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Friday Book Club - Cat's Cradle

by Michael H. Miller

The reputation of Cat’s Cradle among the literary cognoscenti is summed up succinctly in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s obituary in the New York Times: “Though it initially sold only about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English classes.” This was also my perception of the novel — something I had moved on from the same way I progressed beyond acne. Kurt Vonnegut, I thought, is serious fiction for people who do not take fiction seriously. A recent volume published by the Library of America, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963-1973, would seem to confirm his rightful status alongside other inductees into the Library of America’s unofficial canon: Henry James, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth. So why the bias?

My older sister introduced me to Vonnegut when I was 14 and had no interest in books. She gave me a copy of Cat’s Cradle, which I read in more or less one sitting, setting it down, reluctantly, only for bathroom breaks and a longer, more unfortunate respite, Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt’s house. From there, Vonnegut became the first author whose work I desired to read in full. Despite some of the turgid later works—Hocus Pocus and Deadeye Dick, in particular—I succeeded. At the end of this binge, an interesting thing happened: The impulse was purged. I never read a page of Vonnegut again.

Because of the novel’s reputation as, essentially, gateway literature, I assumed I had progressed beyond his writing in favor of Delillo, Pynchon, even the likeminded Philip K. Dick, who has had the benefit of always existing on the fringe of popular taste, always in need of a great defender. (Surely, the argument for Do Androids Dream of Sleep? as the Greatest Novel Ever is rarer than similar claims about Slaughterhouse Five.) Putting aside those assumptions, I decided, for the first time since I was 14, to revisit the author that got me reading in the first place.

I immediately saw a book filled with subtle meaning that had escaped me before, even in that blunt opening line, “Call me Jonah.” If Melville’s Ishmael (probably the most famous character in literature to use the imperative as a way of introducing himself), like the Ishmael of Genesis, was saved from drowning, Vonnegut’s narrator is telling us he is quite doomed from the outset: The Book of Jonah, of course, takes place inside the belly of a whale. The narrator’s real name is not Jonah (it’s John), but from the first sentence Vonnegut has us thinking about water. He repeats the image throughout the novel so that by the time of the arrival of ice-nine, the real villain of the book, a substance that freezes any liquid at room temperature, we’ve been anticipating its appearance and expecting the worst.

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Going Straight

by Benoit Denizet-Lewis

One Saturday afternoon last winter, I drove north on Route 85 through the rolling rangeland of southeastern Wyoming. I was headed to a small town north of Cheyenne to see an old friend and colleague named Michael Glatze. We worked together 12 years ago at XY, a San Francisco-based national magazine for young gay men, back when we were young gay men ourselves.

Though only a year removed from Dartmouth when he arrived at XY, Michael had seemingly read every gay book ever written. While I was busy trying to secure a boyfriend, he was busy contemplating queer theory, marching in gay rights rallies and urging young people to celebrate (not just accept) their same-sex attractions. Michael was devoted to helping gay youth, and he was particularly affected by the letters the magazine received regularly from teenagers who were rejected by their religious families. “Christian fundamentalists should burn in hell!” he told me once, slamming his fist on his desk. I had never met anyone so sure of himself.

Many young gay men looked up to him. He and his boyfriend at the time, Ben, who also worked at the magazine, made a handsome pair — but their appeal went deeper. On weekends we would go to raves together, and I would watch as gay boys gravitated toward the couple. Michael and Ben seemed unburdened (by shame, by self-doubt) and unapologetically pursued what the writer Paul Monette called the uniquely gay experience of “flagrant joy.” But unlike some of our friends who rode the flagrant joy train all the way to rehab, Michael and Ben rarely seemed out of control. There was a balance — a wisdom — to their quest for intense, authentic experience. Together they seemed to have figured out how to be young, gay and happy.

I thought about those times as I pulled my rental car into the Wyoming town where Michael now lives. A lot had happened in the decade since we last saw each other: he and Ben started a new gay magazine (Young Gay America, or Y.G.A.); they traveled the country for a documentary about gay teenagers; and Michael was fast becoming the leading voice for gay youth until the day, in July 2007, when he announced that he was no longer gay.

“Homosexuality came easy to me, because I was already weak,” he wrote in the opening line of an article for the far-right Web site, WorldNetDaily.com. He went on to renounce his work at XY and Y.G.A. “Homosexuality, delivered to young minds, is by its very nature pornographic,” he claimed. In a second WorldNetDaily article a week later, he said that he was “repulsed to think about homosexuality” and that he was “going to do what I can to fight it.”

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Standin' On a Corner

by Dan Frosch

WINSLOW, Ariz.— Repeat the lyric, “Well, I’m a standin’ on a corner in Winslow, Arizona,” and watch the glint of recognition in peoples’ eyes.

So it should come as no surprise that the line from “Take It Easy,” the 1972 seminal hit by The Eagles, has become the lifeblood of tiny Winslow’s tourism trade.

On the corner of Second Street and Kinsley Avenue, on Route 66, sits Standin’ on the Corner Park, an homage to the open-highway ballad that now draws hundreds of visitors every day and has revived this dusty railroad town between Flagstaff and the New Mexico border.

The park’s main attraction is a life-size bronze statue of a floppy-haired man with a guitar, the song’s protagonist. (Locals point out that the statue, by the sculptor Ron Adamson, is neither Jackson Browne, who wrote the song with Glenn Frey, nor Mr. Frey, the Eagles member who sang it.)

A cherry-red, vintage flatbed Ford truck is parked nearby. And on a brick wall behind the statue and truck is a large mural, by John Pugh, featuring a grinning blonde in a pickup, who clearly — as the song says — is “slowin’ down to take a look” at the itinerant, all-American musician who has caught her eye.

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100 Million Android Fans Can't Be Wrong

by Beth Kowitt

The inside story of how Google conquered the smartphone world.

When Google (GOOG) acquired a tiny wireless startup called Android in 2005, few at the search giant had particularly high hopes for the deal -- if they even knew about it. At that point Google had purchased just a handful of companies, mostly software makers it had quietly folded into its operations. (Big, high-profile deals like YouTube and DoubleClick came later.) Besides, not many people knew exactly what Android did: The upstart was in stealth mode, and co-founder Andy Rubin, best known for creating the Sidekick mobile device, said little about its product or mission. Executive chairman Eric Schmidt would later joke that he scarcely noticed when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin bought the company.

Today, of course, Android is impossible to ignore. It is the mobile operating system -- the brains of a cellphone -- that powers more than 100 million gadgets. (That number will be out of date by the time you read this: Every day another 400,000 Android devices are activated.) Apple's (AAPL) iPhone gets credit for showing consumers just how cool and powerful a mobile device could be, but Google democratized smartphones by making Android available free to any handset maker that wanted to use the platform. At last count, Android software was on more than 300 different phones and tablets around the world. The only smartphones that use the iPhone operating system? iPhones. "If you just plot the graph looking at how quickly we grew," says Rubin, now senior vice president of mobile at Google, "it's almost vertical."

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The Big Business of Synthetic Highs

by Ben Paynter

It's a Friday afternoon in April, and Wesley Upchurch, the 24-year-old owner of Pandora Potpourri, has arrived at his factory to fill some last-minute orders for the weekend. The factory is a cramped, unmarked garage bay adjoining an auto body shop in Columbia, Mo. What Upchurch and his one full-time employee, 21-year-old Jay Harness, are making is debatable, at least in their eyes. The finished product looks like crushed grass, comes in three-gram (.11ounce) packets, and sells for about $13 wholesale. Its key ingredient is a synthetic cannabinoid that mimics tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient in marijuana. Upchurch, however, insists his product is incense. "There are rogue players in this industry that make the business look bad for everyone," Upchurch says. "We don't want people smoking this."

From the outside the place looks abandoned. The only sign of life is a lone security camera. Inside, two flags hang above a makeshift assembly line. One shows a coiled snake and reads "Don't Tread On Me." The other has a peace symbol. The work space consists of a long, foldout table containing a pile of lustrous, green vegetation, a pocket-calculator-size electronic scale, a stack of reflective, hot-pink Mylar foil packets, and a heat sealer. Each packet has the brand name, Bombay Breeze, and is decorated with a psychedelic logo featuring a cartoon elephant meditating among abstract-looking coils of smoke and stars.

Upchurch supervises as Harness weighs out portions of the crushed foliage, dumps it into a packet, and slides the top through the heating machine to create an airtight, tamper-proof seal. He finishes about a dozen in 10 minutes, topping off what they will need for their deliveries: two shipments of more than 1,000 packets each. Upchurch points to a disclaimer near the bottom right-hand corner of each package that reads, in all caps: "NOT FOR CONSUMPTION." Says Upchurch: "That's to discourage abuse."

His protests and disclaimers to the contrary, Pandora is getting smoked—it's being packed into bongs and reviewed on sites such as YouTube (GOOG)—for its ability to alter the mind. Like many others, Upchurch is repackaging experimental medical chemicals for mainstream store shelves, most often with some clever double-entendre in the branding. He says he sells about 41,000 packets a month, delivering directly to 50 stores around the country and shipping the rest to five other wholesalers, some of whom use Pandora's products to create their own brands. Upchurch says he ships mostly in bulk orders for larger discounts. He projects his company will earn $2.5 million in revenue with $500,000 in profits this year, depending on what federal and state laws pass. "I think my business model is based less on charts than it is on guts, or something," he says.

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Pencil Dice

The simple addition of dice markings to a six sided pencil makes all the difference. Pencil dice is an essential addition to any brief case, pen cup or pencil case. A little something to help you pass the time, entertain the children or even make decisions.

Sold in pairs
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Feist

[ed.  On a Feist groove today.  Wonderful songs, fabulous voice.]

The Secret History of Iraq’s Invisible War

by Noah Schactman

In the early years of the Iraq war, the U.S. military developed a technology so secret that soldiers would refuse to acknowledge its existence, and reporters mentioning the gear were promptly escorted out of the country. That equipment – a radio-frequency jammer – was upgraded several times, and eventually robbed the Iraq insurgency of its most potent weapon, the remote-controlled bomb. But the dark veil surrounding the jammers remained largely intact, even after the Pentagon bought more than 50,000 units at a cost of over $17 billion.

Recently, however, I received an unusual offer from ITT, the defense contractor which made the vast majority of those 50,000 jammers. Company executives were ready to discuss the jammer – its evolution, and its capabilities. They were finally able to retell the largely-hidden battles for the electromagnetic spectrum that raged, invisibly, as the insurgencies carried on. They were prepared to bring me into the R&D facility where company technicians were developing what could amount to the ultimate weapon of this electromagnetic war: a tool that offers the promise of not only jamming bombs, but finding them, interrupting GPS signals, eavesdropping on enemy communications, and disrupting drones, too. The first of the these machines begins field-testing next month.

On a fist-clenchingly cold winter morning, I took a train across the Hudson River to the secret jammer lab.

Tucked behind a Target and an Olive Garden knock-off, the flat, anonymous office building gives no hint of what’s inside. Nor do the blank, fluorescent-lit halls. But open a door off of one of those halls, and people start screaming.

“Screens off!” barks a man with a fullback’s build. “Turn off the test equipment!” On the ceiling, a yellow alarm light flashes and spins — the sign that someone without a security clearance is in a classified facility.

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The Humpty-Dumpty Problem

by Robert L. Dorit

The publication in 1637 of René Descartes’ Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences changed the practice of science forever. In it, he poured the foundations of modern science by putting forth two powerful and interrelated theses. The first embraced reductionism as a way of knowing: Descartes committed himself to “divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution,” and to “conduct my thoughts in such order that, beginning with those objects that are simplest and most readily understood, I might ascend little by little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex.” Later in the same work, he deployed one of the most durable metaphors of Western intellectual thought: He argued that the body was best thought of as a machine.

By coupling those two ideas—that complex machines could be understood by taking them apart, and that living beings are essentially machines—Descartes set the stage for the age of science. He argued persuasively that living systems emerge as the physical consequences of material forces. For example, also in his Discourse, he explained the workings of the heart:

I wish it to be considered that the motion which I have now explained follows as necessarily from the very arrangement of the parts, which may be observed in the heart by the eye alone, and from the heat which may be felt with the fingers, and from the nature of the blood as learned from experience, as does the motion of a clock from the power, the situation, and shape of its counterweights and wheels.

The living world was thus the legitimate province of the sciences and its inner workings could be probed and understood through logic, observation and experiment.

The task of this new science would henceforth consist in disassembling the seemingly complicated machinery of life into its simplest components, which could then be cataloged, prodded, manipulated and described. According to Descartes’ model, any real understanding of the body could only come from taking it apart, just as one takes apart a machine to discover its inner workings. If we wish to understand how a clock tells time, according to this model, our job is to disassemble it. Understanding a clock means understanding its springs and gears. And the same is true of living “machines.”

This notion of the body as a machine would clear away centuries of intellectual detritus: By arguing that the body was the sum of its interacting parts, and, more importantly, by suggesting that the study of those parts would reveal the workings of the body, Descartes shifted centuries of scientific and philosophical discussion about imponderable life forces and inexplicable animist vapors. (Lest we go overboard in praising Descartes, he clearly panicked at the last moment. He exempted human beings from the ground rules he set for other living organisms. In so doing, he sowed 400 years of confusion and discord with his notion that the mind and the body were separate phenomena, governed by separate rules.)

Implicit in both the strategy of reductionism and the metaphor of the machine, however, is a hidden assumption. That assumption is that an accurate understanding of the parts will reveal the workings of the machine in their entirety. To state it differently, we do not need to be overly concerned with how we take the machine apart, because the parts themselves will dictate the reassembly. But is this assumption true?

Anyone who has tried to repair a piece of lab equipment, a washing machine or even an old-school carburetor knows the dangers of taking something apart without paying careful attention to the process. Making a couple of sketches or taking a few photographs during disassembly certainly makes life easier later on, when the goal is reconstruction. A little thought and a few disastrous reassemblies make it easy to dismiss the idea that the parts harbor the information needed to reassemble the whole. Yet the truth is complicated. I suspect that the reductionist strategy, in its purest form, does work when the number of component parts is comparatively small and their relations are limited and predictable. If a given gear can only mesh with a small number of other components, and a given spring fits only on a single stem, the parts do encode the whole. This is why a good clock maker could probably put a clock back together—even one she has never seen before—if all of the parts were laid out in front of her.

But living systems are not really clocklike in their assembly, and organisms are not really machines. Despite Descartes’ contention that we could not distinguish a well-made automaton of an ape from an actual ape (“were there such machines exactly resembling organs and outward form an ape or any other irrational animal, we could have no means of knowing that they were in any respect of a different nature from these animals”), the relations of parts to wholes in living systems is entirely different from that in machines—and most unclocklike.

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Peaches

[ed.  Wow.  I didn't realize until reading the Feist article (following this post) that she and Peaches were once roommates.  Talk about different career paths.]

Caution advised on the next video, you will never view the Andy Griffith Show (Mayberry, RFD) with the same perspective again.  I won't even get into the Muppets version.

Feist 1234

by Jon Pareles

On the way to the video shoot for a song named “1 2 3 4,” Leslie Feist called her father on her cellphone, urging him to drop by the studio. “I’m going to dance like in ‘Fame,’ ” bubbled Feist, a petite 31-year-old brunette who uses her last name for her solo recording career. “I’m going to be carried around on the shoulders of 50 people, like Madonna in ‘Material Girl,’ only minus the pearls and the back muscles.”

She wasn’t exaggerating. “1 2 3 4,” which appears on her new album, “The Reminder” (Cherry Tree/Interscope), is an easy-swinging tune, almost like a nursery rhyme, that grows into a mass chorus. Tucked into it are lyrics that celebrate the intensity of teenage bonds and feelings: “Money can’t buy you back the love that you had then.” The video clip, to be completed in just two days of rehearsals and one of shooting, would be a big live production number: an uninterrupted, uneditable one-camera take.

Four dozen dancers in color-coordinated thrift-store clothes surrounded Feist, raising her overhead and, at one point, flipping her. The camera swooped around, amid and above them, revealing geometric patterns like a Busby Berkeley sequence. Feist had traded her usual T-shirt and jeans for a flashy blue-sequined pantsuit and pointy golden high heels, which pinched her feet. “It’s not the most pleasant sensation,” she said after dancing in them through take after take. “But it’s for the razzle-dazzle.”

What’s a nice indie-rocker doing in a scene like this? Courting a potential mainstream audience while offering something as substantial as it is catchy.

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IBM 100

by Michael Hill and Jordan Robertson

Google, Apple and Facebook get all the attention. But the forgettable everyday tasks of technology — saving a file on your laptop, swiping your ATM card to get 40 bucks, scanning a gallon of milk at the checkout line — that's all IBM.

International Business Machines turns 100 on Thursday without much fanfare. But its much younger competitors owe a lot to Big Blue.

After all, where would Groupon be without the supermarket bar code? Or Google without the mainframe computer?

"They were kind of like a cornerstone of that whole enterprise that has become the heart of the computer industry in the U.S.," says Bob Djurdjevic, a former IBM employee and president of Annex Research.

IBM dates to June 16, 1911, when three companies that made scales, punch-clocks for work and other machines merged to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Co. The modern-day name followed in 1924.

With a plant in Endicott, N.Y., the new business also made cheese slicers and — significantly for its future — machines that read data stored on punch cards. By the 1930s, IBM's cards were keeping track of 26 million Americans for the newly launched Social Security program.

These old, sprawling machines might seem quaint in the iPod era, but they had design elements similar to modern computers. They had places for data storage, math processing areas and output, says David A. Mindell, professor of the history of technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Punch cards carted from station to station represented what business today might call "data flow."

"It was very sophisticated," Mindell says.

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Swoosh

by Allen Brettman

When the Nike pioneers caught their first glimpse of the black, curvy checkmark, the graphic designer waited patiently for a reaction.

Nothing. Then, what else you got?

Carolyn Davidson, pushing back disappointment that spring day in 1971, pressed on. One by one, she presented a handful of sketches. But ultimately the three men circled back to the checkmark, her favorite.

 "Well, I don't love it," Phil Knight said at the time, "but maybe it will grow on me."

Today, on the cusp of its 40th year, the symbol borne of necessity and a chance meeting at Portland State is one of the most recognizable in the world -- so much so that it can stand alone, without even naming the Oregon sports apparel empire it signifies.

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iCufflinks v1.0

iCufflinks by Adafruit from adafruit industries on Vimeo.

Phil from Adafruit Industries announces the iCufflink: "Open source electronic cufflinks, pulsate like Apple Macs - a very last minute ultimate geek gift for Father's day. I co-designed these little cufflinks; I wanted something that was futuristic but still classy enough to wear for special events when I need to get dressed up. There will be a necklace version too, of course."

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Underworld

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

He handed me a salt-and-vinegar potato chip. We were more than 500 feet underground, sitting on a blanket of powdered limestone, up in Section Two and a Half South. I asked him if there was anything he enjoyed about coal mining.

He thought a moment.

“I’m gonna say no,” he said.

“Oh, come on,” I said.

“You gotta stop shining your frickin’ light in my eye,” he said. “What did I tell you about that?”

He told me that the one thing that was going to piss off Billy, Smitty, Pap, Ragu, and the rest of the guys in the crew was if I pointed my light directly in their eyes. It’s a common early mistake. The normal human urge is to look a person in the eye, and when your only visibility is from a hard hat shining a pinpoint of light through the darkness, naturally you’re going to aim that sucker right at the eyeball.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Go for the shoulder,” he said. “Or the chin.”

I asked him how he got the nickname Foot.

“The first day I went into the coal mine, a guy looked down and said, ‘Damn, how big are your feet?’ I said, ‘15.’ He said, ‘You’re a big-footed son of a bitch.’ And that was it. One guy had a huge head, so of course we called him Pumpkin. One guy had a big red birthmark on his face, so of course his name was Spot. They don’t cut you any slack. They’ll get right on you. A coal miner will get right on you.”

I shined my light on his boots and he wagged them, like puppets.

It was tough getting used to identifying people, in the darkness, just as feet, shoulders, chin, teeth. As for Foot, he was a truck of a man, 49 years old, a wide load in both girth and spirit. He had a messy mop of gray hair and a rugged, intelligent face that often wore one expression: “You gotta be kidding me.” He was proud of a lot of what he’d done with his life—his three kids, his stint as a county commissioner, his coal-mining expertise—but his heart, he said, belonged to his fifty-two head of beef cattle: Pork Chop, Frick and Frack, and, aw, Bonehead, with the amazing white eyelashes.

He’d been in and out of coal mines since graduating high school and had just been promoted to assistant safety director of the Hopedale Mining coal company in Cadiz, Ohio, a small operation in the eastern part of the state, just beyond the panhandle of West Virginia. Aboveground, the area looks a lot more New England—rolling farmland dotted with tall oaks, white church steeples, geranium pots hanging on front porches—than it does the tar-paper-shack Appalachia people tend to associate with coal mining. Underground, I wasn’t permitted to go anywhere without Foot, even though I did. He got sick of me, and I got sick of him, and so he got even more sick of me in what became, over a four-month period, an easy friendship.

“It’s kind of peaceful down here,” I said to him.

“Yeah,” he said.

We were not at the face, not “up on section,” where the bellow and whir and hucka-chucka-hucka-chucka of the toothy, goofy, phallic continuous miner machine was extracting coal and dumping it, load after load, onto buggies that zoomed like lunatic roaches through the darkness. We were over in B entry, or A entry, or perhaps room 3; I had no idea. I rarely knew where I was in that endless catacomb of tunnels, on and on and on, about fifteen square miles in all, where the quiet, when you found it, felt like an 
embrace. You could sit there. You could shut your light off, sit there in the perfectly dark silence. Nothing. Just—nothing.

Until: Pop!

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The Indignity of Industrial Tomatoes

by Barry Estabrook

My obituary's headline would have read "Food Writer Killed by Flying Tomato."

On a visit to my parents in Naples, Florida, I was driving I-75 when I came up behind one of those gravel trucks that seem to be everywhere in southwest Florida's rush to convert pine woods and cypress stands into gated communities and shopping malls. As I drew closer, I saw that the tractor trailer was heavy with what seemed to be green apples. When I pulled out to pass, three of them sailed off the truck, narrowly missing my windshield. Every time it hit the slightest bump, more of those orbs would tumble off. At the first stoplight, I got a closer look. The shoulder of the road was littered with green tomatoes so plasticine and so identical they could have been stamped out by a machine. Most looked smooth and unblemished. A few had cracks in their skins. Not one was smashed. A 10-foot drop followed by a 60-mile-per- hour impact with pavement is no big deal to a modern, agribusiness tomato.

If you have ever eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store or restaurant, chances are good that you have eaten a tomato much like the ones aboard that truck. Florida alone accounts for one-third of the fresh tomatoes raised in the United States, and from October to June, virtually all the fresh-market, field-grown tomatoes in the country come from the Sunshine State, which ships more than one billion pounds every year. It takes a tough tomato to stand up to the indignity of such industrial scale farming, so most Florida tomatoes are bred for hardness, picked when still firm and green (the merest trace of pink is taboo), and artificially gassed with ethylene in warehouses until they acquire the rosy red skin tones of a ripe tomato.

Beauty, in this case, is only skin deep. According to figures compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Americans bought $5 billion worth of perfectly round, perfectly red, and, in the opinion of many consumers, perfectly tasteless fresh tomatoes in 2009—our second most popular vegetable behind lettuce. We buy winter tomatoes, but that doesn't mean we like them. In survey after survey, fresh tomatoes fall at or near the bottom in rankings of consumer satisfaction. No one will ever be able to duplicate the flavor of garden-grown fruits and vegetables at the supermarket, but there's a reason you don't hear consumers bemoaning the taste of supermarket cabbages, onions, or potatoes. Of all the fruits and vegetables we eat, none suffers at the hands of factory farming more than a tomato grown in the wintertime fields of Florida.

Perhaps our taste buds are trying to send us a message. Today's industrial tomatoes are as bereft of nutrition as they are of flavor. According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, fresh tomatoes today have 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than they did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium.

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Black Ops and Blood Money

by Matthew Teague

Hearing the American’s name whispered in his ear, the chief of police in Lahore, Pakistan, turns from his desk and nods toward a nondescript side door in his office. His desk sits surrounded by concentric rings of chairs, occupied by visitors hoping for a moment of Chief Aslam Tareen’s time. Lahore is a city of 10 million people, and justice demands constant attention. But before he’ll discuss the American — perhaps the most notorious American in Pakistan’s history — Tareen needs privacy. He leaves his desk and slips through the side door into a smaller, more secluded office. A bed is in the corner, along with a television, and an attendant brings a pair of slippers and sets them before the chief’s leather recliner. In Pakistan the truth is like a woman; it stays veiled in public, only fully revealing itself behind closed doors. And this particular subject is a treacherous one.

“Raymond Davis,” Tareen says, settling into his chair. “Spy.”

Davis operated in the darkest shadows of the war against terrorism. He worked for the CIA as an independent contractor, gathering information on the jihadist group behind some of the most cruel and spectacular attacks in recent years. The intelligence operation collapsed violently in January when two Pakistani men accosted Davis on a crowded street and he shot them both dead with a skill rarely seen outside spy novels. A botched attempt to rescue him in the -aftermath left a third man dead and Davis under arrest.

The episode inflamed the Pakistani people and set up a tricky showdown between two governments. It also pierced the cloak covering a clandestine world, exposing a realm of surveillance and countersurveillance, suspicion and political exploitation. For the United States, the consequences were profound: Pakistan is the CIA’s most important arena, a hiding spot for Al Qaeda and home of a dangerous, rising terrorist militia called Lashkar-e-Taiba. But Davis’s eventual release cost America much more than the money that was paid to compensate victims’ families: Backroom deals have forced the withdrawal of CIA operatives from the heartland of terrorism.

In the days after the incident, Police Chief Tareen announced to an outraged public that the American had murdered young Pakistani men “in cold blood.” But now, in his private chamber, Tareen can’t disguise a tone of professional admiration.

He had questioned Davis himself, but “from day one to day 14, he would not talk,” he says. Two weeks of silence. And then?

“He was in solitary,” Tareen says. “He said he wanted something to read.” They gave him magazines.

“He was very well trained,” says the chief. “Very calm.”

But what about the incident, I ask — the one that brought on the greatest intelligence crisis in America’s history with Pakistan? What about the shooting?

Tareen smiles.

“The shooting was expert.”

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