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The Art of Waiting

It's spring when I realize that I may never have children, and around that time the thirteen-year cicadas return, burrowing out of neat, round holes in the ground to shed their larval shells, sprout wings, and fly to the treetops, filling the air with the sound of their singular purpose: reproduction. In the woods where I live, an area mostly protected from habitat destruction, the males’ mating song, a vibrating, whooshing, endless hum, a sound at once faraway and up-close, makes me feel like I am living inside a seashell.

Near the river, where the song is louder, their discarded larval shells—translucent amber bodies, weightless and eerie—crunch underfoot on my daily walks. Across the river, in a nest constructed near the top of a tall, spindly pine, bald eagles take turns caring for two new eaglets. Baby turtles, baby snakes, and ducklings appear on the water. Under my parents’ porch, three feral cats give birth in quick succession. And on the news, a miracle pregnancy: Jamani, an eleven-year-old female gorilla at the North Carolina Zoo, is expecting, the first gorilla pregnancy there in twenty-two years. (...)

Like ours, the animal world is full of paradoxical examples of gentleness, brutality, and suffering, often performed in the service of reproduction. Female black widow spiders sometimes devour their partners after a complex and delicate mating dance. Bald eagle parents, who mate for life and share the responsibility of rearing young, will sometimes look on impassively as the stronger eaglet kills its sibling. At the end of their life cycle, after swimming thousands of miles in salt water, Pacific salmon swim up their natal, freshwater streams to spawn, while the fresh water decays their flesh. Animals will do whatever it takes to ensure reproductive success.

For humans, “whatever it takes” has come to mean in vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure developed in the 1970s that involves the hormonal manipulation of a woman’s cycle followed by the harvest and fertilization of her eggs, which are transferred as embryos to her uterus. Nearly 4 million babies worldwide have been born through IVF, which has become a multibillion-dollar industry.

“Test-tube baby,” says another woman at the infertility support group, a young ER doctor who has given herself five at-home inseminations and is thinking of moving on to IVF. “I really hate that term. It’s a baby. That’s all it is.” She has driven seventy miles to talk to seven other women about the stress and isolation of infertility.

In the clinics, they call what the doctors and lab technicians do ART—assisted reproductive technology—softening the idea of the test-tube baby, the lab-created human. Art is something human, social, nonthreatening. Art does not clone or copy, but creates. It is often described as priceless, timeless, healing. It is far from uncommon to spend large amounts of
money on art. It’s an investment.

All of these ideas soothe, whether we think them through or not, just as the experience of treating infertility, while often painful and undignified, soothes as well. For the woman, treating infertility is about nurturing her body, which will hopefully produce eggs and a rich uterine lining where a fertilized egg could implant. All of the actions she might take in a given month—abstaining from caffeine and alcohol, taking Clomid or Femara, injecting herself with Gonal-f or human chorionic gonadotropin, charting her temperature and cervical mucus on a specialized calendar—are essentially maternal, repetitive, and self-sacrificing. In online message boards, where women gather to talk about their Clomid cycles and inseminations and IVF cycles, a form of baby talk is used to discuss the organs and cells of the reproductive process. Ovarian follicles are “follies,” embryos are “embies,” and frozen embryos—the embryos not used in an IVF cycle, which are frozen for future tries—are “snowbabies.” The frequent ultrasounds given to women in a treatment cycle, which monitor the growth of follicles and the endometrial lining, are not unlike the ultrasounds of pregnant women in the early stages of pregnancy. There is a wand, a screen, and something growing.

And always: something more to do, something else to try. It doesn’t take long, in an ART clinic, to spend tens of thousands of dollars on tests, medicine, and procedures. When I began to wonder why I could not conceive, I said the most I would do was read a book and chart my temperature. My next limit was pills: I would take them, but no more than that. Next was intrauterine insemination, a relatively inexpensive and low-tech procedure that requires no sedation. Compared to the women in my support group, women who leave the room to give themselves injections in the hospital bathroom, I’m a lightweight. Often during their discussions of medications and procedures I have no idea what they’re talking about, and part of the reason I attend each month is to listen to their horror stories. I’m hoping to detach from the process, to see what I could spare myself if I gave up.

But after three years of trying, it’s hard to give up. I know that it would be better for the planet if I did (if infinitesimally so), better for me, in some ways, as a writer. Certainly giving up makes financial sense. Years ago, when I saw such decisions as black or white, ight or wrong, I would have felt it was selfish and wasteful to spend thousands of dollars on unnecessary medical procedures. Better, the twenty-two-year-old me would have argued, to donate the money to an orphanage or a children’s hospital. Better to adopt.

The thirty-four-year-old me has careful but limited savings, knows how difficult adoption is, and desperately wants her body to work the way it is supposed to.

by Belle Boggs, Orion | Read more:

Art: Lorna Stevens

Kenton Nelson, Time Out
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Hernan Marin  personjeles 
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Once the Wild is Gone

Conservationists love charismatic species such as elephants. They appear on brochures, websites, and logos. The catastrophic decline in elephant numbers due to illegal hunting in the 1970s (and again now) provides one of the longest-running and most clear-cut stories about the plight of wildlife in the modern world. Who could forget the images of elephant carcasses, with their tusks removed, rotting in the bush? Or the huge pile of confiscated ivory set on fire by Daniel Arap Moi, Kenya’s President, in 1989?

Tourists also love elephants, and wildlife holidays in game reserves and parks offer a deeply romantic experience of wild creatures and people in apparent harmony in a remote, unspoiled land. In establishing protected areas for species such as elephants, conservation creates special places where the normal destructive rules of engagement between people and nature do not seem to apply.

However, nature reserves and national parks — or, in broad terms, ‘protected areas’ — are much more than a romantic idea. In the Anthropocene era, humankind is an increasingly dominant ecological force across the planet, from the tropics to the poles. Biodiversity is in decline everywhere, and the human impact on nature includes over-harvesting and overfishing, agricultural intensification and the growth of cities, toxic chemicals, ocean acidification, climate change, and many others. There is a real possibility of reaching ‘tipping points’, or changes that cause permanent shifts in the state of global ecological systems.

The loss of global biodiversity is the focus of huge efforts by charitable foundations, non-governmental organisations, and governments. The nature of the challenge is widely researched and, broadly, well-understood, yet international biodiversity targets are not being met. Recognising this, parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity pledged in 2010 to create more and better protected areas (at sea as well as on land). This is the familiar strategy of setting aside spaces for nature, which has dominated modern conservation since the late 19th century. (...)

Part of the problem is biological. Protected areas such as national parks do help preserve the animals and plants inside them, if the areas are large enough. Yet, despite the fact that there has been a huge increase in both the number and extent of protected areas through the 20th century, biodiversity loss has continued apace, accelerating in many regions. What is going wrong?

The problem is that protected areas become ecological islands. In the 1960s, a famous series of experiments on patterns of extinction and immigration were conducted in the islets of the Florida Keys by EO Wilson and his student Daniel Simberloff. Their findings became the basis of the ‘theory of island biogeography’. Simply put, islands lose species: the smaller the island, the faster they are lost. Since then, ecologists have recognised that these islands of habitat need not be surrounded by a sea of water. In Amazonia, ecologists conducted experiments on land that had been converted from forest to farms: islands of trees in a sea of dirt. They preserved square blocks of forest of different dimensions and studied the effect on diversity. Edge effects — the increase of sun, wind and weeds at the boundary between forest and cleared land — changed the microclimate of the forest, and species were lost. The smaller the remnant forest patch, the faster the species disappeared.

Landscape ecology, the science of animal populations, and studies of ecological networks all point the same way. Small protected areas surrounded by land without suitable habitat will not be sufficient to protect global biodiversity. And for large mammals, a park that is ‘too small’ might in fact be very large indeed. One of the greatest conservation challenges in Africa is to manage elephants, whose enormous ranges cannot be contained even in the greatest of parks.

One response is to seek more and bigger reserves, or to build corridors between them (‘more, bigger, better and joined’ was the slogan of a UK Government report Making Space for Nature in 2010). Yet, at most, a protected area strategy will create biodiverse islands on a fraction of the Earth’s surface (perhaps 17 per cent) leaving the rest of the Earth (to which humanity is restricted) radically transformed, and perhaps permanently impoverished in diversity.

Science is not the only critic of protected areas. They are often resisted and subverted by the people who have to live with them as neighbours. To understand why so many people around the world feel a burning resentment of protected areas from which they are excluded, we need to know more about their history, which starts in the 19th century — the heyday of empire and expansion of the Western world.

by Bill Adams, Aeon |  Read more:
Photo by Dominic Nahr/Magnum

The Parenting Trap

Under no circumstances are you to cut this out and stick it on the fridge door. Or put it in the file marked “Kids’ Stuff.” There’s nothing here for you. Nothing to do, nothing to act on. No consciousness-raising or attitude-flipping. No strategies or slogans. There is no help. And absolutely no solace. Because, really, what the world doesn’t need now is any more advice on raising children. We’re done with the finger wagging and the head patting. We’ve tried everything and we’ve read everything. We’ve asked, tweeted, blogged, prayed, and read it all. We’ve sat up at night and commiserated with other parents when we should have been having sex or at least paying off the sleep deficit. We’ve done everything, and still it’s like a cinnamon-and-lavender-scented Gettysburg out there.

Why don’t we just stop trying and do nothing? Because nothing can’t make us and the kids feel any worse than we feel now.

I have two lots of kids, a boy and a girl and a boy and a girl. They neatly bookend my responsibilities as a parent. The eld­er girl is in her last year of college. The youngest two are just starting the times table and phonetics, and the older boy is somewhere in Southeast Asia, on what he calls his “gap life,” collecting infections and tattoos of what he thinks are Jim Morrison lyrics written in pretty, curly, local lan­guages but in fact probably say, “I like cock.”

Having spent a great deal of money to educate the first two, I realized along the way that I’ve learned nothing. But then, none of us have any idea what we’re doing. That’s right, none of us know anything. I stand at the school gates and watch the fear in the eyes of other fathers. The barely contained panic as they herd their offspring, already looking like hobbit Sherpas, carrying enormous schoolbags full of folders and books and photocopied letters and invitations to birthdays and concerts and playdates and football and after-school math clubs. You know my younger kids carry more paperwork than I do? And my job is paperwork. And they can’t read.

In the 100 years since we really got serious about education as a universally good idea, we’ve managed to take the 15 years of children’s lives that should be the most carefree, inquisitive, and memorable and fill them with a motley collection of stress and a neurotic fear of failure. Education is a dress-up box of good intentions, swivel-eyed utopianism, cruel competition, guilt, snobbery, wish fulfillment, special pleading, government intervention, bu­reauc­racy, and social engineering. And no one is smart enough now to understand how we can stop it. Parents have no ra­tion­al defense against the byzantine demands of the education-industrial complex. But this multi-national business says that they’re acting in the children’s best interests. And we can only react emotionally to the next Big Idea or the Cure or the Shortcut to Happiness.

by A.A. Gill, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Photos: Left, from Classic Stock/The Image Works, Right, Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis; Digital Colorization by Lorna Clark.

Exposing Your Personal Information – There’s An App for That

Mobile devices and applications are no longer an accessory – they’re central to our daily lives. Gartner predicts the number of mobile apps downloaded will double to 45 billion this year – and they’re only getting smarter. Today’s apps are increasingly essential to accessing critical business applications, connecting with friends on the go and even adopting digital wallets.

While these apps make our lives easier, they also give a wider group of application developers and advertising networks the ability to collect information about our activities and leverage the functionality of our devices. At the same time, the companies, consumers and government employees who install these apps often do not understand with who and how they are sharing personal information. Even though a list of permissions is presented when installing an app, most people don’t understand what they are agreeing to or have the proper information needed to make educated decisions about which apps to trust.

More concerning is that many apps collect information or require permissions unnecessary for the described functionality of the apps. This is not the first time this issue has surfaced – reports of popular apps collecting irrelevant information or transmitting data when devices are turned off has led to significant backlash. However, less is known about the state of privacy across the entire application ecosystem.

To get a sense of the state of application privacy today, Juniper Networks’ Mobile Threat Center (MTC) analyzed over 1.7 million apps on the Google Play market from March 2011 to September 2012.

Topline Findings

We found a significant number of applications contain permissions and capabilities that could expose sensitive data or access device functionality that they might not need. We also determined these apps had permission to access the Internet, which could provide a means for exposed data to be transmitted from the device. Of particular interest, free applications were much more likely to access personal information than paid applications. Specifically, free apps are 401 percent more likely to track location and 314 percent more likely to access user address books than their paid counterparts.

• 24.14 percent of free apps have permission to track user location, while only 6.01 percent of paid apps have this ability;
• 6.72 percent of free apps have permission to access user address books, while 2.14 percent of paid apps do;
• 2.64 percent of free apps have permission to silently send text messages, whereas 1.45 percent of paid apps can;
• 6.39 percent of free apps have permission to clandestinely initiate calls in the background, while only 1.88 percent of paid apps do; and
• 5.53 percent of free apps have permission to access the device camera, whereas only 2.11 percent of paid apps have this access.

by Daniel Hoffman, Juniper Networks |  Read more:

Joe Leavenworth
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On Point, in Their Jeans and Sneakers

[ed. Repost of an extraordinary performance. Lil Buck (with Yo-Yo Ma).]

On Point in Their Jeans and Sneakers.
Alastair Macaulay, NY Times

Japanese Colour Woodcut ca.1790, Unknown Artist
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It Doesn't Mean We're Wasting Our Time

It Doesn't Mean We're Wasting Our Time
~ Frank Cassese: Reflections on a Postcard from David Foster Wallace

Massive Attack

How the Internet Economy Works: Bandwidth

The internet is made of thousands of networks, and a complex web of economic considerations has developed to support the free flow of information. How bandwidth is “manufactured” and then allocated is far more complex than how a packet gets from here to there.

Most people know certain things about the Internet. They know that cables run under the sea, that wires come into your homes, and that modems carry the digital signals to your devices.

But they’ve probably never heard of Internet Exchange Points, and that’s where the magic of the Internet really happens.

Internet Exchange Points (aka IXPs) are the manufacturing floor of the Internet — that is where bandwidth is created and deployed. And bandwidth is just like water and oil and other economic goods: If your country has a lot of it, prices fall; if it doesn’t have a surplus, prices go up. And that has a big impact on the web companies that buy bandwidth.

The Netherlands, for example, is a large net-exporter of Internet bandwidth, using only half of what it produces domestically. That means that large companies like Disney, Google and Netflix can buy ports there at rates that are significantly lower than in some other places and that have dropped by 50 percent in the last year. But where there isn’t an Internet Exchange Point and competition can’t flourish, prices remain high. That’s what you see in places like Mexico. More on that below.

Though Internet Exchange Points are a key building block of the Internet economy, you’d never guess it from where they’re located. They don’t remotely resemble other temples of commerce. You don’t see people standing in them yelling at each other, like you would at a stock exchange. Instead, they can be located inside a beat-up building near a railroad track. Sometimes there’s not a single human being in the vicinity.

A report I covered earlier from the OECD lays out in awesomely clear detail why Internet exchange points are so essential for every geography that values the Internet. They not only facilitate the creation of bandwidth, they lower the cost of transit/bandwidth for businesses and consumers and help create redundant networks and limit or diminish the power of monopoly telecommunications providers.

by Stacey Higginbotham, GigaOM | Read more:

Photo: Om Malik

Light Beer: You Don't Have to Like It, but Respect It

On a hot summer night in Manhattan, the young beer connoisseurs were talking shop inside Good Beer NYC, a craft-beer store on East Ninth Street, when the conversation turned to light beer. The consensus: Three of the top-sellers in America -- Bud Light, Coors Light, and Miller Lite -- were barely worth the glass they're bottled in.

"I used to hate beer because I thought it all tasted like Natural Light," said Jennifer Dickey, the store manager, who was leaning against a shelf of Stone Brewing's Imperial Russian Stout.

Al Alvarez, an accountant who spent his formative beer-drinking years in Germany, thanked God that even the diviest American bars carry Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

Melissa Brandt, another Good Beer employee, chimed in. She'd recently bought her father a case of craft beer but couldn't convert him. Once he'd polished off the gift, he retreated to his basement kegerator full of Bud Light.

"It was a sad moment," she said.

It's common to disparage light beers. As craft beers have elbowed their way into American refrigerators and taps, light beers have become punch lines. What few drinkers know, however, is that quality light beers are incredibly difficult to brew. The thin flavor means there's little to mask defects in the more than 800 chemical compounds within. As Kyler Serfass, manager of the home-brew supply shop Brooklyn Homebrew, told me, "Light beer is a brewer's beer. It may be bland, but it's really tough to do." Belgian monks and master brewers around the world marvel at how macro-breweries like Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors have perfected the process in hundreds of factories, ensuring that every pour from every brewery tastes exactly the same. Staring at a bottle, it's staggering to consider the effort that goes into producing each ounce of the straw-colored liquid.

by Mental Floss, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Photos by Tim Soter

Ikeda Koson Flower Arrangement and Incense Burner 19th century.

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linda vachon / tête de caboche
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Furry Lewis

What It Will Take for Barack Obama to Become the Next FDR

Ever since Barack Obama's election in 2008, people have debated whether he might be for the Democratic Party what Ronald Reagan was for the Republicans -- a transformational president in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who changes the basic assumptions of national politics for a generation or more. In this essay, I draw on Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek's work on presidential leadership to answer this question and explain the challenges facing Obama if he wins a second term. (In a previous essay, I evaluatedthe prospects for a Mitt Romney presidency, which, I concluded would range from difficult to bleak). If Obama wins a second term, he still has a chance to be a transformative leader. But the odds are that he will be more like Bill Clinton--a Democratic president swimming against the tide of conservative politics ushered in by Reagan.

Obama has long had the ambition to be a great liberal president in the tradition of FDR. During the 2008 campaign, he acknowledged that the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, had not changed the course of politics the way that Ronald Reagan had. That is no slight to Clinton, who was (and is) perhaps the most gifted politician of his generation. It is simply the case that Clinton faced a very different set of political constraints than Reagan did when he took office.

And this brings us to Skowronek's central insight. The course of a president's career is structured by where he sits in what Skowronek calls "political time." Is the president allied with the dominant regime in American politics or opposed to it? And is the regime itself robust or vulnerable? (See my essay on Romney for more details.)

Both Clinton and Reagan were oppositional leaders. Reagan opposed the New Deal politics of the Democratic Party that dominated the period from FDR's election in 1932 until 1980. Clinton opposed the conservative Republican regime that Reagan began and under which we still live today.

Reagan had the good fortune to take office when the New Deal regime and its electoral coalition were falling apart. Therefore, he had the opportunity to become what Skowronek calls a "reconstructive" president, one who sweeps away the old regime and its assumptions in order to create a new one. Bill Clinton, by contrast, entered the White House as the first Democrat elected since the Reagan Revolution, when the current conservative political regime was at its strongest. Unlike Reagan, whose political opponents were in disarray, Clinton faced a hostile political climate and continually had to trim his sails. Skowronek calls this situation a "preemptive" presidency, because the leader tries to forestall opposition by triangulating or finding a "third way." Examples of preemptive presidents include Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, and, of course, Clinton.

Preemptive presidents are the most interesting type in Skowronek's theory. In a political age dominated by the other party, they must continually navigate upstream against fierce political currents. Their political legitimacy is always in question. The regime's dominant party continually casts doubt on their right to rule, and their own party often seems too weak to defend them.

This predicament drives preemptive presidents to be pragmatic, compromising, non-ideological, and unorthodox. They triangulate in order to survive. As a result, preemptive presidents often deeply disappoint their own party faithful, who crave greater ideological purity and stronger principled stands. To members of their own party, it sometimes seems as if preemptive presidents never stand up for their principles; instead, they are always temporizing, compromising, and letting their political opponents push them around.

Preemptive leaders quickly learn that ideological purity will get them nowhere. They have no scruples about borrowing the best ideas of their political opponents, modifying them slightly, and then claiming them as their own. They specialize in offering more moderate (and hence more popular) versions of the dominant party's policies.

This practice may annoy members of their own party, but it drives members of the other party positively insane. The latter are quite certain that the preemptive president's pragmatism and moderation are merely a ruse, hiding a criminal conspiracy or a radical agenda. Indeed, preemptive presidents make members of the dominant party so angry that the latter often seem hellbent on destroying them. Think only of the conservative rage against Clinton and the liberal rage against Nixon.

by Jack M. Balkin, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Photo: Larry Downing/Reuters

A Gated Community

I‘m driving a rented white Nissan Sentra, winding past a church and 250 homes near Louisiana’s Lake Killarney on my way to play golf. The houses are small but tidy, with neatly clipped yards and recycling bins out front. Everyone waves at me as I drive by.

The scene is similar to that at thousands of gated-community golf courses across the country. Here, though, I’m required to answer an unusual question before I hit the links. “You don’t have any guns, do you?” the security guard asks at the front gate. “All right, you’re good to go. Pro shop’s to the right.”

I pay my greens fees and head to the first hole. The tee markers are white handcuffs, welded shut. Just past the lake, peering at me from the distance, are the eyes of six guard towers.

If ever there were a question about the ballooning scale of America’s prison system, the Louisiana State Penitentiary provides an answer. It has its own golf course.

There is a correctional center in America for every man here at Angola prison: 5,300 and counting. Fifteen hundred are state or federal prisons, 3,000 are local jails, and the rest are a combination of juvenile centers and private detention centers. There are enough prisoners in the United States to fill every NFL football stadium at the same time, with 80,000 inmates left over.

The vast majority of these facilities will never be tourist attractions—America’s prisons are warehouses for the production of premature death. Even the buildings are designed “to make punishment efficient as possible,” geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has said. With the exception of a basketball game or a slow jog around the yard, their existence seems mutually exclusive with recreation or leisure pursuits of any kind.

Yet at Angola, the largest maximum-security prison in the country, more than 70,000 people a year pay to enter the gates for fun. Most go to see the Angola Prison Rodeo, where inmates have built a 10,000-seat stadium to house “The Wildest Show in the South” every Sunday in October and one weekend in April. Some go for the arts and crafts festival, where prisoners sell handmade items like birdhouses and matchstick replicas of space shuttles for as much as $500. I went to play golf. They sell a t-shirt in the nearby gift shop: “ANGOLA: A GATED COMMUNITY.”

My journey to Angola began earlier this year, when I stumbled on a peculiar image while compiling satellite photos of every American prison, jail, and detention center for prisonmap.com. Next to the entrance to Louisiana State Penitentiary—one of the most notorious prisons in the country, the subject of songs and investigative reports and novels—was a Google Maps marker for “Prison View Golf Course.”

Indeed, Prison View is a public golf course located inside prison walls—perhaps needless to say, the only course of its kind in America. The warden, Burl Cain, had the course built in 2001 to keep the guards around on weekends—“in case of an emergency,” he told the Associated Press at the time. Operated by the Louisiana State Penitentiary Employee Recreation Committee, the course according to its website offers “a spectacular view of Louisiana’s only maximum security prison.” Ten bucks buys a round of golf for anyone who passes a background check.

by Josh Begley, Tomorrow | Read more: