Monday, October 15, 2012
Mortify Our Wolves
We hear, and look up as one at the two attendants hurriedly wheeling something so shrunken it seems merely another rumple in the blanket, tubes traveling in and out of its impalpability, its only life this lifeless cry.
The doors open soundlessly, and the pall of sorrow goes flowing off into the annihilating brightness beyond. Then the doors close, and we as one look down, not meeting each other’s eyes, and wait.
The terrible thing—it could perhaps be a glorious thing; always the ill are meant to see it as such, are reproached if they don’t (carpe fucking diem)—the terrible thing about feeling the inevitability of your own early death is the way it colors every single scene: at some friends’ house I am moved by the beauty and antics of their two-year-old daughter—moved, and then saddened to think of the daughter D. and I might have, for whom my death will be some deep, lightless hole, which for the rest of her life she will walk around, grief the very ground of her being. What is this world that we are so at odds with, this beauty by which we are so wounded, and into which God has so utterly gone?
Into which, rather than from which: in a grain of grammar, a world of hope.
That conversions often happen after or during intense life experiences, especially traumatic experiences, is sometimes used as evidence against them. The sufferer isn’t in his right mind. The mind, tottering at the abyss of despair or death, shudders back toward any simplicity, any coherency it can grasp, and the man calls out to God. Never mind that the God who comes at such moments may not be simple at all, but arises out of and includes the very abyss the man would flee. Never mind that in traumatic experience many people lose their faith—or what looked like faith?—rather than find it. It is the flinch from life—which, the healthy are always quick to remind us, includes death—and the flight to God that cannot be trusted.
But how could it be otherwise? It takes a real jolt to get us to change our jobs, our relationships, our daily coffee consumption, for goodness sake—or, if we are wired that way, to change our addiction to change. How much more urgency is needed, how much more primal fear, to startle the heart out of its ruts and ruins. It’s true that God comes to the prophet Elijah not in the whirlwind, and not in the earthquake, and not in the fire that follows, but in the “still, small voice” that these ravages make plain. But the very wording of that passage makes it clear that the voice, though finally more powerful than the ravages it follows, is not altogether apart from them. That voice is always there, and for everyone. For some of us, unfortunately, it takes terror and pain to make us capable of hearing it. (...)
Part of the mystery of grace is the way it operates not only as present joy and future hope, but also retroactively, in a way: the past is suffused with a presence that, at the time, you could only feel as the most implacable absence. This is why being saved (I dislike the language, too, not because it’s inaccurate but because it’s corrupted by contemporary usage, a hands-in-the-air, holy-seizure sort of rapture, a definitive sense of rift) involves embracing rather than renouncing one’s past. It is true that Christ makes a man anew, that there is some ultimate change in him. But part of that change is the ability to see life as a whole, to feel the form and unity of it, to become a creature made for and assimilated to existence, rather than a desperate, fragmented thing striving against existence or caught forever just outside it. (...)
When my grandmother—whose reading was limited to the Bible and Guideposts, and whose life was circumscribed by the tiny yard around her tiny house in tiny Colorado City, Texas—died 20 years ago, I was pierced, not simply by grief and the loss of her presence, but by a sense that some very particular and hard-won kind of consciousness had gone out of the world. Hers was the kind of consciousness that is not consciousness as intellectuals define it, but is passive rather than active. It allows the world to stream through you rather than you always reaching out to take hold of it. It is the consciousness of the work of art and not necessarily of the artist who made it. People, occasionally, can be such works, creation streaming through them like the inspiration that, in truth, all of creation is.
Into which, rather than from which: in a grain of grammar, a world of hope.
That conversions often happen after or during intense life experiences, especially traumatic experiences, is sometimes used as evidence against them. The sufferer isn’t in his right mind. The mind, tottering at the abyss of despair or death, shudders back toward any simplicity, any coherency it can grasp, and the man calls out to God. Never mind that the God who comes at such moments may not be simple at all, but arises out of and includes the very abyss the man would flee. Never mind that in traumatic experience many people lose their faith—or what looked like faith?—rather than find it. It is the flinch from life—which, the healthy are always quick to remind us, includes death—and the flight to God that cannot be trusted.
But how could it be otherwise? It takes a real jolt to get us to change our jobs, our relationships, our daily coffee consumption, for goodness sake—or, if we are wired that way, to change our addiction to change. How much more urgency is needed, how much more primal fear, to startle the heart out of its ruts and ruins. It’s true that God comes to the prophet Elijah not in the whirlwind, and not in the earthquake, and not in the fire that follows, but in the “still, small voice” that these ravages make plain. But the very wording of that passage makes it clear that the voice, though finally more powerful than the ravages it follows, is not altogether apart from them. That voice is always there, and for everyone. For some of us, unfortunately, it takes terror and pain to make us capable of hearing it. (...)
Part of the mystery of grace is the way it operates not only as present joy and future hope, but also retroactively, in a way: the past is suffused with a presence that, at the time, you could only feel as the most implacable absence. This is why being saved (I dislike the language, too, not because it’s inaccurate but because it’s corrupted by contemporary usage, a hands-in-the-air, holy-seizure sort of rapture, a definitive sense of rift) involves embracing rather than renouncing one’s past. It is true that Christ makes a man anew, that there is some ultimate change in him. But part of that change is the ability to see life as a whole, to feel the form and unity of it, to become a creature made for and assimilated to existence, rather than a desperate, fragmented thing striving against existence or caught forever just outside it. (...)
When my grandmother—whose reading was limited to the Bible and Guideposts, and whose life was circumscribed by the tiny yard around her tiny house in tiny Colorado City, Texas—died 20 years ago, I was pierced, not simply by grief and the loss of her presence, but by a sense that some very particular and hard-won kind of consciousness had gone out of the world. Hers was the kind of consciousness that is not consciousness as intellectuals define it, but is passive rather than active. It allows the world to stream through you rather than you always reaching out to take hold of it. It is the consciousness of the work of art and not necessarily of the artist who made it. People, occasionally, can be such works, creation streaming through them like the inspiration that, in truth, all of creation is.
by Christian Wiman, The American Scholar | Read more:
Michael Winslow
To those of you too young to remember the famed Police Academy series of movies, you missed out on a true gem of the '80s, Michael Winslow. The man was the king of sound effects. If you don't believe me, check out the above video where Winslow does a mean Robert Plant impersonation for "Whole Lotta Love" and then creates a ripping guitar solo ENTIRELY WITH HIS MOUTH. How do you do it Michael?
h/t GS
What Psychopaths Teach Us About How to Succeed
If you are born under the right star, for example, and have power over the human mind as the moon over the sea, you might order the genocide of 100,000 Kurds and shuffle to the gallows with such arcane recalcitrance as to elicit, from even your harshest detractors, perverse, unspoken deference.
“Do not be afraid, doctor,” said Saddam Hussein on the scaffold, moments before his execution. “This is for men.”
If you are violent and cunning, like the real-life “Hannibal Lecter” Robert Maudsley, you might take a fellow inmate hostage, smash his skull in and sample his brains with a spoon as nonchalantly as if you were downing a soft-boiled egg. (Maudsley, by the way, has been cooped up in solitary confinement for the past 30 years, in a bulletproof cage in the basement of Wakefield Prison in England.)
Or if you are a brilliant neurosurgeon, ruthlessly cool and focused under pressure, you might, like the man I'll call Dr. Geraghty, try your luck on a completely different playing field: at the remote outposts of 21st-century medicine, where risk blows in on 100-mile-per-hour winds and the oxygen of deliberation is thin. “I have no compassion for those whom I operate on,” he told me. “That is a luxury I simply cannot afford. In the theater I am reborn: as a cold, heartless machine, totally at one with scalpel, drill and saw. When you're cutting loose and cheating death high above the snowline of the brain, feelings aren't fit for purpose. Emotion is entropy—and seriously bad for business. I've hunted it down to extinction over the years.”
Geraghty is one of the U.K.'s top neurosurgeons—and although, on one level, his words send a chill down the spine, on another they make perfect sense. Deep in the ghettoes of some of the brain's most dangerous neighborhoods, the psychopath is glimpsed as a lone and merciless predator, a solitary species of transient, deadly allure. No sooner is the word out than images of serial killers, rapists and mad, reclusive bombers come stalking down the sidewalks of our minds.
But what if I were to paint you a different picture? What if I were to tell you that the arsonist who burns your house down might also, in a parallel universe, be the hero most likely to brave the flaming timbers of a crumbling, blazing building to seek out, and drag out, your loved ones? Or that the kid with a knife in the shadows at the back of the movie theater might well, in years to come, be wielding a rather different kind of knife at the back of a rather different kind of theater?
Claims like these are admittedly hard to believe. But they're true. Psychopaths are fearless, confident, charismatic, ruthless and focused. Yet, contrary to popular belief, they are not necessarily violent. Far from its being an open-and-shut case—you're either a psychopath or you're not—there are, instead, inner and outer zones of the disorder: a bit like the fare zones on a subway map. There is a spectrum of psychopathy along which each of us has our place, with only a small minority of A-listers resident in the “inner city.”
by Kevin Dutton, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Tim Bower
The Temporary City...Maybe
However, there is another, far more compelling and humane way to view these camps, and that is as prototypical urban types. The various ways in which we define the urban, such as population density, non-agricultural economic activity, and reasonably well-defined boundaries, are conditions that are here amply met. And when one considers the ways in which people artificially conjure cities (consider a company town, built for the sole purpose of extracting a natural resource), then why shouldn’t we consider refugee camps to be cities? More importantly, if we do consent to think of them as cities, what is it that we can learn from them?
Consider, for example, the three refugee camps collectively known as Daadab, in northeastern Kenya. Founded in 1991 to take in Somali refugees from the then-new civil war, the camp is now the world’s largest, and is still growing after 22 years; the influx of new arrivals has been guaranteed not only by the still-unresolved civil war, but also by the added stress of two failed monsoons in the Horn of Africa. As a result,
Dadaab is now the third-largest city in Kenya, but there are no Kenyans living there. Instead, it is home to 450,000 Somalis in a camp that was built for 90,000 people. Refugees…are not permitted to leave the camp, because the Kenyan government wants them to remain refugees and not become illegal immigrants. The government also prohibits them from working.This illustrates the paradox of the refugee camp and why, at first blush, it may seem counterintuitive to think of this form as a fundamentally, if prototypically, urban one. For one, the restrictions on the freedom of mobility violates our contemporary conception of the city: as a place to which people migrate in order to seek economic opportunity (I should note that this is debunked below). The additional perception of refugees as victims dependent on the largesse of both host country and humanitarian organizations – which, of course, operate under their own incentives that are not necessarily aligned with the long-term desires of the refugees – further removes them from the perception as independent actors.
And yet, as the case of Dadaab reveals, we really do have a city on our hands. The logistics of housing and feeding nearly half a million people are formidable, and to facilitate an organized approach the camp is laid out in a grid, with every family assigned an address. Even though it may be motivated only by pragmatism, this is de facto urban planning.The grid layout, by seeking out the efficiencies generated by proximity, creates the conditions for a socialization that is specifically urban. This is particularly striking when one realizes that those being so “urbanized” are people who had, up until that point, likely lived in rural settings. And as the camps grow, infrastructure and services have to maintain pace, and schools and hospitals are founded at strategic locations in order to serve the population. There are also “internet cafes, pharmacies, auto repair shops, and bus depots.” On the other end of things, formal cemeteries have been established and the burial of the dead regimented.
by Misha Lepetik, 3 Quarks Daily | Read more:
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Stephen Colbert Steps Out of Character
[ed. ...and has some interesting things to say about satire and the 2012 Presidential race.]
How to Win the Nobel Prize in Literature
I waited by the phone all week for that congratulatory call from overseas myself! Not for the stuff I’ve already written, which, let’s admit, is pretty amazing. But for the stuff I could write. I’m not saying I’m the most deserving writer on Earth for this recognition. I just want the Swedish people to tell the world I am. Just as the Nobel Prize people preemptively gave President Obama a Nobel Peace Prize for what he could or would do in office, they should give a Nobel Prize in Literature to me (and then maybe the year after that to you) for what we will accomplish in our Literary Careers with the million bucks, the free donuts and champagne and the NPR drive-time interviews we’ll receive as a Nobel Prize Winner. No one remembers who wins the other prizes. They are in subjects most people failed. Chemistry, geometry? Who knows. And I’m not exactly a selfless hero leading my people to any kind of freedom. I have no good intentions here. Writers are all about ourselves! And although my half-written novel Yay-o-wolf remains half-written I think we can all agree it’s going to be the greatest thing since The Bridges of Madison County, which I believe won the Nobel Prize twice it was so good. (I just checked that on Ms. Google and The Bridges of Madison County hasn’t won the Nobel Prize—yet.) The Nobel Prize in Literature is given to a writer for the body of their work while they’re still alive, so they can give a speech in cold, cold Sweden. To blond children who do not laugh or clap, such as those featured in the documentary The Children of the Corn.
So what can you do, oh writer who has not yet died? Here are some helpful hints that you and I can use on our way to the top of the Literature Anthill! (...)
BE DEEP, BUT NOT TOO DEEP
I’m not a deep person. I don’t have deep thoughts. I am not contemplative at all. I have no idea how the universe works or why it does the things it does. And my experiences haven’t given me any insight into the way people live or any ideas of how we could all live better together. Does that mean I won’t win the Nobel Prize? That does not mean that! The Nobel Committee isn’t necessarily looking for the most-daring, most-experimental, nost-smarty-pantsy of writers. They’re kind of middle of the road readers themselves. But like everyone else, they want authors to make them feel smart. Can you make them feel like they’re daring and edgy readers? Then you will soon have a Nobel, my friend. Although they hate any kind of reading that is at all fun, enjoyable, amusing. It’s an eat-your-vegetables kind of vibe they’re looking for. So just fake that kind of tone for like 30-40 years. Dour, solemn, lots of meaningful death shit and lots of adultery. Adultery is like the pinnacle of Literary Themes. If you’re a guy and you sleep around on your wife in books you are deep, existential, Nobel-worthy. If you’re a lady and you sleep around on your husband, the universe will shame you. And that shame will be deep.
But not too deep. It’s not like avant garde writers win the Nobel. Sartre refused his Nobel, which is pretty punk, because he both felt that he wasn’t avant garde enough and therefore winning wasn’t avant garde enough. That’s a lot of money to flush down the toilet. But you can always tell people in bars “The Nobel Prize? Fuck that! I threw mine in the river!” Very punk. But someone probably fished that Nobel out and sold it on ebay. Money’s money, and most writers would gladly tear your heart out and seal their grant-writing envelopes with your still-hot blood if they thought it would get them a few extra bucks. Writers are lazy or they’d go get real jobs like everybody else. Instead they live in the center of a universe in which they are the most interesting character. Yikes!! Double exclamation points!!
The John Cages and Gertrude Steins of the world don’t win prizes. They earn our lip-servicey love. We don’t actually enjoy reading them. We enjoy feeling better than everyone else for reading and listening to people like Cage and Stein. I learned more from every Raymond Chandler novel than I did by reading all the weird Woo Woo Shit I could ever get my hands on. They never gave an award to that French guy who wrote an entire book without using the letter e. Who knows if it was a good book or anything. You should win SOMETHING for writing a whole book without using an e. I can barely write a sentence without using an e. I’m munching on walrus poo. There’s one sentence. It took me an hour to write that. And I’m pretty sure walrus is spelled wrong there, doesn’t it usually have an E in it? I am seeing Es everwhere. So they never give the awards to the people who truly deserve them. That’s why they should give them to you! And me! We’re not up to anything truly complicated or trailblazing. They keep giving the award to people writing in the Magic Realism form. Talking giraffes. Monkeys dressed like angels. That kind of thing. Trees that make you cheeseburgers. Magic cheeseburgers! They love magic realism because it’s safe and it makes people feel smart. And it makes for good movies. Who doesn’t like movies with talking cats? Assholes, that’s who!
So don’t get fancy. Don’t try to do too much. Use E’s, apparently. You just have to learn how to make people feel smarter about themselves without saying much. It’s like how people who don’t talk much seem contemplative, thoughtful. When they’re probably just playing Tetris in their heads. Cheat on your wives in books but not on your husbands! Has a gay writer ever won the Nobel? Maybe just Gide! Although I have my suspicions about Hemingway. So be straight and white and male and old, maybe grow a big bushy beard. And always hold your head or face in your author photos, that helps you sell 10,000 extra copies per book. Blue covers are better. People are always asking for “that book with the blue cover.” Are you writing all this down? This is some serious Nobel-prize-winning gold. Well, get a pen! Go, now!
by Jim Behrle, The Awl | Read more:
Photo by San Francisco Foghorn.
Priority Queues: Paying to Get to the Front of the Line
In the US, as elsewhere, it is becoming more common to see queues where one can pay to get to the front. It brings the market to the experience of waiting in line - but some say it conflicts with the principles of fairness and equality.
Up until recently, the "serpentine" queue was the norm in America - and businesses were proud to implement them.
"There used to be a bank in New York called Chemical Bank and they used to claim that they were the first ones to have that in their bank lobbies," says Richard Larson, a queuing theorist at MIT. "Wendy's is very proud that they were the first ones in fast food to have the single serpentine line."
The model works because most members of society agree the person who's been waiting longest should be served next, he says.
But today, many Americans are waiting in a new kind of queue - the priority queue, where certain customers get higher priority because they pay.
In American airports, priority queues are now visible everywhere - at the check-in counter, at security and at boarding gates. Many airlines now board their passengers according to the amount of money they've paid for their ticket.
Like Ryanair in Europe, discount airline Spirit is both unpopular and extremely successful. People may moan that they have to pay extra to board first or get a particular seat - but the low prices mean they keep booking tickets.
Priority queues are also being brought in to other areas of American life - from highways to theme parks.
Take the Six Flags White Water amusement park in Atlanta, which implemented a priority queue system in 2011.
Some guests simply queue up for their rides. Those who purchase green-and-gold wrist bands - fitted with radio frequency technology - are able to swim in the pool or eat snacks before being alerted to their turn.
Guests who pay an even higher fee - roughly double the price of admission - get the gold flash pass, cutting their waiting time in half.
The company says it has been a huge hit and is now installing the system in all of its American water parks.
I loved using the flash pass, but when I saw a group of teenage girls glaring at another group of teenage girls all wearing gold wrist bands - I wondered if priority queues were adding to the polarisation in American society, already a hot political issue. Is it really a good idea to further divide citizens into first and second-class citizens? (...)
In October 2011, Atlanta created a priority lane on the highway for drivers with a Peach Pass - the price of driving in the lane changes depending on how much traffic there is.
Critics call them "Lexus lanes", because they claim the lanes benefit only the rich who can afford expensive cars.
Aside from the cost of the express lanes, some drivers are also upset that they replace car pool lanes - special lanes for cars with two or more passengers.
Overnight all the car pool drivers who used to ride free were pushed into the general lanes, making traffic worse for everyone except those who pay.
by Benjamin Walker, BBC World Service | Read more:
Photo: Thinkstock
Cooking Isn’t Creative, and It Isn’t Easy
At the core of C.I.’s M.O. are two intrepid observations Kimball has made about the innermost psychology of home cooks. Namely that they 1) are haunted by a fear of humiliation, and 2) will not follow a recipe to the letter, believing that slavishly following directions is an implicit admission that you cannot cook. (When Kimball laid this out for me, I shuddered with recognition.) What the magazine essentially offers its readers is a bargain: if they agree to follow the recipes as written, their cooking will succeed and they will be recognized by family and friends as competent or even expert in the kitchen. To this end, every 32-page issue of the magazine presents a handful of recipes that have been made “bulletproof,” to use a Kimballism, i.e., worried into technical infallibility after weeks of testing so exacting as to bring an average home cook to the brink of neurasthenia. The bargain further holds that the peppercorn-crusted filet of beef or butterscotch-cream pie will turn out not only in C.I.’s professional kitchen, with its All-Clad pans and DCS ranges, but also on a lowly electric four-top, using a dull knife and a $20 nonstick skillet.
The bargain’s appeal is, at root, visceral. To cook well at home is to begin to master the quotidian, to wrest a measure of control over the entropy of day-to-day living. I began reading the magazine as a fearful, ungainly cook several years ago, and I remember the inordinate pride I took in putting on the table, for the first time, a basic but creditable Thanksgiving dinner, made entirely with C.I. recipes. My experience, I have since learned, is actually fairly common. Editor after editor at C.I. recounts stories of readers, a surprising number of whom turn out be white, middle-aged men, who’ve approached them at public events to offer thanks for “teaching me how to cook,” voices froggy with emotion. Kimball views his bond with home cooks as a solemn responsibility. These days, online surveys allow the magazine’s editors to communicate with readers in minutes; no story idea gets into the running unless it surveys well, and no tested recipe is complete unless at least 80 percent of those who tried it at home — thousands of uncompensated volunteers known as Friends of Cook’s — say they would make it again.
From the start, readers latched onto Kimball’s strange magazine with crablike tenacity. Today, roughly three-quarters of subscribers renew, a rate that’s the envy of publishing. In 2007, they signed up their one millionth subscriber, and over the years Kimball has supersized his idea into a franchise that includes 12 seasons of “America’s Test Kitchen,” the most-watched cooking show on public television; a second magazine, Cook’s Country (with its attendant show); reams of special issues and books; a battery of paid Web sites; a radio program; and even an online cooking school, and he has done it without discounting subscriptions or giving anything away or taking on a single advertiser.
C.I.’s headlines, like Kimball himself, don’t truck in false modesty. Invariably the recipes are “better” or “best,” never just worthwhile variations, and their preparation tends to be “easy” or at least “easier,” and even “American classics” don’t make it into print unless they’ve been “improved.” Kimball’s bravado relies on a set of convictions that provoke much low-frequency grumbling among competitors. “Most cookbook authors don’t care what happens to their recipe when it enters your home,” Kimball insists at Le Bernardin. In bighearted moods, he describes the C.I. approach as “why bad things happen to good recipes.” The corollary is his belief that empirically rigorous testing always leads to the best preparation, just as blind tastings — another staple of Kimball’s products — will always winnow out the best brand of crunchy peanut butter or microwave popcorn. To the relativists — those Pollyannas who insist that cooking is as much an art as a science and that a recipe’s effectiveness depends mostly on what a particular cook enjoys eating — Kimball has this to offer: “Cooking isn’t creative, and it isn’t easy. It’s serious, and it’s hard to do well, just as everything worth doing is damn hard.” With this he takes off his spectacles and rubs his eyes, looking like a riled-up border-town newspaperman in a Western, a simile he would no doubt enjoy.
by Alex Halberstadt, NY Times | Read more:
Photograph by Ryan Pfluger
The Hunt For “Geronimo”
Holed up in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Osama bin Laden sat at a computer and set down his thoughts in a long letter dated April 26, 2011, to Atiyah Abdul al-Rahman, his third-in-command and the link to his far-flung and beleaguered followers—the man he addressed as Sheikh Mahmud. It was the al-Qaeda leader’s sixth spring of confinement in Abbottabad. His hair and beard had grown white. Ten years after the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden’s life had shrunk to the cramped and crowded space of the upper two floors of a house behind high walls. His days consisted of familiar routines, rarely broken: his meals, his seven daily prayer sessions, his readings, the poetry lessons for his children and grandchildren, the sermons to three of his wives, the brisk daily walk around the vegetable gardens.
In his letter to Sheikh Mahmud, he raced to catch up with the Arab Spring, to interpret the events in light of his own immutable beliefs. Bin Laden also hammered home some advice about security. After more than nine successful years in hiding, he considered himself to be an expert: “It is proven that the American technology and its modern systems cannot arrest a Mujahid if he does not commit a security error that leads them to him,” he wrote. “So adherence to security precautions makes their advanced technology a loss and a disappointment to them.”
The computer turned bin Laden’s words into neat lines of uniform Arabic. He was feeling confident. He had five days to live. (...)
Eight months earlier, on a hot day in August, Tom Donilon, then the deputy national-security adviser, had added a brief item to the end of his daily morning briefing for Barack Obama. He said, “Leon and the guys at Langley think they may have come up with something”—something related to bin Laden.
There had been no scent of the al-Qaeda leader for more than eight years, ever since he had slipped away from the mountain outpost of Tora Bora during a botched siege by allied troops. The Bush administration maintained that he was somewhere in the mountainous regions of northwestern Pakistan, but, in truth, they had no idea where he was. On May 26, 2009, Obama had concluded a routine national-security briefing in the Situation Room by pointing to Donilon, Leon Panetta, his newly appointed C.I.A. director, Mike Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff.
“You, you, you, and you,” he said. “Come upstairs.”
The four followed Obama through the warren of narrow West Wing hallways to the Oval Office. They didn’t sit down.
Obama said, “Here’s the deal. I want this hunt for Osama bin Laden and [Ayman] al-Zawahiri to come to the front of the line. I worry that the trail has gone cold. This has to be our top priority and it needs leadership in the tops of your organizations.” He added, “I want regular reports on this to me, and I want them starting in 30 days.”
The conventional wisdom is that the intelligence apparatus had slackened off in its search for bin Laden—and it’s true that President George W. Bush, frustrated by the inability to find him, publicly declared that bin Laden wasn’t important. But among the analysts and operatives, the hunt had always continued. Obama’s order just gave it more focus and intensity. Now, a year later, there was something to talk about. While looking for an al-Qaeda figure who went by the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti—a man known to have once been a trusted aide and courier for bin Laden—intelligence analysts had become aware of a curious compound just outside Abbottabad, a prosperous city about 30 miles northeast of Islamabad. Too wary to use cell phones or Internet links, bin Laden relied on couriers to distribute his letters and occasional video and audio pronouncements. Reversing the paths taken by these tapes or thumb drives always ended one or two steps short of bin Laden’s inner circle. But now they had someone who might take them all the way inside. The search for him had lasted eight years. It had taken the C.I.A. five years just to learn his real name: Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed. The trail had ended at this residence.
Panetta brought two of the agency’s bin Laden team leaders to the Oval Office. They handed Obama classified pictures and maps and walked him through the material. What had first intrigued them was the compound itself. Unlike most homes in that affluent neighborhood, it did not have Internet or phone connections. The walls were unusually high, topped by two feet of barbed wire. There was no way to see inside the house itself, from the ground or from above. The agency had learned that the compound was home not only to Ibrahim Ahmed’s family but to his brother Abrar’s family as well. They went by assumed names: Ahmed called himself Arshad Khan, and the brother went by Tariq Khan. They had never been wealthy, but their accommodations were expensive. The brothers were also wary. They burned their trash on-site. None of their children attended school. In telephone calls to distant family members, always made from locations away from the compound itself, they lied about where they were living. The C.I.A. has been known to misinterpret many things, but one thing it recognizes is high operational security.
The agency had been investigating the compound quietly, taking pictures from above and collecting information on the ground. That and telephone intercepts had produced two discoveries.
The first was that living inside the compound on the upper two floors of the central building was a third family. Neighbors in Abbottabad who knew of the Khan brothers were not aware of this third family. The second discovery was that Ahmed still worked for al-Qaeda. Though he was known to have been close to bin Laden years earlier, the agency had no proof that he had retained the connection. But in a telephone conversation with an old friend that summer, a call the C.I.A. monitored, Ahmed was peppered with the standard questions, “What are you doing now? What are you up to?” Ahmed at first didn’t answer. But his friend was insistent, and so he finally gave in, albeit cryptically, explaining, “I’m with the same ones as before.” His friend said, “May Allah be with you,” and quickly dropped the subject. That suggested that whoever Ahmed and his brother were minding in that house was a top al-Qaeda figure.
Those were the new facts presented to the president. “This is the best lead that we have seen since Tora Bora,” said one of the team members. Thinking back on the moment during a long Oval Office conversation, Obama recalled being guarded, “not particularly optimistic.” He found the information intriguing, but only in a general way. The connection to bin Laden was tenuous. Still, he encouraged Panetta and his team to press on. He wanted to nail down the identity of whoever was living upstairs. He also wanted a “close hold” on the information. They were not to let others know about it. They were definitely not to tell Pakistan.
There had been no scent of the al-Qaeda leader for more than eight years, ever since he had slipped away from the mountain outpost of Tora Bora during a botched siege by allied troops. The Bush administration maintained that he was somewhere in the mountainous regions of northwestern Pakistan, but, in truth, they had no idea where he was. On May 26, 2009, Obama had concluded a routine national-security briefing in the Situation Room by pointing to Donilon, Leon Panetta, his newly appointed C.I.A. director, Mike Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff.
“You, you, you, and you,” he said. “Come upstairs.”
The four followed Obama through the warren of narrow West Wing hallways to the Oval Office. They didn’t sit down.
Obama said, “Here’s the deal. I want this hunt for Osama bin Laden and [Ayman] al-Zawahiri to come to the front of the line. I worry that the trail has gone cold. This has to be our top priority and it needs leadership in the tops of your organizations.” He added, “I want regular reports on this to me, and I want them starting in 30 days.”
The conventional wisdom is that the intelligence apparatus had slackened off in its search for bin Laden—and it’s true that President George W. Bush, frustrated by the inability to find him, publicly declared that bin Laden wasn’t important. But among the analysts and operatives, the hunt had always continued. Obama’s order just gave it more focus and intensity. Now, a year later, there was something to talk about. While looking for an al-Qaeda figure who went by the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti—a man known to have once been a trusted aide and courier for bin Laden—intelligence analysts had become aware of a curious compound just outside Abbottabad, a prosperous city about 30 miles northeast of Islamabad. Too wary to use cell phones or Internet links, bin Laden relied on couriers to distribute his letters and occasional video and audio pronouncements. Reversing the paths taken by these tapes or thumb drives always ended one or two steps short of bin Laden’s inner circle. But now they had someone who might take them all the way inside. The search for him had lasted eight years. It had taken the C.I.A. five years just to learn his real name: Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed. The trail had ended at this residence.
Panetta brought two of the agency’s bin Laden team leaders to the Oval Office. They handed Obama classified pictures and maps and walked him through the material. What had first intrigued them was the compound itself. Unlike most homes in that affluent neighborhood, it did not have Internet or phone connections. The walls were unusually high, topped by two feet of barbed wire. There was no way to see inside the house itself, from the ground or from above. The agency had learned that the compound was home not only to Ibrahim Ahmed’s family but to his brother Abrar’s family as well. They went by assumed names: Ahmed called himself Arshad Khan, and the brother went by Tariq Khan. They had never been wealthy, but their accommodations were expensive. The brothers were also wary. They burned their trash on-site. None of their children attended school. In telephone calls to distant family members, always made from locations away from the compound itself, they lied about where they were living. The C.I.A. has been known to misinterpret many things, but one thing it recognizes is high operational security.
The agency had been investigating the compound quietly, taking pictures from above and collecting information on the ground. That and telephone intercepts had produced two discoveries.
The first was that living inside the compound on the upper two floors of the central building was a third family. Neighbors in Abbottabad who knew of the Khan brothers were not aware of this third family. The second discovery was that Ahmed still worked for al-Qaeda. Though he was known to have been close to bin Laden years earlier, the agency had no proof that he had retained the connection. But in a telephone conversation with an old friend that summer, a call the C.I.A. monitored, Ahmed was peppered with the standard questions, “What are you doing now? What are you up to?” Ahmed at first didn’t answer. But his friend was insistent, and so he finally gave in, albeit cryptically, explaining, “I’m with the same ones as before.” His friend said, “May Allah be with you,” and quickly dropped the subject. That suggested that whoever Ahmed and his brother were minding in that house was a top al-Qaeda figure.
Those were the new facts presented to the president. “This is the best lead that we have seen since Tora Bora,” said one of the team members. Thinking back on the moment during a long Oval Office conversation, Obama recalled being guarded, “not particularly optimistic.” He found the information intriguing, but only in a general way. The connection to bin Laden was tenuous. Still, he encouraged Panetta and his team to press on. He wanted to nail down the identity of whoever was living upstairs. He also wanted a “close hold” on the information. They were not to let others know about it. They were definitely not to tell Pakistan.
by Mark Bowden, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Photo: Pete Souza/White House/Getty Images
At The Corner of Hope and Worry
Another day begins with a sound softer than a finger-snap, in an Ohio place called Elyria. In the central square of this small city, the gushing water fountain applauds the early-morning chorus of sparrows. A car clears its throat. A door slams. And then: click.
The faint sound comes as 7:00 flashes on the clock of the Lorain National Bank building, looming over the square. The pull of a string — click — has sent life pulsing through a neon sign, announcing to all of Elyria that, once more, against the odds, Donna’s Diner is open.
Its proprietor, Donna Dove, 57, ignites the grill that she seems to have just turned off, so seamlessly do her workdays blend into one endless shift. She wears her blond hair in a ponytail and frames her hazel eyes with black-rimmed glasses that tend to get smudged with grill grease. She sees the world through the blur of her work.
A dozen years ago, Donna found a scrap of serendipity on the sidewalk: a notice that a local mom-and-pop restaurant was for sale. After cooking for her broken family as a child, after cooking for county inmates at one of her many jobs, she had come to see food as life’s binding agent, and a diner as her calling. She maxed out her credit cards, cashed in her 401(k) and opened a business to call her own.
Donna’s Diner. Donna’s.
You know this place: It is Elyria’s equivalent to that diner, that coffee shop, that McDonald’s. From the vantage point of these booths and Formica countertops, the past improves with distance, the present keeps piling on, and a promising future is practically willed by the resilient patrons.
It is where the recession and other issues of the day are lived as much as discussed. Where expectations for a certain lifestyle have been lowered and hopes for salvation through education and technology have been raised. Where the presidential nominees Barack Obama and Mitt Romney each hope that his plan for a way back will resonate with the Donna Doves, who try to get by in places like Elyria — where the American dream they talk about can sometimes seem like a tease.
But for now, at least, the door to Donna’s is open. So take a seat. Have a cup of coffee. Maybe some eggs.
This morning, as usual, Pete Aldrich is helping Donna through the new-dawn isolation, turning on the coffee and being compensated by food and tips from the occasional delivery. In his early 50s, well-educated and from regional royalty, he has hit some hard times, and may or may not have slept in his car last night, cocooned by his bundled possessions.
Pete tries, though, he tries. He often leaves straight from Donna’s for a job interview, hustling out with purpose, no matter that his thick-lensed eyeglasses are missing one arm. Something will turn up.
That is the communal hope. Donna, for example, is dogged by the day’s anxieties. Why are her receipts going down? What lunch special can she offer to clean out the refrigerator? Should she buy less perch for her Friday fish fry? Can she slide a month on her electric bill? Since she already doesn’t have health insurance, what else can she cut?
“I’m just going in circles and circles and circles,” Donna says one day, gazing through smudged glasses. “And not getting anyplace.”
The fresh aroma of coffee face-slaps the air. Soon the Breakfast Club regulars, that gaggle of Elyrian past and present, will be here to renew their continuing discussion of what was, is and isn’t in this city of 55,000. The presidential election sometimes serves as a conversation starter, like a curio placed between the salt and pepper shakers.
The talk will continue as yolk stains harden and refills turn tepid. Their Ohio is a swing state, after all, and their Elyria sits precariously on that swing. More Democratic than Republican, it has several global companies and the memory of many more; an embattled middle class and encroaching poverty; and the faint sense that the Next Big Thing better arrive before even its beloved park fountain, visible from the diner’s front window, gets shut off.
by Dan Barry, NY Times | Read more:
The faint sound comes as 7:00 flashes on the clock of the Lorain National Bank building, looming over the square. The pull of a string — click — has sent life pulsing through a neon sign, announcing to all of Elyria that, once more, against the odds, Donna’s Diner is open.Its proprietor, Donna Dove, 57, ignites the grill that she seems to have just turned off, so seamlessly do her workdays blend into one endless shift. She wears her blond hair in a ponytail and frames her hazel eyes with black-rimmed glasses that tend to get smudged with grill grease. She sees the world through the blur of her work.
A dozen years ago, Donna found a scrap of serendipity on the sidewalk: a notice that a local mom-and-pop restaurant was for sale. After cooking for her broken family as a child, after cooking for county inmates at one of her many jobs, she had come to see food as life’s binding agent, and a diner as her calling. She maxed out her credit cards, cashed in her 401(k) and opened a business to call her own.
Donna’s Diner. Donna’s.
You know this place: It is Elyria’s equivalent to that diner, that coffee shop, that McDonald’s. From the vantage point of these booths and Formica countertops, the past improves with distance, the present keeps piling on, and a promising future is practically willed by the resilient patrons.
It is where the recession and other issues of the day are lived as much as discussed. Where expectations for a certain lifestyle have been lowered and hopes for salvation through education and technology have been raised. Where the presidential nominees Barack Obama and Mitt Romney each hope that his plan for a way back will resonate with the Donna Doves, who try to get by in places like Elyria — where the American dream they talk about can sometimes seem like a tease.
But for now, at least, the door to Donna’s is open. So take a seat. Have a cup of coffee. Maybe some eggs.
This morning, as usual, Pete Aldrich is helping Donna through the new-dawn isolation, turning on the coffee and being compensated by food and tips from the occasional delivery. In his early 50s, well-educated and from regional royalty, he has hit some hard times, and may or may not have slept in his car last night, cocooned by his bundled possessions.
Pete tries, though, he tries. He often leaves straight from Donna’s for a job interview, hustling out with purpose, no matter that his thick-lensed eyeglasses are missing one arm. Something will turn up.
That is the communal hope. Donna, for example, is dogged by the day’s anxieties. Why are her receipts going down? What lunch special can she offer to clean out the refrigerator? Should she buy less perch for her Friday fish fry? Can she slide a month on her electric bill? Since she already doesn’t have health insurance, what else can she cut?
“I’m just going in circles and circles and circles,” Donna says one day, gazing through smudged glasses. “And not getting anyplace.”
The fresh aroma of coffee face-slaps the air. Soon the Breakfast Club regulars, that gaggle of Elyrian past and present, will be here to renew their continuing discussion of what was, is and isn’t in this city of 55,000. The presidential election sometimes serves as a conversation starter, like a curio placed between the salt and pepper shakers.
The talk will continue as yolk stains harden and refills turn tepid. Their Ohio is a swing state, after all, and their Elyria sits precariously on that swing. More Democratic than Republican, it has several global companies and the memory of many more; an embattled middle class and encroaching poverty; and the faint sense that the Next Big Thing better arrive before even its beloved park fountain, visible from the diner’s front window, gets shut off.
by Dan Barry, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Nicole Bengiveno
Saturday, October 13, 2012
'The Biggest Breakthrough in Depression Research'... Ketamine?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this isn't the entire story.
So why, in a review published late last week in Science, have researchers declared that findings on the effects of ketamine -- what the kids call "Special K" -- on the depressed brain are "the biggest breakthrough in depression research in a half century"?
Anyone who's experienced major depressive disorder, either personally or through a loved one, would understandably be excited about the news that taking ketamine can lift depression in mere hours in patients who are resistant to typical antidepressants. The commonly prescribed serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) take weeks to kick in, if they end up working at all (they don't, for more than a third of depressed patients). It's during this painfully long waiting period that suicide, for two to twelve percent of patients, can begin to be seen as the quickest way out of the darkest depressions.
So yes, ketamine's potent and rapid effects seem downright miraculous, even though the relief it provides from depression only lasts seven to ten days. But researchers at the Yale School of Medicine have known this for a decade now. And the drug has actually been approved by the FDA for use as an injected anesthetic, albeit one with short-term, but psychologically intense, side-effects:
Instead, the studies reviewed here support a different theory, one which suggests that depression is the result of damage to the brain cells responsible for controlling mood. In mice, at least, this atrophy of neurons occurred in response to stress. Although the reasons stress causes this to happen are unclear, the weakening of synaptic connections appears to be at the root of depression and other stress-related disorders.
SSRIs are intended to increase brain levels of serotonin, but they do also, eventually, restore neurons. Ketamine is able to repair these synaptic connections in mice with near-miraculous speed. Indirect evidence from brain imaging supports the theory that this "synaptogensis" is the mechanism allowing for ketamine's rapid effects in humans as well.
So why, in a review published late last week in Science, have researchers declared that findings on the effects of ketamine -- what the kids call "Special K" -- on the depressed brain are "the biggest breakthrough in depression research in a half century"?
Anyone who's experienced major depressive disorder, either personally or through a loved one, would understandably be excited about the news that taking ketamine can lift depression in mere hours in patients who are resistant to typical antidepressants. The commonly prescribed serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) take weeks to kick in, if they end up working at all (they don't, for more than a third of depressed patients). It's during this painfully long waiting period that suicide, for two to twelve percent of patients, can begin to be seen as the quickest way out of the darkest depressions.
So yes, ketamine's potent and rapid effects seem downright miraculous, even though the relief it provides from depression only lasts seven to ten days. But researchers at the Yale School of Medicine have known this for a decade now. And the drug has actually been approved by the FDA for use as an injected anesthetic, albeit one with short-term, but psychologically intense, side-effects:
The psychological manifestations vary in severity between pleasant dream-like states, vivid imagery, hallucinations, and emergence delirium. In some cases these states have been accompanied by confusion, excitement, and irrational behavior which a few patients recall as an unpleasant experience. The duration ordinarily is no more than a few hours; in a few cases, however, recurrences have taken place up to 24 hours postoperatively. No residual psychological effects are known to have resulted.What is new -- and legitimately exciting -- about all this is that scientists are beginning to realize that we may have been thinking about the depressed brain in the wrong way. The effects seen with ketamine suggest that the common explanations for depression -- that it's caused by a "chemical imbalance" in the brain, or by low levels of serotonin -- may not be what's really causing the disorder after all.
Instead, the studies reviewed here support a different theory, one which suggests that depression is the result of damage to the brain cells responsible for controlling mood. In mice, at least, this atrophy of neurons occurred in response to stress. Although the reasons stress causes this to happen are unclear, the weakening of synaptic connections appears to be at the root of depression and other stress-related disorders.
SSRIs are intended to increase brain levels of serotonin, but they do also, eventually, restore neurons. Ketamine is able to repair these synaptic connections in mice with near-miraculous speed. Indirect evidence from brain imaging supports the theory that this "synaptogensis" is the mechanism allowing for ketamine's rapid effects in humans as well.
by Lindsay Abrams, The Atlantic | Read more:
Photo: Olivia Harris/Reuters
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