Saturday, July 2, 2011
Fidel’s Heir
by Jon Lee Anderson
A few years ago, when Hugo Chávez, the President of Venezuela, said that he wanted a new jet to replace the nearly thirty-year-old Boeing bequeathed to him by his predecessor, his critics raised an outcry. But Chávez went ahead with his plans. His new plane, which cost sixty-five million dollars, is a gleaming white Airbus A-319, with a white leather interior, seating for sixty passengers, and a private compartment. The folding seat-back trays have gold-colored hinges, and there is plenty of legroom.
A few years ago, when Hugo Chávez, the President of Venezuela, said that he wanted a new jet to replace the nearly thirty-year-old Boeing bequeathed to him by his predecessor, his critics raised an outcry. But Chávez went ahead with his plans. His new plane, which cost sixty-five million dollars, is a gleaming white Airbus A-319, with a white leather interior, seating for sixty passengers, and a private compartment. The folding seat-back trays have gold-colored hinges, and there is plenty of legroom.
Bolívar is Chávez’s political muse; Chávez quotes and invokes him constantly, and is unabashed about his desire to resuscitate Bolívar’s dream of a united Latin America. In his first year in office, Chávez held a successful referendum to draft a new constitution, which officially renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. More remarkably, he has adopted Fidel Castro as his contemporary role model and socialism as his political ideal, and, a decade and a half after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is leading a left-wing revival across Latin America. Chávez’s hemispheric ambitions have made him one of the most compelling, audacious, and polarizing figures in the world—one of a number of post-Cold War leaders trying to form regional power blocs. A generation ago, Castro sought to undermine United States authority by supporting armed guerrilla forces; Chávez has pursued that goal mainly by using money—thanks, in large measure, to U.S. oil purchases. Venezuela is the fifth-largest supplier of oil to the U. S., providing around a million barrels a day, and its proved oil reserves are among the world’s largest.
One recent Sunday, I flew with Chávez to La Faja del Orinoco, an oil-rich belt of land in eastern Venezuela. In May, 2007, Chávez ordered the nationalization of pumping and refining facilities in La Faja owned by foreign oil companies. The move was one of a series of measures that Chávez had taken to increase Venezuela’s share of oil revenues, including increases in royalty payments from 16.6 per cent to 33.3 per cent, and its ownership stake from around forty to at least sixty per cent. (As recently as 2004, these companies were paying royalties of one per cent of the oil’s value.) Most of the oil companies, including Chevron and B.P., agreed to the terms; ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil did not, and pulled out.
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The Brain Unveiled
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Images by Van Wedeen, Ruopeng Wang, Jeremy Schmahmann, and Guangping Dai of the MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging in Boston, MA; Patric Hagmann of EPFL and CHUV, Lausanne, Switzerland; and Jon Kaas of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN.
Brain Connections
Diffusion spectrum imaging, developed by neuroscientist Van Wedeen at Massachusetts General Hospital, analyzes magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data in new ways, letting scientists map the nerve fibers that carry information between cells. These images, generated from a living human brain, show a reconstruction of the entire brain (1) and a subset of fibers (2). The red fibers in the middle and lower left of both images are part of the corpus callosum, which connects the two halves of the brain.
Mapping Diffusion
Neural fibers in the brain are too tiny to image directly, so scientists map them by measuring the diffusion of water molecules along their length. The scientists first break the MRI image into "voxels," or three-dimensional pixels, and calculate the speed at which water is moving through each voxel in every direction. Te researchers can infer the most likely path of the various nerve fibers (red and blue lines) passing through that spot. The result is a detailed diagram like that of the brain stem (3).
By Emily Singer, MIT Technology Review, November/December 2008
Basking in Russia’s Love Long After a Musical Triumph
A small tumult erupted on Mayakovsky Square the other day as a crowd of Russians pressed in around a gangly, white-haired man from Texas.
At issue was love. Tremulous, tearful love, the kind of love that could compel you to embroider bedroom slippers and tea cozies and thrust them at your love object as he climbs into his car, along with bunches of daisies and a single, perfectly ripe pear.
That is the way Russians feel about Van Cliburn, the American pianist who in 1958, at the height of the cold war, won the Soviet Union’s premier musical competition. Fifty-three years later, that event still reverberates so powerfully here that when Mr. Cliburn steps into a concert hall, the whole room seems to twitch and move toward him like a living organism.
The International Tchaikovsky Competition brings out grand emotions in Russians, even today.
As they watched the awards ceremony on Thursday night, fanning themselves like Baptists at a megachurch, some talked in low voices about the conductor (Russian) who withdrew from the event in disgrace after calling the prize-winning cellist (Armenian) a word that loosely translates as “redneck.” A gaggle of women in their 70s stood in the lobby fuming about the elimination of a favorite pianist in the second round, finally appointing one of their number to confront a judge who was making his way toward the buffet.
But the legend of Mr. Cliburn — who returned at age 76 to serve as an honorary juror — is in its own weight class.
On Saturday, as her friends bickered about whether it would tax Mr. Cliburn too much to give him more flowers, Natalya Subbotina mustered her courage and approached him. He embraced her, and she began to weep. “Natasha!” one of her friends shouted. “Get ahold of yourself! Get ahold of yourself!”
Ms. Subbotina was still shaken a few minutes later, as he drove away.
“He loves the whole world,” she said. “There is enough of him for the whole world! This is a great heart!”
These are echoes of a historic moment. In 1958, Khrushchev was exploring the idea of “peaceful coexistence” with the United States. Enter Mr. Cliburn, a raw-boned 23-year-old from Kilgore, Tex., with spidery fingers that sometimes got so sore he would wrap them in gauze and ointment.
The Great Zamperini
By Elizabeth Segal
Louis Zamperini is 86 years old. His doctors at the VA say they’ve never met a man quite like him. “I’ve got 110/60, a 60 pulse, 185 cholesterol,” he says, grinning as he rattles off the enviable stats. “I’m told I have the vitals of a 35-year-old. And with all I’ve been through, they thought I’d be dead by 55! I almost did lose a kidney after being dehydrated on that raft and fighting those sharks. But the kidney bounced back.”
Zamperini is, of course, referring to the time when, as a World War II bombardier, he crashed over the Pacific and drifted for 47 days on a life raft, only to be taken captive by the Japanese for more than two years. And then there’s the episode during the 1936 Olympics when he was singled out for a handshake by Adolf Hitler, and the time he lifted a swastika-emblazoned banner off a Reichstag flagpole. His death-defying life of derring-do sounds like something out of a book – so, obligingly, he’s compiled these and other remarkable chapters into Devil at My Heels: A World War II Hero’s Epic Saga of Torment, Survival, and Forgiveness (William Morrow / HarperCollins 2003). Released in February, the memoir “contains the wisdom of a life well lived, by a man who sacrificed more for it than many people would dare to imagine,” writes Sen. John McCain in the foreword. Nicolas Cage may soon be playing “Lucky Louie” in the Universal Pictures film version. And don’t be surprised if Zamperini has still more adventures up his sleeve – despite his advanced years, he’s got energy in spades (not to mention those great vital signs). When he isn’t writing and traveling to speaking engagements, he still skis regularly and flies stunts in his World War II-era plane.
Lou Zamperini’s life could have taken a whole other path, given its hard-scrabble start. “My parents really loved me, but I kept getting into trouble,” he says contritely. The son of Italian immigrants, he spoke no English when his family moved to Torrance, Calif., a trait that quickly attracted the attention of neighborhood bullies. His father taught him how to box in self-defense, and pretty soon “I was beating the tar out of every one of them,” he says, chuckling. “But I was so good at it that I started relishing the idea of getting even. I was sort of addicted to it.”
Louis Zamperini is 86 years old. His doctors at the VA say they’ve never met a man quite like him. “I’ve got 110/60, a 60 pulse, 185 cholesterol,” he says, grinning as he rattles off the enviable stats. “I’m told I have the vitals of a 35-year-old. And with all I’ve been through, they thought I’d be dead by 55! I almost did lose a kidney after being dehydrated on that raft and fighting those sharks. But the kidney bounced back.”
Zamperini is, of course, referring to the time when, as a World War II bombardier, he crashed over the Pacific and drifted for 47 days on a life raft, only to be taken captive by the Japanese for more than two years. And then there’s the episode during the 1936 Olympics when he was singled out for a handshake by Adolf Hitler, and the time he lifted a swastika-emblazoned banner off a Reichstag flagpole. His death-defying life of derring-do sounds like something out of a book – so, obligingly, he’s compiled these and other remarkable chapters into Devil at My Heels: A World War II Hero’s Epic Saga of Torment, Survival, and Forgiveness (William Morrow / HarperCollins 2003). Released in February, the memoir “contains the wisdom of a life well lived, by a man who sacrificed more for it than many people would dare to imagine,” writes Sen. John McCain in the foreword. Nicolas Cage may soon be playing “Lucky Louie” in the Universal Pictures film version. And don’t be surprised if Zamperini has still more adventures up his sleeve – despite his advanced years, he’s got energy in spades (not to mention those great vital signs). When he isn’t writing and traveling to speaking engagements, he still skis regularly and flies stunts in his World War II-era plane.
Lou Zamperini’s life could have taken a whole other path, given its hard-scrabble start. “My parents really loved me, but I kept getting into trouble,” he says contritely. The son of Italian immigrants, he spoke no English when his family moved to Torrance, Calif., a trait that quickly attracted the attention of neighborhood bullies. His father taught him how to box in self-defense, and pretty soon “I was beating the tar out of every one of them,” he says, chuckling. “But I was so good at it that I started relishing the idea of getting even. I was sort of addicted to it.”
Rockmelt
Ever since RockMelt launched its social browser, it’s been known unofficially as the Facebook browser. Facebook chat, status updates and sharing are all built right into the browser. Now Facebook and RockMelt are officially working together in a product partnership, and the first fruits of that collaboration can be seen in the latest release available today, RockMelt 3.
RockMelt is still an independent browser with only a few hundred thousand active users. Facebook made no investment in RockMelt, nor is it going to help promote or distribute the browser, at least initially. Its product teams, however, are working closely with RockMelt to make sure that its Facebook features shine. “The partnership is based on a shared belief that social should join navigation and search as fundamental capabilities of the browser,” says RockMelt CEO EricVishria.
There are several new features in RockMelt 3. To start with, RockMelt 3 adds Moves your Facebook buddy list from the left edge to the right edge of the browser. The buddy list is now scrollable, and it can be expanded to view not just pictures of your friends’ faces, but their full names.
The second new feature is that Facebook notifications, messages, and friend requests—what Facebook engineers internally call “the jewels”—are now visible at the top of RockMelt right in the chrome itself. You can visually see when you have a new notification, friend request, or message, and pop down a window to read more.
RockMelt is now integrated with Facebook’s unified messaging system. So if a contact is online, a chat window pops open. If he or she is not, it reverts to Facebook messages.
RockMelt also knows when you are on Facebook.com, and strips away the redundant features from the site which are part of the browser. So the notification counters at the top pf Facebook disappear because they are now a feature of RockMelt. And when you are on Facebook.com, and a friend wants to chat, RockMelt’s version of Facebook chat opens up instead of two chat windows duplicating each other, which is what happened before.
So far, RockMelt has not taken off as much as its initial launch hype would have suggested. Since it opened up its beta to the public in March, it’s seen modest growth, but high user engagement. A Facebook endorsement could help its cause.
So did Marc Andreessen, who is both a Facebook and RockMelt board member, have anything to do with this partnership? Not initially. “Someone on Zuck’s staff was an alpha user—one of our first 100 users—he showed it to Zuck and that is what got the partnership going,” Vishria tells me.
Certainly, it is not too difficult to imagine why Facebook would be interested in supporting the development of a social browser.
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Friday, July 1, 2011
The Odds of That
NY Times article, dated August 11, 2002.
When the Miami Police first found Benito Que, he was slumped on a desolate side street, near the empty spot where he had habitually parked his Ford Explorer. At about the same time, Don C. Wiley mysteriously disappeared. His car, a white rented Mitsubishi Galant, was abandoned on a bridge outside of Memphis, where he had just had a jovial dinner with friends. The following week, Vladimir Pasechnik collapsed in London, apparently of a stroke.The list would grow to nearly a dozen in the space of four nerve-jangling months. Stabbed in Leesburg, Va. Suffocated in an air-locked lab in Geelong, Australia. Found wedged under a chair, naked from the waist down, in a blood-splattered apartment in Norwich, England. Hit by a car while jogging. Killed in a private plane crash. Shot dead while a pizza delivery man served as a decoy.
What joined these men was their proximity to the world of bioterror and germ warfare. Que, the one who was car-jacked, was a researcher at the University of Miami School of Medicine. Wiley, the most famous, knew as much as anyone about how the immune system responds to attacks from viruses like Ebola. Pasechnik was Russian, and before he defected, he helped the Soviets transform cruise missiles into biological weapons. The chain of deaths -- these three men and eight others like them -- began last fall, back when emergency teams in moonsuits were scouring the Capitol, when postal workers were dying, when news agencies were on high alert and the entire nation was afraid to open its mail.
In more ordinary times, this cluster of deaths might not have been noticed, but these are not ordinary times. Neighbors report neighbors to the F.B.I.; passengers are escorted off planes because they make other passengers nervous; medical journals debate what to publish, for fear the articles will be read by evil eyes. Now we are spooked and startled by stories like these -- all these scientists dying within months of one another, at the precise moment when tiny organisms loom as a gargantuan threat. The stories of these dozen or so deaths started out as a curiosity and were transformed rumor by rumor into the specter of conspiracy as they circulated first on the Internet and then in the mainstream media. What are the odds , after all?
What are the odds, indeed?
For this is not about conspiracy but about coincidence -- unexpected connections that are both riveting and rattling. Much religious faith is based on the idea that almost nothing is coincidence; science is an exercise in eliminating the taint of coincidence; police work is often a feint and parry between those trying to prove coincidence and those trying to prove complicity. Without coincidence, there would be few movies worth watching (''Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine''), and literary plots would come grinding to a disappointing halt. (What if Oedipus had not happened to marry his mother? If Javert had not happened to arrive in the town where Valjean was mayor?)
The true meaning of the word is ''a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection.'' In other words, pure happenstance. Yet by merely noticing a coincidence, we elevate it to something that transcends its definition as pure chance. We are discomforted by the idea of a random universe. Like Mel Gibson's character Graham Hess in M. Night Shyamalan's new movie ''Signs,'' we want to feel that our lives are governed by a grand plan.
The need is especially strong in an age when paranoia runs rampant. ''Coincidence feels like a loss of control perhaps,'' says John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University and the author of ''Innumeracy,'' the improbable best seller about how Americans don't understand numbers. Finding a reason or a pattern where none actually exists ''makes it less frightening,'' he says, because events get placed in the realm of the logical. ''Believing in fate, or even conspiracy, can sometimes be more comforting than facing the fact that sometimes things just happen.''
Fall of the House of Busch
On Dec. 18, 2010, August Busch IV and his girlfriend, Adrienne Martin, a former Hooters waitress, aspiring art therapist, and divorced mother of an 8-year-old boy, began what was, for them, a typical night in. They enjoyed a steak dinner at Busch’s home. They drank for hours, and finally went to sleep around 3 in the morning, according to the first of three versions Busch provided to authorities. He woke sometime after noon and went to the kitchen to make two protein shakes. When he returned to the bedroom with Martin’s drink, he tried to wake her. She was unconscious.
Busch lives alone in a 6,300-square-foot mansion set on four wooded acres in the village of Huntleigh, just outside St. Louis. Fifteen miles to the east is the headquarters of Anheuser-Busch, the biggest brewery in America and the maker of Budweiser beer, along with 30 other brands. The company had been run by Busch’s family for 150 years until it was devoured by the Belgian-Brazilian conglomerate InBev (BUD) in 2008 in a $52 billion hostile takeover. Busch, 47, was Chief Executive Officer at the time that Anheuser-Busch was wrenched from his control. He ended his two-year marriage shortly afterward. Pretty soon, Martin, 27, was the only person who saw him regularly.
Police reports describe a chaotic scene in Busch’s bedroom that Sunday afternoon. The room, located on the first floor, is in a wing of the mansion that household staff are not usually allowed to enter. Blackout shades cover the windows. Martin could not be revived. She was lying on top of the sheets on the left side of the bed, dressed in a blue tank top, gray spandex leggings, a black sweat jacket, and one black sock on her left foot. A white sock was nearby. She wore a silver-and-diamond Breitling watch on her left wrist, which had stopped at 5:35:08. The police noted three empty prescription drug bottles with Martin’s name on the labels. They also found a straw with a white residue—later identified as cocaine—under the mattress and another in Martin’s jacket pocket.
Busch has spoken publicly only once since Martin’s death. In a Jan. 4, 2011, interview with the gossip columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, he said that the sale of Anheuser-Busch, just 18 months after he had been named CEO, sent him spiraling into a debilitating depression. He confirmed that he was in rehab for that and “other issues” in early 2010. He also professed his love for Martin. “You know, I’m this notorious bachelor who always wanted someone on the side, but I didn’t with Adrienne.” He added that he was friends with Martin’s ex-husband, Kevin, and was close to their son. “I was falling in love with the kid. … I’ve never spent much time around kids that age before. They don’t care who you are or what you have. They just accept you the way you are.”
Busch stopped cooperating with the police soon after. The St. Louis County prosecuting attorney, Robert McCullough, called Adrienne Martin’s death an accidental overdose and in a Feb. 10 press conference said he would not press criminal charges against Busch, adding: “The investigation as to where the drugs came from is at a dead end.”
The death of Adrienne Martin is the latest twist in a saga that has transfixed St. Louis. The Busches and their beer company had survived Prohibition, labor strikes, and price wars, growing to operate 12 breweries around the country, producing 128 million barrels of beer in 2007 and taking in nearly $17 billion in revenue. The red, white, and blue Budweiser can is practically synonymous with America itself. But at a crucial time, the company failed to adapt to a changing market, leaving it weakened and vulnerable to a foreign takeover. And it was August Busch IV, the last member of the family to lead the brewery, who was there when it all came apart. Martin’s overdose represented not just the darkest moment in Busch’s turbulent life. It also signaled the unraveling of one of America’s most storied families, their business empire, and the city their money had helped build. Lawyers for Busch declined to make him available for comment.
While prosecutors did not file charges against Busch, his legal woes are far from over. Many questions about what transpired at his home this past December remain unanswered. Police reports reflect that Busch himself gave conflicting accounts. His father, August Busch III, had helped him out of other messes, but that was back when the Busch family had a company to protect. Now, August Busch IV’s troubles are entirely his own.
Friday Book Club - Body and Soul
Oscar Wilde once observed that "the public is wonderfully tolerant; it forgives everything but genius." Yet the plot of Frank Conroy's irresistible new book suggests quite the opposite. A rich novel of development with the somewhat familiar title "Body and Soul," it shows that the world can be wonderfully forgiving of genius, so forgiving as to prove a handicap.
From earliest childhood, Claude Rawlings's gift for music is recognized and rewarded. Though he spends most of his days dreamily roaming his Upper East Side neighborhood while his unmarried mother drives a taxi, his budding interest in the piano attracts the patronage of a local music-store owner, Aaron Weisfeld. Weisfeld steers Claude to the right teachers, who help him develop skills that lead to a job as an accompanist to the child of a Park Avenue family.Claude's exposure to wealth prompts him to apply successfully for a scholarship to an exclusive private school, which leads to admission to a prestigious college, where he meets a rich woman whom he marries after they graduate. His fame as a pianist spreads, and he even begins to compose music. But in a reversal of his mounting good fortune, he wins no competitions.
When he complains about this lack of success, one of his former teachers tells him: "You should understand that only so much can come in the form of gifts. Gifts can take you only so far. Eventually we are thrown back on ourselves. It's a cliche, but it's true."
And then, almost providentially, Claude's life comes apart. His marriage founders and his creativity dries up. He feels a sense of fraudulence common to artists, worsened by his never having learned who his father is. Then through a wonderfully inventive complication, he inherits the Third Avenue building that houses Aaron Weisfeld's music store, and he ends up holding out against a real-estate developer determined to demolish his building and put up a block-wide high-rise. As the wrecking ball crashes against a nearby structure, causing an E-flat silver bell over the door of his store to ring faintly, Claude finds his inspiration.
"At the precise instant of the crash, followed a split second later by the bell, he hallucinated the full sound of an orchestra and a piano playing two chords in succession, the first chord dissonant and the second consonant. The hallucination was clear and precise, complete in every musical detail, which he instantly memorized." He begins to compose a concerto, the double meaning of which word is "to join together, to work in concert, but also, from the Latin, to fight, or to contend." For Claude, "the E-flat silver bell represented the solo instrument (piano) engaged in a battle for survival with the more powerful sounds of demolition representing the orchestra." Needless to add, the concerto proves a crowning success.
It is tempting to read from this some message about Mr. Conroy's own artistic output. It has taken him some 26 years to publish just three books; the first a finely written memoir of growing up, "Stop-Time" (1967); the second a somewhat thin, sketchy collection of stories, "Midair" (1985), and now this remarkable outpouring of compulsive storytelling.
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