sort of raving writings about what they meant, that they had something to do with the dawn of Aquarius and U.F.O.s. It was a similar point in that he was humoring clouds into some impulse of the era. So that was the other one I wanted to talked about—he was in the pitch, but I never went there."]

In 1885, Abercromby took his first round-the-world voyage. He was a civilian again, and his private physician hoped the sea air would restore his pitiable health. But he worked slavishly the whole time, keeping a meticulous weather diary, photographing the clouds at sea. He published many scientific papers and a book about the clouds and weather that he encountered. And he kept traveling: Scandinavia and Russia, Asia and the United States, compelled, as he wrote, to “continue the observation and photography of cloud forms in different countries.” Looking up, Abercromby came to realize that clouds looked essentially the same everywhere. Colonialism was sending goods, resources and culture around the planet; suddenly, it must have seemed obvious that we also shared the same sky.

Abercromby’s primary interest was in refining the science of weather-tracking and forecasting, and he knew that meteorologists everywhere would need a standard way to discuss and share their observations. Eventually, collaborating with a Swedish cloud scientist named Hugo Hildebrand Hildebrandsson, he convened a Cloud Committee to hammer out Hildebrandsson’s meticulous “Nomenclature of Clouds.” They declared 1896 “the International Year of the Cloud.” By year’s end, the committee produced the first International Cloud Atlas.

The atlas is now in its seventh edition, and its meticulous taxonomy provides for 10 genera of clouds, 14 species, nine varieties and dozens of “accessory clouds” and “supplementary features.” The atlas also establishes a grammar with which these terms can be combined to allow for the instability of clouds — the way they morph from one form into another — or to describe their general altitude. A cumulus, for example, might just be a cumulus; or it might be a cumulus fractus, if its edges are tattered; or a cumulus pileus, if a smaller cloud appears over it like a hood. An altocumulus lenticularis, meanwhile, is a vast, tightly bunched flock of clouds stretching across the sky at altitudes from 6,500 to 23,000 feet.

Of course, not everything in the sky needs to be precisely described. As a reference book for meteorologists, the atlas has been concerned only with clouds that have “operational significance” — that reliably reveal something about atmospheric conditions. As far as other clouds go, says Roger Atkinson of the W.M.O., one person might look at a cloud and say: “ ‘It’s wonderful. It looks like an elephant,’ and someone else might think, It’s a camel.” But the W.M.O. doesn’t particularly care. It does not see its mission as settling disagreements about elephants and camels.

Soon after Pretor­-Pinney appeared on the BBC, championing his asperatus cloud, the media seized on the possibility, however remote, that the W.M.O. would add asperatus to its atlas. Suddenly, there were stories about the Cloud Appreciation Society all over the place, all over again. This time, Pretor-Pinney — previously cast as a charming English eccentric with a funny website — was presented as the crusading figurehead of a populist meteorological revolt. Pretor-Pinney had initially turned defeatist after shooting the documentary and never bothered reaching out to the W.M.O.; the bureaucracy seemed too formidable. Now he didn’t quite know what to say. When reporters called, he suggested they contact the W.M.O., impishly channeling them as de facto lobbyists.

Then, in 2014, the W.M.O. announced it was preparing the first new edition of the Cloud Atlas in nearly 40 years; the agency felt pressure to finally digitize the book, to reassert its authority over the many reckless cloud-reference materials proliferating online. One of the W.M.O.’s first steps was to convene an international Task Team to consider additions to the atlas. “Most public interest,” a news release noted, “has focused on a proposal by the Cloud Appreciation Society” to recognize the so-called asperatus. The Task Team would report to a so-called Commission for Instruments and Methods of Observation. Last summer, the commission recommended to the World Meteorological Organization’s 17th World Meteorological Congress in Geneva that the cloud be included. Everyone seemed confident that the recommendation would soon be ratified by the W.M.O.’s executive council. Except, the new cloud wasn’t asperatus anymore; it was now asperitas. The Task Team had demoted it from a cloud “variety,” as Pretor-Pinney had proposed, to a “supplementary feature,” and the elaborate naming convention for clouds required supplementary features to be named with Latin nouns, not adjectives. “One of those things that’s so close, but different,” Pretor-Pinney told me, with a tinge of amusement and resentment.

When I spoke to Roger Atkinson, of the W.M.O., he stressed that asperitas would merely be “a fourth-order classification, not a primary genus, not one of the primary cloud types, not one of the Big Nine.” Neither was it the only new classification the Task Team recommended adding; it was just the most famous one. The prominence of the cloud seems to have forced the scientists’ hand. Asperitas didn’t appear to have any operational significance, but the public enthusiasm Pretor-Pinney had gathered around the cloud ultimately made asperitas too prominent to ignore. One task-team member, George Anderson, told me that not giving such a well-known cloud a definitive name would only create more confusion.

Pretor-Pinney conceded all this, happily. “My argument is not that this is some hugely significant thing,” he told me. By now, he was mostly using the cloud to make a point — to needle the “human vanity” inherent in “the Victorian urge to classify things, to put them into pigeonholes and give them scientific names.” Clouds, he added, “are ephemeral, ever-changing, phenomenal. Here you have a discrete, scientific, analytic urge laid onto the embodiment of chaos, onto these formations within these unbounded pockets of our atmosphere where there’s no beginning and no edge.” All he wanted was to encourage people to look at the sky, to elevate our perception of clouds as beautiful “for their own sake.”

Slowly, over the last 200 years, the impulse of cloud lovers like Howard and Abercromby to make the mystical empirical had ossified into something stringent and reductive. Pretor-Pinney wanted to clear a little more space in our collective cloudscape for less distinct feelings of delight and wonder. His championing of asperatus was, in reality, somewhat arbitrary. There were a few other unnamed cloud forms he saw repeating in the society’s photo gallery. He just happened to pick this one.

The cultural history of clouds seemed to be shaped by a procession of amateurs, each of whom projected the ethos of his particular era onto those billowing blank slates in the troposphere. Pretor-Pinney was our era’s, I realized — the Internet era’s. He wasn’t just challenging the cloud authorities with his crowdsourced cloud; he was trolling them. [annotation q="This is fantastic. I love the analogy. What inspired it? In some ways, you’re making the reader the do a little work in understanding what you mean by this." a="I needed to figure out if there was something especially timely about the way Gavin was operating. And to me, that had everything to do with the fact that he was sort of crowd-sourcing enthusiasm for clouds. The troll bit leapt out at me the more I got to know him. I think troll has such a negative connotation, so maybe he was almost like a court jester—he was impishly disrupting the status quo and seeing what happens. He’s interested in this new cloud, but it could have been lots of other clouds, too; he just happened to pick this one. He’s more interested in needling the system than any one particular victory. And that’s a lot more lovable, too."]

I was one of the many reporters who contacted Pretor-Pinney when the first photos of asperatus made the rounds in 2009. I had seen an Associated Press article, with Jane Wiggins’s photo of the cloud in Iowa, and a reference to Pretor-Pinney and his Cloud Appreciation Society and felt a kind of instant and exhilarated envy: Apparently, some people cultivated a meaningful connection to what I’d only ever regarded as vaporous arrangements of nothingness. I wanted in. [annotation q="It’s interesting that you switched to first person here. Why did you do that?" a="Because Jake Silverstein [editor-in-chief of The New York Times Magazine] told me to! And when he told me to, I realized right away that he was correct: His point was, if the piece is going to end so deep inside my own perspective, I needed to ease people into my experience at the beginning of that section: who was this guy (me) tripping out at the cloud conference anyway? Otherwise, it would feel jarring."] Also, I was impressed that these enthusiasts seemed to be rattling the self-serious strictures of the scientific establishment. And so it was disappointing to realize, in those early days and as I checked back with him periodically, that nothing was really happening yet and that no one seemed particularly rattled. Pretor-Pinney even sounded slightly exhausted by asperitas. “It’s the zombie news story that will never die!” he said.

He was, by then, closing in on his 10th year as head of the Cloud Appreciation Society and, as he’d done after 10 years with The Idler magazine, he was questioning his commitment to it. Somehow, being a cloud impresario had swallowed an enormous amount of time. He was lecturing about clouds around the world, sharing stages at corporate conferences and ideas festivals with Snoop Dogg and Bill Clinton and appearing monthly on the Weather Channel. Then there was the Cloud Appreciation Society’s online store, a curated collection of society-branded merchandise and cloud-themed home goods, which turned out to be surprisingly demanding, particularly in the frenzied weeks before Christmas. The Cloud Appreciation Society was basically just Pretor-Pinney and his wife, Liz, plus a friend who oversaw the shop part time and a retired steelworker he brought on to moderate the photo gallery. It was all arduous, which Pretor-Pinney seemed to find a little embarrassing. “My argument about why cloud-spotting is a worthwhile activity is that it’s an aimless activity,” he said. “And I’ve turned it into something that is very purposeful, that is work.”

At the same time, he realized that he’d conjured a genuine community of amateur cloud-lovers from all over the world but regretted never doing anything to truly nourish it; it felt so “fluffy,” he said, “with no center to it, like a cloud.” Soon, that spectral society — that cloud of people on the Internet — would be celebrating its 10th anniversary. “I’m thinking that it might be a nice reason to get everyone together,” he said.

One morning last September, Pretor-Pinney was fidgeting and fretting in the auditorium of the Royal Geographical Society building, at the edge of Kensington Gardens in London. Escape to the Clouds, a one-day conference to celebrate the Cloud Appreciation Society’s 10th anniversary, would be underway in 90 minutes, and Pretor-Pinney was impatiently supervising the small team of balloon- installation artists he had commissioned to rig inflatable cloud formations around the stage. This was the first big event that he organized for the Cloud Appreciation Society. [annotation q="Did you always know the story of the conference would come toward the end?" a="In the draft I first turned in, the conference came much earlier. That was a really good edit from my editors (Sheila Glaser and others)—they basically thought it was too much about the conference. So it became less and less about the conference until it was included just at the very end."] The evening before the conference, he was expecting 315 attendees. But there was a late surge of ticket-buying, and now he was panicking about running out of artisanal Cloud-Nine Marshmallows for the gift bags. Outside, Pretor-Pinney kept pointing out, the London sky was impeccably blue. Not a single cloud. It was terrible. [annotation q="I don’t think people appreciate how hard it is to be funny in writing. Does it come naturally to you?" a="I think I'm good at noticing funny things that people do and say—funny situations. Then it's a matter of finding the words and rhythms that bring out how funny those things are."]

Bounding onstage to kick off the conference, Pretor-Pinney seemed overwhelmed but cheerful. He reminded the muddle of cloud appreciators from all over the world, now crammed into the theater, that “to tune into the clouds is to slow down. It’s a moment of meteorological meditation.” And he celebrated the transcendence of cloud-spotting: how it connects us to the weather, the atmosphere, to one another. “We are part of the air,” he told everyone. “We don’t live beneath the sky. We live within the sky.”

Who were they all? Why were they there? They were a collection of ordinary people with an interest in clouds. Behind all those user names on the Cloud Society website were schoolteachers, sky divers, meteorologists, retired astronomy teachers, office workers and artists. Many people had come alone, but conversations sparked easily. (“I’ve just seen the best cloud dress I’ve seen in my life,” a woman said on the stairway. A second woman turned and said, “Well, yours is quite lovely, too.”) The atmosphere was comfortable and convivial and amplified by a kind of feedback loop of escalating relief, whereby people who arrived at a cloud conference not knowing what to expect recognized how normal and friendly everyone was and enjoyed themselves even more.

The program Pretor-Pinney had pulled together was a little highbrow but fun. A British author recounted the misadventures of the first meteorologist to make a high-altitude balloon ascent. An energetic literary historian surveyed “English Literary Views of the Sky.” Pretor-Pinney and a professor of physics tried to demonstrate a complicated atmospheric freezing process in a plastic bottle, but failed. And between the talks, a musician named Lisa Knapp performed folk songs about wind and weather. She had saved the obvious crowd-pleaser for her final turn onstage: the melancholy Joni Mitchell classic “Both Sides, Now.”

There would be one more talk after Knapp finished, but it didn’t matter. This — the Joni Mitchell moment — was the conference’s transformative conclusion. Knapp had an extraordinary voice, Bjork-like, but gentler, and performed the song alone, accompanying herself with only a delicate, monotonal Indian classical instrument resting in her lap, a kind of bellows, called a shruti box. It let out a mournful, otherworldly drone. After hours of lectures and uncertain socializing with strangers, something about this spare arrangement and the sorrowful lyrics felt so vulnerable that, by the time Knapp finished the first lines — “Rows and flows of angel hair, and ice cream castles in the air, and feather canyons everywhere. I’ve looked at clouds that way” — she was singing into an exquisite silence.

The performance moved me. But it was more than that, and weirder. Maybe, somewhere in this story about clouds and cloud lovers, I’d found a compelling argument for staying open to varieties of beauty that we can’t quite categorize and, by extension, for respecting the human capacity to feel, as much as our ability to scrutinize the sources of those feelings. [annotation q="This is a lovely thought. Did you know in the moment you experienced this that you were going to incorporate this idea into the piece?" a="As far as I was concerned as a human being, and maybe not as a reporter, I was convinced that this was the most important thing that happened during my experience doing the piece. I didn’t necessarily know that it would make it into the story, because it seemed divorced from everything else—but I think that’s because I didn’t quite understand it yet. In point of fact, I don’t think anyone liked the ending of the story when I first turned it in… and I don’t blame them! Sometimes when you have a conviction that something works, and no one else understands it, it’s not because it doesn’t work—it’s because you haven’t done it right. My friend Evan Ratliff used to edit my Pop-Up Magazine stories; we came up with this thing called Ratliff’s Rule. It’s the thing you want to tell people about the story even if it has nothing to do with everything else."] [annotation q="[Editor’s note] Here’s an explanation from Ratliff himself:" a="There are sometimes details and scenes uncovered by writers that are so remarkable, fascinating, or memorable that it is worth doing structural or stylistic backflips to make sure that they stay in the story. The reasoning behind it is that it's very rare to find a moment or detail in a story that you just know will stick in the reader's mind, that they will not only remember but marvel over, tell other people about. Creating those types of moments is a major reason why you are writing these kinds of stories at all. And if you have one, quite often the story you are writing is the only chance for this amazing moment or detail to ever be experienced by anyone but you, or else be lost to human history. So you should do everything in your power to keep that moment in the story, even if it's not necessary for the narrative at large."]

Whatever the case, as Knapp sang, I started to feel an inexplicable rush of empathy for the people I met that day, the people sitting around me — all these others, living within the same sky. And I let my mind wander, wondering about their lives. What I felt, really, was awe: the awe that comes when you fully internalize that every stranger’s interior life is just as complicated as yours. It seemed very unlikely that a meeting of an online cloud society in a dark, windowless room could produce such a moment of genuine emotion, but there I was, in the middle of it. Just thinking about clouds, I guess, had turned a little transcendent, at least for me.

Then I heard the sniffle. It was very loud. With the room so transfixed, it easily cut through Knapp’s voice from a few rows behind me, and when I turned to look, I saw Pretor-Pinney’s wife fully in tears. Then, the woman right next to me, she was crying, too. And I heard others inhaling loudly, oddly, and got the impression there were more. Immediately afterward, out in the hall, the first person I walked past was bashfully apologizing to two others. It was so strange, she kept saying. She just didn’t know why she’d been crying.

A couple of days later, I tried to describe it in an email to a friend: “Many people spontaneously cried, just releasing their tears like rain, and I realized that we are all human beings — that’s the truth ... in all our different forms and sizes, we are expressions of the same basic currents, just like the clouds.” And when I read the email back, I was mortified by how fluffy and stoned it sounded, but still — even now — I can’t pretend it’s not true. [annotation q="I love the way you ended this. I can imagine you were grappling with how to not make it sound overly cheesy, but also authentic. Do you think you struck that balance?" a="I definitely felt like that. It felt a little vulnerable. The last line originally was something like, “I knew it was true, but I knew I’d never be able to explain it in The New York Times.” But that sounded like I was sort of trolling The New York Times, so that got cut. I remember a lot of fretting over that last line. Thankfully, my initial reaction to it was that it was laughably over-the-top, which I guess is good, because I couldn’t possibly be taking myself too seriously."]

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