Teller Reveals His Secrets

In the last half decade, magic—normally deemed entertainment fit only for children and tourists in Las Vegas—has become shockingly respectable in the scientific world. Even I—not exactly renowned as a public speaker—have been invited to address conferences on neuroscience and perception. I asked a scientist friend (whose identity I must protect) why the sudden interest. He replied that those who fund science research find magicians “sexier than lab rats.”

I’m all for helping science. But after I share what I know, my neuroscientist friends thank me by showing me eye-tracking and MRI equipment, and promising that someday such machinery will help make me a better magician.

I have my doubts. Neuroscientists are novices at deception. Magicians have done controlled testing in human perception for thousands of years.

I remember an experiment I did at the age of 11. My test subjects were Cub Scouts. My hypothesis (that nobody would see me sneak a fishbowl under a shawl) proved false and the Scouts pelted me with hard candy. If I could have avoided those welts by visiting an MRI lab, I surely would have.

But magic’s not easy to pick apart with machines, because it’s not really about the mechanics of your senses. Magic’s about understanding—and then manipulating—how viewers digest the sensory information.

I think you’ll see what I mean if I teach you a few principles magicians employ when they want to alter your perceptions.

by Teller, Smithsonian |  Read more:
Photo: Jared McMillen / Aurora Select

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Cheating Death

Star Trek–style teleportation may one day become a reality. You step into the transporter, which instantly scans your body and brain, vaporizing them in the process. The information is transmitted to Mars, where it is used by the receiving station to reconstitute your body and brain exactly as they were on Earth. You then step out of the receiving station, slightly dizzy, but pleased to arrive on Mars in a few minutes, as opposed to the year it takes by old-fashioned spacecraft.

But wait. Do you really step out of the receiving station on Mars? Someone just like you steps out, someone who apparently remembers stepping into the transporter on Earth a few minutes before. But perhaps this person is merely your replica—a kind of clone or copy. That would not make this person you: in Las Vegas there is a replica of the Eiffel Tower, but the Eiffel Tower is in Paris, not in Las Vegas. If the Eiffel Tower were vaporized and a replica instantly erected in Las Vegas, the Eiffel Tower would not have been transported to Las Vegas. It would have ceased to exist. And if teleportation were like that, stepping into the transporter would essentially be a covert way of committing suicide. Troubled by these thoughts, you now realize that “you” have been commuting back and forth to Mars for years . . .

So which is it? You are preoccupied with a question about your survival: Do you survive teleportation to Mars? A lot hangs on the question, and it is not obvious how to answer it. Teleportation is just science fiction, of course; does the urgent fictional question have a counterpart in reality? Indeed it does: Do you, or could you, survive death?

Teeming hordes of humanity adhere to religious doctrines that promise survival after death: perhaps bodily resurrection at the Day of Judgment, reincarnation, or immaterial immortality. For these people, death is not the end.

Some of a more secular persuasion do not disagree. The body of the baseball great Ted Williams lies in a container cooled by liquid nitrogen to -321 degrees Fahrenheit, awaiting the Great Thawing, when he will rise to sign sports memorabilia again. (Williams’s prospects are somewhat compromised because his head has apparently been preserved separately.) For the futurist Ray Kurzweil, hope lies in the possibility that he will be uploaded to new and shiny hardware—as pictures are transferred to Facebook’s servers—leaving his outmoded biological container behind.

Isn’t all this a pipe dream? Why isn’t “uploading” merely a way of producing a perfect Kurzweil-impersonator, rather than the real thing? Cryogenic storage might help if I am still alive when frozen, but what good is it after I am dead? And is the religious line any more plausible? “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust” hardly sounds like the dawn of a new day. Where is—as the Book of Common Prayer has it—the “sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life”? If a forest fire consumes a house and the luckless family hamster, that’s the end of them, presumably. Why are we any different?

Philosophers have had a good deal of interest to say about these issues, under the unexciting rubric of “personal identity.” Let us begin our tour of some highlights with a more general topic: the survival, or “persistence,” of objects over time.

by Alex Byrne, Boston Review |  Read more:
Photo: Angus Clyne

Suzan Buckner
“2011-34-Abstract”
Acrylic on wood
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Me & My Monkey

Confessions of a White-Collar Dope Fiend

Where is the cave where the wise woman went
And tell me where is all the money that I spent?
I propose a toast to my self-control
See it crawling helpless on the floor
Someday there'll be a cure for pain
And that's the day I throw my drugs away
--Morphine, ''Cure for Pain,” 1993

Sunday afternoon, June 6. I am going to kill myself. No kidding. This time I mean it.

I'm sick. So sick. My last fix was 45 hours and, let's see, 20-odd minutes ago. Ancient history. Not a wink of sleep last night. Jumping out of my skin. No way to get comfortable. Every hour is a day. Every minute an hour.

Marrow sucked from my bones. Ice water in there now. Aching legs flailing. Why do you think it's called kicking? Snot streams from my nose, tears from my eyes. Rancid sweat pours everywhere. Shivering. Shaking. Every hair standing on end. Goose bumps on my goose bumps. Why do you think it's called cold turkey?

Sick. So very sick. Something even sicker? One shot, one lousy shot of dope would set me straight. OK, six hours later, I'd need another. Then another. Then another. So the dope-fiend day goes. In Junktime, though, six hours is a lifetime. (...)

As violent as the abruptly junkless body's revolt can be, the psychic pain vastly exceeds the physical. Think on it. Sick as you've ever been, and two hard truths remain front and center: 1.) This infection is self-inflicted, and 2.) it can be cured only by the medicine that caused it. Hair of a very savage dog, indeed. Every dope fiend suffers withdrawal symptoms guaranteed to drive him or her uniquely around the bend. Stone insomnia was my personally homesteaded circle of hell. Marinated in misery, I am blinklessly awake for every single second of the ordeal, hundreds of thousands of seconds over a half-dozen or so nightmarish days.

Junk sickness boasts a powerful psychosomatic component, which makes its ravages no less a horrifying reality. Aging metabolism may be partly to blame, but every time I have run up and then kicked a jones, the withdrawal has worsened and the next habit has come on all the more quickly. These days, 48 hours of use, and I am helplessly hooked. Even clean, the dope fiend must sometimes endure the bizarre phenomenon of smack-agony flashback. Protracted conditioned abstinence syndrome, it's called. Returned to the cages in which they became addicted, lab rats are plunged into writhing withdrawal. Those junkie rodents had been drug-free for months. Months! Once the junk receptors have drunk deep of the poppy's nectar, it seems, they develop a crafty monomaniacal mind of their own. I've suffered torturous twinges of this situational sickness myself in New York's Penn Station, through which I passed again and again on copping missions to Manhattan's ghettos, feeding a secret habit none of my colleagues could ever even have guessed at.

by Anonymous, Washington City Paper |  Read more:

Alex Kanevsky, Blue Room with Running Dog

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Hollywood’s Vial Bodies

A business in Hollywood is small potatoes until it’s known by three letters: CAA, MGM, PMK, SAG, UTA, WME. These days, though, nothing is hotter than Hollywood’s latest health-and-fitness craze: H.G.H. therapy. Just ask any major-league Hollywood player. Earlier this year, following a game of tennis at a swank Beverly Hills country club, a prominent movie producer sat nursing a sore knee. “Just take this,” one of the club members said, offering a vial of H.G.H. A former studio executive recalls a recent dinner out with one of his colleagues. “He’s a family man with a wife and kids,” the executive says. “And he just starts talking about using H.G.H. I was like, ‘Are you crazy?! You’re fucking shooting yourself up?!’ But he said, ‘No, it’s great. And I feel great in the morning. And it’s invigorating.’ ”

Both sources can rattle off a list of Hollywood H.G.H. users, starting with several top-shelf movie stars of both genders. H.G.H.—or “H,” as jocks call it—is an equal-opportunity employer, except as pertains to age. Although one particularly ripped twentysomething heartthrob is said to be on the needle, H.G.H. is largely the domain of stars who wish they were still under 35. The surest giveaway? “Any actor over 50 you’re still seeing with a ripped stomach and veins in his forearms is probably taking H.G.H.,” says a talent manager who represents one famously veiny TV star.

“I definitely saw a difference in my skin,” says Alana Stewart, an active member of the Hollywood social scene. “I know it gave me energy and made me feel kind of more balanced.” Before she began the treatment, she says, “I had started noticing a few gray hairs coming in. But I noticed that when I was taking it—no gray hairs.”

But don’t expect many on-the-record testimonials. So far, the only major players to step forward have been Sylvester Stallone, Nick Nolte, and Oliver Stone. To acknowledge H.G.H. use is to acknowledge weakness. “People talk about H.G.H.—which can cost upwards of $10,000 per year—the way they talk about people who get Botox or Viagra,” says a movie producer. “What you don’t ever hear is people talking about it as if they do it. It’s always those other dudes who look ridiculous.”

Growing Pains

In a sense, H.G.H. is the love child of Viagra and Botox; when administered appropriately, it is said to smooth wrinkles, reduce body fat, and increase lean-muscle mass and bone density, while also improving one’s libido, mood, and overall sense of vitality—to the point that the recipient both looks and feels years younger. “It is a rejuvenating force,” says Dr. Uzzi Reiss, a Beverly Hills physician on the forefront of the H.G.H. trend.

by Ned Zeman, Vanity Fair |  Read more:
Photo Illustration by Mark Hooper

One Is the Quirkiest Number

If there is any doubt that we’re living in the age of the individual, a look at the housing data confirms it. For millenniums, people have huddled together, in caves, in mud huts, in split-levels and Cape Cods. But these days, 1 in every 4 American households is occupied by someone living alone; in Manhattan, mythic land of the singleton, the number is nearly 1 in 2.

Lately, along with the compelling statistics, a stealth P.R. campaign seems to be taking place, as though living alone were a political candidate trying to burnish its image. Two notable examples: Eric Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University, recently published “Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone,” a mash note to domestic solipsism, which he calls “an incredible social experiment” that reveals “the human species is developing new ways to live.” And last fall, an Atlantic magazine cover story examined the rise of the single woman, a piece in which the author Kate Bolick fondly invoked the Barbizon Hotel and visited an Amsterdam apartment complex for women committed to living solo.

In a sense, living alone represents the self let loose. In the absence of what Mr. Klinenberg calls “surveilling eyes,” the solo dweller is free to indulge his or her odder habits — what is sometimes referred to as Secret Single Behavior. Feel like standing naked in your kitchen at 2 a.m., eating peanut butter from the jar? Who’s to know?  (...)

What emerges over time, for those who live alone, is an at-home self that is markedly different — in ways big and small — from the self they present to the world. We all have private selves, of course, but people who live alone spend a good deal more time exploring them.

Rod Sherwood’s living-alone indulgences center on his sleep cycle. A music manager and record producer who works from his railroad apartment in Brooklyn, Mr. Sherwood, 40, said he’ll go to bed at 2 a.m. one night, and then retire later and later by increments, “until I go to bed when the sun comes up.”

He mused: “I wondered how many times in a year I repeat that cycle? I’d be interested to chart it.”

by Steven Kurutz, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Mark Smith

Riesling Goes With Everything, and Sixteen Other Rules for Pairing Wine with Food

I led a wine tasting last week for students at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. I like pouring for twenty-somethings because they’re so eager to taste and talk about wine. With B-schoolers like these, I’ll also cover the industry, from merchandising to pricing and distribution, but mostly I’m there to get wines into their bodies and get them thinking about the culture of wine, how to evaluate it, and how to integrate it into their lives.

About half-way through the tasting, I poured a round of a Rhône-style red blend, primarily grenache with a little syrah and cinsault added for depth and top-notes. It’s a light-bodied, fruit-driven wine with great acidity, and so it’s really food friendly. I asked the assembled what they might pair it with.

Poultry? someone ventured. Good, yes, roasted poultry would be great. What else? Cheese, someone said. Sure—and what else? Long pause. How about fish? I offered. This wine has supple tannins, so it would readily pair with lighter meats and seafood. Grenache in general is great with fish.

A few heads nodded hesitantly as I sensed some of them trying to wrap their minds around red wine with fish. A fellow in the corner raised his hand. So, how do you figure out what goes with what? he asked. How do you learn about pairing?

I don’t have an easy answer for you, I replied apologetically, but it is a great question. I have books on wine and food pairing, and while reading’s no substitute for tasting, books can introduce the foundation principles. You need to understand how to balance a wine’s sweetness, savoryness, acidity, fruitiness, tannin, and weight with those same elements in the food, while also accounting for the food’s spiciness, saltiness, or richness.

I guess it also helps that I’ve been cooking for twenty-five years, I continued, so I know what food tastes like, and I can conjure those taste memories when I’m tasting a wine. I jot notes on all the wines I taste, and addition to noting Color, Aroma, Flavor, and Finish, I’ve recently added a fifth category: Pairing. Here, while the wine’s fresh on my palate, I think about what I might pour it with—regardless of what I’m about to serve for dinner.

I guess my best answer, I concluded, is to buy a couple of books, then to become attentive, noticing what works best for you.

The young man nodded and smiled, perhaps appreciatively, or perhaps simply relieved that I’d run out of air.

I clearly hadn’t provided a remotely satisfactory answer for someone who is new to wine. So, as a kind of atonement, I’ve put together a short list of pairing rules I’ve derived over the years, lessons learned both by reading and by studying what’s in the glass, and on the plate, before me. I’ll track the young man down, and send him this list:

• Wines and foods from the same region generally pair well together. Think Albariño with seafood, Grenache with the aïoli platter, Alsatian Riesling with choucroute, Sherry with Manchego, Barbera with pasta, and Montrachet (the wine) with, well, Montrachet (the cheese). As some like to say, “if it grows together, it goes together.”

• Wines with moderate acidity are generally quite food-friendly. This is because they can cut the richness of a rich dish, and can also balance the flavor of acidic ones, like salad dressing or fresh tomato sauce. Also, acidity in a food can emphasize fruit flavors in the wine.

by Meg Houston Maker, The Palate Press |  Read more:

Nathalie Leverger, “Couleurs Basques”, huile sur toile
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Little Wahinis by Shuna Nabonogu
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Aquarium Collectors are Depopulating Hawaiian Reefs

The movement to end trade in Hawaiian reef fish, led by Snorkel Bob’s maven Robert Wintner, has only grown since his Nov. 2010 interview here on his ultimately successful campaign on Maui to ban certain practices used in shipping them to the aquarium industry and individual collectors.

The Kaua‘i and Hawai‘i county councils recently passed nonbinding resolutions supporting a statewide ban on aquarium fish collecting, while the state Division of Aquatic Resources is considering less restrictive regulations that would still limit the kinds of reef fish that could be collected. Now Petco is currently in the crosshairs, after a supporter of Wintner’s For the Fishes advocacy group spotted a dead baby yellow tang in a tank at its Kahului store.

After a demonstration last month, a store representative announced it would first no longer sell yellow tang, then that it would no longer offer fish from Hawaiian reefs in its two Hawai‘i locations — but activists note that leaves the chain’s Mainland locations unaddressed, as well as the larger issue of trafficking in wildlife from any coral reef worldwide. Another protest is scheduled at 11 a.m. local time in front of the Maui Petco.

According to a Petco representative whose comments were aired on KNUI-FM this morning, “We do sell captive bred animals whenever and wherever possible. When they are not available, we do partner with people who are practicing corporate and sustainable methods” in collecting reef fish.

“Petco knows what the right thing is — they know that taking fish off the coral reefs is wrong and that captive breeding is the answer. There simply is no reason to take wildlife from the reefs,” responded For the Fishes activist and dive instructor Rene Umberger, who with Wintner was featured on the Maui radio station’s morning call-in show.

According to Umberger, over 30 species of reef fish are routinely taken from Hawai‘i and sold at Petco — and collectors can catch unlimited numbers of fish, in contrast to the total ban on live coral extraction. Although state aquatic specialists have reported growth in the number of yellow tang, callers from the Kona Coast and South Maui, as well as Wintner and Umberger, spoke of drastic reductions in the variety and number of reef fish in their favorite snorkeling spots over the last several decades. “I have been at the beach and seen collectors come with buckets and it’s just heartbreaking,” said one Maui resident.

Aquarium collectors, represented by Coral Magazine, Reefbuilders.com and other blogs, dispute the activists’ statistics on the size of the catch and mortality rates, and point to other significant threats to reef life — from runoff pollution and global warming to damage from visitors who step on coral — as worthier causes of concern. “Because they’re not the cause of these problems, (aquarium collectors think) they should be given carte blanche extraction privileges,” Wintner told the KNUI interviewers, in response to one critical call. He also observed that the sale of other kinds of wildlife is much more heavily regulated, if not outright banned, worldwide.

“We have no problems with taking reef fish for food, or a reef fish for a pet, but we’re opposed to the massive extraction for profit,” said Wintner, who earlier noted on the radio show that his dive shops stopped selling fish food years ago because “it was the right thing to do.”

by Jeanne Cooper, San Francisco Chronicle |  Read more:

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Japanese Fart Scrolls

Approximately 200-400 years ago during Japan's Edo period, an unknown artist created what is easily the most profound demonstration of human aesthetics ever committed to parchment. I am referring to He-Gassen a.k.a. 屁合戦 a.k.a. "the fart war." In this centuries-old scroll, women and men blow each other off the page with typhoon-like flatulence. Toss this in the face of any philistine who claims that art history is boring.

Gassy competitions weren't limited to the scenes of He-Gassen (which is hilariously named in retrospect). Fart wars were also used to express displeasure at the encroaching European influence in Edo Japan — artists would depict Westerners being blown home on thunderous toots.

More scrolls here:

by Cyrianque Lamar, IO9 |  Read more:

Fracture Putty

Broken bones in humans and animals are painful and often take months to heal. Studies conducted in part by University of Georgia Regenerative Bioscience Center researchers show promise to significantly shorten the healing time and revolutionize the course of fracture treatment.

"Complex fractures are a major cause of amputation of limbs for U.S. military men and women," said Steve Stice, a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, animal and dairy scientist in the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and director of the UGA Regenerative Bioscience Center.

"For many young soldiers, their mental health becomes a real issue when they are confined to a bed for three to six months after an injury," he said. "This discovery may allow them to be up and moving as fast as days afterward."

Stice is working with Dr. John Peroni to develop a fast bone healing process. "This process addresses both human and veterinary orthopedic needs," said Peroni, an associate professor of large animal surgery in the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine and a member of the RBC.

Peroni and Stice are leading a large animal research project funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. The project includes scientists and surgeons from the Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University and the University of Texas, who conducted the early studies.

by Faith Peppers, University of Georgia |  Read more:
Photo: Wikipedia

There’s More to Nothing Than We Knew

Dr. Krauss delineates three different kinds of nothingness. First is what may have passed muster as nothing with the ancient Greeks: empty space. But we now know that even empty space is filled with energy, vibrating with electromagnetic fields and so-called virtual particles dancing in and out of existence on borrowed energy courtesy of the randomness that characterizes reality on the smallest scales, according to the rules of quantum theory.

Second is nothing, without even space and time. Following a similar quantum logic, theorists have proposed that whole universes, little bubbles of space-time, could pop into existence, like bubbles in boiling water, out of this nothing.

There is a deeper nothing in which even the laws of physics are absent. Where do the laws come from? Are they born with the universe, or is the universe born in accordance with them? Here Dr. Krauss, unhappily in my view, resorts to the newest and most controversial toy in the cosmologist’s toolbox: the multiverse, a nearly infinite assemblage of universes, each with its own randomly determined rules, particles and forces, that represent solutions to the basic equations of string theory — the alleged theory of everything, or perhaps, as wags say, anything. 

Within this landscape of possibilities, almost anything goes. 

by Dennis Overbye, NY Times |  Read more: 

Illustration: Elwood H. Smith

Leah Giberson
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Tax Justice: The Next Great American Movement

Brown v. Board of Education. The Voting Rights Act. Miranda v. Arizona. Roe v. Wade. Texas v. Johnson. The Americans with Disabilities Act. Same-sex marriage. Looked at one way, the past several decades in the United States have been an almost uninterrupted series of victories for the American left and its activist model of advancing civil right and civil liberties through litigation and legislation.

Looked at another way—in terms of tax justice, financial regulation, and income disparity—the economic right wing has dominated American politics for the past thirty-plus years. In the face of little popular resistance and with assistance from both major political parties, the richest Americans and the most powerful corporations have had a free hand to rewrite the tax code and the banking laws to enrich themselves, endanger the world economy, and deprive government of the revenues it would need to, as the Constitution puts it, 'promote the general welfare'.

As income inequality in the States approaches banana-republic levels, Americans are finally having a long-overdue national conversation about taxes, banking laws, and economic justice, but why were we not having this conversation all along? The singular focus on civil rights without a comparable commitment to tax justice may also be the greatest failure of the American left. While it is inarguably a great achievement that any child, regardless of color, can now swim in a public pool, that opportunity means little if tax revenues shrink to the point where cities can no longer afford to open the pools, let alone build new ones.

Let me say at the outset that nothing in this article should be construed to question the value or the necessity of the long, ongoing struggle for civil rights and civil liberties. The sacrifices, heroism, and eloquence of the struggle ennoble our history. Our successes on the road to the equal protection of the law are the nation's greatest historical achievements and the envy of the world. But those same victories might today be more widely enjoyed had we paid comparable attention to less obviously heroic matters, like the tax code and financial regulation.

Capitalism per se need not be at odds with civil rights. Indeed, many of the wealthy are socially progressive, as demonstrated by strong support on Wall Street for same-sex marriage in New York State, as reported multiple times by the New York Times. Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, has even made a video supporting marriage equality. The selfish energies that capitalism unleashes in the pursuit and creation of wealth don't discriminate against individuals, but they do require proper government regulation lest they destroy us all.

The reason that twenty-first-century tax rates constitute a political failure is that for most of the twentieth century tax rates were not what they are now: the rich were taxed more, much more, and the United States managed, despite high taxes on the rich, to be a world economic power. Those tax rates changed because one side, the rich, wanted them lowered and the other side, the rest, did not put up a commensurate fight.

Tables comparing the year-by-year highest tax brackets, like this one from the National Taxpayers Union, have been making the rounds of the internet lately. Here are some highlights:

• From 1954 through 1963, income above $400,000 was taxed at 91%.
• From 1965 through 1978, income above $200,000 was taxed at rates that varied from 70 to 77%.
• From 1982 through 1986, the income bracket varied a bit from $106,000 to $171,580, but the top marginal rate plummeted to 50%.
• When Reagan left office in 1989, the highest marginal tax rate was only 28% and it applied to everyone who made more than about $30,000 a year. In essence, progressive taxation vanished.
• George H.W. Bush raised the top marginal rate to 31%.
• Bill Clinton raised it to 39.6% on incomes over $250,000.
• Finally, George W. Bush lowered it again to 35%, where it remains under President Barack Obama.
For more detailed data, see this spreadsheet supplied by the Tax Foundation.

Were Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon communists for presiding over tax rates of 91% and 70% respectively? Hardly. The 1950s and 60s were decades of prosperity for American businesses and working people alike. Then Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, and the tax rates for the rich began their dramatic decline.

Income taxes are only one piece of the puzzle. Taxes on capital gains and other so-called 'unearned income' like stocks and bonds have also plummeted to favor hording by the rich. The current capital gains tax rate is only 15%, i.e. lower than the historically low income tax. Comparable declines have occurred in estate tax rates and corporate tax rates. The only aspect of taxation that has risen in recent decades has been the number of tax breaks and loopholes for the rich, like those that now allow dividends and so-called carried interest to be taxed at the same rate as capital gains. (For some of these facts in chart form, see this report by the Center for American Progress.)

What happens when governments cannot collect enough revenue because they have lowered taxes too far? Services break down, public investment comes to a halt, and civil society declines. Here are a few examples of the consequences from around the country.

by Jeff Strabone, 3 Quarks Daily |  Read more:

The Odd Existence of Point Roberts, Washington

Wandering Google Maps can reveal magical geographies. When preparing for a recent first-time trip to Vancouver, I started zooming in and out and around the area to see what the surroundings are like. That was how I first learned of the existence of Point Roberts, Washington.

The town sits about 20 miles directly south of Vancouver, on a little peninsular tip of land, jutting just below the 49th parallel. That's the line, as you probably know, that generally demarcates the separation between Canada and the United States, at least from the middle of Minnesota westward. This borderline cuts between Blaine, Washington, and White Rock, British Columbia, the two counterpoint cities of this west coast end of the U.S.-Canada border. But through the waters of Boundary Bay, the line keeps heading west, true along the 49th and directly through the peninsula at this tip of British Columbia. To the south of the line sits Point Roberts, a 5-square mile fingernail of B.C. that is actually part of the United States.

Known as an exclave, Point Roberts is a bit of an oddity in that it’s not an island and yet it’s completely separated from the rest of the U.S. The only way to travel from Point Roberts to the rest of Washington and the U.S. is by passing through one international border crossing into Canada, driving 25 miles, and passing through another international border crossing into the U.S., which is a daily trek for schoolkids above third grade. Cars – a fair amount, but not a crush – regularly line up at either side of the border crossing at Point Roberts. Another 20 miles past the border at Blaine is Bellingham, Washington, the seat of Whatcom County, which oversees this unincorporated town in a strange bit of almost international bureaucracy.

To deploy a somewhat crude simile, Point Roberts is like the foreskin of America; cutting it off probably would have been more convenient, but keeping it has some benefits.

The border crossing is probably the biggest inconvenience, but it’s also the source of much of the town’s economic power.

Resident Kathryn Booth says the border tends to dominate outsiders’ perception of the town. As the operator of pointrobertstourism.com, she’s the self-appointed public relations face of Point Roberts, and she’s heard her share of incredulous visitors since moving here in 2009. “They’ll say ’Oh my god, how do people live here? It’s like a police state.’ And in some ways it kind of feels that way.”

“On the one hand, it’s been rated the safest community because it’s like having a really, really, really strict security guard gate,” Booth says.

by Nate Berg, Atlantic Cities |  Read more:

Bruce Springsteen: Wrecking Ball

At a Paris press conference on Thursday night, Bruce Springsteen was asked whether he was advocating an armed uprising in America. He laughed at the idea, but that the question was even posed at all gives you some idea of the fury of his new album Wrecking Ball.

Indeed, it is as angry a cry from the belly of a wounded America as has been heard since the dustbowl and Woody Guthrie, a thundering blow of New Jersey pig iron down on the heads of Wall Street and all who have sold his country down the swanny. Springsteen has gone to the great American canon for ammunition, borrowing from folk, civil war anthems, Irish rebel songs and gospel. The result is a howl of pain and disbelief as visceral as anything he has ever produced, that segues into a search for redemption: "Hold tight to your anger/ And don't fall to your fears … Bring on your wrecking ball."

"I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream," Springsteen told the conference, where the album was aired for the first time. It was written, he claimed, not just out of fury but out of patriotism, a patriotism traduced.

"What was done to our country was wrong and unpatriotic and un-American and nobody has been held to account," he later told the Guardian. "There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism."

by Fiachra Gibbons, Guardian |  Read more:
Photograph: Kevin Mazur/WireImage