Whenever I’m stuck on a writing project—an all-too-frequent occurrence—I usually try to find my way forward by contemplating a single question: How can I shift what I’m trying to say without reaching for cliches? Because a lot of the time, the reason I’m banging my head against the wall is because I’m taking an approach to the material that’s too conventional or predictable. So I force myself to take a step back and think of some other way into the story, some other theme I should make it my mission to explore.

I’m pretty sure I can trace my embrace of this tactic to something I read in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it aside about George Lucas and an experience he had while studying filmmaking at USC.

[Lucas] and a couple of other USC and UCLA students got a Columbia Pictures scholarship to shoot a short documentary on the making of MacKenna’s Gold, which was being shot in Page, Arizona. It was a lumbering, elephantine studio Western, very much in the style of the bloated musicals of the ’60s, and it was Lucas’s introduction to the Old Hollywood. “We had never been around such opulence, zillions of dollars being spent every five minutes on this huge, unwieldy thing,” he said. “It was mind-boggling to us because we had been making films for $300, and seeing this incredible waste—that was the worst of Hollywood.” While the other students shot conventional “making-of” documentaries, Lucas shot an imagistic film about the beauty of the desert, with the production barely visible in the far distance.

As always, the story worthiest of telling is rarely what’s right in front of your face.

The illustration above should give you some sense of how I spent my summer: Learning everything I possibly could about the current state of hibernation research, the unheralded key to getting our species to Mars and beyond. I did so in order to write this new Wired story, which came out on Thanksgiving morning. The piece’s narrative throughline is about an Alaskan researcher who’s dedicated the bulk of her adult life to trying to understand how Arctic ground squirrels power down for two-thirds of every year. But I also make a stab at grappling with how humans might use and misuse the power to turn ourselves off and on at will:

As for myself, what I find most alluring about hibernation is its potential to offer a brief holiday from the constant din of my own thoughts. In a time of exhausting overstimulation, anxiety, and dread, I find myself wondering what it would be like to switch off for a week or two. In his novelization of 2001, Arthur C. Clarke depicted one of his main characters as longing for the psychological liberation of torpor: “Sometimes Bowman, as First Captain of Discovery, envied his three unconscious colleagues in the frozen peace of the Hibernaculum. They were free from all boredom and responsibility.”

If you’re keen to read more about how NASA’s planning to incorporate hibernation tech into Mars missions, I urge you to check out SpaceWorks’ in-depth report on the topic.

A peasant on a collective farm, visiting an exhibition, is shown a radio station powerful enough to be heard in foreign countries, even in America. He pleads for permission to speak over the station and is finally given permission to say just one word. Stepping up to the microphone he shouts “Help!” with all the power of his voice. 

I’m now motivated to delve into the literature the jokes that North Koreans tell each other in those rare moments when they’re sure no one’s listening. I refuse to believe that even the most suffocating form of totalitarianism can snuff out our species’ desire for levity.

Overcoming sometimes violent resistance by impoverished owners, the police flushed five to six thousand pigs out of cellars and garrets and drove an estimated twenty thousand swine north to the upper wards that summer…The authorities, moreover, kept up their campaign year after year, banishing from lower Manhattan all bone-boiling works along with the putrefying carcasses piled high in their yards. In the late 1850s, Hog Town was invaded and the west side piggery complex between 50th and 59th Streets dismantled. By 1860, New York´s porkers had been definitively exiled north of 86th Street and transformed into a distinctively uptown menace.

According to the authors, the ejected pigs flourished in Manhattan’s northern hinterlands, under the care of Irish immigrants to who slept rough in what would later become Central Park. If anyone can point me in the direction of documents that detail those swineherds’ experiences, please advise.

After the bulls were assigned, we headed to Elvira’s for chiles rellenos. O’Bolger went back to the hotel. Traditionally, bullfighters don’t eat before a fight. If the worst happens and surgery is required, the doctors don’t want to have to go digging through a lot of tamales and beans to make repairs.

If this is the correct Diego O’Bolger, then I certainly hope he’s enjoying the occasional lunch these days.

Now that I have a little distance from the rapidly changing app, I do feel a bit nostalgic for those early days in 2007 and 2008—the era when I used Twitter to flag the weird and the wonderful for a handful of my fellow travelers. Accounts that hew to that ethos are still out there, and it’s my hope that they’ll remain as the platform morphs into whatever comes next. For me, the archetype of Twitter perfection is this stream of information about lighthouses, authored by the founder of the Lighthouse Directory. If only Twitter could be filled with millions of accounts that share its spirit, rather than people who seem to revel in sourness above all.

I’ve been trying really hard to fall back in love with the English language, and this gargantuan compendium of racehorse lineages is really helping. There’s such a pleasing alchemy to the way the names evolve over the different generations, and then often end up with a thoroughbred whose moniker can be interpreted as having multiple meanings. It ain’t quite Jack Gilbert, but it’s helping me reacquaint myself with the snap and patter of the written word. And trust me when I say that’s sorely needed these days: There’s been a certain going-through-the-motions quality to my writing in recent months, and I need to do everything in my power to extricate myself from that trend. If reading up on the great-grandparents of horses with names like Lear Skywalker and Diablo’s Number is what gets me over the hump, then so be it.

So in my quest to improve, I’ve been studying some classic stories that end with tremendous oomph. The one I want to recommend today is something I should have read years ago, given its massive reputation among fans of the genre: Teresa Carpenter’s “Death of a Playmate,” which infamously became the basis for Bob Fosse’s much-loathed Star 80. In addition to being spectacularly reported, Carpenter’s story is notable for how sharply it eviscerates the narcissists who hovered around her main character. The ending drives home the point in such a clear and chilling way—I envy both its economy of language and its moral disgust.

Hype, of course, often passes for prophecy. Whether or not Dorothy Stratten would have fulfilled her extravagant promise can’t be known. Her legacy will not be examined critically because it is really of no consequence. In the end Dorothy Stratten was less memorable for herself than for the yearnings she evoked: in Snider a lust for the score; in Hefner a longing for a star; in Bogdanovich a desire for the eternal ingenue. She was a catalyst for a cycle of ambitions which revealed its players less wicked, perhaps, than pathetic.

As for Paul Snider, his body was returned to Vancouver in permanent exile from Hollywood. It was all too big for him. In that Elysium of dreams and deals, he had reached the limits of his class. His sin, his unforgivable sin, was being small-time.

Related: If you want to know more about why Star 80 is so execrable, I beseech you to check out this recent episode from one of my favorite podcasts, Blank Check. Fosse entirely missed the main theme that Carpenter was trying to convey in the source material.

If Goal A with the revival of Microkhan is to get myself back in the habit of writing and creating stories, then Goal B is to celebrate folks completely nerding out about the most random of subjects. I find few things more admirable or adorable than people who’ve clearly fallen in love with some arcane subject and want to share their enthusiasm with the world.

The brilliant mind (or minds?) behind Indigenous Boats is an excellent case in point. In addition to chronicling the minutiae of all sorts of small seacraft, they’ve also made public this comprehensive 1962 guide to the junks of South Vietnam. It’s just incredible how much labor the guide’s authors, who were U.S. Navy personnel, poured into scouting the nation for different types of junks, all of which are described and documented in loving detail. A small tidbit from the intro to whet your appetites:

If a craft is large enough to carry a water buffalo standing athwartships, it is clearly a junk. If the animal must assume some other position, or perhaps cannot even make the voyage, the vessel is a sampan.

Back on Monday after a hard weekend of churning out the third draft of a Wired story. Wish me luck.