DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: December 14, 2025

If you live in an area with lots of trees, you might want to check out some spectacular winter sights this morning.  The heavy snow has clung to the trees, creating some gorgeous tableaux.

How Do You Lose 110 Billion Pounds Of Pig Poop?:

More than a thousand hogs grow fat in the enclosed shed-like structures on Gene Tinker’s farm in northeast Iowa, while a few hundred cattle pace in open feedlots.

His farm is one of nearly 8,000 concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in Iowa. But the 64-year-old is not an average Iowa pork producer.

Less than a decade ago, Tinker was the state’s top administrator managing questions and disputes over livestock operation permitting.

Tinker was the animal feeding operations coordinator at the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) for 14 years. Before losing his job during department budget cuts in 2017, he advised staff who granted permits to livestock facilities and reviewed plans for handling the manure produced by those facilities.

For years, Tinker said, he had unsuccessfully advocated for the department to update its rules on applying livestock manure as fertilizer. Now, the former coordinator of the state’s livestock regulating body says the DNR’s approach to enforcing regulations and collecting data about livestock waste is inadequate, emphasizing the need for better management to address environmental risks and protect water quality.

While the DNR requires farmers to submit documents outlining their plans for spreading livestock manure, the agency doesn’t collect records of where and how much manure is actually spread.

Those records exist, produced by the certified hauling companies that contract with CAFOs to apply manure. But Iowa law classifies them as “confidential,” limiting public oversight and accountability.

That’s a mistake, because application records could easily be digitized and made publicly accessible, Tinker argues, bolstering the state’s toolkit in its struggle with water pollution issues.

Yet despite a nearly 50 percent increase in nitrate levels in Iowa’s waterways and mounting evidence linking agricultural practices to pollution, Iowa has not substantively updated its fertilizer and manure rules since 2002, except for a 2009 amendment regulating when manure could be applied to snow-covered ground.

“The DNR isn’t changing because nobody’s making them change,” said Tinker.

Cue The Coasters:

Didja Ever Read ‘Train Dreams’?  Or anything by Denis Johnson?  The author was something else:

Johnson’s significance, at least among writers, is hard to overstate. He is best known for his 1992 short-story collection, “Jesus’ Son,” an autofictional account of addiction. George Saunders, while teaching in the M.F.A. program at Syracuse University in 1998, wrote to him about the book: “I can’t think of a writer more admired by our students. Or by me.” Yet, focusing merely on his almost cultlike influence misses, as Rachel Kushner wrote, that he was also “a writer whose ambitions were in their own way as broad and burgeoning as Dostoyevsky’s.” From the beginning, his work attracted the admiration of masters. Raymond Carver called his first poems “harrowingly convincing.” Philip Roth said his first novel was “a small masterpiece.” By the time he passed in 2017, the list of living writers from whom he earned praise — Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, Louise Erdrich, Joy Williams, Jonathan Franzen — was almost as outsized as the dead ones with whom he was compared: Twain, Faulkner, Blake, God.

Johnson lived for 67 years. If you were to divide his life in two, the second half begins in 1989, the year he purchased a cabin in Idaho. His most ambitious work would be written and published from this relative isolation, which would eventually become the setting for “Train Dreams.”

But he could never quite shake what had come in the first half. There were two failed marriages and one son, born when Johnson was only 19. Johnson was the son of a State Department officer and a homemaker, and he had lived in Germany, Japan, the Philippines, Virginia, Iowa, Arizona, Washington, Massachusetts, California, Illinois. He told his first wife that he would never get a “real job.” He tried panhandling, failed at drug dealing, gambled and lost. He once bought a boat for commercial fishing but never managed to get it in the water. He dropped acid for the first time in high school, became addicted to heroin before he finished his undergraduate degree and was an alcoholic for a long time after that. He spent at least seven days in county jail, three weeks at a psychiatric hospital, at least two stints in rehab and, by the time he bought the cabin in Idaho, a decade in recovery. He dedicated his third volume of poetry “to the people I have lied to.”

But what becomes painfully clear in this account is that Johnson’s worst behaviors weren’t only self-destructive. Both his first wife and a long-term girlfriend recount times in the 1970s when he hit them, sometimes so violently that they ended up in the hospital or talking to the police. In these cases, Johnson lied or apologized his way out and persuaded the women to continue their relationships.

Worse, somehow, are the details of his son Morgan’s life. On the night Morgan was born, Johnson drank a case of beer with a friend, put his pregnant wife, Nancy, in the back seat of the car and showed up at the hospital drunk. The nurse sent him to the waiting room while Nancy gave birth. Thus began a pattern of estrangement.

The tragedy of Morgan’s account to Geltner is that, though he was estranged from his father, he apparently grew to idolize him. The broad strokes of Morgan’s life — addiction, incarceration, street life — more than a little resemble the characters Johnson wrote about but narrowly avoided becoming.

There’s lots more.  The conclusion: Great writer, terrible person.

I’m A Night Owl, Baby, Sleep All Day Long.  As in, stowaways living it up on the Iberian Peninsula:

Two burrowing owls stowed away on a cruise ship out of Miami, and are now living the high life at a Spanish resort before returning to the US next month.

Biologists from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) said the mating pair boarded Royal Caribbean’s Allure of the Seas before the vessel’s transatlantic crossing to Cartagena in southern Spain in February. The tiny owls, a threatened species in Florida, usually prefer more rural landscapes, and may have been spooked by all the concrete around the Port of Miami, they say.

They were spotted by crew members a short distance into the 14-day voyage, having found refuge in the ship’s lush Central Park area, which features more than 12,000 plants. The biologists say they probably foraged for food, and were eventually caught by the crew using nets, then handed over to Spanish officials at docking.

They have been quarantined since the spring of this year at the Cites (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) wildlife rescue center in Murcia, 30 miles north of Cartagena, in readiness for their repatriation as soon as mid-January.

Natalie Montero-McAllister, FWC’s imperiled species policy administrator, said the owls are ground dwelling and spend most of their time in ground burrows or large, open areas. For that reason, she said, they might have been confused by the vast expanses of metal on board the ship, and an absence of their regular diet of small reptiles and birds, frogs and rodents.

After a free cruise to Europe, the owls will be returning by air, their fares paid for by the Fish and Wildlife Foundation of Florida, the charitable arm of FWC.

“Our foundation is delighted to help pay for the owls’ ticket home and their care. They’re having quite the adventure and we’re glad to help get them safely back to a burrow in Florida,” said Tindl Rainey, the group’s director of conservation.

We’ll let Carly sing us out: