Above the Clouds

How Skyscrapers Can Save the City

Besides making cities more affordable and architecturally interesting, tall buildings are greener than sprawl, and they foster social capital and creativity. Yet some urban planners and preservationists seem to have a misplaced fear of heights that yields damaging restrictions on how tall a building can be. From New York to Paris to Mumbai, there’s a powerful case for building up, not out.

by Edward Glaeser

In the book of Genesis, the builders of Babel declared, “Come, let us build us a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. And let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered upon the face of the whole earth.” These early developers correctly understood that cities could connect humanity. But God punished them for monumentalizing terrestrial, rather than celestial, glory. For more than 2,000 years, Western city builders took this story’s warning to heart, and the tallest structures they erected were typically church spires. In the late Middle Ages, the wool-making center of Bruges became one of the first places where a secular structure, a 354-foot belfry built to celebrate cloth-making, towered over nearby churches. But elsewhere another four or five centuries passed before secular structures surpassed religious ones. With its 281-foot spire, Trinity Church was the tallest building in New York City until 1890. Perhaps that year, when Trinity’s spire was eclipsed by a skyscraper built to house Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, should be seen as the true start of the irreligious 20th century. At almost the same time, Paris celebrated its growing wealth by erecting the 1,000-foot Eiffel Tower, which was 700 feet taller than the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.

The ceaseless climb of the world's skyscrapers is a story of ever-evolving challenges. Here's how we reached the heights we have—and where we might go from here.

Since that tower in Babel, height has been seen both as a symbol of power and as a way to provide more space on a fixed amount of land. The belfry of Trinity Church and Gustave Eiffel’s tower did not provide usable space. They were massive monuments to God and to French engineering, respectively. Pulitzer’s World Building was certainly a monument to Pulitzer, but it was also a relatively practical means of getting his growing news operation into a single building.

For centuries, ever taller buildings have made it possible to cram more and more people onto an acre of land. Yet until the 19th century, the move upward was a moderate evolution, in which two-story buildings were gradually replaced by four- and six-story buildings. Until the 19th century, heights were restricted by the cost of building and the limits on our desire to climb stairs. Church spires and belfry towers could pierce the heavens, but only because they were narrow and few people other than the occasional bell-ringer had to climb them. Tall buildings became possible in the 19th century, when American innovators solved the twin problems of safely moving people up and down and creating tall buildings without enormously thick lower walls.

Elisha Otis didn’t invent the elevator; Archimedes is believed to have built one 2,200 years ago. And Louis XV is said to have had a personal lift installed in Versailles so that he could visit his mistress. But before the elevator could become mass transit, it needed a good source of power, and it needed to be safe. Matthew Boulton and James Watt provided the early steam engines used to power industrial elevators, which were either pulled up by ropes or pushed up hydraulically. As engines improved, so did the speed and power of elevators that could haul coal out of mines or grain from boats.

But humans were still wary of traveling long distances upward in a machine that could easily break and send them hurtling downward. Otis, tinkering in a sawmill in Yonkers, took the danger out of vertical transit. He invented a safety brake and presented it in 1854 at New York’s Crystal Palace Exposition. He had himself hoisted on a platform, and then, dramatically, an axman severed the suspending rope. The platform dropped slightly, then came to a halt as the safety brake engaged.

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The Man Behind the Curtain

Physics is not always the seamless subject that it pretends to be

by Tony Rothman 

“I want to get down to the basics. I want to learn the fundamentals. I want to understand the laws that govern the behavior of the universe.” Thousands of admissions officers and physics department chairs have smiled over such words set down by aspiring physicists in their college-application essays, and that is hardly surprising, for every future physicist writes that essay, articulating the sentiments of all of us who choose physics as a career: to touch the fundamentals, to learn how the universe operates.

It is also the view the field holds of itself and the way physics is taught: Physics is the most fundamental of the natural sciences; it explains Nature at its deepest level; the edifice it strives to construct is all-encompassing, free of internal contradictions, conceptually compelling and—above all—beautiful. The range of phenomena physics has explained is more than impressive; it underlies the whole of modern civilization. Nevertheless, as a physicist travels along his (in this case) career, the hairline cracks in the edifice become more apparent, as does the dirt swept under the rug, the fudges and the wholesale swindles, with the disconcerting result that the totality occasionally appears more like Bruegel’s Tower of Babel as dreamt by a modern slumlord, a ramshackle structure of compartmentalized models soldered together into a skewed heap of explanations as the whole jury-rigged monstrosity tumbles skyward.

Of course many grand issues remain unresolved at the frontiers of physics: What is the origin of inertia? Are there extra dimensions? Can a Theory of Everything exist? But even at the undergraduate level, far back from the front lines, deep holes exist; yet the subject is presented as one of completeness while the holes—let us say abysses—are planked over in order to camouflage the danger. It seems to me that such an approach is both intellectually dishonest and fails to stimulate the habits of inquiry and skepticism that science is meant to engender.

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So You See, The Answer Is Obvious

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The Meme is the Message

by James Gleick

What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life.’ It is information, words, instructions,” Richard Dawkins declared in 1986. Already one of the world’s foremost evolutionary biologists, he had caught the spirit of a new age. The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment. “If you want to understand life,” Dawkins wrote, “don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.”

We have become surrounded by information technology; our furniture includes iPods and plasma displays, and our skills include texting and Googling. But our capacity to understand the role of information has been sorely taxed. “TMI,” we say. Stand back, however, and the past does come back into focus.

The rise of information theory aided and abetted a new view of life. The genetic code—no longer a mere metaphor—was being deciphered. Scientists spoke grandly of the biosphere: an entity composed of all the earth’s life-forms, teeming with information, replicating and evolving. And biologists, having absorbed the methods and vocabulary of communications science, went further to make their own contributions to the understanding of information itself.

Jacques Monod, the Parisian biologist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1965 for working out the role of messenger RNA in the transfer of genetic information, proposed an analogy: just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an “abstract kingdom” rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas.

“Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms,” he wrote. “Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role.”

Ideas have “spreading power,” he noted—“infectivity, as it were”—and some more than others. An example of an infectious idea might be a religious ideology that gains sway over a large group of people. The American neurophysiologist Roger Sperry had put forward a similar notion several years earlier, arguing that ideas are “just as real” as the neurons they inhabit. Ideas have power, he said:

Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet.

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Robots At Work and Play

by Alan Taylor

Advancements in robotics are continually taking place in the fields of space exploration, health care, public safety, entertainment, defense, and more. These machines -- some fully autonomous, some requiring human input -- extend our grasp, enhance our capabilities, and travel as our surrogates to places too dangerous for us to go. NASA currently has dozens of robotic missions underway, with satellites now in orbit around our moon and four planets -- and two more on the way to Ceres and Pluto. Gathered here are recent images of robots and those who work with them. [33 photos]

 

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11 Alive

On August 2nd of 1943, whilst serving as commander of the PT-109 during World War II, John F. Kennedy and crew were rammed by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri; their boat instantly halved by the impact and two of the crew killed. Six days later, stranded in the Solomon Islands with his fellow survivors, Kennedy carved the following message into a coconut shell and handed it to Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, two natives tasked with delivering it to the nearest Allied base 35 nautical miles away, by canoe. Luckily they succeeded, and Kennedy and his men were soon rescued as a result.

Kennedy later had the shell encased in plastic; it was then used as a paperweight in the Oval Office during his Presidency.

Transcript follows. Image courtesy of the JFK Library.

Transcript

NAURO ISL...COMMANDER
NATIVE KNOWS POS'IT
HE CAN PILOT...11 ALIVE
NEED SMALL BOAT
KENNEDY

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Mistakes Were Made

[ed. An excerpt from this book is linked at the end of this review]

Review by Danielle Procida

There is a vast body of literature on how to do well, how to be happy, what to do and choose for one's own benefit and that of others. This body covers a range from the vulgar to the great moral philosophers. We are not short of such analyses or guidance.

In contrast, the body of work which considers our failure to do well and be good is decidedly smaller, and also, it must be said, rather lamer, particularly in its power to explain why we fall into foolish beliefs, make bad decisions and commit hurtful acts. We remain opaque to others and to ourselves, thinking, acting and responding in ways which are harmful, counter-productive and baffling. Most baffling of all is our propensity to continue in these patterns, to compound error with error and throw good vigorously after bad.

Attempts at explanation tend towards exasperated (and inadequate) conclusions of egoism, stupidity or evil, or contentious structures of historical, social or psychological theory to provide some sort of answer. Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers an alternative to these by describing the workings of a simple process, one which by its nature is hidden from our view. This process is self-justification, and it is driven by an engine of cognitive dissonance, the discomfort we feel at the gap between our self-image and the less attractive reality that sometimes confronts us.

It works like this: I do something that I should not have done, and this troubles me, because I'm not the kind of person who does that sort of thing. Redressing the mistake will be even more painful or difficult than not committing it in the first place would have been. So, to salve this nagging complaint of the soul, I declare to myself that the act was the right one all along, and I confirm this by reinforcing it at the earliest possible opportunity.

Brand on Celebrity

[ed.  This has to be one of the most fascinating, articulate interviews I think I've ever seen.  Whether you care about Mr. Brand or not, it's certainly worth a look.  Who would have thought?]

I'm not a huge Russell Brand fan (I don't dislike him either, but most of his media came out after my daughter was born and I essentially embarked upon a half-decade adult TV and movie fast), but this is a remarkable interview. Brand gets some tough questions from the interviewer, and while he gets excited and even rants a little, he is consistently cogent, intelligent, and well-spoken. This is practically a master class in how to talk about celebrity while being a celebrity without sounding like a knob.

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Happy Easter

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Doll Brawl

[ed. This has nothing to do with the following article but it gives me a chance to tell the only Barbie joke I know:  One day Ken and Barbie are getting a bit closer than usual and, perplexed, he looks in her eyes and says, 'I feel like there's something missing here, but I just can't seem to put my finger on it'] 

Bratz v. Barbie: Who’s the Bad Girl?

by  Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker

Last January, at a courthouse in southern California, a remarkable memo came to light during a trial pitting Mattel, the manufacturer of Barbie dolls, against MGA, the much smaller company that makes Bratz dolls. The 2004 memo, which one of the MGA attorneys introduced into evidence, warned of a “rival-led Barbie genocide.” It went on in similarly doom-laden language: “This is war and sides must be taken: Barbie stands for good. All others stand for evil.”

Well, “evil” won yesterday, big-time. A jury awarded MGA $88.5 million in damages, endorsing MGA’s claim that Mattel had engaged in corporate espionage to ferret out and misappropriate the smaller company’s trade secrets. (I wrote about the Bratz Barbie fight for The New Yorker in 2006.) Through a series of court cases that began in 2004, it was initially Barbie shaking her contoured little bottom in a victory dance. In August, 2008, a federal judge in Riverside, California, ruled that Mattel owned the Bratz line and that MGA would have to stop selling the tarty dolls and pay Mattel a hundred million dollars in damages. The designer who had first pitched the Bratz dolls to MGA, Carter Bryant, was working for Mattel at the time, so his sketches and first so-called “sculpts” of the dolls belonged to Mattel, the company claimed—and the court agreed.

In January of this year, though, it was the Bratz girls’ turn to stick their tongues out at the competition—a move that suited them to a T. The Ninth District Court of Appeals sided with MGA, and overturned the injunction against selling Bratz, concluding, “America thrives on competition. Barbie, the All-American girl, will too.” Then, Thursday, a jury in Santa Ana, California, upheld MGA’s counterclaim about corporate espionage.

Now if by “evil,” Mattel had been referring to certain qualities of the Bratz dolls themselves, I might have said, yeah—evil-ish, anyway. The dolls, which came on the market just over a decade ago, are weirdly sexualized for playthings aimed at five- to ten-year-old girls—stiletto sandals, cushiony Botox lips, heavy eye shadow, and shop-till-you-drop, kept-girl attitude. They’re multi-ethnic, which is nice, but doesn’t quite make up for the rest of the package.

But Mattel wasn’t indicting the Bratz for any of that. In fact, it went for a similar look and attitude with its My Scene dolls. What it didn’t like was competition. On those grounds, it had a very weak case—and one that, had it been upheld, would have resulted in a paralyzingly broad notion of intellectual property. As the Ninth District ruling, written by chief judge Alex Kozinski, pointed out, Mattel “can’t claim a monopoly over fashion dolls with a bratty look or attitude, or dolls sporting trendy clothing. These are all unprotectable ideas.” What can be protected is not the idea but its specific expression: Stephanie Meyer didn’t have a monopoly on vampire stories, nor Degas on pictures of ballet dancers, and Mattel didn’t have one on fashion-forward plastic dolls.

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Flying Fish

[Holy Carp.  I've never seen anything like this.  Incoming!]

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Silly Rabbit

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Pink and Blue

Franklin Roosevelt

by  Jeanne Maglaty

Little Franklin Delano Roosevelt sits primly on a stool, his white skirt spread smoothly over his lap, his hands clasping a hat trimmed with a marabou feather. Shoulder-length hair and patent leather party shoes complete the ensemble.

We find the look unsettling today, yet social convention of 1884, when FDR was photographed at age 2 1/2, dictated that boys wore dresses until age 6 or 7, also the time of their first haircut. Franklin’s outfit was considered gender-neutral.

But nowadays people just have to know the sex of a baby or young child at first glance, says Jo B. Paoletti, a historian at the University of Maryland and author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America, to be published later this year. Thus we see, for example, a pink headband encircling the bald head of an infant girl.

Why have young children’s clothing styles changed so dramatically? How did we end up with two “teams”—boys in blue and girls in pink?

“It’s really a story of what happened to neutral clothing,” says Paoletti, who has explored the meaning of children’s clothing for 30 years. For centuries, she says, children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. “What was once a matter of practicality—you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached—became a matter of ‘Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they’ll grow up perverted,’ ” Paoletti says.

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Saturday Night Mix - Hawaiian Edition

Einstein's Brain

[ed.  I hadn't heard this story, but was intrigued after reading about the death of Dr. Einstein's granddaughter, Evelyn Einstein last week]  

by  Jon Katz

You've all heard the scientific folktale about Einstein's brain, right?  In 1995, during an autopsy after the great man's death, Einsten's brain was removed from his body, ostensibly to be studied for clues to his genius. The tale varies and gets murky after that, but most versions have it that the brain supposedly disappeared and was languishing in some file cabinet or basement.

Some rumors had it that the brain had been cut up and parts resided in various attics and garages around the United States and Canada. Other parts were said to be in the posession of the controversial doctor who performed the autopsy, an odd old man who had vanished from public view. Einstein's family, went the tales, wanted no part of his brain, or of the notion that anything could be learned from it.

Freelance writer Michael Paterniti heard the rumor, along with almost everyone else in America who is interested in science and/or technology, and was fascinated by it. He happened to mention it to his landlord in New Mexico, who didn't even blink. "Yeah," said the landlord, "the guy with the brain lives next to William (Burroughs, the writer) in Kansas. He used to be a pathologist."

So it turns out a shocking percentage of the rumor was true and soon thereafter, Paterniti tracked down the pathologist and the brain (which was stored in formaldehyde-filled Tupperware jars in New Jersey, and offered to drive him to California, where the doctor wanted to take it to Einstein's grand-daughter. Soon the two were barrelling across America in Paterniti's Buick Skylark headed for California, munching donuts, staying in cheap motels, the brain bouncing along in the trunk.

he and she

 

may i feel said he
by e e cummings

may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it's fun said she

(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she

(let's go said he
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she)

may i stay said he
(which way said she
like this said he
if you kiss said she

may i move said he
is it love said she)
if you're willing said he
(but you're killing said she

but it's life said he
but your wife said she
now said he)
ow said she

(tiptop said he
don't stop said she
oh no said he)
go slow said she

(cccome?said he
ummm said she)
you're divine!said he
(you are Mine said she)

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Salt of the Earth

Six Types of Salt and How to Use Them

by Maureen Callahan

Knowing the difference between Kosher and sea salt can make a world of difference in your dishes. Here, six easy-to-find varieties, with tips on when and where to sprinkle them.

Kosher Salt

Use it for: All cooking. Kosher salt dissolves fast, and its flavor disperses quickly, so chefs recommend tossing it on everything from pork roast to popcorn.

Origin: Either the sea or the earth. Widely sold brands include Morton and Diamond Crystal, which are made using different methods. Kosher salt got its name because its craggy crystals make it perfect for curing meat―a step in the koshering process.

Texture: Coarse. Cooks prize crystals like these; their roughness makes it easy to pinch a perfect amount.

To buy: Look in your local supermarket. Kosher salts cost about $1 a pound. If you don't mind a few clumps, buy Diamond Crystal; it has no anticaking agents, which can leave a chemical aftertaste.

Crystalline Sea Salt

Use it for: Adding a pungent burst of flavor to just-cooked foods. These crystals will complement anything from a fresh salad to a salmon fillet.

Origin: Coasts from Portugal to Maine, California to the Pacific Rim.

Texture: Fine or coarse. The size of the irregular crystals affects how fast the salt dissolves. It varies in color, depending on the minerals it contains (iron-rich red clay, for example, gives Hawaiian sea salt a pinkish hue). These natural impurities can add subtly briny, sweet, or even bitter flavors to the salts.

To buy: Check gourmet shops or on-line (thespicehouse.com stocks Hawaiian sea salt). Expect to pay $2 to $15 or more a pound. Many markets sell La Baleine, a relatively inexpensive brand ($3 for 26.5 ounces).

Charting American Exceptionalism

We’re #1: Charting American Exceptionalism

by David Morris

Los Amigos Invisibles

Have some fun.

Second Thoughts

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