You Know Too Much

The venom rarely kills you. Panicking does. Jelena Woehr spends her weekends on horseback ultra-marathons through Southern California rattlesnake country. She knows way too much about how to actually coexist with them, and what really happens if you get bitten.

Anne Rice sent cease-and-desist letters and killed her own fandom overnight. V. Arrow knows way too much about fandom and fanfiction: Dante’s Inferno counts (he wrote himself in to go fight God), the word “fandom” itself was coined in 1938 by rival fan clubs in New York and Los Angeles who feuded for decades over things like how to staple a zine, and one of its founding members was a trans woman also behind the historic Catskills retreat Casa Susana. She also knows about the time Anne Rice discovered her own fanfiction writers and sent cease-and-desist letters that killed the whole fandom overnight.

Her dog refused to let a customer leave the store, and the owner admitted she was right to. Nicole V. Cramer is a certified dog trainer with over 200 pounds of dog living in her house: Liesel, a giant schnauzer mix, and Ruthie, a Great Pyrenees mix, both livestock guardian breeds bred to think for themselves rather than take orders. She knows way too much about reading a dog’s instincts, including the time Liesel refused to let a store customer out of her sight, and the store owner later confirmed the dog had been right about them. The same instincts got the girls through an unplanned face-off with a bear on a hiking trail, no training required.

An all-female civilization that votes, dances, and grieves its dead. The men mate once, then die. Dina Graham fell into this rabbit hole trying to cure her insomnia: pull up something boring enough to put herself to sleep. Bees did the opposite. She knows way too much about how a colony runs entirely on haplodiploidy, where unfertilized eggs become males and fertilized eggs become females, and how a single scout bee’s waggle dance in the pitch-dark hive functions as a literal vote on which flowers the whole colony flies toward next.

You’ve never heard of the company behind one in four American salads. Wen-Jay Ying runs Local Roots NYC, a farm subscription service she started after Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips told her, backstage in a pink Power Ranger costume, to stop chasing the next disaster and think about what her own city actually needed. She knows way too much about the industrial food system that came after: Taylor Farms grows the pre-cut lettuce behind roughly one in four American salads and white-labels it to grocery chains that never have to say where it came from.