A Daunting Path to Prosperity

by Liz Alderman

PISA, Italy — Six years ago, the Swedish retail giant Ikea planned a 60-million-euro megastore just a few miles from where the Tower of Pisa leans into the earth. Backers said the huge construction project, new roads and wave of shoppers would bring hundreds of sorely needed jobs to this bucolic corner of Tuscany.

But things got tangled — as they often do in Italy, where bureaucracy and politics can easily overwhelm economics.

Each application that Ikea filed seemed to require yet another. Each mandatory impact study begat the next. By May, when a local mayor had still not decided whether the company could get a building permit, Ikea put out word it would abandon the plan.

As Italy teeters on the edge of the European debt crisis, it can ill afford more debacles like that one. Otherwise, despite having the world’s seventh-largest economy, Italy may have little hope of outgrowing the staggering debt load that could threaten its financial future — and that of the euro monetary union.

Already, investors seem skeptical whether Italy and other debt-saddled European countries can right themselves, despite the financial rescue plan for Greece that Europe’s leaders agreed to last week.

On Thursday, Italy’s borrowing costs jumped almost a full percentage point at an auction of 10-year bonds, compared with just one month ago. At 5.77 percent, the interest rate was more than twice what financially buoyant Germany must pay on bonds of the same maturity. As higher interest rates make it even harder for Italy to reduce its debt, the main recourse would seem to be faster growth.

“This is the only major issue for Italy now — to resume growth,” said Francesco Giavazzi, an economics professor at Bocconi University and a research fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research in London.

Italy must not only encourage big corporate investments like the Ikea project, experts say, but it must also remove impediments that stifle growth in the thousands of small and medium-size companies that make up the backbone of its economy.

One small-business man, Mauro Pelatti, says he has given up on expanding his business in Florence, an hour east of here. “Bureaucracy is so strong, and taxes are so high, that it’s virtually impossible,” said Mr. Pelatti, whose privately held company, Omap, makes parts for steel-stamping machines used on products like Vespa scooters.

Italy’s economy experienced paltry growth starting in the late 1990s, when the country’s manufacturing was overtaken by competitors in Asia. Then came the global financial crisis in 2007, which shrank Italy’s economy by more than 6 percent.

Growth has resumed, but the International Monetary Fund predicts “another decade of stagnation,” with Italy’s gross domestic product expanding by only about 1.4 percent annually in the next few years. (The German economy, Europe’s growth leader, grew 3.5 percent in 2010 and grew by 1.5 percent in the first quarter compared with the same period a year ago.)

Hindering growth is Italy’s heaving government debt, which at 119 percent of gross domestic product is second only to Greece’s among euro zone members. Although it has run a budget surplus, minus debt costs, for several years and recently passed a 48 billion deficit-reduction plan, the Italian government now spends 16 percent of that budget on interest payments — a bill that will rise if investors and creditors continue to fear that Italy cannot escape Europe’s debt crisis.

Currently, the amount of Italy’s debt held by foreigners — nearly 800 billon euros — is more than that of Greece, Ireland and Portugal combined. Should Italy stumble, the aftershocks would be more disruptive than anything the euro zone has felt so far in the crisis.

Read more:

Steve Martin

 

Begining of the crop, a photo from Yen Bai, North East | TrekEarth

Flying Lanterns of Poznan

On the first day of summer, June 21, flying lanterns are floated on Poznan. 11,439 paper lanterns were released by Poznań to heaven to beat the Polish record.

The first day of summer, it is called. Midsummer Night, commonly called St. John's night, which is the shortest night in the entire calendar year. It is also a festival of fire, water, sun and moon, harvest, fertility, joy, and above all love!

via:

via:

The Cults

A Drug for Down Syndrome

by Dan Hurley

Early in the evening of June 25, 1995, hours after the birth of his first and only child, the course of Dr. Alberto Costa’s life and work took an abrupt turn. Still recovering from a traumatic delivery that required an emergency Caesarean section, Costa’s wife, Daisy, lay in bed, groggy from sedation. Into their dimly lighted room at Methodist Hospital in Houston walked the clinical geneticist. He took Costa aside to deliver some unfortunate news. The baby girl, he said, appeared to have Down syndrome, the most common genetic cause of cognitive disabilities, or what used to be called “mental retardation.”

Costa, himself a physician and neuroscientist, had only a basic knowledge of Down syndrome. Yet there in the hospital room, he debated the diagnosis with the geneticist. The baby’s heart did not have any of the defects often associated with Down syndrome, he argued, and her head circumference was normal. She just didn’t look like a typical Down syndrome baby. And after all, it would take a couple weeks before a definitive examination would show whether she had been born with three copies of all or most of the genes on the 21st chromosome, instead of the usual two.

Costa had dreamed that a child of his might grow up to become a mathematician. He had even prevailed upon Daisy to name their daughter Tyche, after the Greek goddess of fortune or chance, and in honor of the Renaissance astronomer Tycho Brahe. Now he asked the geneticist what the chances were that Tyche (pronounced Tishy) really had Down syndrome.

“In my experience,” he said, “close to a hundred percent.”

Costa and his wife had been trying to have a baby for a couple of years. Daisy’s first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, which they knew can occur because of a genetic disorder in the fetus. When Daisy became pregnant a second time, Costa insisted they get a chorionic villus sampling, an invasive prenatal genetic test. But the procedure caused a miscarriage. (The test showed that the fetus was genetically normal.) Costa vowed that if there was a third pregnancy — this one — they would conduct no prenatal tests.

Now, with Tyche bundled peacefully in a bassinet at the foot of Daisy’s bed, and Daisy asleep, Costa sat up through most of the night crying. He had gone into the research side of medicine in part to avoid scenes like this — parents devastated by a diagnosis. But by morning, he found himself doing what any father of a newborn might: hovering by the crib, holding his daughter’s hand and marveling at her beauty.

“From that day, we bonded immediately,” he told me during one of our many talks over the last year. “All I could think is, She’s my baby, she’s a lovely girl and what can I do to help her? Obviously I was a physician and a neuroscientist who studies the brain. Here was this new life in front of me and holding my finger and looking straight in my eyes. How could I not think in terms of helping that kid?”

With no experience in the study of Down syndrome, Costa took a short walk the next day to a library affiliated with Baylor College of Medicine, where he worked as a research associate in neuroscience. Reading the latest studies, he learned that the prognosis was not nearly as dire as it was once considered. Life expectancies had grown, education reforms had produced marked gains in functioning and — of particular interest to Costa — a mouse model of the disorder had recently been developed, opening the door to experimentation. He soon made a decision: he would devote himself to the study of Down syndrome.

In 2006, using mice with the equivalent of Down syndrome, Costa published one of the first studies ever to show that a drug could normalize the growth and survival of new brain cells in the hippocampus, a structure deep within the brain that is essential for memory and spatial navigation. In people with Down syndrome, the slower pace of neuron growth in the hippocampus is suspected to play a key role in cognitive deficits. Follow-up studies by other researchers reached conflicting results as to whether the drug Costa had tested, the antidepressant Prozac, could produce practical gains on learning tests to match its ability to boost brain-cell growth. Undeterred, Costa moved on to another treatment strategy. In 2007 he published a study that showed that giving mice with Down syndrome the Alzheimer’s drug memantine could improve their memory.

Now Costa has taken the next step: he is completing the first randomized clinical trial ever to take a drug that worked in mice with Down and apply it to humans with the disease, a milestone in the history of Down-syndrome research.

“This was a disorder for which it was believed there was no hope, no treatment, and people thought, Why waste your time?” says Craig C. Garner, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and co-director of the Center for Research and Treatment of Down Syndrome at Stanford University. “The last 10 years have seen a revolution in neuroscience, so that we now realize that the brain is amazingly plastic, very flexible, and systems can be repaired.”

But the effects of that revolution on Down research may yet be cut short. A competing set of scientists are on the cusp of achieving an entirely different kind of medical response to Down syndrome: rather than treat it, they promise to prevent it. They have developed noninvasive, prenatal blood tests which would allow for routine testing for Down syndrome in the first trimester of a pregnancy, raising the specter that many more parents would terminate an affected pregnancy. Some predict that one of the new tests could be available to the public within the year.

Costa, like others working on drug treatments, fears that the imminent approval of those tests might undercut support for treatment research, and even raises the possibility that children like Tyche will be among the last of a generation to be born with Down syndrome.

“It’s like we’re in a race against the people who are promoting those early screening methods,” Costa, who is 48, told me. “These tests are going to be quite accessible. At that point, one would expect a precipitous drop in the rate of birth of children with Down syndrome. If we’re not quick enough to offer alternatives, this field might collapse.”

Read more:

Genki Rockets

Sensory Trip to a Paradise on Screen

by Seth Schiesel

Spectral whales undulate through ethereal mist, their hides speckled with winking gems that pulsate to a throbbing bass line. Gleaming motes of color spin and coalesce into flowers, layer upon layer of shimmering petals. A girl named Lumi, born in outer space and transported to cyberspace, beckons you to rescue her digital consciousness.

Sounds pretty trippy, huh?

This is Child of Eden, the luminous new game from the Japanese auteur Tetsuya Mizuguchi and one of the most inspirational exhibits of artistry to be found in interactive entertainment today. The game — available now for the Xbox 360 and scheduled to arrive for the PlayStation 3 in September — was developed by Q Entertainment (of which Mr. Mizuguchi was a founder) and published by Ubisoft.

In the quest for commercial success, so many games (like so much of any medium) end up similar. The formulas are known, the structures accepted. For many top games the question becomes how well they fulfill and execute the basic template of their genre.

Child of Eden is an example of what can happen when creativity is liberated from the bounds of convention. It hews to only the most basic form of an arcade-style shooting game (stuff is whirling around on a screen; shoot it), perhaps in the way that even rebellious painters hew to the convention of stretching canvas across a wooden frame. From there Mr. Mizuguchi goes wild, integrating music, sound and the player’s own physical movement into a full-body experience.

And that is because Child of Eden makes the best use yet of the new Kinect system for the Xbox 360. Kinect, introduced by Microsoft last fall, does away with the video game controller altogether. Using advanced technology and software, the Kinect sensor, which sits under your television, can see your body in three dimensions and recognize your voice. So in all sorts of games, you just lean if you want your character to lean. If you want it to jump, you jump, and so on.

Read more:

Useless Studies, Real Harm

by Carl Elliot

Last month, the Archives of Internal Medicine published a scathing reassessment of a 12-year-old research study of Neurontin, a seizure drug made by Pfizer. The study, which had included more than 2,700 subjects and was carried out by Parke-Davis (now part of Pfizer), was notable for how poorly it was conducted. The investigators were inexperienced and untrained, and the design of the study was so flawed it generated few if any useful conclusions. Even more alarming, 11 patients in the study died and 73 more experienced “serious adverse events.” Yet there have been few headlines, no demands for sanctions or apologies, no national bioethics commissions pledging to investigate. Why not?

One reason is that the study was not quite what it seemed. It looked like a clinical trial, but as litigation documents have shown, it was actually a marketing device known as a “seeding trial.” The purpose of seeding trials is not to advance research but to make doctors familiar with a new drug.

In a typical seeding trial, a pharmaceutical company will identify several hundred doctors and invite them to take part in a research study. Often the doctors are paid for each subject they recruit. As the trial proceeds, the doctors gradually get to know the drug, making them more likely to prescribe it later.

In an age of for-profit clinical research, this is the new face of scandal. Pharmaceutical companies promote their drugs with pseudo-studies that have little if any scientific merit, and patients naïvely sign up, unaware of the ways in which they are being used. Nobody really knows how often companies conduct such trials, but they appear with alarming regularity in pharmaceutical marketing documents. In the marketing plan for the antidepressant Lexapro for the 2004 fiscal year, Forest Laboratories described 102 Phase IV trials — the classification under which seeding trials fall — in a section labeled “Marketing Tactics.”

Oversight bodies like the Food and Drug Administration generally don’t view seeding trials as research scandals: seeding trials are not illegal, and the drugs in question have already received F.D.A. approval. But even after particularly egregious seeding trials have been exposed, the F.D.A. has not issued sanctions. Take the notorious Advantage study, a seeding trial of the pain reliever Vioxx conducted by Merck. According to a 2008 report in the Annals of Internal Medicine, litigation documents show that the Advantage study was conceived and managed by Merck’s marketing department. Three subjects died in the Advantage trial; five more subjects experienced heart attacks. Oversight bodies should treat the Advantage study as a violation of research ethics.

Read more:

Depeche Mode

How Google Dominates Us

by James Gleick

Tweets Alain de Botton, philosopher, author, and now online aphorist:

The logical conclusion of our relationship to computers: expectantly to type “what is the meaning of my life” into Google.

You can do this, of course. Type “what is th” and faster than you can find the e Google is sending choices back at you: what is the cloud? what is the mean? what is the american dream? what is the illuminati? Google is trying to read your mind. Only it’s not your mind. It’s the World Brain. And whatever that is, we know that a twelve-year-old company based in Mountain View, California, is wired into it like no one else.

Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing. Nowadays you can’t have a long dinner-table argument about who won the Oscar for that Neil Simon movie where she plays an actress who doesn’t win an Oscar; at any moment someone will pull out a pocket device and Google it. If you need the art-history meaning of “picturesque,” you could find it in The Book of Answers, compiled two decades ago by the New York Public Library’s reference desk, but you won’t. Part of Google’s mission is to make the books of answers redundant (and the reference librarians, too). “A hamadryad is a wood-nymph, also a poisonous snake in India, and an Abyssinian baboon,” says the narrator of John Banville’s 2009 novel, The Infinities. “It takes a god to know a thing like that.” Not anymore.

The business of finding facts has been an important gear in the workings of human knowledge, and the technology has just been upgraded from rubber band to nuclear reactor. No wonder there’s some confusion about Google’s exact role in that—along with increasing fear about its power and its intentions.

Most of the time Google does not actually have the answers. When people say, “I looked it up on Google,” they are committing a solecism. When they try to erase their embarrassing personal histories “on Google,” they are barking up the wrong tree. It is seldom right to say that anything is true “according to Google.” Google is the oracle of redirection. Go there for “hamadryad,” and it points you to Wikipedia. Or the Free Online Dictionary. Or the Official Hamadryad Web Site (it’s a rock band, too, wouldn’t you know). Google defines its mission as “to organize the world’s information,” not to possess it or accumulate it. Then again, a substantial portion of the world’s printed books have now been copied onto the company’s servers, where they share space with millions of hours of video and detailed multilevel imagery of the entire globe, from satellites and from its squadrons of roving street-level cameras. Not to mention the great and growing trove of information Google possesses regarding the interests and behavior of, approximately, everyone.

When I say Google “possesses” all this information, that’s not the same as owning it. What it means to own information is very much in flux.

In barely a decade Google has made itself a global brand bigger than Coca-Cola or GE; it has created more wealth faster than any company in history; it dominates the information economy. How did that happen? It happened more or less in plain sight. Google has many secrets but the main ingredients of its success have not been secret at all, and the business story has already provided grist for dozens of books. Steven Levy’s new account, In the Plex, is the most authoritative to date and in many ways the most entertaining. Levy has covered personal computing for almost thirty years, for Newsweek and Wired and in six previous books, and has visited Google’s headquarters periodically since 1999, talking with its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and, as much as has been possible for a journalist, observing the company from the inside. He has been able to record some provocative, if slightly self-conscious, conversations like this one in 2004 about their hopes for Google:

“It will be included in people’s brains,” said Page. “When you think about something and don’t really know much about it, you will automatically get information.”

“That’s true,” said Brin. “Ultimately I view Google as a way to augment your brain with the knowledge of the world. Right now you go into your computer and type a phrase, but you can imagine that it could be easier in the future, that you can have just devices you talk into, or you can have computers that pay attention to what’s going on around them….”

…Page said, “Eventually you’ll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.”

Read more:

Western Spaghetti

*2009 Sundance Film Festival Winner *TIME Magazine voted #2 Viral Video of the Year *2009 Audience Award, Annecy Animation Festival.

Friday Book Club - Clapton

by Stephen King

[ed.  Clapton is like the Zelig of Rock and Roll culture and history.  He's everywhere, and has some amazing stories to tell.]

Most A.A. meetings begin with the chairman offering his qualifications at the head table next to the coffee maker. This qualification is more commonly known in the program as the drunkalogue. It’s a good word, with its suggestions of inebriated travel, and it certainly fits Eric Clapton’s account of his life. “Clapton” is nothing so literary as a memoir, but its dry, flat-stare honesty makes it a welcome antidote to the macho fantasies of recovery served up by James Frey in “A Million Little Pieces.”

A drunkalogue consists of three parts: what it was like, what happened and what it’s like now. Following a format that Clapton, now 20 years sober, could probably recite in his sleep, the world’s most famous rock-and-blues guitarist duly — and sometimes dutifully — covers the bases. He is rarely able to communicate clearly what his music means to him (“It’s difficult to talk about these songs in depth,” he says at one point; “that’s why they’re songs”), but his writing is adequate to the main task, which is describing how he became the rock ’n’ roll version of Harry Potter: Clapton is, after all, the Boy Who Lived. And this drunkalogue has other things to recommend it; to my knowledge, no other addict-alcoholics can claim to have filched George Harrison’s wife or escaped — barely — dying in a helicopter crash with Stevie Ray Vaughan. Both Clapton’s and Vaughan’s choppers took off into heavy fog after a show in Wisconsin. Vaughan’s turned the wrong way and crashed into an artificial ski slope.

I’ve heard it suggested at recovery meetings that the true alcoholic is almost always an overachiever with a bad self-image, and Clapton fits this profile as well as any. After millions of records sold, thousands of S.R.O. concert dates and decades of conspicuous consumerism (Visvim shoes, Patek Philippe watches, a yacht), he can still call himself “a toe-rag from Ripley.”

That’s the small town in Surrey where Clapton grew up. He discovered, as a child of 6 or 7, that the couple he believed to be his parents were really his grandmother and step-grandfather. His mother was actually the daughter of Rose Clapp and her first husband, Rex Clapton. His father was a married Canadian airman named Edward Fryer: “The truth dawned on me, that when Uncle Adrian jokingly called me a little bastard, he was telling the truth.”

Clapton’s first guitar (he seems to remember them all) was a Hoyer too big for him, and painful to play; his first addiction, Horlicks and Ovaltine tablets stolen from the local sweet shop; his first encounter with the sexual embarrassment that would haunt him for years came with a school caning (“six of the best”) after asking a schoolmate, with no idea what the query meant, if she might “fancy a shag.” He got drunk for the first time at 16 and woke alone in the woods, with fouled trousers, vomit on his shirt and no money. Then he adds the perfect drunkalogue kicker: “I couldn’t wait to do it all again.”

The New Dirt on Dry Cleaners

by Ray A. Smith

You drop your most cherished clothes at the dry cleaner, and they're ticketed, thrown into a massive pile of garments and whisked away.

To most consumers, what takes place behind the counter, where imposing machines rumble and steam hisses, is a mystery. What exactly goes on back there? Other common questions: Why do women's shirts often cost more to clean than men's, and why do only some stains come out?

Adding to the confusion is a transition that is already shaking up the dry-cleaning industry. Many dry cleaners will be required to find new solvents to replace a widely used cleaning agent called perchloroethylene, or perc, by 2020. As a result, businesses are using a growing array of new methods to clean garments. Procter & Gamble Co. recently launched Tide Dry Cleaners, a chain of stores that use an alternative product, based on silicone and called GreenEarth.

The result, for many people, is uncertainty. "I find myself looking at tags more to see if I can wash it," says Alli Webb, the West Hollywood, Calif., co-founder of Drybar, a chain of blowout hair salons. She says she is nervous about chemicals and sometimes will drive farther to a cleaner that promotes itself as eco-friendly.

The shakeup is coming to an industry that has changed little for decades. While the Frenchman credited with inventing dry cleaning started with turpentine, perc has been used since the 1930s to clean clothes, and about 80% of cleaners still rely on it. Like turpentine—and benzene, kerosene and gasoline, which were also tried in the early years—perc is good at dissolving oil-based stains. It is pumped into a supersized washing machine to flush dirt from the clothes.

Stubborn stains from difficult-to-remove substances, such as ink, wine and mustard, are attacked by hand with chemicals that target particular substances. Bruce Barish, owner of New York City's Ernest Winzer Cleaners, cites balsamic vinaigrette as "very hard to get out." It's a mix of both water-based and oily stains with a dark dye that is hard to remove—especially since most customers accidentally rub it in.

The quality and service vary, in part because most dry cleaners are independently owned. There are 24,124 dry-cleaning and non-coin-operated laundry establishments in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau.

But certain things hold true across the industry. In a 2009 study that examined 50 randomly selected dry cleaners, New York-based Floyd Advisory LLC found that women paid an average of 73% more than men for laundered shirts. Dry cleaners surveyed say women's shirts don't fit in their industrial presses as well as men's and must be ironed by hand.

Last year, market-research firm Mintel International found that 75% of women who had gone clothes-shopping in the past 12 months said they avoided buying clothes that required dry cleaning.

Indeed, it is customers' low opinion of dry cleaning, in part, that sparked P&G's new venture, the company says. P&G research found that a large percentage of consumers were generally dissatisfied with their dry cleaning, says Ross H. Holthouse, a spokesman for the consumer-product maker's FutureWorks division. "They felt the stores were dark and that they walked into a black box and didn't know what was happening," he says.

Read more:

Zachary Flagg Baldus
via:

T. Rex

cymbal:

Racing to the Bottom: Exploring the Deepest Point on Earth

by Nicholas Jackson

At the southern end of the Mariana Trench, a deep scar that cuts into the bottom of the ocean floor, there is a point known as Challenger Deep. Here, just outside of the Marianas or Ladrones, a series of 15 islands made up of volcanic mountains that peak just above the water line, a small slot-shaped valley plunges nearly seven miles down. At 35,797 feet, Challenger Deep is the deepest known point in the oceans. It is so deep that, if you were able to place Mount Everest inside of the valley, there would still be 6,811 feet of water separating it from the surface.

At just 7,000 feet down, about where the tallest mountain in the world would peak, the pressure becomes so great that whales rely on unique evolutionary traits when hunting for giant squid. Whales have lungs that can collapse safely under pressure and ribs bound by soft cartilage that allows the cage to shift and settle in extreme environments rather than snap. Without similar anatomical gifts, we don't know much about what happens below that level. Imagine what creatures might live at depths five times greater than where whales and giant squid battle in the pitch-black ocean.

We've been there once before, to the bottom of Challenger Deep. But we didn't see or learn much. On January 23, 1960, Jacques Piccard suited up, plopped down inside of Trieste, and sank to the ocean floor. The Swiss-designed, Italian-built, U.S. Navy-owned Trieste is an inelegant machine. The observation gondola, a sphere welded to the bottom of the ship's main flotation system, has walls that measure five inches thick and a tiny, cone-shaped Plexiglas window. 

Trieste

After spending nearly five hours sinking to the bottom of the ocean, Piccard and Don Walsh, a Navy Lieutenant that accompanied him, were only able to peer through the Plexiglas while shivering in the 45-degree capsule and munching on chocolate bars for sustenance. Surrounded by a cloud of sediment that Trieste had kicked up when it smacked into the ocean floor, Piccard and Walsh couldn't see a whole lot from their window, which had cracked on the way down. What they did see, though -- a variety of sole and flounder, two types of flatfish -- proves that at least some vertebrate life can handle the extreme pressure in one of the Earth's most extreme places. Twenty minutes later, Trieste dumped tons of magnetic iron pellets and spent three hours rising back to the surface.

Now, more than 50 years later, humans are nearly ready to return to Challenger Deep. This time, though, they're planning to stay a while, collecting samples, videotaping whatever might be down there, sending out small remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) and then bringing home $10 million. Earlier this year, the X Prize Foundation made that prize money available to the first privately funded submersible to make two visits to Challenger Deep. This money, though, is little more than proof that humans are fascinated with the extreme: climbing Mount Everest, walking on the Moon, searching the floor of the ocean. Ten million dollars will only cover a fraction of the race to the bottom. And it is indeed a race; one with at least three competitors, each close to claiming the prize.

Read more:

Zork Revisited

[ed. I loved Zork and its predecessor Colossal Cave. Back in prehistoric times (early 80s) interactive games were just being born and Zork definitely had a big influence on my developing interest in computers.]

by Philip Bump

In my mind, the house is clapboard, with a black, precisely shingled roof and shutters in a bit of disrepair. The sky is always an intangible, faded blue, and the forest surrounding the clearing is dark green. In other words, it's always summer -- and hot, since I imagine the house surrounded by long, tan, untrampled grass.

The front door is boarded -- I pictured some plywood, though I didn't think about it much. There's the mailbox: a standard issue, gunmetal-gray, Quonset-shaped affair, slightly askew on its pole. And in the mailbox, of course, is a leaflet.

Zork was the first game I remember playing on my family's IBM PC, sometime in the early 1980s. It's hard to convey, for those who didn't go through a similar epiphany, what it was like to look into a screen empty but for a few lines of spare green text:

You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

For a kid that wasn't into fantasy books, I didn't approach it as an adventurer. I approached the game as me: I'm standing in front of a house, not unlike my own, a wrapped gift that you have to figure out how to unwrap. It was like a Choose Your Own Adventure in which no other pages were suggested. Here's where you are, kid. Now what?

What we forget, what was lost with the transition to visual games, is how literary the experience was. A quick catalog of words I learned from text adventures -- mostly from Infocom, the granddaddy of the genre: menhir, footpad, topiary, lapis lazuli. The games were written as much as they were designed; tantalizing adjectives to create a sense of the world, sometimes-obscure nouns to describe things which may not exist in real-life. They sampled from literature as well: one game, A Mind Forever Voyaging, used an excerpt from "The Raven" as an interlude.

Deep into the darkness, peering,
Long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal
Ever dared to dream before.

No English class ever inspired an appreciation for meter more than did those lines.

Read more:

Life on the Line

by Andrew Rice

El Paso and Ciudad Juárez lie together uncomfortably like an estranged couple, surrounded on all sides by mountains and desert. The cities are separated by the thin trickle of the Rio Grande, which flows through concrete channels, built to put an end to the river’s natural habit of changing course and muddying boundaries. One side is Texas; the other, Mexico. The border’s way of life — its business, legitimate and otherwise — has always relied upon the circumvention of this dividing line.

The cities are so close that you can sit on a park bench in El Paso and watch laundry wave behind a whitewashed house on a Juárez hillside. Thousands of commuters come across from Mexico every morning, waiting in a long line at the Paso del Norte bridge, snaking back up the seedy Avenida Juárez, past military checkpoints where hawkers wave tabloids full of tales of carnage. The recent war among various gangs and drug cartels has made Juárez one of the world’s most dangerous cities, while across the way, El Paso remains calm, even eerily prosperous. It consistently ranks as one of the safest cities in the United States. This grotesque disparity has, in some ways, torn the cities apart. Few El Pasoans venture across the bridge anymore, if they can help it, while much of Juárez’s middle and upper class has decamped to the other side of the border, taking their money, businesses, even their private schools with them, forming an affluent community in exile.

I spent a lot of time in El Paso this winter and spring as the Mexican Army mounted a fragmentary campaign against the cartels and as American politicians of both parties exploited the spectacle for their own purposes. In Washington and Austin, the capital of Texas, in the faraway realm that borderland residents call the interior, conservatives were raising the specter of “spillover violence,” while President Obama was boasting of an unprecedented border fortification. In reality, spillover was notable for its scarcity — when stray bullets from a Juárez gunfight improbably flew across the border and struck El Paso’s City Hall last year, it made international news. But that’s about the only physical damage the city has suffered. And the federal security buildup — symbolized by an 18-foot, rust-colored fence that runs along city streets and through backyards, part of a 650-mile, $2.8 billion border wall — was regarded around town as a threatening imposition. Some two million people are linked at this spot, by ties of blood and commerce, and its fluid social ecosystem still retains something unique and emblematic and perhaps worth saving. If scholars of globalization are right that we are moving toward a future in which all borders are profitably blurred, here is the starkest imaginable expression of that evolution, in all its heady promise and its perverse failings.

On a frigid morning in February, I met with Linda Arnold inside a small brick storefront in El Paso. “Unless you are right here, I don’t think you can get how intertwined this community is,” Arnold told me. A midwife with frosted blond hair who favors jangly jewelry, Arnold was running a small business called the Casa de Nacimiento, catering to a specific subset of border-straddlers. At that moment, sweating through labor, were three women who had come over the bridges from Juárez with legal visas. The distance, about a mile and a half from the Rio Grande, was geographically negligible but enormously consequential. Giving birth here would deliver their children a precious advantage: it would make them Americans.

Arnold isn’t an immigration zealot, or even an ideological liberal, despite the hippie-ish connotations of her profession. “We’re not going to sit around here and chant,” she said as we spoke in her office, which contained a sculpture of a womb and a portrait of her own son, a soldier in uniform. “This is a business, not a commune.” What Arnold was offering for sale at Casa de Nacimiento, for $695, was a future untroubled by the border’s impediments. Any child born at Arnold’s birth center would possess American citizenship, courtesy of the 14th Amendment, and with it the ability to cross freely back and forth.

It is El Paso’s way to make the most of the border’s inequities. Arnold moved to town in 1985 with an impassioned commitment to natural childbirth and an entrepreneur’s hunch about an untapped market. Mexican women had a long tradition of crossing the border to give birth, and Arnold soon made herself one of the busiest midwives in the state. Back when she started, getting over the border was as simple as wading across the Rio Grande or paying a ferryman a dollar for a tow on an inner tube. “They would come in with their jeans still wet,” she said.

Read more: