The Lizzie Wade Weekly

Hello! This is my last newsletter on Substack, to let you know that I’ve moved to Buttondown. As a current subscriber, you should have received a newsletter from me yesterday called “Hello from my new home,” which discusses my reasons for moving at length. If you didn’t get it, please look in your spam folder, promotions tab, or other places it could be hiding. To make sure you receive future issues, mark it as “not spam,” move it to your primary inbox, and/or whitelist the new address.

I live in Mexico so of course I’m obsessed with corn. It’s the foundation of the cuisine and in many ways the culture, and it has been for at least 4,000 years. But there are lots of things scientists don’t know about it, including how and why people bothered domesticating it in the first place.

If you asked 100 journalists what their least favorite work task is, I’m positive more than 90 would say transcribing. It’s so tedious, it takes so long, and it involves at least some listening to your own recorded voice, a skin-crawling experience for anyone who hasn’t put themselves through the intense exposure therapy of making a podcast.

Long ago, when I thought about what the month before my manuscript deadline would be like, I hoped for a peaceful stroll toward the finish line, full of editing and polishing and not very much writing. I feared—and somewhat expected—a mad scramble of vomiting up just enough last-minute words to fulfill my contract. Due to Circumstances, I ended up with more of a mad scramble than I would have liked. Many of the ~90,000 words I turned in didn’t exist even 30 days before the deadline.

A temple mound in Florida’s Crystal River Archaeological State Park. Credit: Ebyabe/Wikimedia Commons This week I wrote for Science about a debate bubbling up in U.S. archaeology: Is it unethical to publish photos of objects buried with Indigenous ancestors?

Two years ago, I wrote about human footprints discovered in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park that appeared to be over 20,000 years old. That was a big deal for archaeologists, because, as I wrote at the time: current scientific thinking holds that people first arrived in the Americas sometime around 16,000 years ago.

First of all: hi! I’m back. Second of all: I submitted by book manuscript! It was three years, one pandemic, and several life- and deadline-derailing health issues in the making. I still have many months of work ahead of me, but I made it past the first, and hopefully hardest, step. Finally. I’ve been asked about my book writing process by some of you, and I’ve struggled with what to say because the truth of it feels so boring.

I’m doing 1000 Words of Summer again. The proposition is simple: write 1000 words every day for two weeks. Each day, you get an encouraging email from author and organizer Jami Attenberg and assorted guest writers. (There’s also a Slack and hashtags for social media, but I don’t participate in them.) It’s collective but self-directed, structured but flexible. There’s no goal other than the process. It’s about getting in touch with why you write and how it makes you feel.

It’s very hot here in Mexico City. The highs have been in the low 30s C/high 80s F, which is not that hot compared to other places I’ve lived—or most other places experiencing this same heat wave—but as we’re all learning, extreme weather is often a relative phenomenon, experienced against not some objective standard of “bad,” but against the accumulation of subjective experiences that have coalesced into our idea of “normal” in a given place.