For my review of Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, I decided to make a photo illustration. I took an old book — The Buried Temple — that I'd already ravaged for other projects, flipped it open to the spot where the binding had cracked, and traced the shape of my iPhone onto the pages. Then, I went at the pages, slicing through a few at a time with a razorblade. It took 20 minutes of that to get a deep enough space to fit the phone. ("Paper is wood!" I thought, thinking of my dad sweating through his shirt sawing down the little Douglas fir we'd selected as our Christmas tree.)

Finally, I could lay my phone into the hole that I'd made for it. I carried it to the light box I'd made and set it inside. After I snapped a few pictures, I decided that it was too bare looking and went and got all the pages I'd cut out of the book. I threw them at the book and photographed them where they fell.

Here's how it looked the night of, and the morning after.

Oh, and here are the final products:

Thank you to Wired Science readers and writers who contributed these photos. They are:

1.  @ChicoSantos

2. @AstroLisa

3. @engrmjr

4. @kid_amy

5. @alexismadrigal

6. @kelly_heather

7. @betsymason

8. @davidjurca

9. @jez_horrox

10. @TheMightyDisko

11. @quinho666

When you look at old pictures of your family, how can you not see
yourself forty years on?
 
My dad, the conquistador. My mom, the starlet. Me, the sack of potatoes.
 
One of my sisters looks just like her daughter did at the same age. My other sister has
looked the same for 30 years, except she wears less pink tutus now.

I smell my grandma's couch from here. She had a lot of dogs. She used to cook them meals. There were elaborate presentation rituals. In some of them she pretended to bark. Other times she just told the dog to shut up, in Spanish, lovingly. One dog, she would say, "Hide your ugly face!" and the dog would put its paws over its nose.

I think after she got HBO, she stopped training her dogs. Her last one used to go running around her house jumping from the couch to the floor to the kitchen table. I don't know how we got around to talking about this when I was 12 or so, but she once told me that she kicked a man-friend out of her house when he suggested that her dog wasn't well-behaved. The way she said it, I imagined he was lucky to leave alive, unpunctured by her spike heels, unflattened by a rolling pin (that I'm sure she never used for baking). To this day, when an old Mexican lady walks by in the mission with too much perfume on, I can lose myself in the scent like a cartoon animal heading for a pie on a windowsill. Next thing I know, I'm standing outside the Charizma hair salon with a gaggle of hens staring at me smelling them. Con permiso, indeed.

In 2009, six boxes of pictures were found in my parents' garage. They
contain the only evidence that I once had a button nose. It has since
been unbuttoned.

 And my dad had a wicked beard. Dude's *Latin*!

We boarded a boat on a gray morning. A cheery voice sprang from a
speaker. We'd see whales.
 
Beasts sighted at one o'clock. Face the giants, smell their herring
breath.
 
When they dive, all the mammals held their breath waiting for the
water to break.
 
Closer... And then gone.
 
Afterwards, sandwiches and contemplation of relative size and
importance, squirrels.
 
The traffic was bad getting home. There was no beating it. We were exhausted.