Sarah Gibbard Cook
  • Home
  • About
  • Writing
  • Contact

Threading the Needle

8/28/2023

2 Comments

 
Seven years ago, my sewing machine got lost in a move. Its replacement finally came out of the box this month. With seven years of mending to catch up on, it was time to relearn. Oh, yes, here’s the pressure foot. Oh, yes, here’s the bobbin case. Where I didn’t expect trouble was in threading the needle. I often thread needles to sew by hand, but the one in the machine refused to cooperate.

Guiding a thread through the narrow eye of a needle must be as old as sewing itself. Our word needle goes back via Old English to Proto-Germanic, and ultimately to Indo-European. Passing an elephant or camel through a needle’s eye is an ancient metaphor for doing the impossible. Later, threading the needle became an analogy for moving through tight human spaces in sports, children’s games, and yoga.

Politicians and managers must sometimes thread the needle to navigate a careful, delicate course between groups with conflicting goals. Most days, at this stage of my life, I’m grateful the hardest needle I have to thread is the one on my sewing machine.

Images: (left) Bonifatius Church portal relief in Dortmund, Germany, re words of Jesus; (right) Johann Vogel, engraving, 1649, cropped, re seemingly impossible Peace of Westphalia.
2 Comments

Either/Or and the Bell-Shaped Curve

8/21/2023

0 Comments

 
Picture
“I act like an extrovert, but I think I’m really an introvert,” a friend told me. Many of us have used Myers-Briggs or similar instruments to define our personality types. Duke University psychology and neuroscience professor Mark Leary says scientists prefer to talk about traits instead of types. People are infinitely varied. Most personality traits occur not in opposing pairs but along a bell-shaped curve. Some people are very sociable, others just want to be left alone, but the vast majority of us—perhaps including my friend—fall somewhere toward the middle.

Winter, summer; good, evil; dark, light; rowdy, orderly. Is it human nature to prefer dualism over nuance? For some, clear-cut categories feel better than the ambiguity of a continuum. They make for catchier headlines and greater charisma.

I wonder if binary thinking not only reflects but increases polarization. Take politics: Ordinary folk seem more moderate on average than fit precisely into progressive or conservative boxes. Take masculine and feminine personality traits: Are they inherent or socially constructed? Surely some of each. Young men’s and women’s hormones tilt the former to apply physical strength and the latter to bond with their babies, but plotting each on a bell-shaped curve would reveal huge variety and overlap. It needn’t be either/or.
0 Comments

The Doorway Effect

8/14/2023

2 Comments

 
Picture
When did you last walk from one room to another, only to forget why you’re there? I do it several times a day. Our brains, finite but efficient, use environmental clues to help choose what to remember. When the setting changes—a different room, for example—they tend to wipe the slate clean to make space for something new. Psychologists call it the doorway effect.

The problem is not so much how to retrieve a memory as how to record it in the first place. I try to follow at least a couple of these tips before I reach the doorway:
  1. Pay attention. Heading to the kitchen for a coffee refill is so habitual I do it almost by rote. Thinking the words “I am getting coffee” makes it conscious.
  2. Visualize. When I picture going into the kitchen and lifting the coffeepot, the change of environment at the doorway becomes less abrupt.
  3. Carry a reminder. It may not be as obvious as an empty mug for coffee, but an empty envelope or a toothbrush could signal other intentions.

Now, why did I come in here to the computer?
2 Comments

Climate Changes of Long Ago

8/7/2023

0 Comments

 
Picture
A former neighbor dismissed concerns about climate change, saying this warming trend is just another of the climate shifts that occur naturally from time to time. He was right about long-ago climate changes and wrong about the cause of this one. What intrigues me, though, is the assumption that if today’s climate change were of natural origin, it would give no cause for concern.

Thriving Bronze Age cultures of the Mediterranean world—Egypt, Canaan, Crete, Mycenaean Greece, and the Hittite Empire of Asia Minor—disintegrated rather suddenly in the century after about 1200 BCE. Analysis of fossilized pollen reveals a severe drought throughout the region. Famine led to upheaval, mass migrations, attacks by “sea peoples,” disruption of trade, abandonment of Greek and Hittite writing systems, destruction of palaces and cities, dispersal into small rural settlements, and the fall of Troy.

Fast forward through the rise and fall of Rome and beyond. Vikings from Scandinavia raided and settled in Scotland, Ireland, northwestern France, and even southern Italy. They settled Iceland, previously uninhabited except for a few Irish monks, and southern Greenland, separate from the Inuit in the north. After about 1300, with the end of the “medieval warm period,” icebergs made trade with mainland Europe treacherous. Unable reliably to exchange trade walrus tusk for essentials like grain, Norse Greenlanders either left or died out. Iceland survived, but barely.

History gives no reason to suppose climate change is benign to humans so long as humans didn’t cause it. In fact, human-caused climate change could potentially have one advantage. Unlike the natural disasters of past millennia, those caused by humans might potentially be resolved by humans, if we could summon the political will to do so.

Image: Kerstiaen de Keuninck, (c. 1561-1635), Fire of Troy, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
0 Comments

    Author

    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 


      ​get updates

    Sign up


    ​Archives

    June 2025
    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • About
  • Writing
  • Contact