High and Dry

The Mississippi as seen from Ed Drager's tug boat is a river in retreat: a giant beached barge is stranded where the water dropped, with sand bars springing into view. The floating barge office where the tug boat captain reports for duty is tilted like a funhouse. One side now rests on the exposed shore. "I've never seen the river this low," Drager said. "It's weird."

The worst drought in half a century has brought water levels in the Mississippi close to historic lows and could shut down all shipping in a matter of weeks – unless Barack Obama takes extraordinary measures.

It's the second extreme event on the river in 18 months, after flooding in the spring of 2011 forced thousands to flee their homes.

Without rain, water levels on the Mississippi are projected to reach historic lows this month, the national weather service said in its latest four-week forecast.

"All the ingredients for us getting to an all-time record low are certainly in place," said Mark Fuchs, a hydrologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) in St Louis. "I would be very surprised if we didn't set a record this winter."

The drought has already created a low-water choke point south of St Louis, near the town of Thebes, where pinnacles of rock extend upwards from the river bottom making passage treacherous. (...)

Shipping companies say the economic consequences of a shut-down on the Mississippi would be devastating. About $7bn in vital commodities typically moves on the river at this time of year – including grain, coal, heating oil, and cement.Cutting off the transport route would be a disaster that would resonate across the mid-west and beyond.

"There are so many issues at stake here," said George Foster, owner of JB Marine Services. "There is so much that moves on the river, not just coal and grain products, but you've got cement, steel for construction, chemicals for manufacturing plants, petroleum plants, heating oil. All those things move on the waterways, so if it shuts down you've got a huge stop of commerce."

by Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian |  Read more:

Photograph: Jeff Roberson/AP

Out of Its Shell and Onto Your Plate

Call the creatures scungilli, and you have an ingredient that Italian-Americans have long used in a seafood salad for the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. But call them by their English name — whelks — and you have an item that is suddenly making news on cutting-edge menus.

Whelks are a type of sea snail, or gastropod, inhabiting the Atlantic Ocean and some of its bays and sounds in North America and Europe. Farther south, the family includes conch. In Europe, especially in England, where people eat lots of shelled creatures that might make Americans shudder, whelks are extremely popular.

Credit April Bloomfield, herself an English import, for placing three whole, lightly boiled whelks still in their shells on a plate with a small tub of warm, garlicky green sauce at the John Dory in Midtown Manhattan. Armed with a small fork, you pull the pale meat from the whorled shell, dip and enjoy.

“Some people have questions about them,” said Tim Carosi, the restaurant’s manager. “Most don’t know what they are. But those who do, order them, sometimes 6 or 10 at a time.”

At Oceana, in Rockefeller Center, the executive chef, Ben Pollinger, included a scungilli salad with celery, olives, chiles, cranberry beans and herbs in a lemon-and-olive-oil dressing on his menu last year for the Feast of the Seven Fishes. This year, he has been serving a whelk-and-potato chowder. He said he first encountered the shellfish a few years ago while visiting Maine. “They’re very popular up there,” he said.

Whelks range in size from a couple of inches — a dozen or so in a pound — to eight or nine inches long. So-called common whelks are the smallest and the ones to seek at the fish market for their briny-sweet taste and only slight chewiness. Often from Maine, these are the whelks Ms. Bloomfield serves and Mr. Pollinger puts on his raw bar.

Larger varieties, like the channeled whelk or the knobbed whelk, are usually sold as scungilli. In the New York region, they often come from Long Island Sound, Cape Cod and Peconic Bay.

by Florence Fabricant, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Marilynn K. Yee

There and Back Again

Last year, Midas, the muffler company, in honor of its fiftieth anniversary, gave an award for America’s longest commute to an engineer at Cisco Systems, in California, who travels three hundred and seventy-two miles—seven hours—a day, from the Sierra foothills to San Jose and back. “It’s actually exhilarating,” the man said of his morning drive. “When I get in, I’m pumped up, ready to go.” People like to compare commutes, to complain or boast about their own and, depending on whether their pride derives from misery or efficiency, to exaggerate the length or the brevity of their trip. People who feel they have smooth, manageable commutes tend to evangelize. Those who hate the commute think of it as a core affliction, like a chronic illness. Once you raise the subject, the testimonies pour out, and, if your ears are tuned to it, you begin overhearing commute talk everywhere: mode of transport, time spent on train/interstate/treadmill/homework help, crossword-puzzle aptitude—limitless variations on a stock tale. People who are normally circumspect may, when describing their commutes, be unexpectedly candid in divulging the intimate details of their lives. They have it all worked out, down to the number of minutes it takes them to shave or get stuck at a particular light. But commuting is like sex or sleep: everyone lies. It is said that doctors, when they ask you how much you drink, will take the answer and double it. When a commuter says, “It’s an hour, door-to-door,” tack on twenty minutes.

Seven hours is extraordinary, but four hours, increasingly, is not. Roughly one out of every six American workers commutes more than forty-five minutes, each way. People travel between counties the way they used to travel between neighborhoods. The number of commuters who travel ninety minutes or more each way—known to the Census Bureau as “extreme commuters”—has reached 3.5 million, almost double the number in 1990. They’re the fastest-growing category, the vanguard in a land of stagnant wages, low interest rates, and ever-radiating sprawl. They’re the talk-radio listeners, billboard glimpsers, gas guzzlers, and swing voters, and they don’t—can’t—watch the evening news. Some take on long commutes by choice, and some out of necessity, although the difference between one and the other can be hard to discern. A commute is a distillation of a life’s main ingredients, a product of fundamental values and choices. And time is the vital currency: how much of it you spend—and how you spend it—reveals a great deal about how much you think it is worth. (...)

Americans, for all their bellyaching, are not the world’s most afflicted commuters. They average fifty-one minutes a day, to and from work. Pity the Romanians, who average fifty-four. Or the citizens of Bangkok, who average—average!—two hours. A business trip to Bangkok will buck up the glummest Van Wyck Expressway rubbernecker; the traffic there, as in so many automobile-plagued Asian mega-capitals, is apocalyptic. In Japan, land of the bullet train, workers spend almost ninety minutes a day.

The term “commute” derives from its original meaning of “to change to another less severe.” In the eighteen-forties, the men who rode the railways each day from newly established suburbs to work in the cities did so at a reduced rate. The railroad, in other words, commuted their fares, in exchange for reliable ridership (as it still does, if you consider the monthly pass). In time, the commuted became commuters. In New York, and in cities like Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago, railways begat reachable and desirable suburbs, so that, by the time the automobile came along, patterns of development, and a calculus of class and status, had already been established. It was this kind of commute—the forty-minute train trip, bookended by a short drive or walk or subway ride—that people grew accustomed to, and even fond of. Here was a measure of inconvenience that could be integrated into daily life, albeit with certain bleak side effects, as chronicled by John Cheever and Richard Yates. Commuting by rail became a kind of gateway drug. (...)

Nationwide, the automobile took over from the train long ago. Nine out of ten people travel to work by car, and, of those, eighty-eight per cent drive alone. The car, and the sprawl that comes with it (each—familiar story—having helped to engender and entrench the other), ushers in another kind of experience. The gray-suited armies of Cheever’s 5:48 have given way to the business-casual soloists, whose loneliness is no longer merely existential. They hardly even have the opportunity to feel estranged at home, their time there is so brief.

“Drive until you qualify” is a phrase that real-estate agents use to describe a central tenet of the commuting life: you travel away from the workplace until you reach an exit where you can afford to buy a house that meets your standards. The size of the wallet determines that of the mortgage, and therefore the length of the commute. Although there are other variables (schools, spouse, status, climate, race, religion, taxes, taste) and occasional exceptions (inner cities, Princeton), in this equation you’re trading time for space, miles for square feet. Sometimes contentment figures in, and sometimes it does not.

Commuting makes people unhappy, or so many studies have shown. Recently, the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and the economist Alan Krueger asked nine hundred working women in Texas to rate their daily activities, according to how much they enjoyed them. Commuting came in last. (Sex came in first.) The source of the unhappiness is not so much the commute itself as what it deprives you of. When you are commuting by car, you are not hanging out with the kids, sleeping with your spouse (or anyone else), playing soccer, watching soccer, coaching soccer, arguing about politics, praying in a church, or drinking in a bar. In short, you are not spending time with other people. The two hours or more of leisure time granted by the introduction, in the early twentieth century, of the eight-hour workday are now passed in solitude. You have cup holders for company.

“I was shocked to find how robust a predictor of social isolation commuting is,” Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, told me. (Putnam wrote the best-seller “Bowling Alone,” about the disintegration of American civic life.) “There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.”

by Nick Paumgarten, New Yorker (2007) |  Read more:

Illustration: Kevin H.

Kurt Hutton Merry-go-round at Southend Fair, England, 1939
via:

John James Audubon, Tundra Swan
via:

Pedro Aznar

Cancer has a “Game-Changing” Moment

On Monday morning, I sat in a waiting room at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, drinking a bottle of dye disguised as a room temperature, fruit-flavored drink. I was there, as I am on a regular basis, for my scans. As I waited for my name to be called, to be ushered into a room where I’d change into a seersucker robe, where I’d have a drip attached to my arm, and where I would hold very still while technicians took pictures of my insides, I read the paper. And there on the front page were two words that leapt out at me. Two words that changed my life: Immune cells.

It was a compelling, dramatic story, about a Pennsylvania girl named Emma Whitehead who’d had aggressive, treatment-resistant leukemia. Last spring, Whitehead’s doctors performed an experimental treatment on her, removing millions of her T-cells and inserting new genes, using a “disabled form of H.I.V. because it is very good at carrying genetic material into T-cells.” From there, the altered cells were returned to her body, with the hope that “if all goes well they multiply and start destroying the cancer.”

The experiment was not an immediate success. Whitehead had an intense reaction, including severe drops in blood pressure and fevers that pitched up to 105 degrees. But her doctor, Carl June, hit upon the idea of using an existing drug to lower her cytokines level, and she quickly stabilized. Better than that, she’s now been in full remission for several months. It’s a breakthrough of unprecedented proportions, one with unlimited potential.

I had recognized the narrative as soon as I’d started the story. Back in October, I’d seen two of the doctors mentioned in the Times feature, Dr. June and Sloan-Kettering’s Dr. Michel Sadelain, at the Cancer Research Institute’s awards dinner. I’d heard them tell their story, as they were given a prize for Distinguished Research in Tumor Immunology. The person handing it to them was my doctor.

Immunology has traditionally been the redheaded stepchild of cancer research. Using the body’s own defenses to fight off tumors has long been considered a dubious proposition – too difficult to execute, too controversial because of the resources required to search for answers. The past few years, however, have brought real results that have translated into a variety of new approaches. The Gardasil vaccine is now routinely used on young men and women to prevent the HPV virus, which in turn can help prevent cervical cancer. Doctors at Roswell Park Cancer Center are now working on a cancer vaccine. And in 2011, the FDA approved Ipilimumab, a drug therapy for melanoma unlike any other that’s come before, one that works with the body’s immune system.

Five months after Ipilimumab went on the market, I was one of those patients who needed it. The malignant cancer that I had undergone surgery for a year before had returned with a vengeance, metastasized into my lungs and under my flesh. At Stage 4, I was facing a diagnosis that generally offers patients only a few months to live. I could do the math. I was looking at my birthday and Thanksgiving and Christmas but maybe not Easter. Summer was definitely a long shot. That’s when my oncologist recommended a clinical trial that was combining Ipilimumab with a new investigational drug. I jumped in as soon as possible, entering the first cohort of the first phase, a place in research where, as a doctor later admitted to me, “We usually expect a lot of losses.” Instead, three months later, I was cancer-free. Just like Emma Whitehead.

by Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon |  Read more:

Photo: NY Times

Ben Aronson  Low Sun, Rising Shadow, 1977
via:

8 Great Philosophical Questions That We’ll Never Solve

Philosophy goes where hard science can't, or won't. Philosophers have a license to speculate about everything from metaphysics to morality, and this means they can shed light on some of the basic questions of existence. The bad news? These are questions that may always lay just beyond the limits of our comprehension.

Here are eight mysteries of philosophy that we'll probably never resolve.

1. Why is there something rather than nothing?

Our presence in the universe is something too bizarre for words. The mundaneness of our daily lives cause us take our existence for granted — but every once in awhile we're cajoled out of that complacency and enter into a profound state of existential awareness, and we ask: Why is there all thisstuff in the universe, and why is it governed by such exquisitely precise laws? And why should anything exist at all? We inhabit a universe with such things as spiral galaxies, the aurora borealis, and SpongeBob Squarepants. And as Sean Carroll notes, "Nothing about modern physics explains why we have these laws rather than some totally different laws, although physicists sometimes talk that way — a mistake they might be able to avoid if they took philosophers more seriously." And as for the philosophers, the best that they can come up with is the anthropic principle — the notion that our particular universe appears the way it does by virtue of our presence as observers within it — a suggestion that has an uncomfortably tautological ring to it.

2. Is our universe real?

This the classic Cartesian question. It essentially asks, how do we know that what we see around us is the real deal, and not some grand illusion perpetuated by an unseen force (who René Descartes referred to as the hypothesized ‘evil demon')? More recently, the question has been reframed as the "brain in a vat" problem, or the Simulation Argument. And it could very well be that we're the products of an elaborate simulation. A deeper question to ask, therefore, is whether the civilization running the simulation is also in a simulation — a kind of supercomputer regression (or simulationception). Moreover, we may not be who we think we are. Assuming that the people running the simulation are also taking part in it, our true identities may be temporarily suppressed, to heighten the realness of the experience. This philosophical conundrum also forces us to re-evaluate what we mean by "real." Modal realists argue that if the universe around us seems rational (as opposed to it being dreamy, incoherent, or lawless), then we have no choice but to declare it as being real and genuine. Or maybe, as Cipher said after eating a piece of "simulated" steak in The Matrix, "Ignorance is bliss."

3. Do we have free will?

Also called the dilemma of determinism, we do not know if our actions are controlled by a causal chain of preceding events (or by some other external influence), or if we're truly free agents making decisions of our own volition. Philosophers (and now some scientists) have been debating this for millennia, and with no apparent end in sight. If our decision making is influenced by an endless chain of causality, then determinism is true and we don't have free will. But if the opposite is true, what's called indeterminism, then our actions must be random — what some argue is still not free will. Conversely, libertarians (no, not political libertarians, those are other people), make the case for compatibilism — the idea that free will is logically compatible with deterministic views of the universe. Compounding the problem are advances in neuroscience showing that our brains make decisions before we're even conscious of them. But if we don't have free will, then why did we evolve consciousness instead of zombie-minds? Quantum mechanics makes this problem even more complicated by suggesting that we live in a universe of probability, and that determinism of any sort is impossible. And as Linas Vepstas has said, "Consciousness seems to be intimately and inescapably tied to the perception of the passage of time, and indeed, the idea that the past is fixed and perfectly deterministic, and that the future is unknowable. This fits well, because if the future were predetermined, then there'd be no free will, and no point in the participation of the passage of time."

by George Dvorsky, io9 |  Read more:

Image: Lightspring/shutterstock

One is the Loneliest Number

In the latest issue of the New Republic, Judith Shulevitz offers a fascinating and fairly personal meditation on the consequences of delayed childbearing and older parenting for American society. At heart, the essay is about public health, and the ways in which older parenting — especially older male parenting, the latest research on sperm quality suggests — and fertility treatments seem to be associated with increasing risks of birth defects, genetic disorders, schizophrenia, and possibly autism as well. But there’s a long section on the social consequences of postponing parenting, which intertwines in interesting ways with some of the birthrate-related issues I’ve been writing about lately. Here’s an extended quote from Shulevitz on the world that delayed childbearing is making:

… As soon as we procrastinators manage to have kids, we also become members of the “sandwich generation.” That is, we’re caught between our toddlers tugging on one hand and our parents talking on the phone in the other, giving us the latest updates on their ailments. Grandparents well into their senescence provide less of the support younger grandparents offer—the babysitting, the spoiling, the special bonds between children and their elders through which family traditions are passed.

Another downside of bearing children late is that parents may not have all the children they dreamed of having, which can cause considerable pain. Long-term studies have shown that, when people put off having children till their mid-thirties and later, they fail to reach “intended family size”—that is, they produce fewer children than they’d said they’d meant to when interviewed a decade or so earlier. 

… What haunts me about my children, though, is … the actuarial risk I run of dying before they’re ready to face the world.

At an American Society for Reproductive Medicine meeting last year, two psychologists and a gynecologist antagonized a room full of fertility experts by making the unpopular but fairly obvious point that older parents die earlier in their children’s lives. (“We got a lot of blowback in terms of reproductive rights and all that,” the gynecologist told me.) A mother who is 35 when her child is born is more likely than not to have died by the time that child is 46. The one who is 45 may have bowed out of her child’s life when he’s 37. The odds are slightly worse for fathers: The 35-year-old new father can hope to live to see his child turn 42. The 45-year-old one has until the child is 33. 

These numbers may sound humdrum, but even under the best scenarios, the death of a parent who had children late, not to mention the long period of decline that precedes it, will befall those daughters and sons when they still need their parents’ help—because, let’s face it, even grown-up children rely on their parents more than they used to. They need them for guidance at the start of their careers, and they could probably also use some extra cash for the rent or the cable bill, if their parents can swing it … They may not go off the parental payroll until their mid- to late-twenties. Children also need their parents not to need themjust when they’ve had children of their own. 

There’s an entire body of sociological literature on how parents’ deaths affect children, and it suggests that losing a parent distresses young adults more than older adults, low-income young adults more than high-income ones, and daughters more than sons. Curiously, the early death of a mother correlates to a decline in physical health in both sexes, and the early death of a father correlates to increased drinking among young men …

It’s obvious, in a way, and yet the obvious bears emphasis: In a world where children are born later and less frequently, and where the two trends intertwine, the life cycle inevitably gets lonelier. Your grandparents are less likely to be involved with your upbringing when you’re young, you’re less likely to have multiple siblings (or even a single brother or sister) to be your companions in childhood and your constants in adulthood, your own children are less likely to have aunts and uncles and cousins and your parents are more likely to pass away (or decline into senescence) before you’re fully established as a grown-up in your own right.

There are economic costs to this atomization, just as Shulevitz suggests: Weaker support networks when people are young and struggling, fewer kids to share the burden of an aging relative, and so on. But the emotional costs seem larger — not just the impact of a parent’s early passing, but the non-impact of the relationships you never get to form, because your grandparents are too old and your siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles don’t exist at all.

by Ross Douthat, NY Times |  Read more:

Image via:

via:

The Transformation of American Journalism Is Unavoidable

This essay is part survey and part manifesto, one that concerns itself with the practice of journalism and the practices of journalists in the United States. It is not, however, about ‘the future of the news industry,’ both because much of that future is already here and because there is no such thing as the news industry anymore.

There used to be one, held together by the usual things that hold an industry together: similarity of methods among a relatively small and coherent group of businesses, and an inability for anyone outside that group to produce a competitive product. Those conditions no longer hold true.

If you wanted to sum up the past decade of the news ecosystem in a single phrase, it might be this: Everybody suddenly got a lot more freedom. The newsmakers, the advertisers, the startups, and, especially, the people formerly known as the audience have all been given new freedom to communicate, narrowly and broadly, outside the old strictures of the broadcast and publishing models. The past 15 years have seen an explosion of new tools and techniques, and, more importantly, new assumptions and expectations, and these changes have wrecked the old clarity.

There’s no way to look at organizations as various as the Texas Tribune, SCOTUSblog and Front Porch Forum or such platforms as Facebook, YouTube and Storify and see anything like coherence. There’s no way to look at new experiments in nonprofit journalism like Andy Carvin’s work at NPR during the Arab Spring and convince yourself that journalism is securely in the hands of for-profit businesses. And there’s no way to look at experiments in funding journalism via Kickstarter, or the coverage of protest movements via mobile phone, and convince yourself that making information public can be done only by professionals and institutions.

Many of the changes talked about in the last decade as part of the future landscape of journalism have already taken place; much of journalism’s imagined future is now its lived-in present. (As William Gibson noted long ago, ‘The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.’) Our goal is to write about what has already happened and what is happening today, and what we can learn from it, rather than engaging in much speculation.

The effect of the current changes in the news ecosystem has already been a reduction in the quality of news in the United States. On present evidence, we are convinced that journalism in this country will get worse before it gets better, and, in some places (principally midsize and small cities with no daily paper) it will get markedly worse. Our hope is to limit the scope, depth and duration of that decay by pointing to ways to create useful journalism using tools, techniques and assumptions that weren’t even possible 10 years ago.

We also highlight the ways new possibilities for journalism require new forms of organization. Traditional news organizations have tended to conserve both working methods and hierarchy, even as the old business models are collapsing, and even when new opportunities do not fit in those old patterns. In interview after interview with digitally focused members of the traditional press, the theme of being thwarted by process came up. Adapting to a world where the people formerly known as the audience are not readers and viewers but users and publishers will mean changing not just tactics but also self-conception. Merely bolting on a few new techniques will not be enough to adapt to the changing ecosystem; taking advantage of access to individuals, crowds and machines will mean changing organizational structure as well. (We recognize that many existing organizations will regard these recommendations as anathema.)

This essay is written for multiple audiences–traditional news organizations interested in adapting as well as new entrants (whether individual journalists, news startups or organizations not previously part of the journalistic ecosystem)–and those organizations and entities that affect the news ecosystem, particularly governments and journalism schools, but also businesses and nonprofits.

We start with five core beliefs:

• Journalism matters.
• Good journalism has always been subsidized.
• The internet wrecks advertising subsidy.
• Restructuring is, therefore, a forced move.
• There are many opportunities for doing good work in new ways.

by Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia Journalism School |  Read more:

Illustration: UBMSB

via:

Dirk Baksteen (Belgian, 1886-1971)
via:

via:

The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Hammond: Enemy of the State

On a cold day in mid-December 2011, a hacker known as "sup_g" sat alone at his computer – invisible, or so he believed. He'd been working on the target for hours, long after the rest of his crew had logged off: an epic hack, the "digital equivalent of a nuclear bomb," as it later would be described, on the servers of a Texas-based intelligence contractor called Strategic Forecasting Inc. Stratfor served as a sort of private CIA, monitoring developments in political hot spots around the world and supplying analysis to the U.S. security establishment.

A member of the online activist movement Anonymous, sup_g was part of a small team of politically motivated hackers who had breached Stratfor's main defenses earlier that month – ultimately "rooting," or gaining total access to, its main web servers. In them, they had found a cornucopia of treasure: passwords, unencrypted credit-card data and private client lists revealing Stratfor's deep ties to both big business and the U.S. intelligence and defense communities. But perhaps the most lucrative find of all was Stratfor's e-mail database: some 3 million private messages that exposed a wide array of nefarious and clandestine activities – from the U.S. government's monitoring of the Occupy movement to Stratfor's own role in compiling data on a variety of activist movements, including PETA, Wikileaks and even Anonymous itself.

And now, finally, it was done. Logging on to a secure Web chat, sup_g sent a message to a fellow activist. "We in business, baby," he said. "It's over with."  (...)

For three weeks, sup_g and his crew had worked steadily to ruin Stratfor, one of their biggest and richest targets yet. In addition to supplying geopolitical analysis to everyone from the Pentagon to the United Nations, the firm provided customized security services for leading companies like Raytheon and Dow Chemical, often compiling dossiers on activists and others viewed as threats to corporate profits. By Christmas – which Antisec dubbed "LulzXmas" for the "lulz," or mocking enjoyment, they intended to have at Stratfor's expense – the group had made off with more than 200 gigabytes of data. They then destroyed the company's databases and defaced Stratfor's website with a triumphant message promising a "week of mayhem" that would include posting the firm's secrets online – some 860,000 names, e-mails and passwords, including several dozen belonging to top-secret operators whose identities were now leaked for the very first time. Antisec also planned to use the hacked credit cards to make donations to groups like CARE and the American Red Cross. As an added flourish, the group ended its communiqué with the full text of the influential French anarchist tract The Coming Insurrection. "It's useless to wait . . . for the revolution," the treatise reads. "The catastrophe is not coming, it is here."

Three months later, on the evening of March 5th, 2012, more than a dozen federal law-enforcement officers broke down the door of a small brick house on the southwest side of Chicago and arrested Jeremy Hammond, a 27-year-old anarchist and computer hacker they believed to be sup_g. Six feet tall and lanky, dressed in a purple T-shirt and ratty trousers – a signature style one of his female friends noted was less Salvation Army than "the free box outside the Salvation Army" – Hammond looked more like a crusty punk than a computer nerd. In fact, he was both, as well as many other things: an inveterate "black hat" hacker, an irrepressible agitator and enemy of the "rich, ruling class" who identified with the ideas of the Weather Underground and considered the Occupy movement too tame. (...)

His arrest, the most prominent bust to date of a U.S. hacktivist, was also a major coup for the FBI. Before Hammond was locked up, Anonymous had engaged in a year-and-a-half-long hacking spree, waging a full-scale war against the "rich and powerful oppressors." The group shut down the websites of the CIA, major banks and credit-card companies. They took up the cause of the Arab Spring by attacking the government websites of Libya, Tunisia and Egypt; they broke into computers belonging to NATO and the GEO Group, one of the world's largest private prison corporations. They hacked defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton – an attack, dubbed "Military Meltdown Monday," that yielded 90,000 military and civilian e-mail accounts and passwords. They even attacked the FBI itself.

But none of these attacks had the political resonance of Stratfor. The computer breach not only cost the company millions, but focused worldwide attention on the murky world of private intelligence after Anonymous provided the firm's e-mails to WikiLeaks, which has been posting them ever since. It was, by any estimate, an audacious hack – and one for which Hammond may face decades in prison.

Hammond, who has never admitted to any of the nine nicknames the government claims he operated under, has pleaded innocent to the Stratfor hack. But he has not disavowed his involvement with Anonymous, nor his desire to "push the struggle in a more direct action, explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-state direction," as he wrote to me from Manhattan's Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he has been held for the past eight months awaiting a bail hearing. Indeed, his hallmark as an activist has always been his revolutionary, militant rhetoric, for which he is unapologetic. "I have always made it clear that I am an anarchist-communist – as in I believe we need to abolish capitalism and the state in its entirety to realize a free, egalitarian society," he wrote. "I'm not into watering down or selling out the message or making it more marketable for the masses."

This unwavering commitment, one of Hammond's greatest strengths, would also be what led to his undoing. He was always aware that betrayal was only a click away. "We know we'll finish in prison," says a hacker who worked with him. "Jeremy knew he was going to be raided, which is why he worked so quickly. He wanted people to remember him." What Hammond never suspected was that his downfall would come at the hands of one of his closest and most trusted allies.

by Janet Reitman, Wired |  Read more:

Illustration by Sean McCabe

A Requiem for Syria

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

In Italo Calvino's novel, Invisible Cities, a world traveler named Marco Polo describes the cities of a vast but crumbling empire to its ruler, Kublai Khan. Over time, the intricate descriptions of the cities begin to overlap until the khan slowly realizes that his appointed traveler has been describing the same city, an imagined city, over and over, in fragments -- each vignette exposing another perspective, unveiling yet another city, where death mirrors life and cities are named after Italian women. Each city is suspended between reality and imagination, structured on a set of absurd rules, reminding the reader that a city can only be absorbed through short glances, each glance anchored to an object, a story, or a memory.

I've been reading and rereading Invisible Cities for over a decade. Before the Syrian revolution, Calvino's poetics were safely rooted in the realm of fiction. When I recently picked it up to look for a quote, I began to read it once more -- this time sneaking a few pages at a time between my daily intake of endless streams of gruesome images emerging from our all-too-real Syrian cities. For the first time, Calvino's words detached from fantasy; Syria's cities became embedded within the lines of the Invisible Cities. I listened, along with Kublai Khan, to Marco Polo's narrations and tried to understand how cities become invisible.

Watching death has become a pastime of the revolution. There is much to learn from it. Death is sudden; it is shorter than a short YouTube clip. Death is a man wrapped in his shroud, bloodied gauze strips tied around his head, cotton stuffed in his nostrils, and the bluish-gray tinge of his skin. Death is the camera panning over mass graves where children's bodies are arranged in long, perfect lines, then covered with rust-colored dirt. The death of Syrians accumulated so fast it seems impossible to comprehend over 40,000 lives lost in less than two years.

But the death of a city is different. It is slow -- each neighborhood's death is documented bomb by bomb, shell by shell, stone by fallen stone. Witnessing the deaths of your cities is unbearable. Unlike the news of dead people -- which arrives too late, always after the fact -- the death of a city seems as if it can be halted, that the city can be saved from the clutches of destruction. But it is an illusion: The once-vibrant cities cannot be saved, so you watch, helpless, as they become ruins.  (...)

Aleppo is Calvino's city of Lalage, a city of minarets on which the moon "rest[s] now on one, now on another." It is a city of churches, temples, relics, and graves of revered mystics. It is a city where the spices of Armenia meld with the tastes of Turkey. It is a city where Arabic, Kurdish, and Armenian tongues speak parallel to each other, with an occasional French word mixed in here or there. It is a city of trade and industry, where men are constantly bargaining and negotiating in the same souks as their fathers before them. It is a city where girls walking down the streets in tight jeans and high heels pass by women in long black coats and white veils pinned under their chins. And they know they all belong right here, to Aleppo.

A man who is not from Aleppo recently told me, "When you travel to Aleppo, you don't see it until you arrive." I had never noticed that. Perhaps, because I was always inside it, I never searched for it when we returned. I never doubted that it would always be there, exactly as I left it, untouched, unchanged. But he was right; Aleppo is an inward-looking city; it sees the world reflected in itself. And because we've lived here for generations, we became like that too.

by Amal Hanano, Foreign Policy |  Read more:

Holding Our Breath

Imagine a world without alcohol. Or a world where alcohol can only be obtained by dealing with clandestine and sometimes sketchy homebrewers and illicit moonshine operators (sort of like Prohibition but not quite, since alcohol was legal before Prohibition was passed and many of the economic and "infrastructure" elements contributing to alcohol's consumption were already in place, like bars, breweries, taxes, etc.).

Now imagine this highly sought after drug suddenly being legalized, in effect creating a new and lucrative commodity out of thin air. That's pretty much how normalization of existing marijuana policy might affect our economy and society.

By now most Americans are aware of recent voter initiatives in Colorado and Washington state that legalize the use, production and commercial distribution of marijuana. Over the next year or so each state will be tasked with determining how best to proceed in developing a system for regulating, taxing, monitoring and distributing both the drug and its expected revenues. However, nearly everyone is holding their collective breath (for those that did inhale) as the federal government decides what to do. Under federal law marijuana is still classified as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act. So, all or parts of each state's laws could be invalidated unless federal law is changed, or the entire matter gets lobbed over to the courts and packaged as a state's rights issue. So far, the Obama administration has given little indication of what it intends to do -- and for good reason, the effects of federal acquiescence on this issue are likely to be both far reaching and profound.

To begin with, the states of Colorado and Washington will probably enjoy an immediate and "value added" advantage within their respective economies by being able to grow, market, dispense and 'export' high quality commercial marijuana products more efficiently than anyone else (including drug dealers) -- exports being defined here as sales to out of state residents as the product is transported across borders to various regions of the country (which, as Amsterdam can attest, includes another benefit, pot-centric tourism). There will also be massive new revenues to allocate. But, if the situation gets to that point it will only be because the federal government and courts have allowed it to do so, and most other states are likely to pass initiatives of their own very quickly, given the immense revenue potential to be gained. So any advantage for early adopters might be short-lived.

Continuing with the 'new' commodity analogy, what will then be needed to bring marijuana fully into the mainstream?

Let's start with the producers: Who gets to plant it? How are they licensed and regulated? Who oversees monitoring, quality assurance, product health and safety, and other things like production quotas, and crop subsidies, etc. that "normal" agricultural products require? What about hemp as a commodity for other industries? What is hemp, and what is pot? Basically, the whole gamut of bureaucracy that now manages any other food commodity on the market will need to be revised.

Then there are the distributors: What are the requirements for licensing and reporting? How do you deal with interstate (and international) transport of a some times/some places illegal drug? What are all the various products that might need regulating (brownies, candies, pills, etc.). What tax schemes should be developed, and how should the the tax code be written to encourage or discourage growth of the industry? What restrictions do you place on marketing (or not)? Who manages and enforces all of this? (It makes my head ache just thinking about all the new forms that will need to be designed and printed).

Finally, there are the users: What's an acceptable inebriation level? Where do you go to buy your pot (state dispensaries, liquor stores, bars, the internet)? Will use be banned in certain places like public parks and other venues (as alcohol currently is)? What penalties need to be codified in law to address various use infractions?

Those are just some of the economic and institutional problems, I'm sure there are many more.

But there are societal issues as well, which may be even more complex: Should legal marijuana be part of a more comprehensive drug policy involving things like cocaine, psylocybin, ecstasy, etc. since nearly everyone agrees our so-called "war on drugs" has pretty much failed on all levels? Where alcohol has been responsible for many tragic deaths, broken relationships, lost dreams and more is marijuana a better drug for what ails the human condition? And, if so, are we ameliorating an existing problem or making it worse? Is it even possible to imagine all the issues that could arise if use of the substance explodes and becomes more mainstream?

Finally, there is Washington D.C. Given the issues both large and small that they've been unable to deal with do you think dropping an economic and societal bomb like legalized drug use in the middle of an entrenched bureaucracy and polarized Congress will ever go over very well? How do you think corporate institutions will respond either for or against legalized marijuana based upon their own vested interests?

All I can say is, I'm not holding my breath.

For a more detailed examination of these and other issues see: 'Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs To Know'

Also, this excellent historical review by Lewis Lapham on our basic human need to seek out altered states: Raiding Consciousness. Why the War on Drugs Is a War on Human Nature ]

by markk
Image via:

Greta Garbo and John Gilbert Flesh and The Devil dir Clarence Brown 1926
via:

Football is Dead. Long Live Football.

In a typical regulation football game, the two teams combine to run roughly 120 plays from scrimmage compared with nearly 300 pitches in a typical baseball game. There are no "waste pitches" in football. Every play is meaningful, consequential, suspenseful. Every play is part of a mighty struggle, a drive, and in the end all 120 plays combine to create a narrative, or metanarrative. Baseball, boxing, handball, sooner or later every game gets compared to narrative, but only in football are the plays perfectly linear, drawn up with letters, and only in football is the field itself lined like a sheet of notebook paper. The metanarrative of a single football game then fits within the larger saga of Football, which fits within -- and helps explain -- the masterplot of America.

My cousin Jim doesn't think like this. He just loves the Jets. He has season tickets, even though he lives in Chicago. He keeps a green jersey in the trunk of his car, just in case a Jets pep rally breaks out. He once tried to buy Fireman Ed a beer at the Meadowlands. (Ed said no; he needed to stay focused on the game.) If Jim were stranded on a deserted island for 30 years and a rescue boat finally came, after the rescuers had treated his sunburn and poured cool water down his throat he'd ask them: How are the Jets doing?

But seven years ago Jim found a soul mate to rival Ed: Colleen. So on a sparkling autumn Sunday, Jim made the ultimate gesture of love. Though the Jets were hosting Jacksonville, he agreed to drive Colleen all the way the hell out to Wapella, Ill., in the middle of the cornfields, to meet her folks.

I remember the first time he told me this story. I could just imagine his stoic face as he made super-polite small talk with Colleen's mom, dad, sibs as he looked through old photos, petted the family dog, ate the waffles or scrambled eggs -- all the while darting furtive glances at the TV. The Jets weren't on, of course. In Illinois farm country it was the Bears. But every few minutes the screen flashed the out-of-town scores, and Jim saw that his Jets were locked in a nail-biter. Nursing a one-point lead. Third quarter.

Finally he couldn't take it anymore. Like a twitchy junkie he leaped up and announced he forgot something in the car, he'd be right back. Moments later, hunched behind the wheel, he tuned in the feed from New Jersey. (Do I need to say that Jim subscribes to NFL Radio?) The situation, he learned, was dire. Chad Pennington, shoulder injury, return questionable. Grabbing the Pennington jersey from the trunk, Jim sealed the car windows, cranked the volume and pumped his fist as Pennington's backup, Jay Fiedler, came on.

What the --? Suddenly the announcer said Fiedler was down too, making snow angels on the snowless turf. Just then Jim looked up. He saw Colleen's sweet mom peering through the farmhouse window. He'd lost all track of time. Had he been gone 10 minutes? Half an hour? As he and Fiedler struggled to recover (return questionable), Jim saw what Colleen's mom saw, what anyone would have seen. A grown man in a bright green smock, sitting alone in a car that sways with the vehemence of his pounding and cursing. Clearly Colleen's mom was wondering, as anyone would have, what sort of disorder afflicted her future son-in-law.

It's the same disorder that afflicts tens of millions of Americans. Maybe Jim suffers from a more virulent strain. Maybe not. Football simply has an iron grip on our collective psyche, to the extent that America has a collective psyche anymore. We love it. God help us, we love it.

We always have, going back 143 years, ish, to when it was nothing but a scrum of sweatered Ivy Leaguers, a mosh pit of privileged brats. The depth of our love, however, the irrational ferocity of it, has grown steadily, exuberantly, until now, in post-Ivy, post-9/11, postmodern, post-American America, we love football to distraction. We love it to the tune of $9 billion per annum. (That's just the pros.)

And yet, as with so many relationships, we quietly tell our friends: It's complicated.

by J.R. Moehringer, ESPN | Read more:

Photo: Dominic Disaia