How Patsy Grimaldi Is Getting His Good Name Back

Christening a restaurant is never simple. But the question of what Patsy Grimaldi would call his new pizzeria was further complicated by the fact that he was legally barred from following the long-standing tradition of just naming it after himself. He couldn’t call it Patsy’s—he had called an earlier place that and been sued by the restaurateur who owned the rights to that name. Nor could he call it Grimaldi’s. For business purposes, his last name belongs to one Frank Ciolli, to whom he sold his iconic pizzeria under the Brooklyn Bridge in 1998. In the end, the 81-year-old chose to call the place Juliana’s, after his mother. It helped that the trademark was unclaimed.

If neither Patsy nor Grimaldi could be on the sign, Patsy Grimaldi was determined to put his stamp on the food. One morning earlier this month, he stood at the marble counter in front of Juliana’s refurbished coal-fired oven, auditioning two pizzaioli. Both were clearly nervous. And Patsy wasn’t making it easy. He didn’t like the way Jose Martinez, a 35-year-old with ten years of experience, threw flour on the board—Patsy showed him how to flick his wrist so it settled like a delicate layer of snow. He didn’t like the way 23-year-old Vinny Amato patted the dough—use your fingertips, not your palms—or the way he lifted it off the counter to stretch it with his fists; any true pizza man knows that will make the center too thin. “You get it?” Patsy asked as his fingers flew, nimbly caressing (“like a woman,” he used to say) a lump of dough into a perfect round. Then, perhaps realizing that he had to hire someone if Juliana’s were to open by the end of the month as planned, he added, “I know you are both professionals. But you have to do it my way.”

The prospect of pies done Patsy’s way—blister-edged discs topped with ingredients like fragrant tomatoes and his wife Carol’s homemade mozzarella—has had pizza geeks salivating since word first leaked last winter that the maestro was returning after nearly fifteen years in retirement. That Patsy would be serving his pies at 19 Old Fulton Street, the very spot on the Brooklyn waterfront where he and Carol had opened more than twenty years ago, would make them taste even better. But Patsy’s big comeback has been fraught. Ciolli, who continued to operate Grimaldi’s at 19 Old Fulton until this past December, when he was forced to move a few doors down after a bitter dispute with the landlord, has taken Patsy and Carol to court. Juliana’s, he claims in an affidavit filed last month, could slash his business by 30 percent or more. Patsy and Carol, he alleges, are trying to “steal back the very business they earlier sold to me.”

For Patsy, Juliana’s is more than just a swan song. “It’s a classic, almost Sicilian thing,” says Ed Levine, the editor-in-chief of the food blog Serious Eats and the author of Pizza: A Slice of Heaven. “This is about one thing: getting his good name back.” Even if the name he has to use to restore his legacy isn’t his own.

Never before has the city been the pizza wonderland it is today. You find great pies in Bushwick, the Village, Hell’s Kitchen—even midtown! And you can indulge in a kaleidoscope of styles. There are Sicilian slices at Di Fara; wood-fired Neapolitan pies with soupy centers at Franny’s and Motorino; Roman pies with their crackerlike crusts at Campo De’ Fiori; fried, lumpy, but delicious blobs called montanaras at Forcella and Pizz­Arte. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that less than ten years ago—what the New York Times’ Frank Bruni once called “less self-conscious pizza times”—good pizza in New York meant only one thing: a coal-fired pie.

According to lore, pizza made its debut in New York in 1905, when the Neapolitan immigrant Gennaro Lombardi began using leftover bread dough to make pizza at his grocery store in Little Italy. The pies were cooked in coal-fired ovens, not out of any culinary pretension but because that was the technology of the day. The result was a pizza with a crust that was neither too thick nor too thin, a slightly charred bottom that lent a subtle smokiness, and distinct islands of sauce and fresh-pulled mozzarella.

The original Lombardi’s closed in the early eighties (a spinoff still operates in Noho), but not before giving root to New York’s three other great pizza families. Anthony Pero, who opened Totonno’s in Coney Island in 1924, worked there. So did John Sasso, who started John’s in 1929, and Patsy Lancieri, who opened Patsy’s in East Harlem in 1933. To a casual observer, their pies might have seemed interchangeable. But the four families have long defended their turf with the same ferocity of those other famous New York families (minus the violence and illegal sidelines). Louise “Cookie” Ciminieri, Anthony Pero’s granddaughter, still runs Totonno’s in Coney Island. She refuses to tell customers what goes into her sauce or whether there’s a touch of Romano cheese sprinkled on her pies. (Survey says? There is!) And she certainly would never deign to taste someone else’s pie. “I don’t eat anyone’s pizza,” she says brusquely. “Because then they turn around and say Totonno’s eats my pizza!”

by Jane Black, New York Magazine |  Read more:

Photo: David Leventi

The Island Where People Forget to Die

In 1943, a Greek war veteran named Stamatis Moraitis came to the United States for treatment of a combat-mangled arm. He’d survived a gunshot wound, escaped to Turkey and eventually talked his way onto the Queen Elizabeth, then serving as a troopship, to cross the Atlantic. Moraitis settled in Port Jefferson, N.Y., an enclave of countrymen from his native island, Ikaria. He quickly landed a job doing manual labor. Later, he moved to Boynton Beach, Fla. Along the way, Moraitis married a Greek-American woman, had three children and bought a three-bedroom house and a 1951 Chevrolet.

One day in 1976, Moraitis felt short of breath. Climbing stairs was a chore; he had to quit working midday. After X-rays, his doctor concluded that Moraitis had lung cancer. As he recalls, nine other doctors confirmed the diagnosis. They gave him nine months to live. He was in his mid-60s.

Moraitis considered staying in America and seeking aggressive cancer treatment at a local hospital. That way, he could also be close to his adult children. But he decided instead to return to Ikaria, where he could be buried with his ancestors in a cemetery shaded by oak trees that overlooked the Aegean Sea. He figured a funeral in the United States would cost thousands, a traditional Ikarian one only $200, leaving more of his retirement savings for his wife, Elpiniki. Moraitis and Elpiniki moved in with his elderly parents, into a tiny, whitewashed house on two acres of stepped vineyards near Evdilos, on the north side of Ikaria. At first, he spent his days in bed, as his mother and wife tended to him. He reconnected with his faith. On Sunday mornings, he hobbled up the hill to a tiny Greek Orthodox chapel where his grandfather once served as a priest. When his childhood friends discovered that he had moved back, they started showing up every afternoon. They’d talk for hours, an activity that invariably involved a bottle or two of locally produced wine. I might as well die happy, he thought.

In the ensuing months, something strange happened. He says he started to feel stronger. One day, feeling ambitious, he planted some vegetables in the garden. He didn’t expect to live to harvest them, but he enjoyed being in the sunshine, breathing the ocean air. Elpiniki could enjoy the fresh vegetables after he was gone.

Six months came and went. Moraitis didn’t die. Instead, he reaped his garden and, feeling emboldened, cleaned up the family vineyard as well. Easing himself into the island routine, he woke up when he felt like it, worked in the vineyards until midafternoon, made himself lunch and then took a long nap. In the evenings, he often walked to the local tavern, where he played dominoes past midnight. The years passed. His health continued to improve. He added a couple of rooms to his parents’ home so his children could visit. He built up the vineyard until it produced 400 gallons of wine a year. Today, three and a half decades later, he’s 97 years old — according to an official document he disputes; he says he’s 102 — and cancer-free. He never went through chemotherapy, took drugs or sought therapy of any sort. All he did was move home to Ikaria.

by Dan Buetnner, NY Times |  Read more:
Andrea Frazzetta/LUZphoto

Why Can't We Be Friends?

Can heterosexual men and women ever be “just friends”? Few other questions have provoked debates as intense, family dinners as awkward, literature as lurid, or movies as memorable. Still, the question remains unanswered. Daily experience suggests that non-romantic friendships between males and females are not only possible, but common—men and women live, work, and play side-by-side, and generally seem to be able to avoid spontaneously sleeping together. However, the possibility remains that this apparently platonic coexistence is merely a façade, an elaborate dance covering up countless sexual impulses bubbling just beneath the surface.

New research suggests that there may be some truth to this possibility—that we may think we’re capable of being “just friends” with members of the opposite sex, but the opportunity (or perceived opportunity) for “romance” is often lurking just around the corner, waiting to pounce at the most inopportune moment.

In order to investigate the viability of truly platonic opposite-sex friendships—a topic that has been explored more on the silver screen than in the science lab—researchers brought 88 pairs of undergraduate opposite-sex friends into…a science lab. Privacy was paramount—for example, imagine the fallout if two friends learned that one—and only one—had unspoken romantic feelings for the other throughout their relationship. In order to ensure honest responses, the researchers not only followed standard protocols regarding anonymity and confidentiality, but also required both friends to agree—verbally, and in front of each other—to refrain from discussing the study, even after they had left the testing facility. These friendship pairs were then separated, and each member of each pair was asked a series of questions related to his or her romantic feelings (or lack thereof) toward the friend with whom they were taking the study.

The results suggest large gender differences in how men and women experience opposite-sex friendships. Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa. Men were also more likely than women to think that their opposite-sex friends were attracted to them—a clearly misguided belief. In fact, men’s estimates of how attractive they were to their female friends had virtually nothing to do with how these women actually felt, and almost everything to do with how the men themselves felt—basically, males assumed that any romantic attraction they experienced was mutual, and were blind to the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female friends. Women, too, were blind to the mindset of their opposite-sex friends; because females generally were not attracted to their male friends, they assumed that this lack of attraction was mutual. As a result, men consistently overestimated the level of attraction felt by their female friends and women consistently underestimated the level of attraction felt by their male friends.

by Adrian S Ward, Scientific American |  Read more:

Illustration Kyle Staver-Adam and Eve with Goats, 2011 via:

No Respect

A girl phoned me the other day and said, “Come on over, nobody's home.” I went over. Nobody was home..

During sex my wife always wants to talk to me. Just the other night she called me from a hotel.

I drink too much. Last time I gave a urine sample there was an olive in it.

I haven’t spoken to my wife in years. I didn’t want to interrupt her.

I tell ya, my wife and I, we don’t think alike. She donates money to the homeless, and I donate money to the topless.

I was making love to this girl and she started crying. I said, “Are you going to hate yourself in the morning?” She said, “No, I hate myself now.”

I was such an ugly baby. My mother never breast fed me. She told me that she only liked me as a friend.

It's tough to stay married. My wife kisses the dog on the lips, yet she won't drink from my glass!

Last night my wife met me at the front door. She was wearing a sexy negligee. The only trouble was, she was coming home.

My family was so poor that if I hadn't been born a boy, I wouldn't of had anything to play with.

My wife and I were happy for twenty years… then we met.

My wife made me join a bridge club. I jump off next Tuesday.

My wife only has sex with me for a purpose. Last night she used me to time an egg.

Rodney Dangerfield (A True Original)

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Kenton Nelson, Just Their Inclination
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Kanji City - Kyoto (by COGLabTokyo)

“Kanji City” is a movie that portraits the landscape with Kanji, an ideogram whose shape of the letter embodies its meanings.
The City of Kyoto is shown with 16 kanji animations, each of which symbolizing a tree, river, temple, gate and so on.
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Keith Jarrett

Redefining Sex Work

Jolene Parton is a ho. She's also a Berkeley native, a comic-book fanatic, a Dolly Parton aficionado (hence the name, which is fake), an NPR listener, and a big fan of Vietnamese food. She wears big round glasses rimmed in translucent pink plastic, and, in her ears, jade-green plugs. She's redheaded and rosy-skinned and pretty in the kind of way that would be at home in a J. Crew catalog, but for the pierced septum and stylishly half-shaved head and aforementioned plugs; as is, she's probably more like American Apparel material. And she's been working in the sex industry, broadly defined, for about four years, first doing odd jobs at what she describes as the "entry-level" end of the sex-work spectrum — foot fetish stuff, artsy nude photography, one night during which she "cuddled with a guy in his apartment for money" — and then in porn and at various peepshows and strip clubs; a bit over a year ago, she started escorting. And when she says she loves her job — which she does, often and unbidden — she does so with the kind of steady-eyed enthusiasm that's hard to fake.

"It's been great, honestly," she told me a couple weeks ago at an Oakland Chinatown lunch spot, steam rising from the vermicelli bowl in front of her and fogging her lenses. She genuinely likes her clients, or at least as much as anyone can be expected to like the people they work with, and she appreciates the freedom of being able to set her own hours: "I don't have an alarm clock," she said. "I make breakfast every morning, I get to hang out with my friends whenever I want. This job affords me a lifestyle most people don't get."

Sex is one of those commodities that tends to be popular no matter how bad the economy is, and Parton said the Bay Area's booming tech industry — and its attendant cadre of young, lonely men who want an escort they're compatible with both sexually and intellectually — has been great for business. All told, with a rate in the several hundreds of dollars an hour, she can work between five and ten hours a week and still make far more than the vast majority of other 24-year-olds out there. Parton has met many of her friends through sex work, and it's via her involvement with the Bay Area chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project — a national advocacy group and decriminalization effort founded by and for sex workers in 2003 that's better known by its acronym, SWOP — that she's found her footing as an activist. "Honestly," she said, "my job is one of the most stable and rewarding things in my life

Parton is exceptionally well-adjusted by any measure — especially for someone working in a trade that's illegal and often maligned — but as it turns out, she's far from alone. In fact, she's but one example of what's beginning to look like an emerging breed of sex workers: educated, empowered, tech-savvy, and activism-oriented, honest about who they are and proud of what they do. They have iPhones and nose piercings and college degrees; they chronicle their experiences on Tumblr and are out to their families. They're primarily what are known in the industry as "indoor" sex workers — meaning they find clients mostly via the web, at online marketplaces like Eros and Redbook, rather than working on the street, and they tend to charge rates in the hundreds of dollars an hour. (...)

"The relationships between customers, managers, sex workers ... are incredibly varied and very nuanced," said Max Besbris, who conducted a sociological study of Oakland's sex trade as part of his honors thesis at UC Berkeley and is now a Ph.D candidate at NYU. "What we've seen is that there's a great deal of agency exercised by a lot of women and men who do sex work. But the laws basically reduce all relationships to exploitative ones."

The latest and highest-profile such proposed law is Prop 35, which appears on California's November ballot. It's a complicated measure, rife with legalese and referential to several different parts of the penal code, but essentially, Prop 35 would expand the definition of, and increase penalties for, human trafficking. On the surface, it sounds like one of those unequivocally positive ballot measures anyone can feel good about voting for — and, in fact, it's been endorsed by both of California's major political parties.

Advocates of Prop 35 — mostly law enforcement and those who work with victims of childhood sex abuse — argue that human trafficking is an epidemic in California and the laws as they currently exist don't adequately address the problem. But the ballot measure is also getting vehement criticism, much of it from within the sex industry itself: A number of victims' rights organizations have come out against it, arguing, for the most part, that a problem as complicated as trafficking deserves a more comprehensive solution, and many sex workers have raised fears about unintended consequences, specifically with regards to the fact that the proposed law would expand the definition of trafficking to anyone who benefits financially from prostitution, regardless of intent. "Prop 35 implicates a lot of adult consensual behavior," said Monet. "In my opinion, it's an erosion of sexual rights" — not a protection of human ones.

In Parton's eyes, it's not just that Prop 35 would further criminalize the kind of work she does. It's that it's predicated on the idea that that kind of work — the kind where all parties are participating by choice and no one feels exploited — is fundamentally impossible, that all sex workers are victims. And in that sense, Prop 35 isn't just an inconvenience — it's an affront to a political and social movement that's taken years to build.

by Ellen Cushing, East Bay Express | Read more:
Photo: Blair Hopkin

Agustin Castillo
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Victo Ngai
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Everything Breaks Eventually

In the corner of Building 4, a massive complex at Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, the ghostly skeleton of a pickup truck endures a constant torment. The truck has no wheels, no bed, no seats, and no steering column—it’s just a vacant shell and a set of pedals. Inside, a pneumatic piston is positioned to press on the gas pedal over and over again, night and day. It’s a test of the whole accelerator assembly, but engineers are focused on one simple part—the hinge that connects the gas pedal to the frame.

Building 4 is Ford’s Tough Testing Center, where the company evaluates nearly all of its nonengine parts, from seat belts to axle assemblies. The facility is a monument to a dark truth of manufacturing: Even the best-engineered products fail. Some percentage of all mechanical devices will break before they’re expected to. “Companies come to me and say they want to be 100 percent failure-free after three years,” says Fred Schenkelberg, whose firm, FMS Reliability, estimates the lifespan of products. “But that’s impossible. You can’t do it.”

Consider a few recent examples. In 2009, Mohawk Industries—one of the largest makers of carpeting in the country—was forced to discontinue an entire line of carpet tiles when the tiles failed unexpectedly, costing the company millions. In 2010, Johnson & Johnson had to recall 93,000 artificial hips after their metal joints started failing—inside patients. In 2011, Southwest Airlines grounded 79 planes after one of its Boeing 737s tore open in midflight. And just this past summer, GE issued a recall of 1.3 million dishwashers due to a defective heating element that could cause fires. Unexpected failure happens to everything, and so every manufacturer lives with some amount of risk: the risk of recalls, the risk of outsize warranty claims, the risk that a misbehaving product could hurt or kill a customer.

This is why the sprawling hangar-size rooms of Ford’s Building 4 are full of machines. Machines that open and close doors, robots that rub padded appendages on seats, treadmills that spin tires until they erupt in a cloud of white smoke. There’s even a giant bay where an entire Ford pickup is held up in the air by pistons that violently shake the vehicle by its suspension. Officially, Building 4 is about reliability, but it’s actually more about inevitability. Ford isn’t trying to ensure the gas-pedal hinge will never break. The company knows it will break; its engineers are trying to understand when—and how and why—this will happen.

Product failure is deceptively difficult to understand. It depends not just on how customers use a product but on the intrinsic properties of each part—what it’s made of and how those materials respond to wildly varying conditions. Estimating a product’s lifespan is an art that even the most sophisticated manufacturers still struggle with. And it’s getting harder. In our Moore’s law-driven age, we expect devices to continuously be getting smaller, lighter, more powerful, and more efficient. This thinking has seeped into our expectations about lots of product categories: Cars must get better gas mileage. Bicycles must get lighter. Washing machines need to get clothes cleaner with less water. Almost every industry is expected to make major advances every year. To do this they are constantly reaching for new materials and design techniques. All this is great for innovation, but it’s terrible for reliability.

by Joseph Flaherty, Wired |  Read more:
Photo: Christopher Griffith

Weather forecast for tonight: dark.
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Ivory Worship

Ivory, ivory, ivory,” says the saleswoman at the Savelli Gallery on St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City. “You didn’t expect so much. I can see it in your face.” The Vatican has recently demonstrated a commitment to confronting transnational criminal problems, signing agreements on drug trafficking, terrorism, and organized crime. But it has not signed the CITES treaty and so is not subject to the ivory ban. If I buy an ivory crucifix, the saleswoman says, the shop will have it blessed by a Vatican priest and shipped to me.

Although the world has found substitutes for every one of ivory’s practical uses—billiard balls, piano keys, brush handles—its religious use is frozen in amber, and its role as a political symbol persists. Last year Lebanon’s President Michel Sleiman gave Pope Benedict XVI an ivory-and-gold thurible. In 2007 Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo gave an ivory Santo Niño to Pope Benedict XVI. For Christmas in 1987 President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan bought an ivory Madonna originally presented to them as a state gift by Pope John Paul II. All these gifts made international headlines. Even Kenya’s President Daniel arap Moi, father of the global ivory ban, once gave Pope John Paul II an elephant tusk. Moi would later make a bigger symbolic gesture, setting fire to 13 tons of Kenyan ivory, perhaps the most iconic act in conservation history.

Father Jay is curator of his archdiocese’s annual Santo Niño exhibition, which celebrates the best of his parishioners’ collections and fills a two-story building outside Manila. The more than 200 displays are drenched in so many fresh flowers and enveloped in such soft “Ave Maria” music that I’m reminded of a funeral as I look at the pale bodies dressed up like tiny kings. Ivory Santo Niños wear gold-plated crowns, jewels, and Swarovski crystal necklaces. Their eyes are hand-painted on glass imported from Germany. Their eyelashes are individual goat hairs. The gold thread in their capes is real, imported from India.

The elaborate displays are often owned by families of surprisingly modest means. Devotees have opened bankbooks in the names of their ivory icons. They name them in their wills. “I don’t call it extravagant,” Father Jay says. “I call it an offering to God.” He surveys the child images, some of which are decorated in lagang, silvery mother of pearl flowers carved from nautilus shells. “When it comes to Santo Niño devotion,” he says, “too much is not enough. As a priest, I’ve been praying, ‘If all of this stuff is plain stupid, then God, put a stop to this.’”

Father Jay points to a Santo Niño holding a dove. “Most of the old ivories are heirlooms,” he says. “The new ones are from Africa. They come in through the back door.” In other words, they’re smuggled. “It’s like straightening up a crooked line: You buy the ivory, which came from a hazy origin, and you turn it into a spiritual item. See?” he says, with a giggle. His voice lowers to a whisper. “Because it’s like buying a stolen item.”

People should buy new ivory icons, he says, to avoid swindlers who use tea or even Coca-Cola to stain ivory to look antique. “I just tell them to buy the new ones, so the history of an image would start in you.” (...)

Today’s ivory trafficking follows ancient trade routes—accelerated by air travel, cell phones, and the Internet. Current photos I’d seen of ivory Coptic crosses on sale beside ivory Islamic prayer beads in Cairo’s market now made more sense. Suddenly, recent ivory seizures on Zanzibar, an Islamic island off the coast of Tanzania—for centuries a global hub for trafficking slaves and ivory—seemed especially ominous, a sign that large-scale ivory crime might never go away. At least one shipment had been headed for Malaysia, where several multi-ton seizures were made last year.

The Philippines’ ivory market is small compared with, say, China’s, but it is centuries old and staggeringly obvious. Collectors and dealers share photographs of their ivories on Flickr and Facebook. CITES, as administrator of the 1989 global ivory ban, is the world’s official organization standing between the slaughter of the 1980s—in which Africa is said to have lost half its elephants, more than 600,000 in just those ten years—and the extermination of the elephant. If CITES has overlooked the Philippines’ ivory trade, what else has it missed?

by Bryan Christie, National Geographic |  Read more:
Photographs by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images

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The Vanishing Groves

No event, however momentous, leaves an everlasting imprint on the world. Take the cosmic background radiation, the faint electromagnetic afterglow of the Big Bang. It hangs, reassuringly, in every corner of our skies, the firmest evidence we have for the giant explosion that created our universe. But it won’t be there forever. In a trillion years’ time it is going to slip beyond what astronomers call the cosmic light horizon, the outer edge of the observable universe. The universe’s expansion will have stretched its wavelength so wide that it will be undetectable to any observer, anywhere. Time will have erased its own beginning.

On Earth, the past is even quicker to vanish. To study geology is to be astonished at how hastily time reorders our planet’s surface, filling its craters, smoothing its mountains and covering its continents in seawater. Life is often the fastest to disintegrate in this constant churn of water and rock. The speed of biological decomposition ensures that only the most geologically fortunate of organisms freeze into stone and become fossils. The rest dissolve into sediment, leaving the thinnest of molecular traces behind.

Part of what separates humans from nature is our striving to preserve the past, but we too have proved adept at its erasure. It was humans, after all, who set fire to the ancient Library of Alexandria, whose hundreds of thousands of scrolls contained a sizable fraction of classical learning. The loss of knowledge at Alexandria was said to be so profound that it set Western civilisation back 1,000 years. Indeed, some have described the library’s burning as an event horizon, a boundary in time across which information cannot flow.

The burning of books and libraries has perhaps fallen out of fashion, but if you look closely, you will find its spirit survives in another distinctly human activity, one as old as civilisation itself: the destruction of forests. Trees and forests are repositories of time; to destroy them is to destroy an irreplaceable record of the Earth’s past. Over this past century of unprecendented deforestation, a tiny cadre of scientists has roamed the world’s remaining woodlands, searching for trees with long memories, trees that promise science a new window into antiquity. To find a tree’s memories, you have to look past its leaves and even its bark; you have to go deep into its trunk, where the chronicles of its long life lie, secreted away like a library’s lost scrolls. This spring, I journeyed to the high, dry mountains of California to visit an ancient forest, a place as dense with history as Alexandria. A place where the heat of a dangerous fire is starting to rise. (...)

The world’s oldest trees, bristlecone pines belong to a group of ‘foxtail’ pines that live in small alpine pockets of the western United States. Foxtail pines are hardly newcomers to this Earth. Their oldest fossil ancestor dates back more than 40 million years, to the Eocene, the epoch when modern mammals first emerged. Though today the trees are found at between 2,700 and 3,500 metres, their range fluctuates considerably with climate. Because the trees like things dry and frigid, they extend their reach downward in cool, glacial times and recede to high ground in warm periods. In California, foxtail pine fossils have been found as low as 1,500 metres, no doubt the denizens of a previous ice age.

The oldest of the living bristlecones were just saplings when the pyramids were raised. The most ancient, called Methuselah, is estimated to be more than 4,800 years old

In March this year, I paid a visit to these extraordinary beings on an arid strip of dolomite atop California’s White Mountains. Located just north of Death Valley, the White Mountains are some of the driest on the planet. Visiting the trees in March meant trudging several miles through snow at just over 2,700 metres, as road access to the bristlecones is closed through May. It also meant that the forest was empty, as deserted of human beings as it has been for all but a brief flicker of its history.

It is hard to resist cliché when conveying the antiquity of the bristlecone pine. The oldest of the living bristlecones were just saplings when the pyramids were raised. The most ancient, called Methuselah, is estimated to be more than 4,800 years old; with luck, it will soon enter its sixth millennium as a living, reproducing organism. Because we conceive of time in terms of experience, a life spanning millennia can seem alien or even eternal to the human mind. It is hard to grasp what it would be like to see hundreds of generations flow out from under you in the stream of time, hard to imagine how rich and varied the mind might become if seasoned by five thousand years of experience and culture.

by Ross Andersen, Aeon |  Read more:

Photo: Nick Paloukos

Cracking the Quantum Safe

This summer, physicists celebrated a triumph that many consider fundamental to our understanding of the physical world: the discovery, after a multibillion-dollar effort, of the Higgs boson.

Given its importance, many of us in the physics community expected the event to earn this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. Instead, the award went to achievements in a field far less well known and vastly less expensive: quantum information.

It may not catch as many headlines as the hunt for elusive particles, but the field of quantum information may soon answer questions even more fundamental — and upsetting — than the ones that drove the search for the Higgs. It could well usher in a radical new era of technology, one that makes today’s fastest computers look like hand-cranked adding machines.

The basis for both the work behind the Higgs search and quantum information theory is quantum physics, the most accurate and powerful theory in all of science. With it we created remarkable technologies like the transistor and the laser, which, in time, were transformed into devices — computers and iPhones — that reshaped human culture.

But the very usefulness of quantum physics masked a disturbing dissonance at its core. There are mysteries — summed up neatly in Werner Heisenberg’s famous adage “atoms are not things” — lurking at the heart of quantum physics suggesting that our everyday assumptions about reality are no more than illusions.

Take the “principle of superposition,” which holds that things at the subatomic level can be literally two places at once. Worse, it means they can be two things at once. This superposition animates the famous parable of Schrödinger’s cat, whereby a wee kitty is left both living and dead at the same time because its fate depends on a superposed quantum particle.

For decades such mysteries were debated but never pushed toward resolution, in part because no resolution seemed possible and, in part, because useful work could go on without resolving them (an attitude sometimes called “shut up and calculate”). Scientists could attract money and press with ever larger supercolliders while ignoring such pesky questions.

But as this year’s Nobel recognizes, that’s starting to change. Increasingly clever experiments are exploiting advances in cheap, high-precision lasers and atomic-scale transistors. Quantum information studies often require nothing more than some equipment on a table and a few graduate students. In this way, quantum information’s progress has come not by bludgeoning nature into submission but by subtly tricking it to step into the light.

by Adam Frank, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: Jesse Tise

Henderson, William Penhallow (American, 1877-1943) - The Gossip - c. 1922
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George Underwood - British Surrealist Painter
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The Billionaires Next Door

Pittsburgh was one of the smelters of America’s Gilded Age. As the industrial revolution took hold there, Andrew Carnegie was struck by the contrast between “the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer.” Human beings had never before lived in such strikingly different material circumstances, he believed, and the result was “rigid castes” living in “mutual ignorance” and “mutual distrust” of one another.

The twenty-seven-story Mumbai mansion of the Ambani family, rumored to have cost a billion dollars, is just seven miles away from Dharavi, one of the world’s most famous slums, and the gap between these two ways of life is even wider than anything Carnegie could find in the Golden Triangle. So, for that matter, is the difference between Bill Gates’s futuristically wired 66,000-square-foot mansion overlooking Lake Washington, which is nicknamed Xanadu 2.0 and whose library bears an inscription from The Great Gatsby, and the homes of the poor of Washington State, where unemployment in 2012 was slightly above the national average.

Even so, the correct etiquette in today’s plutocracy, particularly among its most admired tribe, the technorati of the U.S. West Coast, is to downplay the personal impact of vast wealth. In April 2010, when MIT students asked him how it felt to be the richest person in the world, Bill Gates suggestedit wasn’t a very big deal. “Well, the marginal return for extra dollars does drop off,” Gates said. “I haven’t found any burgers at any price that are better than McDonald’s.” He admitted there were some great perks, like flying on a private jet, but said that after a “few million or something, it’s all about how you’re going to give it back.”

If you traveled to Mountain View to visit Eric Schmidt when he was CEO of Google, you would have found him in a narrow office barely big enough to hold three people. The equations on the whiteboard may well have been scribbled by one of the engineers who works next door and is welcome to use the chief’s office whenever he’s not in. And while it is okay to have a private jet in the Valley, employing a chauffeur is frowned upon. “Whereas in other cultures, you can drive your Rolls-Royce around and just sort of look rich and have a really good time, in technology it’s not socially okay to have a driver who drives you to work every day,” Schmidt told me. “I don’t know why, but you’ll notice nobody does it.”

This egalitarian style can clash with the Valley’s reality of extreme income polarization. “Many tech companies solved this problem by having the lowest-paid workers not actually be employees. They’re contracted out,” Schmidt explained. “We can treat them differently, because we don’t really hire them. The person who’s cleaning the bathroom is not exactly the same sort of person. Which I find sort of offensive, but it is the way it’s done.” When he was CEO of Bain Capital and building his current net worth of about $200 million, Mitt Romney drove a Chevrolet Caprice station wagon with red vinyl seats and a beaten-up fender. Carlos Slim’s trademark look is slightly scruffy casual wear, and he loves to tell journalists he doesn’t own any homes outside his native Mexico.

But even when he dresses down, a billionaire inhabits a world apart. A little more than a decade ago, I asked Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at that moment the richest man in Russia (and, as it happens, also someone who favored casual clothes and lived in a modest house), what he thought of the rest of us. “If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him,” Khodorkovsky told me. “Everyone had the same starting conditions, everyone could have done it.” (Khodorkovsky’s subsequent experiences — his company was appropriated by the state in 2004 and he is currently in prison for fraud and embezzlement — have tempered this Darwinian outlook: in jail cell correspondence he admitted that he had “treated business exclusively as a game” and “did not care much about social responsibility.”)

by Chrystia Freeland, Reuters |  Read more:

Sleight of the ‘Invisible Hand’

Much has been made of Paul Ryan’s devotion to, and timely disavowal of, Ayn Rand and her work, but little has been said about the Scottish philosopher he and Mitt Romney have cited as the ideological embodiment of what’s at stake in this election. “I think Adam Smith was right,” Romney affirmed in a January debate. “And I’m going to stand and defend capitalism across this country, throughout the campaign.”

Capitalism is a word that Smith never used — the author of “The Wealth of Nations” had been dead for almost 50 years before it entered the language, via Karl Marx — but his most famous expression, “the invisible hand,” is often taken as its proxy. Romney juxtaposes it with what he calls the “supposed informed hand of government.” As he said in a speech on economics at the University of Chicago in March, “When the heavy hand of government replaces the invisible hand of the market, economic freedom is the inevitable victim.”

Heady words, but hardly unusual. Few phrases in Western philosophy have embedded themselves as deeply in the vernacular as Smith’s invisible hand, and no single image has ever so captivated (and occasionally inflamed) the popular mind. This has been the case for a while now — the intellectual historian Emma Rothschild called the 20th century “the epoch of the invisible hand”— but the financial crisis and the federal government’s response have recently made it a cause for celebration and debate.

This development would most likely have surprised Adam Smith. The invisible hand makes only three appearances in his work, all fleeting. Blink, and you will miss them.

The most cited usage is in “The Wealth of Nations,” the foundational text of modern economics, first published in 1776. The invisible hand appears once, several hundred pages into the work during a discussion of trade policy. Mercantilism, then the prevailing school of economic thought, held that the way to secure a nation’s wealth was by implementing rigid protectionist polices. Smith agreed that such polices could strengthen certain sectors of an economy, but he contended that this came at the expense of “the general industry.” If restrictions were lifted, every merchant would pursue the most profitable trade available to him, making the most efficient use of his own time and money. Granted, he would act with an eye only toward his personal “security” and “gain,” but in so doing, he would “render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can.” He would be “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention,” namely, to benefit society and the broader welfare of its citizens.

“[T]he system works behind the backs of the participants” is how the Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow described this phenomenon. Smith wouldn’t have objected, though what clearly intrigued him was less the enlightened mechanism than the moral paradox. The invisible hand not only works behind the backs of participants, it succeeds despite them.

Consider Smith’s use of the phrase in “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” the first of his two great works. He describes the landlord who, admiring his fields, consumes in his imagination “the whole harvest that grows upon them.” Fortunately for the poor, the size of a wealthy man’s stomach, if not necessarily his storehouse, is roughly equal to theirs. The rich “only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable.” The rest they “divide with the poor” such that they “are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions.”

Again, the system yields an outcome that is salutary and humane, but one that stands at odds with the selfish interests of participants. The wealthy, says Smith, spend their days establishing an “economy of greatness,” one founded on “luxury and caprice” and fueled by “the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires.” Any broader benefit that accrues from their striving is not the consequence of foresight or benevolence, but “in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity.” They don’t do good, they are led to it.

by John Paul Rollert, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: Leif Parsons